Getting deep into 23 Things Kansas now. Working on the RSS assignment, I opened an account on Bloglines and subscribed to fifteen feeds, some inadvertently. I chose bloglines because it was the first tutorial I read, and it looked easy. I had no trouble subscribing. The Resource Shelf and Shifted Librarian are two of my subscriptions, but I also subscribed to lots of news. This will be a great tool for me. My Favorites bar is overloaded.

Free State Library circulation area

I really enjoyed the webinar assignment last week. It even sent me on a shopping trip to the bookstore. I listened to an archived session from the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center entitled Historical Fiction and Biography: The Tudors and Before. It was located on OPAL 11/18/09 Book Break:
http://www.opal-online.org/BookBreak20091118Tudors/

Lori Bell presented the 45 minute session, consisting of a lecture and slideshow. She is a lover of all things Tudor and has been reading historical fiction since the age of 10. The Showtime presentation, The Tudors, prompted her to put together this booktalk. She traced the Tudor line back to the War of the Roses and forward to Henry VIII's last wife and presented fiction titles available in recorded books that went along with it. There were a lot of titles, and I was so excited that I ordered a couple of them in print form..Katherine by Anya Seton and A Rose for the Crown by Anne Easter Smith.

If you like historical fiction, you might enjoy this webinar. It gave me some great ideas.

I'm trying the webinar assignment, but find that the time commitment involved in doing it correctly is huge. I'll have to do this one at home. But I found a great discussion on the Tudors. I lost it when I had to help a student and can't find it today. I'll keep looking.

My facebook page has settled in nicely. I friended my kids and a couple of colleagues, and found a picture of my best friend from high school. Whoa.

I have successfully created a facebook page, and I've asked both my grown children to friend me. I haven't heard from them. Just wait until I learn to tweet. I hear it's even easier than texting, a skill at which my son says I'm terrible.

After I finished creating my facebook account, I tried to sign on to my blogger account and could not remember my password. And so it goes.

I'm not sure what an avatar is, but I have one. I couldn't find a picture that resembles a "mature woman", but I was able to change my hair color from purple to grey. Now back to work.

Our school district upgraded its circulation platform a couple years ago to Destiny, a Follett product. When you search for a book you also see the book cover, ala Amazon. I love this feature. My favorite reads this year, so far:

I'm enrolled in a class called 23 Things Kansas. I created this blog as part of our first assignment and I'm excited to learn about the other 22 things. I'm a librarian who lives to read. I've been accused of being a little pushy because when I read a book I love, I want everyone I know to read it, too. I work in a large high school and there's never a dull moment in the library, regardless of what you've heard.
I didn't know if the librarians in our district would be able to participate because of firewall considerations, so I was surprised and happy to access the 23 Things website and find that I could.

The quick brown fox

There is a rock wall running the length of our backyard, and a fox's den just beyond the end of it. Normally this wouldn't present a problem, but with all the snow in the last three weeks, Mrs. Fox has been using the top of the wall as her personal highway. Normally this wouldn't present a problem, but our dogs, Sunny and Jack, have some issues with it. Mrs. Fox is brilliant red and very easy to spot against the white, snowy background. The dogs have worn a path from the windows in the sunroom to the back door. They run outside in a crazed zigzag path to the wall and back to the door, then to the sunroom windows then back to the door. It doesn't seem to bother Foxy at all. Oh, did I mention the dogs are labs? And the cardinals are too quick?