I can’t believe we have been married for 13 years. I sort of remember the first time I met Den, well sort of. It was probably like his first or second week as a pizza delivery driver at my parents’ Round Table Pizza restaurant. Yes, really! People usually think I am joking when I tell them how I met him. My old friend Judy and I had just gotten back from Huntington Beach. That was usually my summer hangout. I was 16 at the time and life was carefree.

He was actually in the back making pizzas when I met him. When it was not busy, the drivers would have to help make pizza while waiting for their orders. I think I went over to introduce myself, which I usually did with new employees. I had to check out the new meat, so to speak. I would usually accompany him on his pizza deliveries and then we would eat salad together. Funny huh? I always thought he had the funniest sense of humor and he was just the nicest guy.

Through the years our friendship kept growing stronger. I dated a little but, and he was usually there for me through that period in my life. At some point, I had realized that I had more than friendship feelings for him, so one day we had a conversation about moving our relationship to a new level. That was an interesting time for us. I know initially he wasn’t quite sure about the idea. I guess maybe he didn’t know if he could trust me. (lots of back history to that, which I don’t feel the need to write here). That weekend I was going to Colorado with my dad because he was thinking about buying some real estate there. This time away from each other gave us some space to think about things.

Well obviously, he ended up going for my idea and here we are 20 years later. For the numerically challenged, we met in 1988, started dating in 1993, got engaged 1994, and got married in 1995, a month after I received my B.A. in Psychology and his M.A. in Medieval History. We waited 7 years before having children. Brennan was born in 2003 and Elden in 2005.

We are heading out for an overnight trip to one of our favorite spots, sans the kiddos to The Glen Ivy Hot Springs, located in Corona, CA. I am looking forward to a nice day relaxing in the mud and mineral baths, and soaking the day away in the pools.

On a sad note, I am deeply upset about the fires surrounding Yosemite National Park. So far the fires are only 10% contained and according to the latest from AP, 25 homes were lost. The park itself is still open, with highway 140 shut down, although Highway 120 at Big Oak Flat, Highway 123 over Tioga Pass and Highway 41 through Oakhurst are still open. This is a really special place for us and we try to make it out here at least once a year. The firefighters definitely have a tough fight on their hands. I hope that they make some headway into this fire soon.

Three years ago my littlest man came into our lives.

He is just the sweetest little guy. I can’t believe he will be starting preschool in September. He has talked about school in the past, telling us that he want to have his own school. He is sort of on the shy side, although he definitely has his loud moments. He loves to mimic his big brother, as well as taunt him at times. He chatters up a storm, and can sort of count and say part of the alphabet. He loves cuddling with me, which I so love to, although sometimes he wants to cuddle inside my shirt. LOL! I usually don’t write a big milestone entry, mainly because I haven’t been keeping a very good track of his milestones. But he is happy, healthy, and well loved.

Yesterday for his birthday, we took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner. This particular Chuck E. Cheese was run down, and they didn’t turn on their air conditioner, so I was sweating like a pig. But nevertheless, the kids had a blast. When we first got there, I was following them around, to make sure they were okay, but I noticed that Den was already sitting at the table eating his salad. I had forgotten that they stamp your hand and they guard off the entrance. Other than the chance that one of them could have fallen down or something, they were pretty much safe. So I sat down as well to relax a little bit and to cool off. We will be throwing him a big birthday party once we settle into the house in month or so. I would feel bad for some reason if we didn’t throw him a party, mostly because he has never really had a big party with all his friends. Last year, we took him to CEC as well and his first birthday we with family. Actually, he doesn’t really have too many friends, except for the siblings of Brennan’s friends. He does talk about his 12 year friend from the Y though.

Speaking of “The big move”, it is coming up real quick here. I guess it is not a totally big move because we are only traveling 45 minutes away, but it is big in respect to the fact that we are moving from a small 2 bed, 1100 square foot tiny townhouse, with basically no backyard, to a huge 2500 square foot home in the burbs, with 5 bedrooms, a pool, my own craft room, and a gigantic backyard. We have plenty of space for growing our own fruit and vegetables. In terms of gardening, there is so much to do. Lots of weeds to get rid of among other things. Yesterday I went there for the delivery of the dishwasher and oven, and to see the amazing work that was done on the house. You can check out my flickr for some pictures of the house. We are pretty much tossing every piece of furniture here and getting new stuff. I also met our next door neighbor to get her numbers for the pool cleaner and gardener. She also grew up in this neighborhood, but in a different house. It turns out that she is a year older than me, but she went to a different high school than me. She did mention two other ladies and they both remember me from my varsity days in tennis. Pretty wild! I also watered the plants, and grass around the house and my dad was there and showed me how to clean the pool.

We still have more packing and throwing away crap to do today. In the morning, I will be taking the kids to the local library here for the last time, and then in the afternoon is Brennan’s last basketball game. They will be having a party and the coach will be handing out the trophies. Brennan has been so excited to receive his trophy. He really did enjoy himself, although it did take a little time for him to warm up to the practices. It has definitely been a great learning experience for him. I won’t be signing him for soccer in the fall, and will wait for him to let us know what he is interested in next.

