First day of school

Ever since I can remember I have been excited - not just excited, but ecstatic - about the first day of school. Even as a graduate student at Utah State I found myself unable to sleep the night before the first day of classes. It's as good as Christmas. I just don't know what I'm going to do when I'm not a student anymore. Luckily, as an academic librarian I'll still have a "first day of school" and daily opportunities to learn stuff. This is one of the most attractive things about being a reference librarian: when people ask questions at the reference desk I get to help them find an answer. Questions come on various topics and librarians get to be generalists -- to know a little bit on a lot of different topics. The library is a great place for a curious person.

On Wednesday classes start here at Univ. of Illinois and I can hardly wait. I'm taking three courses:

• Information Organization and Access
• Reference and Information Services
• Interfaces to Information Systems

The first one is a theory class that is required for the degree. The second is on reference sources (like bibliographies and online databases) and how to use them, and the last one is an online class that's all about how to create better computer interfaces for library catalogs and other info systems. I'm pretty nervous about that one since I'm not the most tech-savvy student. But I think I know enough (hopefully) to make it.

This past week has been a really busy one; training for library graduate assistants started Tuesday afternoon and continued Wednesday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. These were pretty exhausting days, with lots of information packed in. We practiced using different databases, learned about policies and procedures, had an introduction to the print reference collection (the largest in the United States besides the Library of Congress), and learned all about the library's online catalog. It's been very fast-paced and interesting, but a bit overwhelming. I work my first shift on the reference desk this coming Thursday and I hope I remember enough to answer the questions that will be coming my way.

The other GAs seem like a really nice group. We've spent lots of hours together this week in training and we also went out as a group on Friday night to a restaurant called Crane Alley. There are nine new grad assistants -- we range in age from 23 to 39; three of us are married and one moved here with her boyfriend; we are all female; we came here from Michigan, Oregon, China by way of Texas, various cities in Illinois, and Utah. Those are the demographics in a nutshell.

What I'm reading: The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, a bridal shower gift from Momma Jo. It's a really different book about Nazi Germany, narrated by Death, about a little girl who steals books from a Nazi book-burning party and from the mayor's library. I'm not done with it yet, but hoping to finish this week.

Bikes & Mike

Yesterday we got bikes! We found a bike mechanic in town who fixes up used bikes and sells them (mostly to students) and we each got an aluminum-framed mountain bike. Mike's is a Schwinn, mine is a Diamondback and we LOVE them. We spent almost four hours yesterday riding around town, mostly on campus. We had a fabulous time and got a little bit sunburned.

Here's Michael on the engineering campus. (Click on the picture for an enlarged view.)

Melissa by the Admissions and Records building.

Some of you, dear readers, may be curious about Michael's new job. Today I sat down with Michael for a brief interview about what it means to be a banker at Main Street Bank and Trust:

Q: What do you do as a personal banker? What are some of your daily tasks?

A: Well, I'm new on the job, so I'm sure I haven't learned all of my daily tasks yet. But, mostly, I'll be opening new accounts, closing accounts, helping customers manage their accounts, and, eventually, helping customers with loans.


Q: What do you like best about the job so far?
A: So far, I've enjoyed the people I've met. I'm really impressed with the other employees at Main Street, and (almost) all the customers I've met have been very nice. Some have been, shall we say, interesting...


Q: What do you think will be your biggest challenge as a personal banker at Main Street Bank and Trust?
A: I'll be working at the campus branch with a large international student population, so I think my biggest challenge will be to communicate effectively with students who don't necessarily speak the best English.


Thanks, Michael, for your contribution.


Notes from Primary: One of my favorite kids in Primary, Macy Holm, was SO entertaining today. During the closing hymn in Sacrament Meeting I could hear someone singing loudly and I couldn't understand the words that were coming out. I looked across the aisle, and there was Macy (who is 3) with her eyebrows knit, mouth wide open, singing nonsense words to the tune of "I Believe in Christ." Later in Primary, during singing time, Macy asked me: "Did you know that cats can purr?" (This came out of nowhere, as far as I can tell.) AND the three little girls who sit on the front row -- ages 3-4 (including Macy) sang so loudly and fervently on one of the Primary songs ("An Angel Came to Joseph Smith") that I started giggling so hard I couldn't sing at all.

Here's one of the purring cats that I know.

You look like a monkey and you smell like one, too

Here at the Bowles-Terry household we have had two fabulous reasons to celebrate.

1. Michael got a job as a personal banker at Main Street Bank and Trust, the campus branch. He starts Friday. There are a lot of nice things about this job: it's on campus, so we can travel to work together; he'll be working mostly with students, according to the branch manager, because students form the main clientele of the branch; we will no longer be in the ranks of the uninsured! Hooray!

2. Yesterday was Michael's 28th birthday! We went out to dinner at KoFusion and had some very delicious sushi and Michael got presents.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and a new watch. Very exciting.

I also baked a Boston cream cake. This was quite a project. I have had some difficulties baking in our oven and at this altitude, but I thought that I was overcoming said difficulties. On Monday night I baked rolls and they were delicious. But I baked the cake and this is what came out:

I said several cuss words. Michael said this thing looked kind of like a pancake. But by some miracle of transformation (namely a yellow cake mix by Betty Crocker) we ended up with this lovely concoction.

Let's hear it for Betty Crocker!

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.