It’s that time of year again where the most recent purchase of a new and fresh planner, journal, notebook, or calendar will completely change your life. This time things will turn around as soon as you crack open the cover and lace the little attached ribbon across Page One.
Except it won’t.
But it could.
It just needs your help. And attention.
Continue reading Rage Against the Screens!Welcome to another installment of “a small talk question sends me into a philosophical quandary for days” wherein I try to sort out my thoughts on quiet days and my continuing bafflement with how people think about children.
Continue reading When Quiet Isn’t PeacefulBack in January this year (2025) a colleague asked if I would be on a roundtable panel to talk about creativity at the OK-ACRL conference. I agreed and it was a great little panel with a lot of useful takeaways. I ended up ruminating for months on some things I had roughly put together for that discussion.
Thankfully, that turned out to be useful as I gave a talk this past Friday at our University Libraries annual all-hands-on-deck meetup. I wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to be going into it, but I learned a lot form the aggregation of my thoughts and notes and had several people appreciate the event afterwards.
Since we had breakout sessions and not everyone was in the same room, several people expressed either sincere of feigned sorrow for missing my presentation. Since I already have most of it written down, and it would benefit greatly from having links to quotes, events, other talks that you might want to follow I am going to roll it all out here in more or less the same cohesiveness that the live studio audience received.
Continue reading Let’s Get CreativeToday we said goodbye to our Madam Curie. Affectionately known as Creep, or Creepo, because in the mornings when she would wake up she would root to the foot of the bed to come out of the covers, stretch out and creep to the head of the bed to wake us up or say good morning.
In the late 1980s they held a little parade in my hometown. Looking back now I wonder how they shutdown the only farm to market road through town to have it, but it was (and is) a small town. At one of those parades I saw a car that I immediately loved and wanted. There was no other place to drive this kind of vehicle other than the main highway or dirt roads and neither of those were going to do the car or the driver very much good. But, I kept wanting it, nonetheless.
Continue reading The Tale of The Count CarToday marks the thirteenth year since I first started throwing my thoughts, misspellings, and run-on sentences out into the digital world. I have to update several pieces of the “about me” section on here, but before I did that I wanted to take a look back on all the versions that have been on the various scrapes I began, and abandoned, before.
Continue reading Past Blog RegressionI’ve been sitting on this for over a month. Well, not sitting, more cobbling together thoughts and experiences from over 15 years of knowing, learning from, and working with Dr. Jim Westgate.
Continue reading My Mentor; My FriendThere is an African proverb (Zimbabwean if I can believe what I found online) that says “The ax forgets, but the tree remembers.”
Continue reading The Ax forgets but the tree remembers
Two weeks ago, I unplugged. It wasn’t just zoom fatigue or general email nuisances but just an utter and complete doneness with screens. I also wanted to take stock of the amount of time I was wasting on social media too and the best way to break it is cold turkey. I took the social media apps off my phone, I took my email apps off my phone, and I took a week off of work.
Continue reading Digital Robinson CrusoeThe next to last step in finishing my PhD work is underway. I take comprehensive exams over every book written in the Spring. I have an approved and finalized reading list and have started gathering the ones I don’t already own. So, naturally, I am trying to take stock exactly how it came to be that I live in Oklahoma and am reading in American Cultural History of Science.
Continue reading You May Ask Yourself…