Besides birthdays, basketball games, and moving this week, Den and I will be also be celebrating our wedding anniversary. We will spending the day at one of our favorite spas, and will be spending the night out there. Looking forward to a romantic time with my hubby.

So what’s been going on with our life? Well our packing is slowing coming along, but we plan to be out of here by the end of the month. The renovations on the D house is almost done. I haven’t seen it since a week or so ago, but Den was over there today and reports that everything looks great. It’s funny because I had this original design scheme in mind, but mostly all if is completely different, except the wall colors. It’s not that I had changed my mind or anything. I originally fell in love with Silestone, but at $65 a square foot, realized that I would have to go with granite. The white with bluish speckles is rather uncommon for granite, so I ended up going with a sample that the contractor had. Also, I wanted light wood or rather pergo, but the contractor suggested the darker color, which was fine, since it was actually the second lightest color. They ended up doing a combination of a lighter and darker wood. I am sure it all looks fabulous. I have yet to take pictures of the inside, but here are some pictures of the outside. If you don’t already know the background this is actually the house that I grew up in. We will be renting it from my parents and will be renting out our current pad.

The kids are doing good. Elden will be turning three at the end of the month and we will throw him a big party once we are settled into the D house. I have no idea of his milestones and such, but he seems to be doing fine. He is a very happy boy, and much more laid back then his type A brother. I still drop him off at the daycare at the local Y, but not as much I could be. He will be attending preschool a couple times a week, starting in September. I really wanted to get him into the local co-op program, but I missed the deadline. I did call again today, to see if anyone dropped out. I may enroll him into swim class, although for the first time on our mini vacation, he actually swam a little bit by himself. He usually clings onto us in the water, but braved it on his own.

Brennan is in summer school, and will be there for another couple of weeks. His second to last basketball game is tomorrow. He is excited for the last game, since he will receives his trophy. We don’t have any sports planned for him in the Fall. I want to give him time to adjust to his new surroundings, and especially to Kindergarten, before throwing any extra activities his way. He will be going in the mornings, instead of the afternoons, so I think that will be a big adjustment for him. This past week, Brennan decided that he didn’t need to sleep with his night lights anymore. Elden still wants me to lay with him in his crib, unless he is really tired and just conks out.

We took the kids on a mini vacay to Legoland and Seaworld earlier in the week. The kids had a total blast, which left us totally exhausted. We also lost Elden for about 15 minutes at Legoland. He wandered off after Den pulled him out of this shark structure. We started to walk down to this line for a ride. I saw Den walking down, and I just assumed Elden was walking with him. Brennan was following behind me, when I realized Elden wasn’t there. After I had a major panic attack, Den found him at a nearby lost and found, where he was sitting happily on a bench with a few LL employees. I am uploading the pictures to Flickr as we speak.

Speaking of Flickr, I need to download all my images from May 2007 to the harddrive on the computer. I am a total idiot because I haven’t backed up anything from that time, and one of our external drivers conked out a couple weeks ago. I pretty much lost all the videos, except for a handful that I uploaded onto youtube and vimeo. Thankfully, I uploaded all the photo onto Flickr, but now I have to either download onto the harddrive, or just order DVD’s. I will most likely do the DVD’s.

Well off to sleep now.

I’ve had this rash on my left for the last month or so. Perhaps, Elden’s rash from his cheeks and arm rubbed onto me. I most definitely should get a prescription for it.

So not only is it July the 4th, but it is also my Dad’s 70th birthday. To celebrate in style, he is upstairs in his room taking a nap. LOL! He is so methodical on his naps. In the mornings, since he has retired a couple years ago, he usually does yard work in the backyard. He says that by keeping himself active physical, will slow down the aging process. Not only that, but he goes hiking up at the local mountains every Saturdays, goes golfing a couple times a week, and like I mentioned he does lots of yard work or whatever interesting project he has going on with himself, like scanning every piece of paperwork into his terabyte harddrive. He has always been the kind of person that likes to keep busy. Anyways as part of his birthday gift, we are sending my parent’s off to Vegas for a couple of days. Where do you send someone that pretty much has and seen it all? Besides that, we also got him a gift certificate to Borders. And this morning out of guilt, I went to Nordstroms and bought him a shirt. After speaking to my mom this morning, she emphasized to me that she hoped that I actually bought him something. And no, to her a gift certificate would not cut it. So I got him a nice Tommy Bahama like shirt for him and had it wrapped in a pretty Nordstrom box. How sad though, I am much more concerned on what my mom thinks about the gift, rather than my dad. (And yes, I do have some issues with my mom, that I still need to resolve).

So now we are here at my parent’s taking it easy and waiting for other family members to come over for a bbq. My brother bought Guitar Hero, which I am not too interested in, the kids are playing something. I keep hearing Brennan calling out Elden and mentioning something about Seaworld, which we will be going to in a couple of weeks. I’m actually wanting to take a nap, but I thought I would take some time to blog, since I have been terribly bad about it.

