What's My Age Again?

World Tour of Denver

2012-02-08T22:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the best day I've had in a while. Today was a total flop.

Let's start from the top.

The Penrose Library is in the midst of renovation, and invited the campus to come to a "chair tasting," in which we sit in a few dozen chairs and tell them how we feel about them. I was on campus for something else, so I figured I'd stop by and see this silliness. I ended up spending an hour sitting in various chairs and scoring them on comfortableness, aesthetics, and durability, and at the end of it I got a voucher for coffee.

That was the start of the weirdness.

After that, I decided I wanted ramen. The craving for ramen can develop into an obsession, and with only one semi-decent ramen house to be found in the city, it's also a bit of a rare treat. So I go driving off to get ramen. I end up stuck behind a vehicle doing fifteen under the speed limit half a mile by my exit, and since I'm already in a cloud of wanderlust and cabin fever from the weekend blizzard, I decide I will try passing, and if I miss the exit I will keep driving. I miss the exit, so I keep driving.

I get off a couple stops after, am vaguely lost, and drive around until I see an sign for a Korean BBQ place. Well, I haven't been to a Korean restaurant since I got to Denver, so I figure, why not? The only problem is that the turn in is behind me. So I keep going, and turn into the next parking lot, which happens to have an antique mall in it. It's around three thirty by this point, not really supper time yet, so I figure, what the hell, I'll browse.

The mall is set up as a series of displays owned by sellers who probably rent the space. Along the wall there are a few separate rooms, one of which is nothing but watches and cameras. I figure it's lucky that the pocket watch I was looking at was over a hundred bucks, or I might have tricked myself into thinking I could afford it.

After trawling around for possible book finds (lots of books, all of them worthless), I stepped out, prepared to have something to eat. Only, just then I noticed a "deli" in the same complex as the antique mall. It was a Russian market, and since I was already there and out of the car, I decided to go inside. Ended up with a bunch of preserved fish and a real hankering for deli meats, but my mind was still on Korean.

So now I think I'm going to get to the restaurant. Only, when I drive into the strip mall I find myself parked in front of an English tea house, advertising food and gifts along with sit down dining. So I go in there too. One of my classmates used to bring in a box of PG Tips last quarter, and lo and behold, there was a bunch of that in stock, so I figured, well, I just ran out of black tea, and this stuff doesn't show up at safeway, so I'll grab it.

As I'm walking to the restaurant I pass an African Market, so I go in there too. Lots of grains and spices in that one, and a hair salon in back. I was almost tempted to get one of the many DVD stacked up front, just to see what Congolese cinema was like, but I have enough crap in my room right now, so I passed on that.

So after a stroll around Russia, a stop in England, and a quick detour to Africa, I finally made it to Korea.

And man. That food was GOOD. Korean is hot in a strange way that is comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. I don't tend to like spicy food. I don't like spicy Thai, and I hate spicy Mexican, but there's something about spicy Korean that I am willing to suffer through. It helps that I made an excellent menu decision. It was hard to make, considering all the soups, noddles, and grilled selections looked equally mouthwatering, but I finally went with a beef, dumpling, and rice cake soup, partially because it looked less dangerously orange in the picture.

It was a good thing I chose that too, because it unexpectedly came with 7 sides, all of which were amazing. Banchan is one of the most marvelous culinary inventions of all time. Multiple sauces and textures of varying heat, all in little portions so you can eat a lot of different stuff and still get full. They're all extremely simple, but perfect together. A few use this thick sauce that is sweet when you first eat it and then becomes surprisingly hot after the first few seconds. They put it on veggies, seaweed and broccoli. SO GOOD. And when my tongue started aching all I had to do was drink more soup, which was not spicy at all, and reset my palate perfectly. I ate more in that sitting than I had in a single meal for weeks.

And when I was done I was given a complimentary desert drink, a sort of barley tea that was ultrasweet. The gross mouth feeling you get when you've eaten a lot of hot food was instantly gone.

And all of this for 11 bucks.

This couldn't have come at a better time. The day before I had tried chicken fried steak at a local diner and hated it. It tasted like I was eating oil and batter and gravy and nothing else. A few days before that I had gone out with a friend to a Japanese restaurant, and took a risk on their ramen. That was also almost inedible, and again tasted like eating oil.

So I was so happy that I had found a place that was not only relatively cheap, but was really, really good.

Today was almost the opposite of that experience. Again I had to go driving somewhere, but this time I had a definite destination and a time limit. There was an SLA meeting at the Denver Tech Center, which is basically this huge chunk of the city where massive office buildings are surrounded by massive car parks. In other words, it represents everything I hate about car culture.

The DTC is only 15 minutes away, but once I got there I spent 45 minutes driving in circles, trying to find the building the event was supposed to be in. Eventually I decided the effort wasn't worth the gas and drove back home to "attend" the event online. Unfortunate, considering I had registered and paid, and had a meal waiting for me at the building that I could not find because the roads were not designed to make sense and the buildings were not designed to be easily accessible. And it was ironic too, since the speaker for the evening was a gentleman who was all about sustainability and the alteration of our social structures to better support our core values.

If I ruled the world, you can bet the first alteration I would make would be in bulldozing that entire god-forsaken zone down and replacing it with something that made sense.

I'm a sucker

2012-01-27T22:32:00.000-08:00

Cats are ridiculous. They are supposed to be easy to care for, until they are impossible. You put water down, and food, and do your thing, and the cat does his thing, and that's that. And then something goes wrong and nothing you do is right. You want me in a cat carrier? Yeah right. Here, let me yawl at you in a pitiful manner so you don't know if I'm dying or if I'm pissed.

Long story short, Rufus and I had an interesting evening tonight. I had to pop and allergy pill down his throat, which meant I had to sneak up to him, brace him between my legs, stick the pill in his mouth, and wait for him to swallow. He was not happy. He expressed his displeasure by barfing on the carpet multiple times, refusing to move unless prodded and then crawling a few inches forward to lie down again, and looking sick in general.

He has no idea how close he was to getting shoved into a cat carrier and driven through the freezing night to some animal hospital. After about half an hour he started walking around again, and now he's filling his belly with cat food, likely so he can puke it at me later.

He also yowls at me every five minutes or so. So, I get up and make sure nothing is wrong and he's sitting with his cat toy, looking up at me expectantly. I think he knows I feel guilty for shoving the pill down his throat and is milking it. My guess is that he was used to me being the pushover, and so my manhandling him for the first time ever was so offensive he had himself a little fit.

He's back to normal now, but I'm going to be jumping at every little thing for him for the rest of the weekend. Here's hoping he doesn't take too much advantage of that.

Here's to the New Year

2012-01-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

I've decided to shift gears on a number of fronts, to fix some issues, both chronic and recent.

It occurs to me that I haven't posted her in a long while. This isn't because I haven't written anything. I have! You should see the list of my unpublished and incomplete blog posts in my queue. But I have been working on the assumption that anything I post needs to be substantial and complete. The result is that I write a fair bit, but haven't gotten to the point I wanted to make about some random subject that has been sitting on my mind, and I'm out of time, so I'll get back to it later. By the time I'm ready to work on the post again all of the information on what is happening in my life is out of date, and it's time to start over.

So I am going to try to be less of a perfectionist in all of this and not wring my hands if a post doesn't yet feel like a complete "article" to me.

Of course I expect this one to be big, because so much writing is overdue. Did I just break my resolution two seconds after I stated it?

I'm also changing my perspective on my education, which I hope will save me from an aneurysm. My philosophy towards education has been, "Get through it so you can start doing real work," since high school, which means I have a tendency to overload on course work and aim for early graduations. In undergrad I was working on my studies at double speed, and graduated in four years with credits to spare. I wonder to this day if the velocity at which I hit my Japanese studies doesn't have something to do with the burnout that followed.

But I digress. I can't rush through the fast track anymore, for a variety of reasons that I might expound upon later but won't mention now because of resolution 1. The ultimate result is that I'm slowing down. I am no longer looking at the standard graduation time of two years as a sort of deadline, and I am no longer taking classes on the basis of what will get me out of here faster.

The benefits to this are twofold. When you have the mentality that you have to get something done, and then you can start on what's important, you'll likely never get to what's important. So I am turning that upside down and will focus on what's important, while fitting the other stuff in.

This means that I am making my education outside of the program my priority. I'm going to work at the Norlin archives, and will fit things around it. I applied for the LRS fellowship position, and will lower my coursework load to adjust. I'm only going to take classes that focus on archives and special collections, even if there are only two of those courses offered in a quarter. Three thousand dollars is too much to spend on a class because nothing that was on my course plan was actually available.

This means it may be an extra year before I graduate, but when I graduate I will be much better prepared to do that "important work." In fact, I will have already done it.

I have some other simple resolutions that I still think I could pull off but have been failing at. One book and an hour of language study a week, five hundred words a day (got that one today!), 50 dollars worth of expendable income a month.

The first week of January I blew $130 on a book on Japanese architecture, which was under market price but still places this as the most expensive rare book purchase I have ever made. In penance I won't be spending money on anything but food and the occasional museum entry fee for the next three months, which I have stuck to so far. Every time I see something I want (A CD of the 10th anniversary Les Mis performance) I tell myself I have to wait till April, and if I still want it then I can buy it. Likely I will no longer want it.

It's internship application time. A lot of deadlines have already passed, and a lot of opportunities I've ruled out because they aren't feasible for one reason or another. The stuff I am interested in looks highly competitive, and it's difficult to sell yourself when you are in a mindset that is frustrated with your education and skeptical about your own qualifications. Two nights ago I was lying in bed, mind racing nowhere as usual, until I had finally had enough and said to myself, "Stop thinking, just do it."

