And boy did I meet a ton of cool people. I know a big part of attending conferences and participating in clubs and groups has to do with networking, but if the Denver Library community is a web then I am tangled all up in it. I must have met a dozen or so awesome people, and have spent the time after the conference trying desperately to keep their names and faces straight in my head. I figure if I can recognize half the people I met at a later date I did ok. I won't go into specifics because it would take forever to cover everyone and what made them awesome, and I don't want to commit the crime of forgetting someone important.
Because I was volunteering for a good portion of the time, and was playing DDR when I wasn't volunteering, and chatting when I wasn't doing -that- I didn't actually attend very many of the seminars or panels. I'm not much of a seminar person anyway. It reminds me too much of class, and besides, I wasn't registered. I did sit in on a talk given by the staff at anythink Libraries (small a) and was extremely impressed. The entire district when from being a "dump" to the ideal that all public libraries should strive to achieve. When I think of my own time trapped in the hell of suburbia, I know I would have loved to have a library as forward thinking as anythink. I would have preferred they not be so extreme that they do away with capitalization though. And that's not to say my hometown library is -bad-. It's just not nearly as good.
Besides the parade of friendly and fascinating people, the highlight of CAL has to be the Battledecks competition Friday night. Competitors had to improvise a speech that followed the conference theme (Transformation and Illumination), plus a bonus theme that was different for each person (Urkel an H1N1, American Bacon vs. Canadian Bacon), all without seeing any of their slides before hand. And the slides were a collection of lolcats and non-sequitur captions. I have not laughed so hard in a very long while. Every presenter was hilarious, and a few of them straight up killed the audience. Apparently the winner of the competition was the state librarian, so if I ever meet him face to face I'll have to compliment him on his ability to make squid pants relevant to the library profession.
There was an auction table at the conference with some interesting stuff, including a plush owl and some exquisite woodblock etchings, but the item that really grabbed my attention was a three credit tuition waver, worth almost 3k. I had a chance at cutting 1k out of my tuition right there, but unfortunately I ended up with competition at the very end, and wasn't willing to get into a bidding war just so I could pay up front nearly the whole cost of a single class. Oh well.
The weather has taken a turn for the cold. Just last week I was hot in a t-shirt, and now it's 50 degrees and I'm sitting with a blanket, turtleneck, and sweater. I'm going to have to go out and pick up a box of tissues.
So now that that week is over, I have time to relax, right?
Haha. No.
This week I have to:
- Arrange an advising meeting and get next semester sorted out.
- Visit the Asian collection in UC Boulder for two separate classes.
- Finish a comparative paper. (And read the papers I need to be comparing.)
- Create a service bibliography
- Submit applications for every position Rangview library has open, because Rangeview is awesome.
- Attend a volunteer orientation at the local animal shelter.
- Register to volunteer at the DPL CTC
- Attend two job interviews on Monday
- Build my new website and put up the intro tutorial to web design
- Contact someone at the Talking Books Library about volunteering there
- Cajole the Michigan Lighthouse Conservatory into providing me with their collections list for upload into librarything
- Post flyers for the Denver satellite to the Rally to Restore Sanity
- Add another 100 prompts to a fantasy project
- Do some research on spy libraries
- Finish reading a book in Internet Neutrality
- Review one e-book, and two magazines
- Find some time to eat and sleep.
Wish me luck.
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