Oh, so this past week, I attended my first library conference. No actually, this would be my second library conference. I actually attended a ACRL conference up at Santa Barbara or somewhere up north, back about a decade ago when I used to work as a Slide Librarian. So this was the big American Library Association conference here out in Anaheim, CA. I was able to attend due to a project through ALA and CLA-IT, which entailed me interviewing and filming attendees. The first day, on Friday, June 27 we interviewed a handful of attendees (but I accidently deleted them off my camera), and also interviewed the vice president / president elect Michelle Frisque, past president Bonnie Postlethwaite, and Alex Cohen, a committee member for top tech trends of LITA a library planner. Thankfully, I did not delete those because they were filmed on the videocam. That was basically all we did on Friday. Later for dinner, I met up with my brother at Buco’s.

Then I took a quick trip to Palm Springs with my mom’s club, where we stayed at the MiraMonte Resort and Spa. I had a lovely mud wrap and mostly enjoyed myself at the pool with a couple drinks in hand. For dinner, we went to Roys. It was quite delightful, but I was exhausted by the end of the night.

I left back home early, but went back to the conference in the evening to attend my University’s reception. It was great to meet some colleagues and faculty in person, and collect some business cards. I wanted to attend a series of Feminest films, but the parking lot was closed off to the Convention Center, when we returned back from the Hyatt. Before heading back home, I grabbed coffee with one of my coherts, to plan for the next day.

The RUSA President’s Program on Monday was most excellent and was definitely the highlight of my day. I was particularly impressed by Marie Radford’s enthusiasm.

Robert Spector, consultant and author of The Nordstrom Way: the Inside Story of America’s #1 Customer Service Company and The Nordstrom Way to Customer Service Excellence. Robert has studied customer service in the corporate world and is a frequent consultant and speaker.

Donna Bachowski, Head of Reference Central, Orange County Public Library, Orlando, Florida. bachowski.donna@ocls.info, (407) 835-7370.

Marie Radford, Associate Professor & Library Consultant, School of Communication, Information & Library Studies, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. mradford@rci.rutgers.edu, (732) 932-7500 x8233. Marie is the author of The Reference Encounter: Interpersonal Communication in the Academic Library, which was published in 1999 by the American Library Association/Association of College and Research Libraries, Chicago, Illinois.

I was planning to watch the Book Cart drill team, but only caught the naming of the winners because I showed up a tad late. Luckily, one of my coherts videotaped the entire program. This has to be the most hilarious competition ever. When I get a chance, I will upload a few snippits onto my Flickr, but I am sure if you do a search for ALA Book Cart drill team competition, you will find it up on the web.

On Tuesday, I basically plowed through the exhibitions to pick up free books and other random goodies. They had lots of book signing from many authors. I got a half a dozen prereleased books, as well as kid’s books, and posters. I wasn’t planning on coming that day because it was only a half day, and I hit tons of traffic heading out to Anaheim, but I ended up showing up. It was well worth it for the free books.

I enjoyed meeting new colleagues and seeing other classmates for the first time. It was lots of fun, but I think the next time that I attend a library conference, I want to attend through a scholarship. Which is actually one of my next goals for the coming year. I also want to join LITA and RUSA, so I can get more involved professionally.

So as far as my classes for the Fall semester, I decided to take two classes. Brennan will be in kindergarten and Elden will be starting preschool. I will definitely have a little more free time in the daytime to devote to my studies (at least that is what I hope). Here is the description for my classes.

This is the general description for LIBR 220, but you can find additional information on this page for
Susan Aber, who will be focusing specifically on the topics of GIS, map and map librarianship.

LIBR 220. Resources and Information Services in Professions and Disciplines taught by Dr. Susan Aber

Examination of the nature of resources for, and services to, professions and disciplines including methods of communication, characteristics of users, and current methods of meeting research needs in libraries and information centers.

Examples of topics studied include:
Legal Resources, Business Resources, Maps and Geographic Information Systems, Film and Media Collections, Digital Humanities, GLBT services, services for older adults, Latino patrons, African American patrons, Asian-American patrons, Native American patrons.

I also decided to take LIBR 266. Collection Management taught by Dr. Yelena Pancheshnikov

Study of collection management in all types of libraries and information centers. Includes analysis of information needs, criteria for selection, collection use evaluation, and resources for collection development

I am over halfway through my program, and the school only gives us 7 years to complete the program, so I figured that although, I won’t be looking for a full-time job in the next year, I should at least try to get through a little quicker than I have been doing. I am excited though to eventually go back to work and be more involved with the Academic library industry.

Whew, this is what happens, when I don’t write something for a while. I end up writing a huge as novel. I know this is probably not too interesting to you, but I enjoy looking back at my entries to see what I wrote about.

I thought I would share this article that Den has recently published at PopMatters. This is what happens when you mix a father of two kids with an academic that has a background in history of religion.

“Swiper, No Swiping!”