Meet the New Frog!

Elmerthefrog, tentatively identified as a Gray Tree Frog (click on photo for link to information).

We have a new frog in the vivarium. I caught Elmerthefrog on my patio. As usual, my cat Collage found the amphibian for me. She also lets me know when there is a treefrog at the front door window. The treefrog, however, is a bit smarter than this chap. I was probably only able to catch Elmerthefrog because when I got the mason jar and opened the screen door, the screen door pinched his foot to the glass door. I was horrified to see the frog's form splayed out on the glass and reclosed the screen to set it free. Wounded, he was easy prey.
When I put him in the vivarium the next day (he was reluctant to leave the jar, but I upended it in the tank and eventually he let go), he went right for the same rock the leopard frog lives under. I spend hours showing kids the frog that lives under the rock and explaining "nocturnal" to them. "When we turn off the lights and go home at night, he probably comes out and has a big party!"
We also have tadpoles (both toad and frog, I think) and we're watching the back legs appear on the toad ones. This is so exciting and the kids love it.
Why do we have this in the library? Just an attraction? Well, this enables us to speak to the shy child. We don't have to look directly at each other. We can both focus on something in the tank and talk about it. Having been a shy child (oh, sure, I know none of you believe this), I understand how important this can be, to get a child started talking.
The original idea had been to have a bunny, but frankly, if a frog or toad croaks (so to speak, ahem), it's no big deal to me. We had Mr. Toad for two years. Then he "went home." One astute little girl responded to that euphemism recently with, "You mean he died." Yes, he died. Then he was taken "home." If a bunny "went home," I'd just freak. It would be the same as one of my cats dying, and I didn't take that well either time.
I also don't have a big problem when one of the "pets" (say, the crawdad) eats one of the others (say, the ubiquitous and mostly useless mosquito fish that people optimistically put in their ponds, etc. hoping they will eat mosquito larvae but in fact they eat anything that wiggles, including their own babies and the babies of more interesting fish and amphibians). My lovely co-workers go on and on about "murder" and "ichthycide" and it is a little gross when the crawdad rips the head off of a small fish, but it's interesting, too, ya know?
The crawdads are endlessly fascinating. I brought one huge one in I found in my street. You read that correctly, it was crossing the road and, I might add, it raised its puny front claws threateningly at my car! I drove home, got a gallon pickle jar (handy thing, those!) and a pancake flipper and went back to get it. It was all clumpy on the bottom of the tail and I thought it was just muddy (they are called "mudbugs"), but it turned out to be hundreds of perfect miniature baby crayfish! What a great display that made! Once in the water in the bottom of the jar, the babies let go and swam all over. If I jiggled the jar, they reattached to the momma. I was able to return them to the pond the next day.
That was just a pickle jar and some local fauna! We also have walking sticks at my house, so I put them in the giant pickle jar and bring them in for a day or so. Not only does this help communicate with kids who look on adults with the wary eye, but it may even give them a subject to read about: animals, bugs, pets, biomes ... the list goes on.
Get some critters in your library!

Absolutely True

Ohhhh, some of these YA books really are good. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (like American Born Chinese*) is a book I might even be able to read again. Never has tragedy been so funny. Sherman Alexie writes a humerus-tickling, duct-milking story of a Spokane tribe kid who leaves the rez to save his own life. The rampant alcoholism that destroys his people (belying Tolstoy's axiom that all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways) is treated with the same deftness as the vagaries of his adolescent erections. Ellen Forney's cartoons/illustrations capture the whimsical pathos of Alexie's prose. I'm sitting here at the Children's Room desk wiping the last of the tears away. Where else can you find basketball, comics, and Tolstoy all mixed together?
AbTrue and American Born Chinese join with The Watson's Go to Birmingham - 1963 in a bittersweet minority triptych sure to rock the discussion house for any youth book club of over-privileged, pasty white kids ... and maybe some not so privileged ones. These are the experiences of American kids, realistic kids anyone can relate to, each one's story told by a master of his craft. Each one leads the outsider quietly towards empathy.
* see review below

Go Lijit!

