Cheap Thrills

Summer is winding down already! It's hard to believe that August will be here this week. I start Graduate Assistant training (to work on the reference desk in the library) on August 14th and start classes on August 22nd. I'm looking forward to it, even though it means that life will become much busier. We've had a lovely (and eventful) summer vacation. The last months have felt kind of like an extended honeymoon, with lots of time for hanging out, recreational reading, etc. etc. etc.

We've been enjoying these last few weeks of summer freedom by pursuing the "cheap thrills" of the title.

Lask week on the Harry Potter release date - July 21 at midnight - we went to the release party at the Urbana Free Library. It was quite a fun event.

There was an Owlery. . .

. . . with real owls!

There were games (like Quidditch), a magician, a storyteller, a caricaturist, and lots of people in costume.

It was really fun. After hanging at the library for a while, we went to the Borders release party, which was just a zoo. It was packed!


(Michael's getting the book for his birthday on Tuesday. Shhh! Don't tell.)

We saw the latest Harry Potter movie this past week at a drive-in movie theatre (my first time at a drive-in) in Gibson City, a small town just outside of Chambana. The Harvest Moon Drive-In Theatre was a lot of fun.

We also visited the Champaign County Fair and watched the 4-H livestock auction. Yeehaw! (The grand champion pig was nowhere near as good-looking as Nick's grand champion last year at the Franklin County Fair.) But the highlight of the fair for me (and Nicholas Hugh will appreciate this) was the food. We had a deep-fried bratwurst on a stick AND a deep-fried Milky Way on a stick. The Milky Way was so delicious -- it was like a fatty, chocolatey, caramely cookie. Except better.

In other news: Michael has a calling in the Rantoul Branch now. He's teaching the 9-11 year olds in Primary. He's also been working the last couple of days for Brigitte, the owner of the yarn store in town. She's moving in to a new building and needed some temporary help with cleaning and painting, so that's kept Michael busy for the past two days and he will probably be at it through at least the first part of this upcoming week.

What I'm reading: I just finished a book of short stories by Dave Eggers called How We Are Hungry and am starting on John Steinbeck's East of Eden (September's RS book club pick).

Visit to Cache Valley

Robert and Sarah got married last Tuesday and their wedding was just beautiful. We were so happy to be there for all of the festivities. They got married Tuesday morning in the Logan temple, then we had lunch at Firehouse Pizza, then they had a lovely reception in Sarah's parents' yard in Smithfield. Those two kids seemed so happy. They got married in the midst of a heat wave -- it had been nearly 100 degrees for days -- but the heat broke on their wedding day, and although there was a little bit of rain, it was a beautiful day.

My mom and darling aunts Sandy and Roxane at the reception.

We were thrilled to get to hang out with Nick, Mom and Dad, and some friends in Logan while we were in Cache Valley. It was great to see everyone.

Michael and I took a little drive up to Bear Lake last Saturday, where we saw and had a tour of the Paris tabernacle. It's a really fascinating building from the 1880s. One of the interesting features is that the three towers in the front are all different heights, giving the building an asymmetrical look.

Bear Lake itself was beautiful, of course, and very very blue. We enjoyed raspberry shakes at LaBeau's and drove home through Logan Canyon (which is still surprisingly green, even with all of the heat and drought).

P.S. A side note about the wedding: we got to spend quite a bit of time talking to my uncle Tyler, who told us about a couple of Mormon blogs that I am finding very interesting: Exponent II and By Common Consent. Exponent II is a journal that states that its purpose is: "to provide a forum for Mormon women to share their life experiences in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance" -- the blog is an offshoot of the journal. The blog By Common Consent is affliated with the Mormon journal Dialogue. I feel that there are some really important issues discussed in these forums that aren't usually up for discussion among Mormons: gay marriage, feminism and women's careers, and much more.

Crystal Lake

The weather here this week is beautiful. It's a bit cooler (in the range of 80 degrees) and dry. The sky is blue instead of the grayish hazy color that it is when it's really humid. Yesterday Michael and I went to Crystal Lake Park in Urbana and rented a pedal boat.These geese raced with us up and down the lake. I was a little bit afraid they were going to bite me -- they looked hungry.
P.S. I plan to update this blog once a week (or occasionally more frequently than that if anything exciting is going on). So check back weekly, or you can subscribe to the blog by going to the bottom of the webpage and clicking on the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" link.

