Word Clouds in the Forecast

My lovely & talented friend K. recently turned me on to this website: Wordle. You cut & paste either text or the URL of another website and Wordle turns it all into a word cloud, with the most common words shown as largest. (The Boy of course already knew about things like this, since he's a linguistics dude.) It's kind of the awesomest thing ever.

She got married last year, so she plugged in the text of her wedding ceremony. And lo and behold - the three most common words were her name, her wife's name, and the word "love." Really shows their priorities, huh?

I started off by popping in the text of my resume (above, click to biggify). The biggest/most common words appear to be historical, exhibit, research, assistant, and new. Not bad for an emerging museum professional! So go on - you know you want to. Go play with it yourself!

Weekend Update

I haven't done one of these in forever & a day, but we had a fun weekend last weekend and I thought I'd share a little. Warning - the post is long!

On Friday afternoon, we walked to the church around the corner (the one we're considering having the wedding in!) & gave blood. Since we were doing so at the same time, the nurses had a friendly competition going as to who would finish first. I'm proud to say that I smoked my future husband, pumping out a pint of blood in 4 minutes, 36 seconds. ;)

Afterwards, we were a little woozy, so we got barbecue delivered. Yeah, that's what I said. Southern BBQ, delivered, in New Hampshire. It's from MoJo's & it's good. Later, we went out for a couple of beers with a couple of friends & proved ourselves wicked cheap dates. Two beers was enough after the afternoon's loss of blood. After a stop at Gilley's for cheeseburgers & poutine, we took our tipsy selves home.

Bright & early the next morn, we were up to watch our roommate run in a 5K that went right past our front door. We made a sign for him (his nickname around the apartment is "Monkey," so it said "Go Monkey Go!" & had a picture of spider monkey) & cheered from our perch on the front steps as he went by.

Around 1:30, we headed down to Charlestown to check out the Tall Ships at the Navy Yard. We waited in an interminably long line to board the Amistad, then after a stop for chicken fingers & fries, waited in a much shorter line to see the Bluenose II. Having roots in the Maritimes, she's the one I really wanted to see anyway. Besides, I interned for the last nine months at the USS Constitution Museum, so I've toured Constitution quite recently. And we can always go back!






After we finished our ship-ogling, we headed to Cambridge to a show at the Middle East. Doors opened an hour later than we thought, so we popped into my old local, the People's Republic, for a beer & a bit of the Sox game. Then, back to the Mid East for a good mewithoutyou show.

We spent the night at my sister's in Hometown, then spent much of the next day at the Franklin Park Zoo with her, her husband, and the little things. :) We were exhausted when we got home, of course, but it was a fun weekend!

“Mackerel & Moonshine”

In honor of my leaving for my annual vacation to Prince Edward Island exactly two weeks from today, I wanted to share an awesome anecdote from the Island. Our neighbor, a hale old boy in his 60s, told me this story last summer. C was a crotchety old man who lived nearby & I love this tale of an "old boys' night in" that A & B spent at his house.

A & B go over to C’s house with a bottle of moonshine. A says to C, “Try some of this shine.”
C roars, “I’m not drinking your shine.”
A pours him a glass and says, “Come on, just try it.”
C: “No, I’ll not be having any of your shine.”
A: “It’s all we’ve got.”
C: “Well, maybe I’ll just try it.”

The boys go on a tear & try to cook up some supper around midnight. They’ve got some mackerel they jigged earlier that day & want something to put with it. A says, “I want a cabbage." C roars, “You’re not getting my cabbage!” They go back & forth for a bit, then A wins & the cabbage goes into the pot with the mackerel and some potatoes. When it’s time to eat, they discover that C, a crabby old bachelor, only has 1 fork, 1 knife, and 1 spoon. They each grab one utensil and make do as they can.

In the morning, B stumbles home to his wife & says, “See if you can dig up some silverware for the poor old bugger.” She brings some over and C roars at her, “I don’t need any of your old silverware!”

Good Working Playlist

I spent the afternoon & evening tweaking my thesis project for its live web release sometime this month (will let you know when). The artists on my working playlist were, in their proper order:

• The Decemberists
• G. Love & Special Sauce
• Lily Allen
• David Bowie
• Arcade Fire

Nice.

(One might argue that since I'm currently posting about the playlist instead of properly working, it hasn't actually inspired me to be that productive. But then, one might be a capitalist, unimaginative jerk-butt if one did so. Take that, left side of my brain!)

Cutie-Cutes on July 4th

The Boy & I spent the weekend on the Cape with friends (pics to come if I can wrangle them from those who had cameras), so we didn't get to see the little things on July 4th. However, their mama sent me some pics. I love these two in particular:

Thing 2 awed by the power of sparklers

Thing 1 with his first sparkler ever

Wer Ond Wif

So, you might be wondering, where are all the posts about wedding planning? I thought she told us she was going to turn into an annoying, wedding-planning, blogging bride-to-be? What gives?

Well, trust me, I am an annoying, wedding-planning blogging bride-to-be. However, for everyone's sake, I decided to limit how much of that made it onto this blog. Note that I said this blog.

That's right - I've started a third blog, one that will be dedicated to wedding planning stuff. It's called Wer Ond Wif, which means "man and woman" in Old English. And yes, the linguistic-major soon-to-be-husband helped me come up with the name. ;)

I created Wer Ond Wif in March, but have just recently begun posting on it. So if you're not totally bored by napkin colors or photo booth options, head on over & check it out.


(And don't forget about my professional blog, Museophilia!)