I tell myself that all the time and it usually doesn't stick, but the next day I sat down and wrote an application to the LRS Fellowship, and today I'm finally getting one of these posts complete. Something has shifted in my head and the difference is palpable. I just don't know what it is.

It might be that yesterday I enjoyed a brief moment of catharsis. Library Science and the library field in general is driving me nuts. Again, I'll leave the details for later or this will never be done. I had reached a point where my annoyance was was like a snowball at the top of a mountain, and was gaining some serious momentum.

I spent the day yesterday with a good friend. We cooked, ate, bought a lot of Chinese snacks, and chatted later that night with her fiance and his coworker about our respective programs. My friend is in LibSci too, so she gets what I am saying when I make my complaints, and no one was telling me to shut up, so I went at it, full speed. At one point one of them said I looked like I was about to strangle someone. If I could have strangled an entire profession at that moment I probably would have.

All this may give the impression that I no longer like, maybe even hate, LibSci, full stop, but that isn't true. The frustration comes from loving it and wanting it to be better. Bitching, even when it is called critique, isn't always the best way to make it better, but sometimes you just have to let out the steam.

So now I am at the point where I am thinking, everything I am worried about may be valid, but it doesn't even matter. I'll focus on myself, do what I need to do on the individual level, and let everyone else wring their hands over the mess that is libraries in the 21st century. Otherwise I am going to die of agida.

This post is already huge and I haven't even started. A second post may be coming soon.

2011-10-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

I thought this would be a smoother quarter than those from last year, and then I had to go and take four classes instead of three, and end up president of a student group somehow. (I don't know how to say no. Really need to work on that.)

Needless to say, a lot has been going on, and I have been remiss in taking note of it. Not a day after I complained about the messy pile of books on my floor I went out and got myself a little bookshelf, which is already full, so there's one improvement.

This past weekend is I was up in Boulder for a SRMA event hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder. Lots of talks from interesting archivists in the area, and we went on a spitfire tour of Norlin library's conservation, archives, and special collections department. We got to see a Mein Kampf signed by Hitler, flip through (yes, touch) an incunable from France, and got to see the university's presses and such for repairs.

This coming weekend is the CAL Conference, which I will admit I'm only mildly interested in. My focus has properly solidified towards archives and special collections, and CAL is all about public librarianship, with maybe a few exceptions. But I will be seeing some people there that I haven't seen since the last conference, so it will be nice to meet up and mingle and all of that.

On top of that I'm thinking of getting a friend for my rat. They're social creatures, and although I play with her all the time, I think she could use a friend. We've both been sniffling though, so I'll have to see about whether or not it's appropriate to bring an animal into a sick house.

Summer left with this weekend. After weeks and weeks of record heat, October dropped the temperature by ten degrees, and so it has stayed. I'm breaking out all the sweaters and so on, and expect to remain bundled up until April.

Checking In

2011-09-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I broke into a car to turn off the headlights. Lots of beeping and blaring ensued, and it took me a good two minutes to find the controls, because they were not standard, but no one paid me any mind.

There was a lot of nice stuff in that car. =s

Anyway, I have been busy with four classes (3 is too much) and will hopefully find time to put my thoughts down beyond some inane observation on the effectiveness of car alarms (useless) in the near future.

Smatterings

2011-08-24T17:18:00.000-07:00

I had my first job interview upon coming back home yesterday, and my first rejection this morning. It was a case of other applicants having more experience specific to the job than I did.
I think I should drop some money for a bookshelf, but I don't know how I'd get it back to the apartment. May have to talk to the roommate about this.

This just isn't cutting it anymore.

I think that this quarter, academically speaking, is going to be awesome. I'm finally taking archival classes for one, and will have an independent study in which I do nothing but study historic book making processes.
I had my first encounter with with bookless library here on campus yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised at its efficiency. Sure, there is no browsing, but books requested actually do end up on hold within two hours, and I ended up biking home with a book bag so full my back was rather angry at me.
There is still a lot I have to write about concerning my time at the Murie Center, but it will likely take a while for me to sit down a process. For now, here area few lingering photographs.

One of my last projects involved assessing the condition of the film in the studio. We had about 16 reels, all in surprisingly good condition.

Finally got a decent shot of a ground squirrel, since by the end of my time on the ranch they had become fat and lazy, and didn't mind being a foot away.

A box I found in Mardy's cabin turned out to be a portable film projector. It was a lot of fun to disassemble and to figure out what all of the little knobs and such did.

Welp

2011-08-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

Today is the day I should have been driving home, but I'm still in Wyoming. Oh well!

Two days ago I woke up to a strange sound in my room that I immediately assumed was the army of mice inside the walls breaking through and preparing for their final offensive. It was this rapid pattering sound that kept whizzing by my head the way you might expect a mosquito buzz to. I could hear it pretty much everywhere, so when I crawled out of bed in the pitch blackness I was prepared to see mice swarming over everything. I'd already found the occasional present left by them, so if the sound of them working away at the walls wasn't enough I had firm evidence of their invasion plans.

But there were no mice when I turned on the light. Instead there was a bat in the room about the size of my hand, fluttering about in confused circles. I have no idea how it got in. None whatsoever. And apparently neither did it, because it certainly had no idea how to get out. It was actually kind of cute, and I didn't have my glasses on so all I really saw was a palm sized fuzz fluttering around, but I'm sure it would have been adorable if it had just stopped flying around like a bat out of... well... and settled down.

I tried the bee trick of turning the light back off and opening the door. It's not like there was much light outside for a bat to be attracted to, but the stars were enough I guess, because after a few more frustrating laps the bat figured it out and escaped to freedom.

I am so glad it wasn't the mice.

Crash!

2011-07-29T12:17:00.001-07:00

I have not had a car since I crashed it, two months ago. The hope was that I would have it on time to drive back home, but that's in a week and just the other day I was informed that the shop I left it at is still waiting for a part. I was planning on going to some major events in Denver, one of which I had already paid for, so I was feeling bummed enough to give into my co-worker's constant offers to put the pressure on the shop and get er done.

So my boss gets on the line, makes the lady cry because he's insisting on results and she's going on about a funeral, and then he gets hung up on.

=s

I don't know enough to determine if I'm getting strung along here or if 2 months is a legitimate amount of time to be waiting for parts in the middle of nowhere, but the stress of it all is finally starting to annoy me. I'm finding it easier to just assume my plans are bust and carry on from there than to try to struggle to make shit happen, but everyone around me is insisting that Something Be Done.

All I know is that after all this I am no longer sitting pretty on savings. If I were rich I would take the one hour flight back down to Denver and just throw another 300+ bucks at the problem that way, but I haven't made a monthly profit since I started this little grad school adventure, and now I can feel the walls closing in. It seems like a good time to cut my losses and just enjoy a little extended time here. I donno.

The Good Old Days

2011-07-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

While compiling a catalog of the books here in the archives I ran across this interesting excerpt from a book called "Naturalist's South Pacific Expedition: Fiji"

Ordonez and I were about to enter the rest house when Mr. Stanley, who is familiar with the ways of the colony, tactfully suggested I go alone to arrange about our quarters. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Miss Lorna Reay, in charge of the rest house, post office and just about everything for which efficiency and dispatch are required, wished to accommodate me and my Filipino assistant. Yet, because a number of white guests were lodged in the building, she was not sure how they might react to the unprecedented situation of living under the same roof with a colored person. I consulted the highest authority in charge, the "D.C.," about it. He explained that it were best not to start a troublesome precedent, no matter how well educated the Filipino might be. He could not live in the rest house, but he could live in the native servants' quarters, eat his meals in the rest house kitchen, join me in the rest house to help me with my work, but not use the main entrance which was reserved for guests.

And later on, after the author is furious at the terrible treatment provided to his assistant, he rents out a house and he, Ordonez, and Mr. Stanley move in together.

There, the general public would never know that Mr. Stanley, Ordonez and I, all three of us, lived in perfect harmony and actually ate together at table as real human beings. I have always admired Mr. Stanley, a man of education, for waiving a custom prevalent in Fiji as well as in benighted and bigoted sections of the southern United States.

The year was 1940.

Yellowstone, Finally

2011-07-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

So, Yellowstone. While the area is huge and beautiful, most of it is inaccessible by car. Hiking is one way to get a more in depth interaction with the area, but since I had a day to cover as much as I could, I decided to do the touristy car loop. It's very difficult to write about the experience, because Yellowstone is all about the experience. It's about standing in a spot and being surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells and feels of a very special place. When you're looking down into a bubbling, rainbow pool of sulfuric water, and the cool breeze is mingling with the hot steam against your skin, and you can taste the sulfur on your tongue, and a buffalo is rolling in the dirt nearby, and the vents are growling with the sound of thermal energy straining against the rock, you realize there's no medium that can really do justice to it all. But I'll try a little.

Old Faithful may be the most famous geyser in the park, but that's probably just because it's the most predictable and has a short enough interval for people to guarantee a sighting. There are other, nicer geysers that you can get closer to. I preferred Solitary Geyser myself, for a number of reasons. For one, it takes a bit of hike up a hillside to get to, which means instead of being one of a hundred people on Independence Day weekend crowding around the more popular geysers I found myself alone in a very nice outcropping. I also saw a pika on my way up.

This isn't my photo. The pika I saw moved too fast for me to get a shot of, but I doubt I will see one of these critters again. They only live in high elevation, and to be honest, I'm not sure if what I saw was a pika. I got a good look at it, and it certainly wasn't a rodent I had ever seen before, but there might be some cousin I'm unfamiliar with or something. It looked a lot like the little guy above though.

