Just to get us all caught up and contemporary, I was cranky on Inaug. Day., which was a drag. I had really tried to get there but little things like work and my kids schedule couldn't be worked around. Also, my fear of driving alone on a horrible freeway. So I was pretty sad when Tuesday rolled around and I was finally confronted with the whole truth "You're not going". Then it snowed 4 inches and rather than shut down, as I've heard the South does, all my works were open and yet, paradoxically, my daycare was closed. So there was a scramble of parent-caring and working from home schedules. But I did get to watch the Inaug. from the comfort of my office which has a TV and cable, for some reason, although I was also answering Virtual Reference IM questions at the same time and though I did want to help people find full-text articles, as I typed I was also thinking rather hard "Hey, the new President is being sworn in, take a 5 minute break, why don't you?" College kids today. On that subject, I was helping with a Public Policy Research class yesterday and here are the issues freshmen care about, even those who attend a rather expensive private college:
high-speed trains ("Like they have in Europe!")
TARP
the environment
healthcare
Katrina recovery aid
gay rights

so that was encouraging.
(Oh and back to the Inaug. for one second - I think Rick Warren made himself look stupid and kind of inarticulate, which was what I was hoping for and what I love about Obama - he lets people hang themselves, rather than do it himself. And I liked Michelle's gloves, though it is sexist to comment on her outfit only, I really did like it. And speaking of inappropriate - the CNN commentators were KILLING me. I guess when you have 6 hours of live commentary to do, ad-lib style, quality is hard to maintain. At one point I asked my co-worker "Did he just compare the people on the Mall to the people who came over on slave ships" and she just nodded slowly, equally horrified.)

I have been given a Flip camera for one of my classes this term and we're keeping a video journal all semester - not to document ourselves or our feelings but to try and come up with visual indexing terms for uh, digital video retrieval, if you're really interested, which it happens I am. I love this little camera. I'm changing my approach every week, and this week it's patterns - daily patterns like feeding the baby, my work etc. in snippets. It's a whole different way to think about my day, in pictures, rather than this white box. But honestly, I like this white box better.