Well, so far the move has turned out to be even better than I’d hoped. I hadn’t realized how liberating it would feel to think, “I can generally walk 4 blocks — That means I can walk to the coffee shop, or to the store, or to dinner with friends, or to the public library, or to the river, or….” My world just expanded exponentially.

Even on days when four blocks are far beyond my capacity, I can sit at my kitchen table and watch the town walk by.

Still, part of my plan was missing. I’d intended to start reading the local paper. I’d even filled out the online request form for a subscription a few days before I moved. And yet… no paper.  Little did I know, there’s an initiation process. Remember how putting mail on hold works here? Yeah, it’s kind of like that. Here’s how to subscribe to the local paper.

1. submit online request (which includes name and address fields… this becomes significant later)
2. wait for person to contact you to “complete your order,” wondering all the while what the point of an online subscription form is if there’s no actual mechanism to subscribe online
3. wait some more
4. resubmit online request with “I don’t need two subscriptions, just one, but I’m worried the first one got lost” in the notes field
5. get email from them asking me to call them to complete my request, and confirming my address, which is wrong by one number
6. correct the address error via email, so it’s in writing
7. call them to set up payment
8. RECEIVE NEWSPAPER… and discover that your name is misspelled by one letter
9. email them to ask that your name be spelled correctly
10. open paper, wondering what level of reporting you’ll find

Luckily, I’m not actually interested in high quality reporting. Luckily, I’m mostly interested in knowing, even at a very basic level, what’s been going on in town. And I’m sure the letters to the editor and the police blotter will become my favorite sections. This week, for example, there was a sink reported to the police — a sink sitting in the middle of an intersection.

Of course, given my interactions to date, it’s possible that someone reported some silk in the road. One letter makes a big difference.

This blog used to feel incredibly private to me, but what with one thing and another, it no longer does. I don’t write here very often, but it’s a nice space to have for those times when I have distinctly non-librarian ideas to write about. Welcome.

Last weekend I was hunting around for some good cheese to put out for company. The selection wasn’t great (maybe all the delivery people were watching the Canada/U.S. hockey game?) but one wheel caught my eye. It didn’t name the type of cheese (though honestly, even if it had I probably wouldn’t have had much of a clue — I’m cheese-ignorant for the most part). It just said that it was part of the “Masterpieces” collection, and that this particular cheese was named “Vincent.” What makes this collection fun is that the rind of each wheel is decorated with a painting by the cheese’s namesake artist.

There in front of me was a wheel of Vincent cheese, so I did what anyone would have done: I picked up the wedge that depicted Vincent’s ear.

I’m going through Olympics withdrawal. I love the Olympics. I particularly love the Winter Olympics. There isn’t a winter Olympic sport I won’t watch. I even watched part of a hockey game this year! And somehow, the 50K cross-country skiing race is exponentially more interesting to watch than marathon running. And then there are crazy things like bobsled to ponder. I mean, what other Olympic sport is so full of people who defected from other sports, or people from unlikely places like Jamaica, or people who’s only contribution after the initial start is ballast? The sport is nuts! Oh, and this year one contestant even won a platinum medal! I just love the Winter Olympics.

But the sport that really divides people is curling. (Talk about a crazy sport!). Liking curling isn’t just a preference, it’s an identity. The more you tweet and blog and talk about watching curling the more the rest of us know that you wish to be known as a connoisseur of the Olympic games — a really with it kind of person with personality and a well-developed sense of geekish superiority. It’s kind of like being a goth in high school. You get to revel in being so totally different from everyone but without actually having to be different in a unique way. You get to be exactly the same as other goths, and do so in protest against sameness. Brilliant.

Meanwhile, I will continue on with my omnivore style of Olympic enjoyment. While I do, I may sip a glass of wine, which I will enjoy without knowing if it’s mediocre or stellar. I may even dress in black. And while I’ll sit slightly smug in my ability to tell the various figure skating jumps apart, I’ll know, deep down, that I’m no connoisseur. I just love the Winter Olympics.

I don’t know how the squirrel ended up huddled under the center support of a highway overpass, five lanes of highway traffic on one side, five equally perilous lanes of traffic on the other, concrete on all sides and overhead. Having gotten there, though, is it any wonder he’d want to get back to a less concrete world?

I imagine he tried to climb the concrete supports. I imagine he spent some time calculating just how far he’d have to run before finding the end of the highway. And I imagine he even made a couple of trial runs in each direction before coming back to the overpass and desperately trying to memorize traffic patterns in hopes of finding a gap.

By the time I approached, hurtling towards him at 55mph, the squirrel passed the point of desperation. He had seen the possible futures that lay before him if he stayed and if he ran. He had begun the run.

In a series of mad, tail-frizzing dashes, he crossed all five lanes of traffic and then leaped at the concrete barrier that separated him from the blighted grass…

…and leaped again, panic mounting as his claws scraped uselessly down the barrier.

I wonder if he ever realized that he could run 10 feet in either direction and find the relative freedom of inner-city grass or if he kept flinging himself against the concrete. I’ll never know for sure.