Magical Widgetry

Manassas, VA.

Since I've been in Manassas, I've had many hours to ponder the life of a post English graduate, photography teacher, and dance studio owner. How is my job search going? Exciting at times, and frustrating at times.

So, most of my day has consisted of:

• Editing my resume
• Looking for jobs on Craigslist
• Looking for an apartment in the DC area
  
• Playing on Gmail/Facebook/random Internet goodness

My random Internet creamy nougat centers of the day were:

1. Simply Audiobooks online book rental.
• Following the NetFlix model, Simply Audiobooks allows you to rent books via mail. You create a bookshelf of interesting reads, they send you one, you read it and send it back (in SA pre-paid shipping material). What a great way to get a number of interesting titles at your doorstep! I love listening to books, so I'm looking forward to trying it out.
2. Mac Widgets
• I'd never used widgets until I bought a Mac, and didn't start playing around with them until today. Whereas a clock, calendar, calculator, and accuweather come standard, I added a BPM counter (compatible with iTunes, so that once you tap out the BPM, you can select to add it to your iTunes library) and a Word of the Day widget (from dictionary.com). Scrolling to my right corner has never been so fun!
  
3. Fourteenth Annual West Chester University Poetry Conference
• Upon departing Nashville, TN, I've since found myself around a myriad of different writerly folk. These wordsmiths range from scriptwriters (Eran), writers for impressive journals and magazines (Gena), to humor novelists (Bobby), and famous critical analysts (Tore). They have since piqued my interest in finding out more about an MFA in poetry as an option for the next few years. I spent some time researching New Formalism, and found myself linked to this poetry conference in June, only 3 hours driving distance from here. Yay writing!

In addition to these finds, I was also pleased to see that Johns Hopkins in Baltimore has a small program for an MFA in poetry.

As I'm not traveling in the physical realm, I hope these sites give you an idea of where my mind has been.