Berry Plush Diaper cover

Lavender Fields, Jam tots, size Medium

more flight of the conchords

Flight of the Conchords

I love my little family

Today was baby bibliotecaria's first cable car ride. She slept through it, but her big brothers were very excited for her. I was kind of overwhelmed by the surrounding tourism that I forgot to snap a picture.

Not that I don't like visitors to our city--I love them. I am just easily overwhelmed by crowds.

We began at the cable car museum, which the boys love. It boggles my mind, to see those huge wheels spinning, pulling these little cars up these huge hills...

After our cable car adventure, we went by Ali's Coffee shop, and I ran into my good friend from school in Firenze, Italia--Betsy! She was jogging about.

I haven't seen B. for over two years.

But I just really enjoyed looking at my beautiful family all day, and my handsome husband. That was the best part of the day.

I am still waiting....

I am now Incomplete - Verified... which means:

Your application has been reviewed by the Data Specialist in Graduate Studies & Research.
-Check your "To Do" list in http://my.sjsu.edu for a complete list of outstanding documents and instructions.

So I've checked it... and my transcripts are somewhere in the mail room, or in the trash or something. Maybe they're in someone else's file?

The annoying thing is that I can check all this stuff--giving the illusion of actually doing something, even if it is really just a frustrated impatient waiting.

I just want to be Complete.

Thank you M.T. for Happy Lion

He is first son's most favorite companion. He goes on our trips, and his absence is felt at bedtime. We have had mass lion hunts that have kept us up, searching, past bedtime.

I sent it all in

I had such fun mailing in my transcripts to SJSU yesterday. They were received at 4:27am today (thank you www.usps.com ). Now I wait...

And seek out daycare for 2 kids. Which is really difficult [for me]. I've decided that they have to go to the same place and that money is no object. I find a school I like that will take both kids, and then I discover that there is a 9 month waiting list. Fun.

I think I can wait though because I can perhaps get Mr. Bibliotecaria to watch the little ones on the few days I have to commute to school and do the work before/after the kids sleep. Coffee is my friend. Then there is summer...

And then I'll be ready for internship, or whatever adult endeavors my life brings me. I am terrified.

I think, what if there is a huge earthquake--how will I protect my children... and the list goes on and on... I guess it doesn't help that oldest son has had special drills for when the 'bad people' come to school, where they all have to hide in the cloakroom... life in the era of school shootings is .... I'm having trouble finding a different adjective other than terrifying.

So now I'll fill out the application for my kids' preschool. Which will, incidentally, cost a lot more than my M.L.I.S. program.

Not with a bang

But with a whimper. T.S. Elliott gave us these lines, and he believed that civilization would end with people shooting each other in the streets. Well, L.A. and Chicago go on, with people shooting each other in the streets.

Forget Iran having nukes, I think that importing poisoned food from China will kill us all. I am all for free trade, qua qua qua, but it is completely insane for us to not grow our own food and depend on another nation for food, no matter how cheap.

This situation of eating things that we know not what they contain, coupled with converting the great central valley of California from the best agricultural land the world has ever know into track homes, makes me think that the end is, truly, neigh.

I doubt the God would write the Divine Comedy

of Dante. This is too human.

I think that if God were to write a play it would certainly be a musical. There would be lots of tap dancing and beautiful ladies and handsome gentlemen. Synchronized swimming, swings dropping from on high. Everyone would know the words and the dance steps.

Everyone would fall in love and have a dance partner. When the number was over, it would be so good that you will still hum it in your head, and never want it to end.

Baby Bibliotecaria

Please read

this web log.

The Sun Is

Do you watch the sun set? As an undergraduate in San Francisco I would find my way to Ocean Beach almost every day (except the El Nino year of '96-'97) to watch the sun set. I had two spots complete with striking cliffs and trees to perch within, and watch the sun slip to the other side of the earth.

I like to think of it not so much as setting, but going to the other side. Setting speaks only of the sun disappearing from sight--but we know that it is actually only made invisible because of the rotation of the Earth. Strangely, this is they only time of the day when we can gaze directly at the sun, if only for a few seconds. Why would one want to miss that moment?

As an adolescent, I would retreat to the Pacific... I would paddle out on my board and sit on it. Although the surf was sometimes not so great, this was the best time for me to be in the water, because I would sit on my board and watch the sun sink into the ocean, being rocked back and forth, just out past the break.

There was a man who we always found at Ocean Beach at this important time of day. He had two frisbees and would alternate throwing one into the stiff wind coming from Hawaii and beyond over the Pacific. The disc would spin and hover in the air, and then be returned to the man. Sometimes he would catch it, and then throw the other disc into the air, have it spin away and then return to him to be caught at times, at other times dropped into the broken wave.

Now living in the East Bay I sometimes make the effort to catch the sun set. But it isn't quite the same, even from the towing vantage of the hills, or the point of Alameda. I think that it is right for the Pacific--violent and vast--to swallow the sun. Nothing else can then give birth to the source of light and life on the other side of the world.

Now I sound like some kind of hippie.

What is it?

No purchase necessary.Void where prohibited.

slide

wheeeeeee!

what does it mean in ordinary time?

What the heck was I thinking?