Trip to Nauvoo

Michael and the sunstone

On Saturday Michael and I went to Nauvoo for the day. We left our house a bit before 7:00 a.m. and got home around midnight -- it was a very full day! Nauvoo is about a three and a half hour drive from Chambana, so it's just about right for a day trip. (As a side note -- we stopped at a gas station on the way there to use the restrooms. Michael was waiting for the men's room and a friendly guy started a conversation with him. "You guys on a road trip?" "Yeah, we are." "You're pretty dressed up for a road trip." "Well . . . I guess you could say it's a religious pilgrimage." Can you imagine what Mr. Friendly must have thought? Two perfectly normal-looking kids on a Saturday morning -- and they're zealots!)

We went to the beautiful Nauvoo temple for an endowment session. It's such a remarkable building. The missionaries in our branch have both served in Nauvoo and they told us that if we asked some of the temple workers to show us, we could see some ceremonial temple clothing from the 1840s. A temple worker showed us those cases plus the baptistry in the basement of the temple and the spiral staircase that goes up six floors to the tower. It was beautiful.

We saw a lot of the historic sites in Old Nauvoo:

The Wilford Woodruff home, where all eight rooms have fireplaces!

The Scovil bakery, where we got to try some fresh gingerbread cookies,

The Brigham Young home (which is much smaller than his summer home in St. George, which we visited just a couple of months ago),

The printing office, where we saw archival copies of newspapers, The Times and Seasons and The Nauvoo Neighbor, and how they were printed in the 1840s,

The brickyard, where workers would produce four million bricks in a season -- between March and October (and we got our own little Nauvoo brick),

The Lucy Mack Smith home, where Joseph Smith's mother lived for a short time after the other Mormons left Nauvoo. Her arthritis was too bad to go in a wagon to the Salt Lake Valley.

The Sarah Melissa Granger Kimball home. Sarah Melissa Granger was an intelligent and wealthy woman who started inviting other women in Nauvoo to come to her home to sew shirts for the men who were working on the temple. She started a Ladies' Society that later became the Relief Society. Later, in Salt Lake City, Sarah was the first president of the Utah Suffrage Association and was instrumental in gaining women the right to vote. This was probably my favorite site that we visited. :) I'm looking for a good biography of Sarah Granger Kimball. Does anyone know of one?

We walked down Parley Street towards the Mississippi River, the same path that the Mormons took when they were leaving their beautiful city of Nauvoo. If they looked back, they would have seen their temple on the hill.

We felt very comfortable and at home in Nauvoo -- it felt sort of like Utah-minor with all of the missionaries and Mormon tourists. It was nice. We're visiting Utah-major this coming weekend for Robert and Sarah's wedding and we can hardly wait.

Happy Independence Day

It's a long-standing tradition in the Bowles family to have a giant family breakfast at Grandma and Grandpa's house on July 4th, with pancakes, eggs, potatoes, bacon, sausages, "sunshine," and so on. So this morning Michael and I cooked up some yummy pancakes and eggs and hasbrowns and bacon in our own very small approximation of the famous "Bowles family breakfast." We had everything but the family. :( But we're having a really great holiday. We spent some time walking around at Crystal Lake Park, just a little ways from our house in Urbana. It's supposed to rain later this evening, but now it's just really humid and hot. I hate sweating. Later we're going to grill some burgers and pop some corn. See how most of our entertainment revolves around food?

Here we are at the park. Happy Independence Day!

On Monday I went to a knitting circle at Caffe Paradiso that's sponsored by Klose Knit, the yarn store in town. The owner of the yarn store, Brigette (pronounced with a hard "g" like the girl in Sound of Music -- she's German), instituted the knitting circle and teaches people how to knit at the cafe. It was very sparsely attended (it seems that everything in this town nearly shuts down for the summer -- it's a real college town) with just two other women besides Brigette and myself. But the whole thing was very entertaining AND I learned that one of the graduate assistants I'll be working with at the reference desk teaches sock classes at Brigette's store! Another knitting librarian! (btw -- Is it just a coincidence that so many librarians knit? And have cats? Search blogs on Google for "knit librar* cat" and see what you come up with.) I'm working on a pair of socks, but I might go back to the brown cabled cardigan that I started this winter now that I have a knitting support group again!