You can also get much closer to Solitary Geyser. I'm pretty sure this is it, but all these pools and geysers tend to look the same after the first dozen or so. It eruption is puny in comparison to its siblings, only four feet or so, but it erupts every 10 minutes with an angry little burble. It also has managed to kill most of the forest down hill from it, which is an impressive feat imo.

The other nice thing about Solitary Geyser is that just to the left of where this picture is taken you have a bird's eye view of most of the geysers in the area. I got to watch another geyser, one with a very impressive height, go off in the distance, whereas you can't see all that much once you climb back down to the boardwalk.

Everywhere there are signs warning you to stay on the path, not to drop things into the features, and so on and so forth. I found it interesting that the warning signs were in eight different languages, all western save for Japanese, and yet hands down the most common language I heard while I was at the park was Mandarin. Sometimes I heard more Mandarin than English. If I were to list the languages I heard in their order of frequency, it would go: Mandarin, some South Asian Language (not familiar enough with India to pin point it), French, and then Texan. At times I understood more Mandarin than Texan.

And yet there's no literature in Mandarin or Punjabi or whatever. Obviously all the signage was created prior to the huge wave of Chinese tourism that we're now experiencing. I'd say that a quarter of the people in some of the areas I visited at least were Chinese or of direct Chinese decent.

Anyway, back to the tour. There was wildlife of course. At one point a large herd of elk was spotted traveling across a plains area, which caused quite a traffic buildup as everyone veered off the road to watch, but most of the time the rockstars of the large mammal world were the buffalo.

Here we have a buffalo standing around, doing nothing more than holding up traffic forever. He wasn't moving, or really bothering to care about the cars trying to get around him. He just stood there and seemed pleased with himself. The rest of his herd was being more reasonable on either side of the road. People are, in general, really stupid when it comes to their tourism. There were cars that would stop right at his face and someone would hang out the window to take a picture. The white car you see stopped behind him had gotten around, stopped, and the lady in the passenger seat got out and started shooting. It took quite a while for the cars on the other side of the road to decide it was time to let me through, and even when I was trying to get around the stupid white car in front of me insisted on taking more pictures before moving on.

This was the closest I came to any buffalo, but it wasn't the most interesting encounter. There's a patch of road a few miles before you even hit the park where a herd likes to hang out in the mornings. I've passed them twice now, and both times you slow to a crawl as you navigate around these beasts going back and forth from the street. The cool part about that herd are the baby calves they have right now. They're only about the size of a large dog, and are caramel colored and nothing but leg. I didn't see any calves in the park, only outside of it.

On occasion there were buffalo at the springs. I don't think the rangers appreciate this much, because when you're trying to tell people that stepping off the board walk will result in falling through a weak crust to your boiling doom, having a ton of animal chilling right next to the water does not properly illustrate that concept.

The majority of the spots carved out for tourists were around hotsprings and 'paint pots.' I couldn't figure out how to take pictures of the paint pots to give a really good sense of them, because a large part of their charm is the fact that they are boiling mud, and I didn't manage to get a good shot of any bubbles bursting, so all it looks like is interesting colored mud. The spectrum of color represented in the paint pots is impressive though. They go from red, to blue, from black to white. The photo above isn't a paint pot. It's a hot spring. I think it's abyss hotspring but I don't quite remember. The colors were much more vivid in person, but you get some sense of what the stiller waters looked like.

On the return loop I ended up encountering snow. There were some large drifts about 3 feet deep on the sides of some of the larger hills, and this pile was blocking the path to this waterfall...

In order to get to it you had to clime up the drift into the forested area and then back down once things cleared up. I ended up with snow in my sneakers in July.

That's pretty much it. I left at 6AM and didn't get back home until 10pm. After I was done with the park I drove to Signal Mountain, where I was told one could get the best view of the sunset over the Tetons. This was true, but here is where my most ridiculous encounter with mosquitoes until this morning happened. I got to the top about an hour before sunset, assuming that there would be no parking and it would be crammed with people, but when I stopped there was almost no one, and the people who were there were leaving. I didn't realize what was going on until I was making my way to the over look and passed a guy who was wildly waving his hands in front of his face. Even though Signal Mountain give one amazing view across all of Jackson hole and Teton National Park, the mosquitoes up there are vicious. I tried hiding in the car but couldn't get in fast enough to prevent a few dozen mosquitoes from following me. It was the top of a mountain, so there wasn't anywhere to flee from them either.

I was determined that I'd wait it out though. A number of people came, got to the overlook, and then retreated, but by the time the sun set only about ten people had maintained the will for the payoff, though the photographers were complaining that there were so many mosquitoes that their shots were being ruined.

I managed to kill two mosquitoes at once just by slapping at a random place on my leg. They were really nasty. But I did see a nice sunset.

Interlude

2011-07-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

I was planning on talking about how Saturday night included one of my most ridiculous mosquito encounters ever, but I went out hiking this morning and that no longer holds true. Until today I had been relatively peaceful towards the mosquitoes, even though they were growing in number and their incessant buzzing has been keeping me up at night. As long as they didn't land on me and start sucking, they could live. And the mosquitoes in my room have been good about that, generally.

Today I left in the early morning hours to hike the Two Ocean and Emma Matilda lake paths. Around each lake is about 6 miles, and combined they're about 10 or so. It was supposed to be a good area for animal sightings, including bears, so I had this can of bear spray with me that looked something like a miniature fire extinguisher.

The good news was I didn't get attacked by a bear. The bad news was I didn't even see a bear, or anything else for that matter, beyond a few grouse, which were pretty cool.What I did end up running into were mosquitoes. The entire hike was so utterly infested with them I don't doubt that was why there were no animals in sight. They had all be driven away by these blood suckers, and I was the only stupid mammal that didn't turn right around and leave when I noticed there were so many of them.

The scenery around the hike was nice, there was some cloud cover keeping things from getting too hot, and the hike was very docile, with only some mild inclines. Thank God, because I shot through it all as fast as my legs could carry me. I was too stubborn to turn back until there was no point in not just finishing the loop, but I couldn't stop without getting engulfed by insects. Even as it was I was almost eaten alive. If I hadn't had my sweater things would have been much, much worse. As it was, the only parts of me that were exposed were my face, my throat, and my knuckles, all of which were attacked so consistently my hands were bloody and black from retaliation by the time I made it out. In the beginning I kept feeling them coming down on the top of my head, so I had to put my hood up. I made the mistake of checking my shoulders a few times, only to get a little creeped out by the sheer number of mosquitoes trying vainly to get through my sleeves. I learned pretty fast to not worry about it and just charge through. Even the sound of the many streams feeding into the lake were drowned out by the insane buzzing. It all reminded me of those stupid swarms in Diablo II, only instead of zapping my stamina these mosquitoes actually enhanced it by driving me forward.

I had brought lunch with me, which I had sealed tight to prevent the smell from attracting bears, but I couldn't stop to eat it without being thoroughly eaten in turn, so I was starving by the time I got back to the car. Instead of looping around both lakes as I had intended, I ended up cutting my losses and marching down the middle of them.

All in all, it was a real disappointment. The first of the summer, to be honest. I would have loved to have taken my time and enjoyed the solitude of the place, but it just wasn't going to happen.

So after I got home, took a nice long shower, and finally had my lunch, I decided I was done playing nice with the mosquitoes, and whatever foolish insect crossed my sight or caught my ears was going to die. I've been hunting them almost four hours straight now. The floor of my cabin is littered with corpses, and still they keep coming. I had thought there were only a couple in here, but apparently I was wrong. Either that or for every bug that falls, three more take its place. No wonder the buzzing was keeping me up at night. I had brought some nice earphones with me, and keeping them on and the volume up is the only thing keeping me sane right now, to be honest. If I hear one more stupid whizzing noise behind my head I might just snap.

So I think I'm done with hiking, or at least next time I run into so many mosquitoes in one place, I am going to turn around and find a nice place to hang around.

There are no photos of any of this because getting the camera out and holding it still was too much of an invitation to the swarm.

Wild Archival - Day 31

2011-07-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

After a straight week of warm, dry weather, the skies opened up thirty minutes ago and pelted rain down on us hard enough that it sounded like the timbers were cracking.It all ended as quickly as it began, and now I'm sitting comfy in bed, enjoying the cool air the little storm brought with it and trying to get my thoughts in line.

This week has been a particularly eventful one, and it's hard to figure out where to begin. There was the last few days, which I spent meeting a number of very interesting people and discovering a number of very interesting things, and then there was yesterday, which I spent driving a loop around Yellowstone National Park.

I'm going to try to be concise here, but I don't think it'll happen.

So Monday I happened to run into a gentleman at the Center whom Steve introduced to me as Harvey Locke, and his wife Marie. I think her full name was Mariezef, but I'm not quite sure about that. They were French Canadians, come down to give a talk at the visitor's center, which Harvey invited me down to see.

It was an excuse to stay out of the studio, which has been hard to stay lurking in since the weather has improved, so I made the trek down and watched. Apparently this Harvey Locke is a forerunner of Canadian conservation and a major spokesperson for the Yellowstone the Yukon initiative, which was the group that had the Murie Center's artist in residence Dwayne Harty paint some of the most remote areas of the Canadian West.

So there was that connection. Anyway, the Lockes turned out to be hands down wonderful people. They invited me to join them at a dinner gathering at the center, and I ended up spending the evening chatting with ten or so people about every little thing but mostly conservation and Jackson, was eaten raw by mosquitoes and had some of the most delicious fruit salad ever. There was mint in it.

