spring cleaning the blog

It's Spring Cleaning time! The new banner gets rid of the snowy landscape in favor of a shot I took in SF, of a display in a Japanese restaurant window on Fillmore Street. Fresca has pointed out the banner contains a Japanese version of Leo the Large.

I'm excited because I have to have everything in my office packed up and ready to move by May 19; our building is going to be renovated! They've only been promising to do that since I arrived in 1988. This means sorting through the accumulated crap of about twenty years--longer than I have lived in my present home. I need external motivation (such as "we will tear down the walls") because every year I give office clean-up a shot, and every year I fail miserably. This time, I will have the motivation of a deadline and at least 20 free boxes--about half of what I'll need-- and furniture movers, to get me going. But there is no point in starting that process until after the semester is over, so I'm having to resist the urge to plunge in immediately as a form of procrastination.
I'm itching to do the same at home, although I did most of that last summer during the big purge and I have to wait for the same reason: two papers to finish writing! Class prep to do! But, the itch must be scratched, so I decided to tweak this blog instead. I have not been happy with my blogging process lately. So I decided to play around with the layout a little: I've removed the bloglist and I'm adding the blogs I follow to my iGoogle page instead. I may change my mind about this, but I'm going to try it out for now. As I've moved to using iGoogle to manage my online calendar, gmail, news feeds and work-related sites, I realized that it was probably a better way for me to keep up on blog feeds than an RSS reader or a blog list. So if anyone who was previously linked to this page misses their link, I am following you in a different way.

In the summer, I plan to migrate from Blogger to Word Press, but that will take some time and attention that I don't have now. I think it will be a better platform for work-related blogging, given what I've seen others do with it elsewhere. Not a priority, just on the agenda.