Saturday Michael and I are going to Nauvoo. We're very excited!

What I'm reading: Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way by Bill Bryson. Very entertaining read about linguistics and dialects and vocabulary and language development. Love it.

Stacks and stacks and stacks

I started work this week at the university library and am really enjoying it so far. The librarian that I'm working with, Merinda Hensley, is in charge of library instruction, so I'm helping her with several teaching projects this summer and working about 20 hours per week. On my first day of work I discovered that Merinda and I are kindred spirits. How could I tell? We are reading the same book at the same time! Merinda took me out to lunch, we started talking about food, and I mentioned that I'm almost finished with Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/) and Merinda said, "Me too!" So we had an instant bond.

My current work project is an annotated bibliography of books on writing to help doctoral students who are stalled on their dissertations. Yesterday I went searching in the stacks to find the books on the list. The stacks are a very scary place: ten decks of books, low ceilings, very little lighting, half-floors, and tricky compact shelving. I've heard that some librarians take sticky notes into the stacks with them in order to find their way back out -- kind of like a bread crumb trail. I didn't get lost and I found most of the books I was looking for, so I would call my first experience in the stacks supremely successful. :)

The university library is a really interesting place. The building was completed in 1926 and has been added onto about a half dozen times, and it is NOT one cohesive whole. In fact, it's sort of a mess of half-floors and dead-ends and staircases that lead nowhere. You may think I'm joking, but I'm not. The main stacks hold approximately 10 million volumes. It's hard to imagine, isn't it? (http://www.library.uiuc.edu/administration/collections/collections/libhistory.htm) Housed inside the main library are a whole bunch of departmental libraries, including an English Library, Education Library, Newspaper and History Library, and many more. Unlike most academic libraries (75% of academic libraries in the U.S. use Library of Congress cataloging), the UIUC library uses the Dewey Decimal system, which I read about today in the Library and Information Science Library. (It was quite a fascinating read.) The interesting thing about using the Dewey Decimal system in a library as big as UIUC's is that numbers get extremely long. For example: 808.0420711N176I. OK, maybe "interesting" is a stretch. But I'm going to be a librarian! I love this stuff!

The (underground) undergraduate library, from the courtyard

I work at the main library, where undergraduates are not allowed to go into the stacks. They have their own little library and the two libraries are connected by an underground tunnel. The undergraduate library was built completely underground so that it would not block sunlight to this test field that grows on the quad and has been growing there since 1876.

The campus is huge. I decided to go find the Library and Information Science building, where most of my classes will be held in the fall. It's a huge brick building a couple of blocks away from the main library.

Isn't it gorgeous? I think I'll learn really well in such a lovely building. :)

Setting up housekeeping

As you can see, we're slowly setting up housekeeping and the place is starting to feel like we belong there. (An update on the stinky carpet: it gets replaced tomorrow!) But we still have a long way to go before we have everything unpacked. We're currently living in about half the house: bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.

We've already visited the very lovely farmer's market where we procured this delicious peach salsa:

Also the Urbana Free Library, where we can now get library cards because we're registered Illinois voters! (And Illinois is one of the "early primary" states, so come February we get to exercise our democratic rights. We hardly ever got to vote in primary elections in Utah ;)

And here's the very cool Caffe Paradiso where we spent lots of time before we got an internet connection at home. (We find that we can live without many things -- television, two cars, etc. -- but we cannot live without the internet.)

Caffe Paradiso is just one of the many cool cafes in town. But it's my personal favorite because they play eclectic alternative music, have mismatched tables and chairs, and have very cool art in the ladies' restroom. All the walls are painted different shades of purple and each wall has a different artistic scheme. One wall has dinner plates with plastic fruit stuck all over the wall, one wall has hair and beauty accoutrements such as combs, curlers, brushes, etc. Another wall has gold spray-painted flowers. Maybe someday I'll get brave enough to take my camera into the bathroom, but I'm not quite ready for that just yet.