After dinner we retreated to the camp fire and continued our conversation, which had drifted to the cultural differences between Canada and the US in terms of guns. By twilight there were only a few of us left, still chatting away and roasting a few marshmallows I had pilfered from the back. At one point a moose and her calf stepped out of the forest line. All we could really see was their silhouettes down the path, but they were quite close. By the end it was just me and Dirk, kicking around embers and listening to the moose bugling out in the distance. At one point we heard an owl too.

Dirk is an awesome guy. Everyone here is awesome, but Dirk is like Minnesota's answer to Steve Irwin. He has such genuine enthusiasm for absolutely everything, and when he talks about all the random critters we come across out here it's not hard to believe that those experiences are the best anyone could ever have. He ended up telling me that night that the strange sounds I had heard a while back ago were most likely coyotes.

About two weeks ago I was lying in bed, getting to sleep, when I hear what sounded like hyenas yipping somewhere close by. The sounds kept getting closer and closer, and lasted for a good 15 minutes, until I was pretty sure they were somewhere right on the property. It's pitch black outside. There is no light, so opening a window would have done no good in identifying the sound. Besides, I didn't want to draw attention to myself. Then, when we were at the fire this Monday dirk was talking about coyotes coming so close to his cabin he would have stepped on them if he had gone out. He assured me that they were harmless, but all the same I think I will try to keep a wall between us if they do come by again.

Then, for the rest of the weeks I was doing the fun work of organizing the messiest cabinets in the archive. I had been pampered with how well done everything else in the collection was, but there were a few drawers that were little more than piles of paper dumped in with the barest of labeling and no organization whatsoever, so there was a lot of rearranging, and relabeling, and organizing things back and forth until something that looked like sanity appeared.

I did find some neat stuff along the way.

This was in with a drawer full of awards and metals. I found it interesting for two features.

The mush detail at the top...

And the tag on the inside. According to this the badge was made in Newark, and the interesting historical detail is in the list of unions on the tag. That's something I've never seen before, though I suppose the more I work with material from this era the more it might come up.

And here was the second cool find. Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, by Theodore Roosevelt.

Limited edition, 164 of two hundred, signed by the author. Now, in the world of rare books this is not actually a huge deal. But the guys at work got a kick out of it and you have to admit, it's not many people who have gotten to flip through a book signed by Teddy.

Here's an illustration from the book I found particularly amusing. Cook vs. Bear.

Now that the inventory is pretty much done, the time for playing with materials has passed. Most of the work I'm doing this month will be writing up procedure, starting grant work, and making a report with suggestions on how to proceed from here.

And then, some quick tidbits:
There is a family of bats in the roof of Mardy's porch. Every time I step outside in the evening I can hear them screeching away, but luckily the door is enough to keep that sound out. I haven't seen them yet but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.

Apparently mosquitoes have a period of extreme activity, which is sometime from the beginning of evening until nighttime. Considering how long that window of time is right now, it's a slaughterhouse.

I keep remembering to mention something here and then forgetting when I go to put it down.

Since this post is already long, I'll put Yellowstone in another one.

Yellowstone

2011-07-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

How crazy is this? I spend the entire day, from dawn to dusk, in the great national parks of Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and still my closest encounter with wild life happens as I'm trudging back, exhausted, to my cabin. I was a few steps away from the porch when I heard a "thud thud thud" to my left. When I turned I saw the white butt of some ungulate bounding away from me a mere five feet or so away. She probably would have kicked me if she was any closer. There's this large bush near the cabin, and since it was already twilight and she was well obstructed, neither of us saw each other until I had almost run into her.

I froze, she froze at a safer distance, we stared at each other, and then I crept into my cabin and opened my curtains without turning on the light. Once she was certain that I wasn't coming out to attack her she started grazing again, right outside my window. I watched her meander around, stopping occasionally to stare my way with huge, mickey mouse ears outstretched, (don't think she could see me, but you never know) until it got so dark all I could see was the white of her tail and the dark shadow of her ears when she moved. Eventually I couldn't see even that, so now I'm typing this up.

This day was too full for me to write about exhausted as I am, never mind this week. I saw a ton, learned a ton, drove 300 miles, and now I need to pass out and write up a more in detail report later tomorrow.

Badassery

2011-06-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

In the mornings I read incident reports for all public parks in the nation. They have taught me a few things.

1) There's a suicide or an attempted suicide almost every day in public parks.
2) If it weren't for rangers and trained rescuers there would also be a lot of dead hikers and climbers in the parks.
3) Water and cold are deadly.
4) Some people are just bad ass. Case in point:

On Tuesday, a 52-year-old woman headed out from the Farewell Gap trailhead on a solo day hike as part of her training for an ultra-marathon. She hiked up Farewell Canyon, crossing Franklin Creek on a snow bridge. On her return trip, the snow bridge collapsed underneath her and she fell into the creek. She was swept downstream under the snow for 30 to 40 feet before being able to stop herself. She stood up in the creek under the snow, but had no access to the surface. Using her hands, she dug through about five feet of snow and created a small hole, then threw her backpack out of the hole. It was seen there by other visitors, who went to examine the pack and found the woman under the snow nearby. By that time, she'd been trapped in the creek under snow for over three hours and was hypothermic and incoherent. One person pulled her out while another went back to the trailhead to summon help; the other members of the group helped warm her. Rangers and a park helicopter with a medic on board were dispatched to the scene. When the rangers arrived, the woman declined either evacuation or medical assistance. The rangers helped her return to the trailhead. [Submitted by Dana Dierkes, Public Affairs Officer]

Wild Archival - Day 24

2011-06-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

Last week was the first in which I seriously felt like an Archivist. I just finished the bulk of my folder level inventory, which is basically a list of folders that researchers used to get a beat on what is available in the collection and narrow their search. I wasn't sure if it was any good, because even though I had done my research a general lack of experience meant that I was asking myself questions constantly. Was I prioritizing the right projects? Was I doing work that's usefulness was appropriate for the time spent on it? Were the results going to be understandable to anyone but me? The folks at the center had been very supportive and enthusiastic about my work, but they weren't really overseeing it.

I ended up reprocessing a large portion of a collection as well. It had been put into our system in more detail than any other part of the archives, but all the material was then thrown into a box and finding any of it was impossible. So I ended up spending a day refoldering things and fixing little errors that cropped up along the way. The whole time I was thinking, am I getting distracted from the more important business at hand? Processing is very time consuming, and there was still a lot of other stuff to be done.

Well, on Friday I had my first researcher come in. He was a nice guy, looking for information on the Muries' collaboration with other scientists in their field. I gave him a quick explanation about the organization of material, suggested a few places for him to start, and printed out my guide while warning him he was the first person to see it. I was sort of steeling myself for harsh criticism. This guy had been to a number of other archives looking for relevant material, including large university archives, so he was obviously familiar with how these things worked. I was half expecting him to go through the guide, look up, and ask, "how is this supposed to help?"

Instead he praised it (maybe cause he really was a nice guy) and then managed to use it to hone in on a pile of material that was rel event to him, which he spent the rest of the day on. The awesome part was the files he ended up pulling were the ones I had refoldered a few days ago because they were in disarray and I couldn't properly record their arrangement until it was fixed.

So my decisions were vindicated and my material was useful. At that moment I stopped feeling like a student pidling around with stuff and started feeling like someone with a little real control and authority. It's a nice feeling, let me tell you.

In non-archival news, a robin has decided the the little overhang under the Homestead porch is a great place to raise a family. This means that she has built her nest about a foot over the heads of anyone who goes into the building through front door and isn't aware that they are coming until they duck under the porch. When I saw the empty next my first thought was that I was going to be dive bombed constantly. I was correct. Three times now I have gone to make lunch or what have you and a robin has dived at me in a flurry of indignant tweeting. I figured after the first time she would realize that she had made a mistake in her planning and move the nest, but no luck. I am now going around to the side door so I'm not responsible for an avian heart attack.

Today I forgot about her and opened the front door to leave. The robin was in her nest and I saw her before pushing in the screen door. We stared at each other. She did not look amused, so I backtracked and went out the side. The neat part is you can easily spy on the nest from inside the cabin. The annoying part is getting attacked while you are lurching to the kitchen for breakfast is not the most relaxing way to start the day.

Wild Archival - Day 20?

2011-06-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

I'm losing track of how long I've been here.

Spring has come out full force by now. The grass is growing an inch a day so that I'll be wading through it soon enough, the buttes have exploded in color, and the insects are out in full force.

I opened my door last night to a small army of mosquitoes. Five minutes out there will get you ten bites if you aren't properly covered, and I can't shut my door fast enough to keep one or two of the buggers out. I had just been told a story of a group of monks who had visited the ranch last year, and how they hadn't even swatted at the mosquitoes that probably were gorging themselves on liters of holy blood, and I've been feeling generous, so rather than kill the stray bugs out right I've just been swatting them away.

Until this afternoon, when a small swarm of them had me for lunch. At that point I was annoyed and itchy, and the mosquito population in my room had reached the unacceptable level of three or four, so I ended up killing one. Got blood all over my hands.

Most of my direct encounters with the wilderness have been with bugs. It's a good thing that spiders don't particularly bother me because they have quite the representation up here. You shake anything and a spider falls out of it. I had to trap a noisy, stupid bee in a box and throw it out of the studio one day, and who should fly out of the box when I open it but a spider. I was washing carrots, put them in the sink for a moment to put something away, and when I come back a spider is sitting on the carrot. I pull my curtain open in the morning and a spider falls onto my pillow. I'm much happier with spiders than I am with mosquitoes though, so we've been getting along fine. I just throw them out of the room once in a while.

There were also some sort of moth convention yesterday. Six huge grey moths were hanging along the side of the building and refused to move for anything. I poked one a few times and it didn't even react.

This guy was about the height of my pointer finger.

I took the path behind the center again, and the flooded area was no longer flooded, which I'm taking as a good sign.

