Also a few weeks ago, I went out to lunch at an interesting little place near the university with some fellow librarians. It was nice enough to eat outside, and the cherry blossoms rained down on us in force.

The restaurant we ate at had a Jolly Box.

No, seriously. Check out the sign on the box.

Sadly, there was only coffee creamer and packets of sugar inside. False advertising!

Then, we wandered over to a quick mart and low and behold, proof that we were near a college campus!

Yes, they now sell ready made beer pong. Whodathunkit?

My partners in crime, the Prairie Debutante on the left, who can charm people out of the deepest funk and make them play nice together, which is a scary superpower to have, and Dr. Revolution on the right, for when you absolutely, positively must overthrow someone. Accept no substitute. It’s the artfully knotted scarf that gives her away. Always be wary of people in scarves!

I downloaded a bunch of pics off my camera the other day, so I thought I’d post them for you.

First, I don’t think I posted the pic of when Diana Pharaoh Francis and I went on our book signing marathon on Christmas Eve.

Then a few weeks ago, I came to work to find the library on fire. Or at least there was a smoking outlet on the 7th or 8th floor. It meant chilling outside in the cold for an hour or three waiting for them to okay the building. We went and got coffee, but first we admired the firemen. And their trucks.

And policemen. And their cars. And their fine, efficient work, of course.

See how we at the library admired?

Okay, it’s super lame, but I’m the web manager over at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and I made a couple of new images for the conference we’re having in Belgium in August of this year. One is a small announcement over on the right with the Grand Palace at night, and the other is a preliminary ad for the conference with this nifty stamp on it. Basically, we got the images from istockphoto, but hey, I picked them out and did the pretty fonts and such, so I’m totally taking credit for them. Here’s the ad, just for a preview, but go check out the other one.

I survived the first day of instruction, and it went really well. That’s always a nice kick off to the semester, so I was pretty happy about it. Right now, I have way too much to do at work, so the break from writing is a total blesing because I don’t have to feel guilty about not making word count every day.

Maybe I should go on writer’s strike every February and September, since those are the worst teaching months for me. Hm. Much consider for future guilt-saving.

I’m back at work today after the holidays with family and friends. I also had a yucky cold the last week or so, which is just super unfair during a vacation.

I wrote like crazy, and can see the glimmering light at the end of the tunnel for this book, which means you may get fewer blogs between now and my deadline on the 15th. Sorry!

I also started coming up a list of conferences I’ll be attending and trips I’ll be taking this year and I’m already exhausted! I have the Popular Culture Conference with my fellow romance scholars in late March, a library conference the next week in early April, RT in late April, a vacation up to M’s new digs in May, RWA in July, and I hope another trip in July or August to visit the family in Texas.

I think I need a vacation from my vacations!

I always know when the semester has finally dragged to a close when my inbox is not full of students going “I have a paper due in one hour and need sixteen articles right now. Heeeeelp meeeeeee!” and I can drive into the parking garage and it’s like a ghost town. The level of stress in the library just cracks and it’s totally peaceful.

Ah, bliss!

Of course, I’m on deadline right now, so my stress level hasn’t gone anywhere but through the roof, but at least I’m not getting it at work and on the writing front. The good news is, it’ll all be over soon.

Ah, bliss!

Just in time for next semester to start.

I yanked this off of her Facebook page because I had to share the awesomeness with the world.

I’m having an awesome writing week. I’m also having an awesome work week. Normally, these are separate and very distinct events, but everything is cranking right along at top speed.

I’ve got all my lecture notes for the library research classes I’m teaching in the next couple of weeks.

None of the meetings I have to attend this week are the ones that make me want to staple things to people’s foreheads.

I’m going shopping this weekend to bond with a co-worker. Hey, this is work related! Totally.

I’ve got an awesome outline for Every Witch Way and am trucking right along with making my page counts every day.

I have two outlines for shorter ebooks hammered out and ready to go when I get a minute to write them.

I’ve got my roomies for the RT Convention hammered out. Hotel reservations have been handled. Costumes are already being discussed/planned for the parties.

All in all? Good week, people. Good week.

Dear Parking Enforcement Officer,

While I realize that you were just doing your job this morning directing traffic on the first week of school, and you were doing so inside the parking garage because apparently licensed drivers in the state of California are too dimwitted to know how a parking garage works, but I digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes, directing traffic inside the parking garage. I have to say, sir, that I am more than a little irritated that you stood in front of the ramp to the second floor and forced me to park on the first floor. While I understand that I arrive early and the first floor is never full when I get there, I arrive early for just this reason. When I am early I get to pick where I park and am not forced to park in just any space that happens to be available. There are, in fact, reasons that I don’t park on the first floor, such as, in that particular garage, the way you have the first floor arranged is almost guaranteed to bottleneck traffic, make people mad, and cause accidents.

Thus I park in a very specific area of the second floor. Not the same space every day, of course–I’m not that OCD–but in the area that is the easiest to get out of and the least likely to get me stuck behind some minivan trying to stuff itself in a compact space.

So, I am annoyed with you and with other drivers that made it necessary for you to be in my parking garage this morning and disrupt my perfectly planned and normally well-timed parking experience.

Also, because I had to jockey for a space with the fifty other cars you forced to park on the first floor, you made me late for work.

Fuck you very much,
Crystal

One of the big differences between my old job in Utah and my new job in California is the kind of university I work at. In Utah, I was still in a medium-to-large city, but in California, I’m right downtown. Which means dealing with the occasional tweaker, crackhead, alcoholic, homeless person, and/or…general crazy person.

That’s the background for this little story.

So, I was leaving the library yesterday and walking down the street to the parking garage when a man in an electric wheelchair came speeding up–I should note here than he was driving in a remarkably straight line for someone who reeked of whiskey–and stopped right in front of me. He stares at my chest and said, “I don’t know if she has children, but I told that lady she had nice breasts.”

I blinked. Tried not to snort. Stepped around him. Kept going and hoped he didn’t decide to follow me in his very fast wheelchair that could SO beat me in a race.

So. Um. Thank you, homeless man? I’m not sure if he was talking about MY breasts, since he said “she” rather than “you” or if I was measuring up unfavorably to some chesty broad in his mind, but…okay.

I may, apparently, have nice breasts, but maybe not. Still not sure how that would relate to having children, unless he thought the nice breasts were due to breastfeeding, but…perhaps applying logic here is giving him a little too much benefit of the doubt.