I was trying to paint Easter, and then when I look at it on the wall now in ordinary time, it makes more sense.

But it isn't Easter. Not quite.

It is really hard to paint Easter.

I think it is still too... What? Still to something-else-other-than-Easter.

I wanted to see Mary Magdalen and the tomb without the boulder blocking the entrance. And she kind of looking over her shoulder at Us.

But now I think it is a group of beautiful veiled modest women, or one woman, all intertwined within herself/each other.

Image on the right is stamped crayon and watercolor.

This is where I used to live, but then I moved.

this was a bit of poetry in spam email received today.

Then she twisted the nozzle off and walked back along the hoses length, looping it over her arm. And, as he also so often did, he tried to block this memory; and found himself a second too late.

Sometimes I feel compelled to check spam for the weird parts included in the message to sneak past the filters. I would love to be hired for such a position, I think that perhaps this way my poetry might be read, accidentally.

Or is it sentences from random books; selected from random books and put together?

What do you think?

La mort veut être belle

copywrite 2006 La Bibliotecaria Laura; not to be used without permission.

Gli Colori

On road trips while Mr. Bibliotecaria drives I like to paint. Here are my beautiful little colors, crying out to be used up in marriage to paper and light.

Paintings to follow... but here is a link to my friend's website, Padre Bruno, from whom I learned to paint...

A Garden

I have a terrible sin to confess--I am constantly envious of those around me with private gardens. I physically ache for a garden, to grow vegetables, flowers, succulents.

I want to play in the dirt with my children, I want to make a special home for birds and insects.

I believe that children and those who care for them should spend at least half of the day outside; but this is difficult for a mama of 2 busy boys and a baby girl. Yes, we constantly visit public parks, the seashore, botanical gardens. And it is good in a way that we can't just plop down in our own little patch--it keeps us out and visiting these beautiful jewels of out cities. California has so many wonderful parks of all sizes, so there is really no excuse to remain in doors.

I guess it doesn't help that The Secret Garden, written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is one of my favorite books. I've read it so many times as a child and as an adult that I think perhaps it informs and contributes to this ache in me, because I think that a garden is more than just a place to barbeque, but represents a place to discover encounter the Divine and friendship and healing. Obviously there is the Garden of Our Origin, Eden, and then there is Carmel.

I get this same heavy feeling in my chest, from my very favorite part of this Burnett's novel is the first paragraph of Chapter 21. I'll finish with it, this pit of salve for my heart:

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in some one's eyes.

Ducks in a Row

I am ready to apply to graduate school. I need to brush up my essay a bit, and e-mail my former boss to make sure it is okay to list him as a reference. But, thanks to Bob at City College SF, I have all my transcripts--except for my record from U. C. Berkeley Extension.

image from here.

This grade isn't posted yet, as I still have to post a story and possibly an essay, but it will surely boost my g.p.a (which should be sufficient, but now that it is time to act I am wondering if a Higher G.P.A. would be better?)


I submitted my FAFSA awhile ago, hoping that if I get my application in on the earliest possible day, I will possible have time to apply for scholarships and grants. I haven't crunched all the numbers, but I hope I can afford school.

I guess it will be good timing as Mr. Bibliotecaria will be finishing school. If he applies to grad school and we have to move north, I can transfer (right?) to the other good library school in Seattle.

I just hope I don't lose my mind. Baby Bibliotecaria will be almost old enough to be cared for by someone else. Ideally Mr. Bibliotecaria will be working from home or have a flexible enough schedule to care for her. Second Son Bibliotecaria will be in school, and of course First Son Bibliotecaria will have school.

I am hoping to be able to handle the maximum amount of units per term.

You can see French the Cat is still in his bed, and Fern Fern sits next to the basket on French's table in his kitchen. There is also a little stack of bowls on the table, and a small red pitcher on the floor beside the sink.

Shake 'n' Pour

Okay, so this post could get kind of hairy. It involves possibly shocking details about the General Mills is Betty Crocker. Are they one person; is this like a trans-gender thing? Don't ask, don't tell.

I was at the large chain store which I affectionately call WhiteWay looking for bisquick-- just regular old Bisquick. I was horrified to see this thing.

It is called the Bisquick Shake 'n' Pour. Note, there was no regular ol' box of bisquick on the shelf next to it--just the betty's pancake mix, which to the untrained eye would appear as a lesser quality product than the tried and true Bisquick. They're actually the same exact thing.

So do they really want to you buy this petroleum product, non-recyclable thing called Shake 'n' Pour, instead of a box of Bisquick? I already have a Shake 'n' Pour: it's called a pyrex measuring cup. Bisquick has reached an entirely new level of slackerdome.

Donnie Darko

Yes it took me awhile to finally see this movie, but I was presently surprised. The theological under/over tones, coupled with dark '80s music and paranoid schizophrenia, Graham Greene --what a winning film!

Several of the plot twist kept me wondering about the movie for awhile, and the lack of scientific reality of the whole time travel concept didn't bother me at all. It isn't really a sci-fi movie at all. It is more of a thought experiment, where one accepts something totally unreal as real for the sake of learning/exploring a greater idea--the nature of sacrifice and well, there is some cool joy division.

Not for children, I still have a hard time looking at rabbits, even after a few days. Rent it today!