Aside from blogging about the BlogHer conference, I decided to take a babystep toward giving a higher profile to my blogs. I can tweet about it, plurk about it, pownce on it ... and another idea that was given, was to link up with lijit.com and get an idea of how many people visit my blog and what they are actually reading. As far as I know, Julie (Hi, Julie!) is the only person (she's not, Hi, Tammy!) who reads this blog and she even leaves a comment now and then. This inclines me to read hers. But I'd really like to know, in a general sense, if there are any other people reading my blog, etc., but just not leaving comments.
I have information like this on Flickr, and I found it fascinating. I check it every morning. What photos were looked yesterday? How many times? Were they direct traffic? Did someone post my photo on their site? Dead useful info!
So I signed up for this lijit thing. Wheee! Take a look below!These are my ligit stats.
Ooo, a pie chart! Doncha just love those? There's a graph showing the number of hits my sites (the ones I've included) get every day (oooo!), the pie chart breaking it down into sources (how many googled? how many direct?), a list of the locations in the world that accessed my sites, and a handy map showing the viral spread of the marfnet! See the little dot off the coast of China? Who could that be? (Hi, Marleeeeeene!)
There is also a widget, the lijit "wijit," that will search a list of your included sites. No one has used that yet. I might at some point, when I've lost track of what I'm writing about where. This is embedded in my blogs.
Another really useful statistic is a list of popular search terms. What were they looking for when they found your site? Information like this will help me pander to the lowest common denominator - mwah-ha-haaaa! - and tailor future blogs to lure in the unsuspecting, people who really are looking for someone named Richard Hertz (Dr. Dick to the rest of us).
I really enjoy this tool! (Hee! I said "tool"!)

Pants On Fire

Live video feed in Second Life from the BlogHer '08 Conference in San Francisco. By the second day, the feed from the conference was much better and the closing session was only interrupted once. They promise to do even better next year

"But you promised, you say. You swore you were moving all this icky Second Life crap to another blog and we wouldn't have to see it anymore!"

Calm down, calm down - this isn't about SL (well, it is; but in for a penny, in for a pound). This is a report on the conference I attended which just happened to have herniated into SL. It was the BlogHer '08 conference for women bloggers. I have a blog (okay, I lie again, I've got about five ... or so ... I've lost track), I'm a woman (or perhaps I just play one in SL), SL attendance was FREE (and we know how I love that word) and I thought "what the hey!"

Panelists for the Blogging SL session and some of the attendees (note wheelchair accessibility).

In the beginning, we had some technical problems. The feed from the live conference ("live"? what's that?) in San Francisco kept cutting in and out. After the intro and keynote came the break-out sessions and there were some specially devised for SL. Over the course of two days I attended the Blogging and Second Life, Second Life and Security, and Using Second Life for Good (not Evil) sessions. Just like any other session in Real Life (tm) there is a panel that discusses their experiences and then the attendees were allowed to make comments and ask questions. In most cases, the panel operated in voice chat (except when their transmission was icky and then they did text chat). To keep things reasonably organized, the attendees used text chat. In one of the sessions, someone transcribed the voice chat for the technologically impaired. I wish someone had done that at one of the Info Island conferences when I didn't have voice chat when I was unable to hear anything. I was working directing people to the correct sessions and had hoped to be able to attend sessions, but that was verklapft. Now my system can handle voice chat. Whee!

While Lludmila is all dressed up and professional-looking, her typist is in sweatpants, unwashed hair, and probably picking her nose.

While at the conference, I mini-blogged the experience on Twitter, annoying all the people who follow my tweets, no doubt. I noticed Lexi did this all the time and it annoyed me until I saw how useful it was. Yes, I could take notes and I could probably share them, but I was able to share bites immediately with my "posse" and get comments back from some of them, one who had already tried an internet tool I mentioned in a tweet.

This is a wonderful tool that our State Library should employ so that more librarians can attend conferences and workshops. There is no driving time or distance involved, a much smaller carbon footprint, no parking, no overnight stays, no per diem. Of course it is always better to be there live, but this not only saves time and money, it's just dead cool.

I will add more info on the conference on my SL blog so that those who are interested (ha!) can read it there and the rest of y'all are off the hook.

My Latest Addiction

I've tweeted on Twitter, I've Plurked, I've Pownced and I've tried to aggravate/aggregate/whatever them into FriendFeed or Plaxo and from there to Facebook so I'm not stretched flatter'n a 'possum on I-75, but not until I ran across Swurl from a comment by a Plurker (I can just see y'all wincing out there) did I really fall in love. I have no use for this thing, but gosh and by golly it's beautiful! Notice how much better I'm getting at profile pictures ... well, artier anyway.
This is by far the prettiest of the Swurl pages. There are two others, one for my feeds and another for the feeds from my friends - and boyoboy is there a long list of friends/contacts! I linked up with just about everything I had and it found my contacts on each one and then matched them up to the contacts' other pages on other sites. That looks to be a bit much, but I can also click on just the Swurl link for someone and look at that, or just the Flickr link for them and peer at that. So, if I were limited to a quick peek at just one site, I think this would be it.
There is also a way to comment on any of the entries, even my own. And off to the right is a space for "conversations," which I haven't had yet. I've only had time to put comments on two things so far.

Just look at the timeline above! It's a mosaic of the content that I've added to mini-blogs and Flickr and YouTube. /me just swoooooons. /me also comes to the conclusion that she spends far too much time on Second Life.