Still looks a little unpleasant though. There were hoof tracks in the mud, but alas, no bears.

That shiny white stuff is water. The path wasn't -completely- dried out, so I had to detour through the brush at right.

This lovely little field was at the other end.

One of the many lovely little spots along the trail.

I've also been trying to take a picture of the ground squirrels but they're too timid.. They are everywhere now. When I walk between the cabins they scatter before me, but they move too quick and they stick to the tall grass, so it's hard to get a good view of them. When I got here their holes weren't really finished. They were all shallow and led nowhere, but now there's this huge pile of fresh dirt that is added to daily, even though I never catch the critters adding to it, and you can see evidence of their work everywhere.

I don't get the point of this particular tunnel. Maybe there are other branches somewhere.

One of the more obvious tracks.

Work has hit a level of comfortably boringness. I've almost finished going through every cabinet in the building, and next will be rearrangement, which is always a very delicate matter.

Wild Archival - Day 13

2011-06-18T16:44:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's already been two weeks! Things are going by fast, but work wise the pace has settled into a comfortable tedium. I'm doing folder level inventories at the moment, which means pulling out every folder in the building, taking a quick look at what's in them, and recording the contents with a description that will help people find things, but won't overwhelm with too much information. I missjudged the time this would take by a number of days, but that's why I developed an open schedule.

The great thing about getting down to folder level is that you end up in contact with pretty much every item in the collection. As a result there have been some great finds. I'm holding off on scans until I get posting permission, but I'm going to show off a few of the cooler artifacts that have shown up at the bottom of a drawer or hiding behind paper.

There was a set of four of these. They're old Kodak negative books. The front is a slide index for easy cataloging and retrieval, and the slides are kept in transparent paper to allow for ease of viewing without one needing to remove the negatives from their places, or so the little description on the inside cover crowed. The negatives were the size of the paper you see here, huge.

I'm not sure what this pipe is about, and neither was the archivist I talked to yesterday. She suspects that it may be a family heirloom from Norway. The head can be removed and the whole thing is a little longer than my arm. This photo is crap so I may try for another one later.

This is a galley for one of the many books published by the Muries. I had never seen anything printed in this sort of format.

My photography skills here are pretty bad, but they give you the gist of what I've been turning up. Of course most of the material I'm working with are not artifacts like these but simple paper materials. The majority are letters, speeches, or articles.

There were some really nice days this week so I took advantage of one to walk the "around the world" trail here at the ranch. It's a three mile or so circular trail that begins and ends at the back of our property and runs through some pristine little areas. You lose sight of anything resembling civilization a few turns in, and the trail is only minimally upkept. Sometimes you can see a wear in the ground, sometimes dead wood has been arranged as a sort of curb, and sometimes the only thing indicating the right direction is a little orange tag hanging from a branch. I managed to wander off the trail twice, but the area is safely hedged in by road and water, so I was unconcerned and managed to find my way back easily.

I didn't see many animals during my walk. A chimpmonk and I had ourselves a staring contest, and I certainly found evidence of animal life, mostly in the form of big piles of elk and moose poop, (and some poop that looked a lot more carnivorous, which kept me on my toes.) I don't know if these guys poop so much that there will naturally be a ton landing smack in the middle of the trail, or if they're planting land mines on purpose, but I ended up stepping into one at least once. Luckily it's all dry. Ahem. Sorry for the TMI.

Another ubiquitous sign of animal life was in the ground squirrel tunnels that spread out like veins in the soil. When I got here spring was just grabbing hold and there wasn't must going on on the ground, but now everywhere you go there are holes and little mounds indicating tunnels. On the ranch there's one tunnel that's nothing more than an entrance on the side of the path and an exit on the other side two feet away. You'd think at that distance the little critters would just decide to run it.

While I didn't get a peek at many mammals, I did see a ton of birds, including a predator of some sort. It was probably a little under two feet tall and was perched at the very top of a pine, screeching.

Spring is taking it's damn time getting here, and even now the flowers are only just begging to bloom with any seriousness.

The path was still relatively brown, although at some parts the grass had taken over so much you couldn't see the wood placed down as guides. There were some beautiful little openings in the trees where the Tetons stood as backdrop for a beautiful little creek. The trees themselves were a little less impressive. Some sort of moss seems to be eating up the entire evergreen population, so there's a ton of fallen wood, and the threes that are standing are sort of naked from the bottom up for a good number of feet.

At one point in the path the little branch guide turned left into a marshy area. The path literally disappears into still water that's covered in slime, and the only way through is to walk across this fallen tree. At first I thought I had taken a wrong turn, but the little orange trail marker was hanging over the water like it was no big thing, so I pushed forward. The tree was rotten and barely as wide as my foot so I had to make my way sideways, and the branches that touched the water, along with the land all around the side of the submerged area, was covered in this thick white stuff. When I looked closer it looked like spiderwebs of some sort. So as I'm walking along this log I have the image of an infinite number of water spiders sleeping under the surface, just waiting for me to trip and stick my foot in.

The best part was that this dead tree did not even have the courtesy to be long enough to reach the other end. So once I got to the tip I had to make a leap onto a far bank, and then push through some dense forest before coming out where I was supposed to.

It was worth it though. At the other end was a clearing covered in blooming larkspur. Quite the colorful little reward. And the ranch turned out to be only a few feet away.

I didn't take my camera on my walk as I preferred to just soak things in without thinking about shooting, but when I go again I'll take a few pictures as illustration.

Speaking of pictures, we had a group in this week that spent the last three days getting up at 4AM to shoot in the park, coming back for lunch, and then leaving at 5 to do it all over again. It one of the many programs the Murie center has, and was led by a professional photographer local to the area.

Turns out when events happen we employees get to enjoy some major perks. We were allowed to go out on the shoot, which I didn't take advantage of because I value my sleep too much, but we also got to eat with the group. This didn't just mean I got to munch on free pizza. They bring in a professional gourmet chef (and awesome guy) who makes delicious food and saves leftovers for the employees. I have been eating like royalty for the last few days, let me tell you. Pumpkin pancakes with orange icing, some of the most tender pork I've ever placed on my tongue, and yesterday night was this:

Buffalo meatloaf stuffed with mozzarella, some sort of green, and pepper. It was soo good. Desert was a lemon cake and chocolate mousse made with kailua creme, and topped with strawberries and whipped cream. There are leftovers in the fridge so I am set for days.

I really should update more, considering how much is going on and all that I'm leaving out for the sake of brevity, but I suppose that's enough for now. I'm going to grab some meat loaf and chill for the night.

Wild Archival - Day 6

2011-06-11T20:31:00.000-07:00

Look who showed up to the ranch a few days ago!

I was sitting down to have some lunch when out of the window I see this cow moose who has decided to do the same thing. She was munching on greens on the ranch right next to the path I take to go between cabins, so I decided to let my soup go cold and grab my camera.

We're literally inside the national park, with no barriers restricting access by wildlife, so anything can walk right up to our cabins, and they often do. There was a cabin just to the right of where I took this picture, which was my go to shelter if Miss Moose decided I was being annoying. As it was, she just looked at me in that, "I really don't want to run but if you move I will," way that beasts of prey do, I took a few pictures, and then snuck back to my soup. By the time I had finished she had disappeared.

As far as moose are concerned I guess she was pretty small. Maybe a few hands shorter than a horse. She still looked big enough to beat me up though, so I kept a respectful distance.

Whatever it is that is living in the roof of the archive building doesn't seem to like my taste in music, because every once in a while I'll have a song on and he will start chattering incessantly until I turn it off. Everyone's a critic.

I've settled into the archives as much as I can really. It's hard getting my bearings in there, because I don't have all that much experience with management (read: none) and there isn't any documentation on how things were done before. So I've kind of been playing detective, looking for clues about what was happening before I came onto the scene. This isn't easy when all you've got are some scribbled notes and a few files on old projects to work around. Plus, I get to play with this program called Past Perfect, which is enough of a topic for its own post later.

The most exciting part about this week is hands down the flooding warnings. One of the first things that happened when I came up here was a notification by the national park service that they had moved all of their archival material to a secure location on higher ground in anticipation of flooding, and that we should consider doing this too. So I got a little crash course in disaster preparedness, calling people and getting them to agree to house material if need be, trying to figure out what would need to go and where it was, and realizing that we had no means of getting most of this stuff out of the building if flooding did happen. Most people at the ranch are not very concerned, so I'm taking my queues from them, but it would be really nice to have some boxes available. That's first order of business next week, assuming the icepack waits until I get boxes delivered before it decides to melt all over us.

This is our adversary right now, the Snake river. It's been raining on and off all week, and as you can see the water is already high and a little angry. If the snow on the mountaintops melt suddenly, we are going to have a pleasant little flood. So far so good. I'm am crossing my fingers so hard that it stays that way.

Today was the start of my first weekend up here, so I took advantage of that to take a trot down to the river by way of a small hiking path. The path is wonderful. You still have a view of the road through the treeline, but cars go down that particular path so rarely you might as well be deep in the wilderness. Wilderness up here in WY is much different than the forests I'm used to. The land is a little rocky, and peppered with shrubs and clusters of flowering plants. The trees here are a good mix of pine and birch and others that I'm not familiar with, and are not particularly dense, so you can see quite a ways through them. The path itself is nothing more than a little land worn down between the shrubbery, but it's well kept. A few fallen trees have gotten themselves hacked in half for committing the crime of impeding foot traffic.

Just past the river you can step off onto another foot path that goes through an open plain and spits you out a couple hundred feet at a small retail cluster. I had myself a delicious lunch of pulled pork sandwich, onion soup (NO CHEESE! I was a little put out by that.) and hot cocoa (which made up for the cheese issue.)

