1. I have an unnatural and almost disturbing drive to collect things. However, I also have a need to go through fads, so things that I have collected in the past include:

• Rocks. These are the first things I started collecting and I started collecting them when I was like 3 yrs old. I had a bag that I’d carry around everywhere filled with rocks. One time a little boy on a playground stole my bag, opened it and was unimpressed because it was a bag of random rocks and threw it on the ground. I hit him with my bag of rocks.
• Agates (and fancy rocks). Just because I leave a collection doesn’t necessarily mean I’m done with it. I resumed the rock collecting when I was around 11 yrs old one summer by collecting agates and polished rocks in Minnesota, so I actually have some Lake Superior Agates… somewhere. I just upped the ante on that one.
• Pens. This is one of my longest ongoing things that I like to collect. For a while I was really into fountain pens and crazy fancy pens… but I got tired of refilling them with ink. Or the potential of getting a bad nib that would just bleed like crazy. This led to my later collection of-
• Office supplies. Man, I freaking love office supplies.
• Coins. My dad got me into that one. I never got especially serious into it but I do have a giant piggy bank at my dad’s called the PigMan (he’s half pig half man and he wears overalls) filled with coins of all assortments. (Sometimes my dad calls me and asks me about those commercials about the special limited edition coins that they advertise on TV because he wants to buy them “for my stepbrother.”)
• Collectors spoons. I used to get them in every state I’d travel through or if I just found a really cool one that I liked.

• Pogs. Thankfully both the spoons and the pogs were short lived with me. However I still have a big bag of pogs somewhere so if you want to play, I’m your lady.
• Snow Globes.
• Baseball cards. There’s a terrible story that goes with those.
• Trolls. I used to love trolls! Especially the wish ones with the jewels in their bellies. Er, yeah.
• For a while, anything X-Files related. Including Mulder and Skully Barbie dolls.

As a side note, do you see why I don’t tell personal stuff? Because I’m f’ing weird people.

• McDonald’s happy meal toys. I kept them in their little plastic wrapping and everything. This also included teeny beanie babies, which I was exceptionally crazy over. However I never collected actual beanie babies because I thought that was stupid.

• Yarn and knitting patterns. My current ongoing collection.

Are there others? Probably but I have a feeling I’m already boring you. Also, in my defense I never collected Pokemon cards, so there’s still hope for me, right?

Wow that was a long first thing. I’m pretty sure it’s all downhill from here guys.

2. My mom used to have a friend who was really into drag and was actually crowned the drag equivalent of Miss Ohio. Anyways, Amber once offered to make my prom dress. Here’s a really unflattering picture I took of her outside of a bar we got kicked out of trying to catch her show:

3. There are two things that I’ve been interested in pretty much my whole life: being a librarian or librarianship and murder mysteries. I actually played a librarian in a murder mystery called “Just Desserts” and it was amaaaazingly bad. So bad it was awesome. That was the first play I was in. I played the librarian Edna Mae who had an unhealthy obsession with her cats. The last play that I was in I played a man. Which is funny because I could maybe get away with playing a boy, at best. However I played a man who hit on a woman and every time he’d fail a buzzer would ring, we’d go back to the point he was succeeding and start all over again. (It was equal opportunity fail though, sometimes the woman would set off the buzzer too.)

As you can see, there’s no hope for my big acting career. First because… I suck at acting. Second because no matter what they tried to do I still looked like a ghost under those lights.

4. I have always been lucky as far as moms and strong female influences are concerned. For a while I had a really rocky and almost horrible relationship with my actual mom. We fought a lot. As an understatement. However now I have three moms:

Angel, my stepmom:

And Becky, John’s mom:

All of which probably did not want me sharing these photos with you! ;p

Plus even when things were rough, I had other moms. So I’m definitely a strong believer in that it takes a village to raise a child. But I’m not about to rush out and join a polygamist cult. Just saying. The other moms thing reminds me that-

5. For my first job my mom had to sign a waiver saying it was alright for me to handle adult material. I thought I had just gotten a job to rent out Home Alone but apparently the video place I worked at had an adult section. The woman who co-owned the place with her husband was freaking awesome! There were some really crappy parts to working at the job; like one time a customer was furiously upset because he had a fine from King Kong (which he swore he had never checked out and I could just call his wife if I thought he was a liar!) and another customer was concerned that he was going to beat me up (so was I) so they called the cops on him.

