Laurabelle's Blog

Today was great fun. Instead of work this morning, I had a skills assessment for the KCLS public services employment pool. I won't go into the details, but it involved a lot of pretending to be a librarian greeting patrons, helping them with reference questions, performing reader's advisory, and giving a short booktalk. I was [...]

This weekend Jeff and I went to a wonderful SCA event, A Celebration of Chivalry and Mostly Fibers Too. Basically it was fighting activities plus lots of fiber arts classes, which was great for both Jeff and myself. I spent all day Saturday learning to tat and spin and sew, and Jeff heralded for two [...]

I found a hilarious article about the failure of Tim Eyman's Initiative 864, which would have cut property taxes in King County by 25%. Eyman's paid signature-gatherers only got 79% of the number of signatures necessary to get the measure on the ballot for this November. (Everyone who works at KCLS is relieved.) The funny [...]

Given that I've been ragging on Qwest, I felt like I should give them credit for the good as well as the bad. When I called them last week to ask for a refund of the charges for Jeff's service when he wasn't able to use it, they gave it. (It amounted to about $17.) [...]

Horace is a very needy cat sometimes. He was insufferable this morning, wandering around and crying unhappily until I pet him or let him jump into my lap. He'd jump up, have me pet him for a while, then jump back down and wander off somewhere else. Now he's finally settled down on the fleece [...]

I started reporting spam again via SpamCop the other day. Before I did that, I went through their mailhost configuration interface so that their parser would know what my legitimate servers were. I thought I had done that properly, but evidently not, because today I got an email from the Flying Hamster (one of the [...]

Yesterday Dorothea asked for raspberry recipes, and it just so happens that I’ve made a couple of raspberry pies or tarts in the last few days. Unfortunately, the recipes I used are in cookbooks, so all I can do is share references rather than the full recipes themselves. The first recipe I used was for [...]

Every other Wednesday is System Migration Project Meeting Day at KCLS. These meetings have been happening since the spring, but I wasn't able to attend them until June because I had class on Wednesday afternoons. I started going to the meetings as soon as I could, and I would go so far as to say [...]

This afternoon I learned to spin on a drop spindle! I had expected to try it once and never again, but I found that it’s much easier than one would have expected. At least it’s fairly easy to make thread that will stay together; it’s somewhat harder to make thread of an even thickness, but [...]

Today Jeff and I went to the Madrone Peasant's Revel, which was a blast even in the light rain. The festivities included traditional peasant games such as cheese rolling, Wet Rag on a Stick, Clench a Wench, and cabbage ball, all of which were at least as much fun in the rain as in the [...]