I would say the view from Dornan's is great, but the view from everywhere is great. It's particularly nice here, because you climb up to get to the area, and get to enjoy the mountain range free of interference from the treetops. At some point I might have the myriad peaks memorized, but at the moment the only peak familiar to me is Grand Teton, and then only from the ranch. I know some people can point out each individual peak like the faces of old friends, but they still all look the same to me. Well, I've got a month.

Wild Archival - Day 1

2011-06-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

There are things they never tell you when you begin your training as an archivist. One of those things is this: you will spend as much, if not more time, protecting the archives under your charge from weather, mold, and pests as you will playing with all the tresures in their boxes. Sure, the material you get to work with makes everything worth it, but dealing with that material takes about 10% of your time. The rest of it is spent chasing grant money, inspecting shelving for the teltale signs of critters, convincing the public that yours is a collection worth valuing and preserving, and chasing after chaotic data.

It's all fun of course. It can just be exciting in ways you don't at first anticipate.

Today was my first official day on the job. I've bitten off quite a chunk of work for the next few months, and don't anticipate being able to swallow quite all of it, but I'll do my best. And I can't help but enjoy the perks of my position in the meantime.

I'm living up in the mountains, literally inside a national park. My commute at the moment is a one minute walk from one cabin to the other. The living quarters I've been given is a little room on the end of a larger log cabin. The nights here are still cold, but I've got a little space heater that keeps things at a pleasant 65 degrees through the night. And the view is pretty much ideal. There's a large open space in front of the cabin where guineapig sized gophers chase each other, and I've already seen elk wander out of the tree line and graze about. The mountains poke out of the treeline, and I've got a direct view of Grand Teton Peak. Yesterday was so warm and pleasant I spent most of it reading and writing on the porch in the company of a particularly loud bumblebee. At one point a humming bird buzzed by, hovered a few feedtfrom my head, took a moment to ponder my existance, and then flittered away. That's my life right now.

It's not all play and pristine wildlife though. Yesterday I brought a few visitors into the archives to look around. They were inspecting the bookshelves when one of them said, "There's a mouse in one of your traps." I hadn't even really started work at this point, and didn't even know there were traps in the building, so my immediate reaction was, oh great, I'll take care of it tomorrow.

Well, today is tomorrow, and as I was going through my predecessor's work I found a folder on pest control in a museum setting, complete with survey forms and replacement sticky traps. Welp, I figured, I guess I should get this done with now and put it behind me.

I go to where the guest pointed out the first trap, and sure enough there's a little tail poking out of the cover. At least it's not moving, I think to myself, and lean over to more closely inspect it. Turn out there was more than a mouse in that trap. The entire thing was covered in little brown spiders. Immediately the archivist in me is thinking, "Is that a bad thing?" while the wuss in me is thinking, "Oh God, I have to touch that don't I?"

What's more, there were 11 of these traps, including one with a second, bigger mouse in it. I spit out some four letter words to steel myself up, put on some archival gloves, and got to work collecting them. Once I had them all in a neat little line in the middle of the room the really fun part started. I had to inspect every trap for signs of species dangerous to organic material such as books or artifacts. That meant opening every trap up and counting every ant, spider, and whatever else managed to get itself stuck.

These traps had been set over a year ago. There was a LOT of dead things to count. The spiders were probably the worst, and they also made up about 90% of the count. Spiders = ok for the archives but kinda creepy for me, particularly since there is a slight chance that a majority of them were brown recluses. However, none of the 100+ insects that I had the pleasure of inspecting were noted as particularly dangerous to collections, so all in all the trapping meant good things. The mice were worrisome, but two in a year didn't tell me much. One was bloated and the other looked like it had deflated, so they were probably at different stages in the grand circle of death, but beyond that I could tell little else.

For a moment I considered taking a picture of my gruesome little collection so other people could share in the disgustingness of it, but I decided to spare people. Instead I wrote up my tallies, threw all the traps in the garbage outside (far away from the archives), and then scrubbed my hands three times.

When they said these archives have been neglected, they really meant it. Every corner is covered in cobwebs and dust, and I've spotted more than a few spiderwebs and sacs of whatever it is spiders put in sacs. Lunch and babies most likely.

And even as I type this there is -something- going about its business in the roof just above my head. there's white stuff that I'm going to assume is insulation starting to come out of the holes in the boards up there, so that's going to be something we have to take care of real quick.

While I think most of the material in here has escaped damage so far, I haven't actually taken a good look at the books that occupy a quarter of the space. I'm kind of dreading the discovery of mold, or silverfish, or maybe a nice pile of mouse poo, but that's the job.

On top of all this, there's some concern that the area will experience flooding in the next few days. This means I'm bumping up my disaster preparedness project to tomorrow.

I haven't even had a chance to go through the collection itself yet. I have no idea what's in these cabinets right now, which means I have a lot of exploring to look forward to. I'm just hoping I've seen the last of year old dead mice.

And now, what everyone is waiting for: the pictures.

The view from my window.

Mardie's porch. A lot of history was made here, and it's now used for events and speakers.

My workplace for the summer. This picture was taken right near the porch.

The interior of the archives. I'd take a picture of the file cabinets but they look like file cabinets. That big black thing is a heater.

Bear Casts. The Muries made hundreds of different casts, but we only retained a few.

The view from my porch. J told me the names of all the peaks but I don't have them memorized yet.

What's this?

A Radio/Turntable!

I can't even be mad.

2011-05-30T21:36:00.000-07:00

My rat has apparently learned how to pull the keys off my laptop. I went to get a drink and when I came back two of them were gone. So far I've only found one. It's obvious now that Cleptoferret was the appropriate name for this little trouble maker.

Two days until I'm off to Wyoming, so they'll be full of frantically packing, purchasing whatever I need, and trying to clean the room so I don't walk into a roach house. Cleo is going up with Austin for the two months that I'll be away.

I'm super pysched and at the same time super nervous. I feel pretty unprepared, but I always feel that way and things usually work out.

Furry Scurry

2011-05-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

I am so sore today. Yesterday was spent doing manual labor, starting from 5AM when I helped set up for the Dumb Friends League's Furry Scurry, and I hung around the event until 11, where I helped take everything down until 1:30 PM.

It was a little chilly in the morning, but nothing oppressive, and once work started we warmed right up. The beginning was a little bit awkward, as I was grouped up with 8 sorority girls doing projects that required an even number of people, so I felt like the fifth wheel for the first half hour or so. But once I started helping out where I could either do something by myself or the other volunteers acknowledged my presence things picked up.

Once setup was done I had 3 hours to myself before I had to report for take down, so I got myself lost in the park and explored the neighborhood. There are some very nice houses in the Washington Park area, some of which might be considered mansions, and a number of them were open to visitors for a special open house event. I wanted to check them out after the Scurry, but by the time take down was over I was exhausted, sore, and my knee was acting up. So I ended up taking a shower and falling asleep instead. Can't say I regret that decision, though next year I'm going to pick either setup or take down and use the spare time to see me some houses.

No More April

2011-04-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

I've written something like 6 blog posts in my head this month, but never set down to actually commit them to the site.

There was the time I almost ran over a 5 motorcyclists because they were doing 100+ miles in extremely dense traffic and weaving between cars where there was only enough space to fit their bikes and their elbows.

There was the time I failed to see Noam Chomsky in person and was angry for the rest of the night.

And there's a ton of stuff I've already forgotten about this month.

And now I've cut my hair. I donated a little over two feet and got a free haircut out of the deal. It's pretty short now, and I have bangs, which is something new. I like it. It's a little less fuzzy and a little longer than I had expected, but I may put something in it and tussle it up.

Only one month until this year is over. And then Grand Teton. I'm starting to get nervous about that, but I'm preparing as best I can.

April!

2011-04-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

The frequency of blog posts here is a pretty good indication of my mental state. When I'm tired/bored/overwhelmed and so on the updates drop like a rock. March was quiet because I was trying to get started on the right foot for the new semester and not quite managing it, what with my itchy fingers and a workload that I still struggling to keep in check. I thiiink things will be better this semester but I'm not quite sure.

The classes I have this semester feel like the first jump from LIS 101 to more in depth topics. This is great. It also means a more difficult workload and readings. And, none of them are really focused on the sort of skills I will be needing for my internship, which means I need to do a lot of independent work over the next two months to do as effective a job as possible up in WY.

The skin thing is pretty much resolved, and my rat is now officially adopted and I'm not allergic to her, so that's two problems gone. I've also finally gotten confirmed for my insurance, so here's hoping that that all goes smoothly too.

I saw Sucker Punch yesterday with some LIS buds, and it turned out to be a mash up of Inception and 300 that didn't quite work as either. The shame was that the first scene was -great-, and then the rest of the movie completely failed to live up to the quality the intro promised. Oh well.

I'm moving the "Awesome Archival" stuff that I used to post here to a dedicated tumblr, here. For short, drive by content tumblr is a better platform, but anything substantial will still be posted to this blog.

Yay!

2011-03-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

Straight As for the winter semester. I have NO idea how that happened to be honest, because by the end of it I was really struggling. But either I got my shit together or my teachers pitied me or some combination of the two, because my GPA as not nearly as ruined as I expected it to be. Maybe it's true what they say, that failing out of grad school is a feat in and of itself.

This semester is going to be better though. I can feel it in my toes, or that could be the itching from the hives I've managed to develop over the last few weeks. I also managed to pick up a head cold yesterday, and the rat is sniffling too which makes me nervous, but THIS WILL BE A GOOD SEMESTER.