However other parts of the job were pretty cool. It was a sweet first job to have anyways.

6. I once had a job that almost killed me. Well, not really but doesn’t that sound so dramatic? I worked at a place during the holidays that took pictures of kids, pets, couples, whatever. Anways, they ran that place on slave labor and hatred; they wouldn’t allow any time for breaks, including lunch. Since I was working as many hours as I could as it was a holiday job, I ended up getting dehydrated and catching the flu. Which put me in the hospital. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sick. While in the hospital they said I had a potassium deficiency and ran a potassium drip in my I.V. at twice the normal speed which was one of the most painful and freaky things I’ve been through because it felt like my arm was burning off! So that’s the only place I’ve ever been a no call/no show and I felt like it was justified. They closed down after that winter, shocker.

7. I refuse to get my hair cut at that place “Regis” in the mall. When I got married, I’d read all of these things about getting married and the one thing I agreed with was “don’t try and be someone you’re not on your wedding day.” Well, I like to get dressed up all pretty but that’s not at the core of my being or anything so I wasn’t going to get some $60,000 dress or anything. However the day the wedding rolled around I ended up having more time than I thought I would so I said to my cousin, let’s go get our hair did because we’re fly gals. So we went to Regis in the mall, which wasn’t exceptionally busy or even busy at all. However the woman who was doing my hair bitched and moaned about how people come in without making appointments on big days like their wedding. But I’m like, why do you have a big ass sign that says ‘no appointment necessary’? Also, I didn’t want anything fancy, she just heard wedding and assumed I wanted some sort of crazy ass up-do. Well, she did a good job:

But it was torture to sit there and listen to her complain the whole time. Then when I checked out I got my cousins hair too and she had just had it straight ironed but they charged me for a chemical straightening. So I hate Regis. However I had a kick ass wedding!

8. When I first met my husband, I thought he was a jerk. I’ve since changed my mind. He’s really a total sweetie but he can’t talk on the phone to save his life. Which is hilarious because all I want to do is talk on the phone… well if you can get me on the phone, I often misplace it or forget to call people back or don’t see missed calls. I’m a mess about all of that. John is a punk on the phone though. He’s abrupt or he mumbles or just sounds whiny. Sometimes I yell at him about that but he just shrugs because guess what- too bad, we’re married now. :p

9. The friend who hooked me and my husband up had us help her out with a zombie comic. It’s called “Lazarus” and is kind of made of win. Although a little embarrassing for me… I must really like you guys.

10. I have two cats who I am constantly harassing with my camera.

Well I hope you enjoyed this loooong all about me post. Otherwise this was all in vain! Keep on rockin’ in the free world. Speaking of which, here’s a graph of my music for you, just email me if you’d like my social security number and a copy of my birth certificate!

This is it guys!! The end of my Learn and Play experience and I’ve got to say… there were some highs and lows. The highs were definitely seeing everyone elses blogs and feeling more connected to CML. Basically it made CML feel like a sort of living breathing entity with people behind it. Sometimes it’s hard to feel like one of the movers and shakers when you’re part time. But that disappeared for me with Learn and Play for some reason. I became “legitimate”. ;p

What wasn’t awesome is that some people at my branch really had a problem with Learn and Play on some sort of fundamental and weird level. They didn’t like that people were participating; they didn’t (and still don’t!) like that people were ‘getting paid to play’ and they thought it was a total scam to get out of (real) work. Luckily they were in the minority. However, you know that sometimes a very vocal minority can feel like a huge majority. It would have been nice to have someone big and important really just come out and say “this is encouraged, stop hating.”

