Lots of Little Things Add Up to Not Much

It's been quite the week so far. Annoying tourist season has started in NYC, making my morning commute noisier than usual as hordes of tourists plus tour guides pack into the subway car I'm in.

Rude, don't watch where you're going season has been underway for a while now, so mix that with hordes of tourists roaming the city streets and I've got plenty to bitch about.

New phone system at work has been an interesting challenge. Our library branch is now a call center! And we've got new phones. The handset is too wide for my hand and I keep dropping it. My ears don't like headsets, so that's not an option. I get earaches. And the buttons on the new phone are different or the same in different places, so it's been almost a game of who will lose the most calls in a day while trying to transfer them. Plus, the phones have displays that show a lot of info that's hard to read. I painted the buttons with different Sharpie colors, so it looks very cool now, if nothing else.

On the entertainment front, summer shows are returning. Burn Notice is back, The Closer returns in July, and a week from Friday, we get Torchwood: Miracle Day on Starz! I'm psyched!

Oh, and the Mets have made baseball fun this week.

Guess that's it. I hear some chocolate calling my name. :)

Feeling: ready for a 3-day weekend!

~~~o0o~~~

Some Cool Blogs I Just Found Out About

Someone asked Joseph Mallozzi (a writer/producer of Stargate) what blogs he reads and he suggested some good ones. I really like The Hot Librarian, though there hasn't been a new post for over a month. One of her posts led me to a brief list of funny amateur blogs, which led me to this priceless bit of inanity: Ugly Outfits in New York. I've seen plenty that would qualify, but sadly, have never been able to get my camera out and snap the pic in time to either get a shot in focus or to avoid being seen by the subject and having either my camera or face broken, or perhaps both. People can be so sensitive about their fashion choices.

BTW, here are glimpses of the less glamorous side of snow in NYC. You'll note it warmed up a bit and has started to melt, leaving many Manhattan corners resembling mini frigid lakes.


I had the day off for New Year's (yeah, it makes as much sense to me as it probably does to you), so I went to get my comics and on the train, had to listen to a group of tourists all armed with little guides to NYC. In the summer and during the holiday season, I especially hate the 49th Street stop on the Broadway line because there are a lot of hotels in that area and tourists flood the subway at that point. I had to listen to such comments as "Where's the business district?" "Check page 28." "I want to see the Empire State Building." "That's the other way. How about the Statue of Liberty?" "That's what I meant. The Statue of Liberty." "Where's Lincoln Center?" I came thisclose to grabbing the book out of the hands of the one I guessed was the mother and telling her Lincoln Center is the other way, in the W. 60s, and why didn't you bother figuring all this out before you got on the train? Instead, I reminded myself that tourists pump money into the city's economy by paying for hotels, food, and funny little souvenir hats.

I end this randomized post with a picture of some of the delicious petit fours a grateful library patron sends us every year for the holidays. My boss and I managed to eat most of them.


Feeling: still mellow




~~~o0o~~~