Before I go off and do my homework to ensure that THIS WILL BE A GOOD SEMESTER I need to do a quick recap of my visit to the Murie Center up in Wyoming. I drove up on Tuesday, spend a brilliant Wednesday helping the people up there with a small project and otherwise lounging and napping, which was brilliant, and then drove down on Thursday. Everyone at the center was extremely hospitable and their enthusiasm for the Center's mission was contagious. The center itself was beautiful. The buildings themselves have existed for almost a century, iirc, but they've all been renovated on the inside so that even in winter they're warm, dry, and comfortable.

The archives themselves are very small, and already relatively organized. It looks like most of the work will be with a little policy and then developing reliable finding aids, and maybe cataloging the many books scattered all over the various buildings. I have homework ahead of me, but it shouldn't be too bad.

The bed I was given. There's like 4 comforters on that thing. It was heaven. The cabin itself is pretty big. There was another empty bed out of the frame, and a dresser behind me.

One of the spidery walkways between cabins. The building in the picture is the bath house, which is quite modern and very comfortable inside.

The door to my cabin. You can see the snow piled up past the window.

Where it fell naturally it only came up to my thigh.

And a random photo of the rat that I will be adopting.

She's a terror and I love her, but man has she given me grief. She's already tried to steal my homework to make herself a nest.

2011-03-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

Today I dreamt that I had left the rat cage open and let the cat in. The cat immediately dove into the cage and started eating the rat.

I woke up when I had flung my hand out and ended up toppling a few books next to my bed.

Le sigh. Can't even get peace in dreams right now.

I'm a Sucker

2011-03-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

I only have one rat left. The other three were returned to DFL, but I wanted to give the one that didn't bite a chance. Well, now that she's alone and I can give her attention she's turned out to be ridiculously adorable and I've grown attached and sending her off to die is no longer an option. So I guess I'm adopting a rat. She hasn't shown any sign of infection, so I am crossing my fingers and hoping that all will be well.

Dream Interpretation

2011-02-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

Urgh and double Urgh is the how I feel about this semester.

Anyway, today I had a dream that sort of highlights one of the issues I've been having lately, that being the rats in my care.

Unlike the young rats I had before that were nervous but quickly acclimated to human contact, these rats are adult and want nothing to do with me. They freak out if I try to pick them up, freak out of I try to put them into a ball, and generally behave as if I am the enemy, with a single exception, and she still doesn't like being handled all that much.

After getting bit by two of them and then developing a pleasant rash (which is already going away) I pretty much gave up on trying to give them handling time.

On top of this these rats are extremely rambunctious with each other, but only between midnight and 5AM. They seem to enjoy body slamming each other all around the cage, which is constantly waking me up. On top of this two of them like gnawing on the cage bars, which makes this extremely loud grating noise. Last night I had to get up something like three times and give them a stare down so I could go back to sleep.

So the only thing I can remember about my dream tonight was wrangling around a bunch of baby rats that varied in size from as small as a grain of rice to about the size of a hazelnut. They were so small that the bars of the cage meant nothing to them and they were skittering around desks and I had to use pieces of paper to corral them back like they were insects. And then I picked up the mom and she apologized to me.

Usually dreams come and go rather quickly, but apparently I was very focused on getting all these baby rats, because the scene felt like it lasted around 10 minutes.

Le sigh. I have to admit I am looking forward to when I can bring these rats back, but their prospects for adoption are not all that good (at least for three of them).

I'll Take Care of it Later

2011-02-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

There's a large stain on the passenger seat of my car from a coke bottle that froze, broke the tin, melted, or exploded (considering the shape of the stain) and then froze again. I'm not quite sure what to do about that beyond curse loudly and rue the moment I forgot to take the can out of the car.

You know you're too busy when

2011-02-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

So today was a ridiculous day that started at 6AM and shows no sign of stopping. I'm finally back from some late night errands and having my dinner at 10:15pm, so I'm figuring that I'll put down a rundown to enshrine this day for all time and also wind down before getting back to work.

So this was my day.

6:00AM Get up. Usually I wake up, tell myself, "COME ON YOU CAN DO IT" and then sleep for four more hours. This time my subconscious was apparently aware that if I did not get up I was in big trouble because crawling out of bed was relatively effortless.

The first thing I do is shoot out an e-mail to change an appointment because I had said yes to a few too many things and created for myself an impossible schedule. So that pretty much set the tone for the day.

I work a little on two assignments until my roommate has taken her shower and gone off to brave the fridged cold. The cat comes in, as usual, tries to get into my closet to eat the rat grass in there, as usual, and then I go to take a shower. I usually shoo Rufus out of my room when I'm not there, because the first few days I was at the apartment he decided he was going to advertise his displeasure at the world by peeing on people's things, but today I thought, hey, he hasn't done that in -months-.

Well, he didn't pee on anything, thank God, but he did manage to puke up his breakfast on my blanket. So "Put blanket in washer" is added to my to do list.

My breakfast consists of a staling bagel, which is really not that bad. I shoot of the first two assignments and start on the third until around 10:15, which is when my first appointment comes up.

Early last fall I had talked to my advisor about possible interning opportunistic and she had mentioned the Murie Center. It's an historical site about 500 miles north of Denver that needs an archivist to go up and organize their holdings. After saying I was very interested, the subject was put on the back burner as I dealt with school and work and looked for other, more official internship targets.

Well, a few days ago I was contacted about the Center again, and had a very nice phone conversation with the man who was doing the work in getting the project off the ground. The details of the internship are pretty much exactly what I wanted: a big but manageable project that needs someone to go in and set things up into a proper archive. Whoever gets the job will be extremely autonomous and basically in charge of the archives for the time they are there. It was really hard for me not to just flat out say "Oh my god this is so fucking AWESOME" but that was basically what I was thinking for the entire interview. Nothing is final yet, and I have applied to other places, but by April I'll know what I'm doing with my summer, and if it's working at the Murie Archives I am going to be PSYCHED.

So immediately after I finish that call I throw my blanket in the wash, try to work on my third assignment some more because it's due today (in something like 4 hours now) and then rush off to the appointment I postponed.

The Dumb Friends League ended up with an influx of rodents, so I offered to foster a few. Asimov and Darwin had already been gone a week and I figured I could take a few more animals in. By the time I could find time to get over there there were only rats left, which I didn't mind at all, but these rats were not babies who needed to be acclimated to human contact. They were adult rats who had been overbred and needed to be held for a few weeks to ensure that none of them were pregnant before adoption. So I ended up with four adult female rats. None of them have names yet and none of them are really all that used to human contact. They nibble and then bite, but not hard, and will absolutely not sit still in my hand.

I was given the penthouse suite of rat cages to keep them in. This thing has three levels and a stand alone wheel. It barely fits on my dresser. It also took me a while to set up, since I kept putting the ramps on the wrong side of the cage. I lined the bottom with a generous helping of newspaper and nesting stuff, and then let the girls have at it. At first they did the usual rat exploration thing, and then one of them started ripping up the newspaper at the bottom of the cage and dragging it into the rathouse. I had shredded two pages of newspaper just for that purpose, but it was being ignored as this little tan rat was systematically destroying all the lining. OK, fine.

So I get them their food and try to attach the water bottle before realizing that I have no straps and will have to go back to the shelter. No problem, it's already 1:30 and I'm hungry so I'll grab some Wendy's on the way because I don't feel like cooking. What I really wanted to do was sneak in grocery time too, but I had a paper due in a few hours that I hadn't gotten far on.

I grab my food, grab the straps, drive back home, get my blanket, put in a real load of laundry, eat my lunch, and try to write 8 pages in one hour while I am still doing the research necessary. 3:50PM gets here and I'm only 5 out of 8 pages done and now have to decide if I want to get points off for a late paper or a shitty paper. I choose late paper and drive off to class. I had broken down and gotten a parking permit, because it is simply too cold for me to walk to school, and I sense that it will be that way for the rest of the semester, but the parking rules are a little draconian and I couldn't actually find a lot I was allowed to park in (also, I hate 4PM classes. UGH.) so I ended up parking on the street anyway. Basically, if this permit does not earn me its money back I will be super annoyed.

I get to class a little late, again, and spend a good amount of time chiding myself inwardly. At this point I also realize that my laundry is still in the dryer and it will be five hours before I have a chance to get it out. oops.

Class goes well, and then I drive off and get gas and those groceries I was planning on picking up earlier in the day. My toes almost freeze off simply as I wait for my tank to fill up. (Stupid gas prices) Seriously. Every time I think that it has finally gotten COLD it gets a little colder. My face was going stiff and if I had not worn knee length socks I'm pretty sure my legs would have been entirely numb. I am congratulating myself for having to foresight to buy some boots, because they're about to get a lot of use. It also took me a bit to open the gas tank because there was a solid layer of ice that needed to be broken through to open the hatch.

Anyway, I get my gas, start to seriously worry about frostbite of the toes and decide it's time to find some long johns or something, and then went next door to get my groceries, including a pack of gizzards and hearts. They're dirt cheap and super delicious, but I managed to actually burn soup as I was making them last time (apparently when you put the stove on high heat the water disappeared faster. Who knew!) I also burned a pot that my roommate had inherited from her grandmother. I was, as you might expect, very sorry, and also got a little gun shy of gizzards.

But gizzard soup is go good. And so cheap, so I got another pack and will be trying again, this time on low heat and with a timer to keep me from spazzing so I don't burn down the apartment. I am giving my mom agida right now. I know. <3

So I come home, get my laundry, put away my groceries, make a quick supper, check on the rats, and see that they have managed to put every last scrap of newspaper and filling and grass into their little hut, so that they can barely fit in there themselves and cleaning the bottom is going to be a pain in the but. I compliment them on their sick nest building skills, refill their empty food bowl, and then finally sit down to have my supper.