So now we’re going to switch over to swanky interview mode:

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

I’m not going to lie, I was very resistant to Twitter going into this whole thing. However, this program has made me see the error of my ways. I was already really into Flickr since I use it on my other blog like it’s an addiction. That’s actually how I felt about most of the cool things. Hey, I’ve already done this: I’m already super cool.

But I hadn’t done Twitter and I think that what made it really cool was that it drove neat people from work onto it. Because twittering to yourself is so very lonely. It’s more fun to get responses back to what you say.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?

I’m not altogether sure. I feel that it’s affected how I respond to adversity in a way because there are people out there who think the internet and the things on it are a sham. Are stupid and worthless. Like it or not though, the internet is here and if we don’t get used to it nobody will want to get used to us. I think that it’s really made me see that I want to always be someone who learns and not someone who gets to a certain points and says “I’m too ______ to learn anything new.” It’s good to be young and idealistic and whatever but it’s nice that this program has made me realize that I want to keep part of that with me forever. To really be a ‘lifelong learner’ and not be corny about it. I haven’t set any specific goals or anything but just knowing that I want to do lifelong learning and being aware of it is a big hurdle in the first place. Being self aware is a big deal!

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

Definitely! I learned all kinds of new things and I learned about a lot of people that I probably would never have heard about… or it would have taken me a long time to learn about them. One thing that I was very impressed with is that a boss asked me for help in setting up her blog but then eventually motored on and completed everything before I did!  Very surprising and cool.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

What if you really hate blogging? I got a huge impression that most people, even people who have gone far and will complete Learn and Play, hate blogging as they know it. As most people know it. Well then you’re out of luck here. I wouldn’t make it so blog intensive. I would say, put a link in to a flickr picture that you liked. Not, blog about flickr or put that picture on your blog and then put the blog’s permalink into the tracking log. Which is where I think a lot of people got lost, frustrated and gave up.

Also, we had to sign up for a lot of sites. Twitter, LibraryThing, BlogLines, the wiki. People don’t like to give out their email address because they already get spam. Well, I don’t with gmail but the point is that people do and they don’t like it. It would be nice if we could really just survey it. I really didn’t want to sign up for BlogLines. Some people refuse to sign up for Twitter and that should be more than okay- because you’re informed enough at that point to make a judgement on it.

Sure I made a judgment on the X-Files and people who liked it before I saw it… and then when I finally did watch it I ended up being a super nerdy fan for it. But we’re allowed to make goofy mistakes like that when it comes to TV shows, movies, musics and web apps. So hating LibraryThing irrationally shouldn’t stop you from getting a step done. Honestly, I have all kinds of ideas but I’ll stop now because you probably stopped reading after the super cool youtube.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you again chose to participate?

Yes! Because eventually I will win a sweet prize from you guys. You can’t stop me forever!!! Of course the prize has already been won right? The prize of knowledge.

/corn

I will miss you Learn and Play. I’ll think of you tonight while I’m wiggling in anticipation for what will seriously be a truly terrible movie. As I post my thoughts to my twitter I’ll think of you and shed a tear like the guy on the side of the highway does when people litter.

I wish I knew how to end this right.

Finish Line, originally uploaded by andrew_mo.

Front porch gossip 1890s, originally uploaded by Laxlon.

So this has taken me a while to get to because I like to take my time with things on the internet and apparently you can only really check out MOLDI at work if you have a Mac at home because they hate on Macs like everyone else. Which is a silly stupid shame because Macs are just too pretty to hate! Also an audio book that’s not iTunes compatible?? Are they high?

Randomly, have you checked out Book Lamp? I was terribly unimpressed. Sure the guys story on how it came to be was impressive and the idea is impressive however the execution… oh if only the world ran on good intentions and sticktuitiveness.

Anyways, I like the idea of being at home and downloading a book on tape and bing bang boom, I’m reading… sort of. I love audio books in general and I’ve been a BIG fan of Librivox for a while. Which like Project Gutenberg can only really do stuff in the free domain. So we’re talking ooooold books. Which are books that I like and that I especially like to listen to because it makes me want to sit in a glider on a porch somewhere with a glass of lemonade and my knitting.

