Oh, yeah, we went to Romania cause my husband is awesome

We have had the best year ever. Really, we have. Globetrotting and at home, everything has been pretty darn marvelous.

Friday tomfoolery

Sarah Wright's Dewey Decimal Section:

078 Newspapers in Scandinavia

Sarah Wright = 91818389780 = 918+183+897+80 = 2078


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Zombie escape made simple

How I do love commoncraft. They make all of the crazy-complex stuff in life seem so much simpler, fun even. And for Halloween, they even help us stay safe from zombies.

Zombies don't eat candy, don't dance, and can't swim. They don't sound like much fun at all.

This is a purely technical, experimental, and mostly boring post

Nbii.gov partners 2007-2008

alliance amc art basin biodiversity conservation cswgcin department ducks energy engineering epa explorer forest galveston gbif information institute interdisciplinary invasive james land mapping marine monitoring montana national natural noaa nsf nwr parks pbif pondicherry program project protection resources resources- river science service species state texas university university- university-national usfs usgs

created at TagCrowd.com

As it says, I used TagCrowd.com, a quick and easy way to turn text into a tag cloud. I especially like doing it to my information science papers to see how big the words data, information and academic get, usually correlated to how boring my paper is. The best part is seeing the words you don't expect pop out at you. Like service, or even better, texas.

Many good tools exist to do this for you, starting with all kinds of input: your blog, website, excel spreadsheet (IBM Many Eyes = lots of text analysis tools), or just cut and paste text from anywhere. A list of cloud generators can be found here.

The cloud you see above is part of my practicum project this semester, studying the National Biological Information Infrastructure (Nbii.gov). I'll spare you the details. This is just a test--don't go thinking that this is valid, complete data, 'cause it aint.

We got married!?

After eight years of bliss, we decided to spice it up a bit. So we went to the courthouse and tied the old knot. We don't have pictures of that here, but here is our low-key, friends and close family party in the mountains that we threw to celebrate:


On the left is our friend who is designing our rings; he is a highly skilled jeweler in addition to being a lifelong friend (I can remember rolling around in his bunk bed when we were 3 or 4). He also teaches at John C. Campbell Folk School, if you're interested. On the right is my father-in-law. Ah, the naming of people is so much easier when you are married. He used to be my boyfriend of eight years' father, or some other complicated thing! That's really the only reason we got married. But we love each other, too, of course.



And Ranger Bob let my mother wear his hat, most likely against park regulations. But she sure was happy about it.






And the food was fantastic. One of my vegetarian friends said she would pay to attend a buffet like that. Hmmm...







This pesto was amazing, especially with the home-made bread.







Then my Dad got his banjo out, and things got a little bit more fun. Cause that's why banjos were invented.





















And then one of our guests drank a little too much a little too fast. . . and suffered the consequences. Either that, or the banjo music attracted zombies. It does that sometimes.

Sorry for the delay

In the interest of keeping some action going here, I'm going to be minimalist and post my pretty pictures while keeping my mouth mostly shut. Cause that's what I do when I'm covered up with school; head down and keep chugging. Thank god for late fall breaks, leaf-covered paths and rainy, windy fall days. It's about time!
















Thanks to Pisgah National Forest, I now have returned to a state of sanity, mostly. This place is one of the most magical in its ability to recharge the batteries. I think it's something about the constant wind blowing across the top of the bald.
Bring a toboggan and prepare to feel good. You just can't keep hold of a bad mood up here! Thank you Max, whoever you are.

This post is not educational

School has finally started! And in order to soften the blow, we went camping and got all nature-y. So enjoy this last uneducational post before I am so immersed in Information Science that I can't talk about anything else!


It's been a busy couple of weeks since my last post, first trying to cram as much leisure time in as possible, and then getting oriented in my new graduate program. We went to our favorite camping spot and got to see some really impressive shooting stars, part of the Perseid meteor shower, before we fell asleep like old people. But not before a little night swimming, one of the best things to do when primitive camping on a lake! Closely followed by the early morning swim while the fog is still lifting off of the water. We also did a little hiking to stretch our legs and give Solomon a chance to run.

The haze that you see in the picture is partially because it is August and we are having an endless heat wave and our air quality is like hot mud, and partially due to a small forest fire that was happening in a different part of the park. In the other direction, the air was much clearer. It was good, and we had more swimming afterwards to cool off. And then we had to go home, but we had huckleberries (more commonly known as blueberries, but I am respecting the local parlance, and it's fun to say!) to bring home and turn into cobbler for a few more delicious reminders of our fun.

And finally, before I end this post I have to brag about my mother. She called me after 9:30 last Saturday night, meaning something momentous had happened. Unlike my inlaws who routinely call after 11:00, and I do mean P.M., she goes to bed early, like 9:00. (I'm awake at 11, usually, but do I want to talk on the phone? No. I'm busy reading...or doing something else that's better than talking on the phone. Like flossing my teeth. I'm not really a phone person.) But back to my Mom... she had just gotten the exciting news that she had won 2nd place at the local fair with her quilt! See the birds? And the herringbone border? I think it's beautiful.