We brought Michelle back to the airport in South Bend Saturday morning, and afterward decided to hang around and explore a little bit. We expected to find some sort of campusy district with little funky shops and restaurants and stuff, and totally didn’t find it. So then we went to track down a game shop our friends Conrad and Heidi mentioned when we saw them last week, and thought we found it, and then discovered they didn’t open until noon. We had, like, an hour to kill, and nowhere to go until we drove back toward campus and I saw a sign for the Potawatomi Zoo. Being members of the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo, we got reciprocal free admission, and figured that would be as good a place as any to hang out.

It’s a lovely place, the Potowatomi Zoo. Having only brought our phones, we didn’t get many great pictures, but here are a few.

These koi freaked me out a little bit, with their big sucking mouths and frenzied feeding.

Ridiculously cute, this black and white ruffled lemur is curled up taking a nap with a friend.

The cotton top tamarin clusters with 5-15 others around a sleeping area. When we walked up to their exhibit, they were on the look out.

As soon as a loud bunch of people came through the door, they all got up and spread out across the exhibit to defend their home.

It was a good time. After the zoo, we made it back to the game shop, where we bought a bunch of 1-2 player games we can play together, and had a tasty lunch at Chipotle before heading home again.

And then work happened. And Michelle.

My sister, Michelle, was in town last week — she took some time off to study for her pediatrics boards and decided that she would be less distracted here than she would be at home. I think she got quite a bit done. The big part of my job was to keep her on task: getting up at a consistent time, working on questions, going to bed at a decent hour. It just didn’t leave a whole lot of time for blogging.

The work happening is that I got back to work from vacation right at the launch of a big technology learning initiative that one of the committees I chair has been working on. We’re calling it Learning 2.0, a take-off on Web 2.0 because we’re asking staff to get some exposure to and experience of Web 2.0 tools so that they can find ways to use them in the library, and know what the heck people are talking about when they come in trying to figure out how to link to a picture from Flickr in their MySpace page. I’ve written a bunch of blog posts in the last week, but they’ve been all work related.

I still have a whole bunch of stuff to write about. Hopefully I’ll get some more time this week to work on posts and pictures and stuff.

I’m thinking about changing the theme on this here blog of mine. To what? I have no idea. I like the pink, but I’m not totally tied to it. And while the 3-column layout lets me pack in all kinds of info, I wonder if it’s a little bit overkill. Anyway, if things go a little wonky around here over the next week or so, it’s because I’m experimenting with new looks.

• Deb’s funeral was extremely cathartic, a chance to sob all the sobs I’d been carrying around with me for most of that week. I knit through the service — Deb wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
• I talked to my doctor about the incident at the optometrist’s office, and she basically said not to worry about it. It isn’t common, but it’s normal.
• My quasi-lenten attempt to not eat out fell apart the week Deb died. As it happens, it had neither the effect of saving money nor of causing me to eat less, so I’m not too torn up about it.

I am a boring blogger with a boring blog.

I have this card I bought one time at Paper Source that has on its front a certificate for being a Bad Storyteller. It’s a little harsh, and I haven’t found the right person/situation yet for giving it, and so I see it every time I look in my stationery drawer to find a card for someone. I’m thinking that if I changed the word “Bad” to “Boring,” and “Storyteller” to “Blogger,” I’d have the perfect card to give to myself.

I don’t know why I’m so bad at blogging. Maybe I feel inadequate because the blogs I read (particularly the knitting ones) always seem to have new stuff on them, including pictures. I just never get the pictures going until I have a whole bunch of finished objects, and I never feel like I have something worth posting unless I have a picture. Or maybe I’m just not imagining that people will want to read my bad stories (See! Bad Storyteller!). I don’t know.

If you just got all excited because Stuff and Things and Whatnot finally turned bold in Bloglines, I apologize.

That’s me! Hanging out, not writing a bit in these last few weeks.

So here’s what’s going on:

1) I did the Breast Cancer 3-Day September 16-18. Mom, my sisters and I ended up raising over $10,000 for the event. You can read all about it, if you’re interested.

2) I manaically finished three children’s sweaters for the niece and nephews for our early Christmas with the in-laws. They come up from Florida in October before the snow flies, and we do all the gift-giving with them. All three sweaters were from Rowan Babies: Relish, in KnitPicks Shine Apricot, Hans, in KnitPicks Shine Cloud and River, and Solo in Rowan Denim Memphis. Sadly, I was in such a hurry to get them finished that I didn’t take a single picture of any of them. I did, however, learn that I like raglan sleeve assembly much better than set-in sleeves, and one major disadvantage to working with cotton is that you can’t really graft ends the way you can with wool, leaving the tedious job of weaving in.

3) I’m tired all the time. I blame this on the fact that I’ve been up past my bedtime for what feels like weeks straight, which I blame on the fact that I got myself roped into stage managing for Two Gentlemen of Verona at First Presbyterian Theater. While I love Shakespeare and really enjoy working with the words, taking script notes during rehearsals is pretty tedious, and I do get a little bored, just sitting on my butt the whole time. We have tech this weekend. Ugh.

4) I can’t wait to go on vacation.

My next knitting projects — a sweater of my own devising for my sister, and an excellent Peruvian-style dog sweater for Lisa’s dog, Chaucer — will hopefully get better attention here. I’m also psyched that Nona over at NonaKnits is going to run a glove knitalong! Gloves sound fun, and I’m finally catching a knitalong at the beginning!

So I’m blogging from the Indianapolis Convention Center. In spite of this being a “Day of Nothing” on our calendar, I’ve got myself dragged along to the pre-release tournament for Magic the Gathering’s latest block, Ravnica. Geekfest extraordinaire. I am so not playing (I have my own expensive hobby which, as I like to think to myself, at least has a pragmatic element), but my husband and Alice, a good friend of his, are. Alice and I are currently two of five girls in a room with about a hundred geeky boys and men, ranging in age from 12-ish to well into the 50s. It’s a little weird.

I did find the wifi connection, though, and I figure if Mike can spend $75 playing with collectible trading cards for the day, I can spend $9.95 to blog and work on my 3 Day website.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted — good thing I’m not a part of any web ring or anything, or I might have been booted off by now — but I’ve had a ton of things on my plate. I have a ton of knitting to do, on deadline, of course, and having just finished up the Breast Cancer 3-Day, I have a post-mortem of sorts to work on writing. But now I finally feel like I have a chance to catch my breath, so all is well. Hooray!