So MOLDI is interesting and I’m glad I checked it out; thanks Learn and Play!

pea pod buttons, originally uploaded by blue lady studios.

Aren’t these the cutest buttons?

Speaking of pods… podcasts are pretty sweet! I used to listen to Lime ‘n Violet once… but the problem with podcasts is that people keep coming out with them and my time keeps getting taken up more and more by looking for pictures of pea pods on the internet. I know I need to learn how to prioritize better but I just love wasting my time. So podcasts are great and they’re great for libraries.

I think that we should really start to focus on helping people make their own podcasts. Making the library like a cool tech-zone where if you want to do a podcast or a vlog, you can go into our sweet technical narnia room and do it. (After signing up and signing your life away, of course.) I mean, how sweet would it be if the library were just like, hey come here and get out there? That could be a slogan!

Some fancy cupcakes, originally uploaded by anapaulaoli.

Aren’t these cupcakes fancy? They are the nicest crocheted cupcakes I think I’ve seen in a long time. Because as cool as crochet is… knitting’s better!

Oh yeah and I looked at CMLs Toolbox and I have to say it was pretty intriguing. Especially the tool bar that you can install on your browser. I like an immaculate browser (I learned that from experience, I used to put any and every tool bar on there because, hey, why not?) so I won’t be installing them… however it’s nice knowing they’re out there. Almost gives me a real sense of calm and well-being. :p

However Youtube is a great way to get people into libraries. Teens love youtube… so having say, webcams or just digital recorders at the library so they can get in and make their own content- that should be something that the library focuses on. If we focus on kids creating their own content, we can also focus on informing them how to do it in a less gaudy way. Push out some The Everything Youtube Guide or whatever and have more content that doesn’t make you cringe. Speaking of which, have you seen Storytubes?

Here’s a ninja cat for your consideration:

If I already posted that, sorry! How cool would it be too to do a digital book report? I would have been all over that when I was in school. Because I’m a cheese ball. Anyways, here’s one of my own videos that I uploaded to youtube:

I saw this sheepy at a festival… just, wait for it!

But I do love it quite a bit!

However there is someone that I love more than Google (if we’re acting like Google is a person here) and that’s this handsome guy:

Anyways, one day we decided, hey, you know what responsible adults have? A BUDGET.

Well, we didn’t know how to really go about doing one of those. I mean, it’s hard to keep track of a burrito here or a bargain DVD there. So we decided, since we were doing the adult thing, lets justify getting a cheesy joint email account and actually put it to use. So we used google docs. Which meant that neither of us really had an excuse to not write down where our money was going. Because we both had access to it anywhere that could access the internet. The key word in that sentence was access.

With google, it doesn’t matter what computer you’re using- they follow you everywhere. When you’re in the bathroom and you feel like there’s someone there- it’s google.

Mario meets cupcakes? Did I die because this must be heaven. ;p

So I’ve gone back and checked out delicious. It is a very cool idea and I like this more for a group of people than for one person. Here’s my reasoning: when you’re looking through one person after an others links, you start to see the same things, I mean, we’re all on the same internet. But it’s like talking on the job, which is apparently a controversy!, but I digress- you start talking about the same thing every day. Then you start compounding, one thing on top of another and next thing you know you’ve come up with something revolutionary… or spiraled into a discussion about reality TV. Either way- win/win.

In a group delicious you start out with the basics, wikipedia (check!) then you move onto some real xcorex reference action.

Delicious always makes me think of Tumblr. I knew some people who were like, oh man, blogging is too much work! So they hopped on Tumblr because they had something to say. Like Twitter… like everything that’s Web 2.0 all rolled up in one. Speaking of which, have you seen the State of the Web (potentially NSFW only not really since it’s all cute looking)? For summer 2008. Which I guess means this post has stumbled (hi-o) into Web 2.0. Again!

I checked out the Web 2.0 Awards. What cracked me up was that under books, Craigslist is the #1 website for buying/trading books. It didn’t crack me up in that I disagree- I totally agree. It’s just Craigslist also gave us this:

Carton of irregular cat hats. Can any other website in the world compete with that? Game over.