Non-social post-birthday girl

And now begins my self-declared non-social week. I have schoolwork to catch up on, house stuff that needs accomplishing, errands to run, and other things to do, all of which have been procrastinated for long enough. Richard happens to be out of town, so the timing is perfect. I'm not going anywhere except to run errands and to meet with a fellow ASIS&T officer for some officer-business lunchiness.

My birthday was really, really good. Definitely in my top 5 birthdays ever. Richard threw a Virgo birthday party for me and a few other Virgos which went well. Not too over the top and still very fun. Steph was in town up from St Louis and one friend group (mostly all library people) met another friend group (mostly all GSLIS people). My social networks definitely follow a theme. Good food, good friends...good times.

I got served breakfast in bed the next day, accompanied by schoolwork in bed (yes, us grad students really know how to par-tay down). On my actual birthday I got roses, a gift card for a massage, and taken out to a nice dinner. I also got nice presents from friends and family, of course. And a ton of Facebook birthday wishes, which was surprisingly fun and made me smile all day long.

And now that I've been pampered and spoiled and treated so nicely, I'm going to hole up and work on getting all stressed out by all the things I need to get done. But I keep reminding myself that major stress now means much less stress in the very near future.

If I feel like I've accomplished enough by the end of the weekend, I think I'll go use that massage gift card.


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As always, on the day after my birthday, I like to remember all the good times with my best friend C, who died of lymphoma in 2004 on Sept 19. I miss you.

Sick, ad infinitum

I can't believe I am sick. Again. I think that over the past two months I have been well a total of about a week. I've either had a sore throat, a cold, asthma flare-up, or a combination of the three. This time it is a really nasty cold with accompanying aches and a fever, plus an annoying cough. I was so muzzy at work today that I couldn't focus on anything for more than a few minutes. A bad idea when you are cataloging games and videos. And I'm working this weekend as well. But I lined up some less-challenging tasks to do in case I'm only able to stare glassy-eyed at the screen. I also have a paper to finish up before Monday. I was up until 3am last night working on it, which didn't help my cold at all, or the clarity of the paper. Bed will be early tonight, I foresee. Now that I'm a student, I seem to be much more susceptible to illness (go figure). And my asthma is worse this year too.

I've almost used up my sick time at work, which is highly unusual for me. Luckily, I only have a few more hours to go before I've fulfilled my contract. In the 2+ years I was a staff member, I probably called in sick a dozen times. I know I had a huge amount of unused sick time (a couple of weeks, maybe) left by my final day. Too bad it can't get converted into cash; I could really use some extra. But it does somehow get credited to my retirement account. I think they figure out what 25% of it is and add it onto your total days worked. Bah. The entire amount of hours should count. At least I am putting all my accumulated staff vacation hours to use. Those unused hours are why my contract is up next week instead of in August.

Two more weeks of class and about one more week of work and then I have a month break before my third summer class. Well, except for my second job. And my incomplete class. But so much fewer scheduled commitments! Maybe I'll even clean my bathroom sometime this year. Or just sleep a lot.

Koha-ing the day away

I'm working from home today because I'm not feeling great (nothing serious, just stomach issues) and I'm saving my strength for class this evening. Normally, I'd be at the Family Resiliency Center (warning: really annoying background music) working on setting up their library. But today I'm installing Koha on my Mac so that I can play with settings and then later transfer them to the FRC setup, thereby saving some time to focus on how to catalog their collection instead of poking at Koha the entire time I'm there. They'd like to have everything ready to go by April 25, but I really doubt that's going to happen. Anyway, I need to start keeping better track of what I'm doing in Koha, and my blog is a natural space, so expect more posts about Koha and setting up a brand new library. I'll probably even have some retroactive posts thrown in.

Today
I'm working from this lovely document. Otherwise I would be totally lost.

So many little things to install before I can install Koha: Xtools (which takes up 2.8 GB installed and required me to register myself as a "developer" with Apple and is still installing itself as I type this), MySQL (version 4.1.x, which is old, but actually will work with Koha), and Apache (which was incredibly easy).

At the FRC I had them install Koha (Windows environment on a network) instead of trying to figure it out myself. Better use of time and resources. Although it has taken some work to convince their IT guys that I'm not just setting up a database containing titles and authors. Once again, no one realizes the work that goes into cataloging a collection.

Weekly Update

In no particular order, this week I:

• Watched an episode of Lost with a group of people. Definitely an experience I want to repeat.
  
• Saw Night at the Museum with Mark. It was cute, but probably would have been more enjoyable if seen when it first came out.
  
• Stitched and bitched at Jen's (I'm making a knitted and felted laptop case).
  
• Wrote my final project proposal for Advanced Cataloging class.
  
• Evaluated a collection of folktales for Storytelling class.
  
• Knocked head against wall over (still) incomplete Collection Development class.
  
• Tripped badly over own words in discussion section of Libraries, Info and Society class.
  
• E-mailed an (ultimately unneeded) explanation of what I was really trying to say. in discussion to a select few friends. Made me feel less tortured over the whole thing, anyway.
  
• Reminded myself that I need to get through the class in order to graduate and that I am perfectly capable of doing so without my head exploding from anger and frustration. It isn't *that* bad.
  
• Attended my very first Metadata Roundtable. It was very interesting. I think I am a classification geek. I'm on my way, in any case.
  
• Amused myself in Metadata Roundtable by observing the gender ratio and physical positioning of the attendees. Yep, definitely still an anthro geek.
  
• Followed up on Grad Assistant possibilities for this Fall.
  
• Deleted over 200 blogs from my Bloglines account. Breathing a bit more easily now.
  
• Created giant pile of unread magazines and catalogs for the cats to play on. Then recycled the pile, which was the ultimate goal.
  
• Heavily weeded the pile of (mostly ALA free crap) books I've been hoarding since Summer 2005.
  
• Vacuumed the air-intake duct (it was covered in cat hair) that was behind the pile of crap books.
  
• Made a decision to work through what is already on my "to read" list, which is in the higher hundreds, instead of grabbing books by browsing. We'll see how long this lasts.
  
• Read a couple hundred pages of stuff for school.
  
• Investigated alternative classification schemes for the Family Resiliency Center's library.
  
• Was fed a lovely Sunday dinner by Richard (thank you). He saved me from eating my default whatever-is-still-in-the-fridge-with-the-possible-addition-of-crackers meal. I need to start cooking healthy food again. Stupid Winter slumps.

...and other stuff that isn't going to make it in this entry. I have too much to write as it is. And now that I've got my fingers warmed up, it's back to that non-blog writing thing.