And now that I've typed this up it's midnight and I need to finish that overdue paper. Tomorrow is work at 8PM, the commute is about 30 minutes on a good day, an hour in this weather because the chances that I25 will be clogged with some sort of accident are 99%, so it's a 6AM morning for me again.

Phew. Thank goodness not all days are like this one.

Awesome Archival!

2011-02-01T18:39:00.000-08:00

This blog combines two of my loves, historical material and fine menswear!

I love old catalogs.

Happy Birthday

2011-01-29T09:57:00.000-08:00

To Tom Paine, and to my Grandma =D

Awesome Archival!

2011-01-27T15:04:00.000-08:00

From the BBC, a German missive used to fool the Nazis away from Normandy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12266109

Update

2011-01-17T14:31:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Birthday to me.

Things have been moving forward in a whirlwind of activity lately, and I've been trying to keep my footing as best I can. Classes are twice as intensive as they were last semester, and on top of that I now have work and am trying to continue my Chinese lessons. I have to resort to a deep skim of my reading materials because there are just so many, but so far that's been alright. At least the readings are more interesting than last year (for now).

I am super excited about the History of the Book class, where we are taking field trips and having meetings with people involved in multiple aspects of rare book librarianship and archives. I'm excited about the final paper for that class too, but seeing as how it's due in only 8 weeks, the excitement is spiced up with a healthy dash of terror.

I'm now an official foster parent for small mammals at the Dumb Friends League. My first two fosters are rats named Asimov and Darwin.

The girls being cute.

Asimov taking a break from her frantic scurrying.

Rufus being his curious self.

The cat has so far done nothing but stare up at the cage, try to jump onto the dresser, and gone after the grass reserved for the rats like it was crack. The rats find him to be a curiosity and that's as far as it will ever go. I'm halfway through their 2 week foster period, and am going to be very sad when I let them go. They're adorable, and actually make excellent pets.

It's been a sweltering 50 degrees here for the last few days, and people are walking around in shorts and flip flops. I'm not that crazy, but I've been enjoying being able to use my window cleaner without rendering myself blind. The commute to and from work has started getting old, but with the right CDs I can weather any rush out traffic. I do wish I wasn't commuting more than 5 hours a week though.

Awesome Archival!

2010-12-15T19:41:00.000-08:00

Our Awesome Archival today is a digitization project that allows anyone access to Maimonides's code of Jewish Law. The following excerpt is from Language Hat.

The Bodleian Libraries are the proud custodian of Maimonides' authorized manuscript copy of his major halachic work, the Mishneh Torah, a code meant to collect disparate rulings and to present them "succinctly and clearly, so that all the Oral Torah will be easily accessible to all." ... A later owner of the copy, a certain Eleazar, son of Perahya, stipulated in his will that this and the other volumes of the Code (now lost) should remain in the public domain for consultation....

The manuscript is now as public as it gets. The scan is archival quality, which means you can see scuffs, stains, and so on at a high zoom rate. There are a lot of similar digitization projects taking place all over the world, providing the general population access to documents that until recently have required a great deal of work in terms of access permissions and travel to get to.

Smatterings

2010-12-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

With Winter break seems to have come a blogging break. I think I mentioned that even though I am out of school for a while I feel busier than I ever was, and that remains true. So, here is a quick 'I'm not dead' post to provide a quick overview of what I've been doing for the past two weeks.

I've started Chinese lessons. Chinese is one of those languages that is almost impossible to break into for me. I've tried learning half a dozen times now, and nothing sticks. The problem lies in the fact that pronunciation alone is such a struggle. With languages like Japanese and French the sound of the language came naturally to me. Not so Chinese. Too many minimal pairs that do not exist in English. Just tone itself is enough to make things difficult, but with x j s q etc also being hard to hear and pronounce for an English speaker, Chinese is a real devil of a language. It almost makes me miss Japanese.

I'm now hard at work as a Wrangler for Anythink libraries, an amazing library system that has done (almost) everything right in how it has reinvented itself into a 21st century library. Our library director was elected Librarian of the year by the ALA, and the district itself earned the 2010 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, which means our director will be meeting with the president and first lady. The branch I work at is relatively small, but the materials are checked out in such a rapid basis that with two or three of us working full tilt we can barely keep up with the circulation. I was angsting for quite a while over not being able to find a job, so now I am extremely happy that I stuck it out and finally landed in such a perfect position.

The job itself is great (books everywhere!) my co-workers are awesome, my bosses are ridiculously nice, and so on and so forth. The only things that could make the job better is if the branch was closer (It's a 45min drive away) and if they let us work in larger chunks of shifts. 5 hours is the max per day, which means a -lot- of driving, a short shift, and then a lot of driving again. This makes it somewhat difficult to schedule the other things I have going on.

The internship has unfortunately been put on a sort of hold (though I have free time again tomorrow, woo!) simply because Boulder is even further than work, and I need a whole day dedicated to going up there if it's going to be worth my time at all. For a month and change I haven't had that whole day. Quite disappointing, but I'm looking for things to improve on that front soon.

I occurs to me that I have spent most of my brake doing non Archival type stuff. I've been taking advantage of the time to do things like write 300+ prompts for a fantasy world building challenge, and NaNo, and so on and so forth. I feel like I should be using my time more constructively towards my future employment... but writing a ton of questions like "What body modification is taboo in your world and what is wide spread?" Is so much damn fun. I've finished that project, and will probably be including it in whatever website I build when I find the time for that. This is where I look at my to-do list and laugh.

While working at the 'cat desk' at the local shelter I was told that they are looking for foster parents to keep small mammals, like guinea pigs and rats and such. I can't bring a cat or dog home due to Lord Rufus and apartment restrictions, but a small animal should be alright, so I've applied, will be going through an interview, and then hopefully will be helping a little critter acclimatizes itself to human interaction, which will make it more appealing to prospective adopters.

About the same time I was given a book by a fellow volunteer. I had been talking to her about school, and the fact that I was studying to become an archivist, so one day she gives me this book called The Collectors by David Baldacci. Baldacci is one of those big names in the world of the spy/intrigue novel. I've shelved many of his books, but have never read a word of any of them, mostly because of my bias against any fiction written before the 1940s. But, since this book was being given to me I figured I had to at least make a go of reading it.

Turned out that wasn't going to happen. I got something like 5 chapters in (read: 10 pages) before putting it down and deciding that I had much better ways to waste my time. You would think a book that apparently revolves around the Archives of the US Government would be interesting, but the writing is so absolutely amateur that the wonder that should naturally go hand in hand with materials recording the very birth of our nation has been neatly removed by bluntly telling prose and a cardboard cast. Definitely not going to bother.

There is an ice skating rink on campus that has free skate for an hour on most days of the week. Because I'm a full time student, admission is free for me, though it still costs to rent shoes, but 3 dollars is a nice price for an hour of good exercise and slamming into rink walls. I still need to learn how to stop...

NaNo 2010

2010-11-30T23:49:00.000-08:00

Awesome Archival!

2010-11-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

This blog is awesome: How to be a Retronaut. It showcases cool historical materials (most recent is Eiffel Tower blueprints) and weird stuff from the past. Very neat.

And in the news: The National Library in India has a Secret Chamber. No one knows what is in the secret chamber, since there is no way to enter it, not even a trap door, but some are predicting skeletons, or maybe even a treasure horde. They're going to bore a hole through the building and see.

2010-11-26T18:10:00.000-08:00

I occurs to me that being hot, sweaty and uncomfortable in the middle of fall might indicate that I'm sick. That would also explain the lethargy and inability to get out of bed at a decent hour. I guess it's time to start drowning in tea.

Estes Park

2010-11-23T13:17:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago I went up to Estes Park with my uncle. It's most famous for being home to the Stanly Hotel, a haunted building that inspired Steven King's the Shining, but the best part of it for me was the trip there and back through winding mountain roads.

Last week I went back to Estes for a NaNo write in. I am sorely behind, so I figured going an hour and a half out of my way to sit and write was a good way to force my butt into action. It worked rather well. I got something like 10k out of that one day.

I opted to drive back that night instead of staying over and risk driving while exhausted. Turns out being the only car driving down dark, winding, steep roads with the music blasting is a ton of fun. I also ended up having to wait for a herd of ~~caribou~~ Elk to cross the street right as I was leaving town, which was awesome. ~~Caribou~~ Elk are huge, and I was very glad that they were only interested in crossing the street and not in inspecting and/or starting a fight with the bright metal things in their way. Needless to say, I was very careful for the rest of the drive. Running into one of those things would not be pleasant at all.

Awesome Archival

2010-11-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of an Auction by Bonhams.

The first two episodes (the last two videos) are the really interesting once. Provenance is inspected in a number of very rare books recently brought in for auction.

End of Fall Semester

2010-11-19T13:32:00.000-08:00

PHEW. Fall semester is over. My last class was last night and I just have a few finishing touches to put on a project before the whole thing is behind me. But somehow, even though I have a two month break ahead of me, I feel like I'm busier than ever. It might be because:

I've still got that internship and now I'm volunteering weekly
I got a job (FINALLY) at an awesome place but it's 45 minutes away
There's a NaNo novel looming over my head
And a fantasy world project I committed to that must be finished by December
I'm starting to take Chinese lessons
It's time to go trolling for scholarships and internships
And I have some work to do for the LIS publishing group that I have been putting off with the excuse of "I'll do it when the semester ends."
Oh yeah, and two book reviews are over due. =x

So now that the essential schoolwork is out of the way all of the little stuff is bubbling to the surface.

The last few weeks have been a little hairy. I continue to ignore my limits and attempt to take on much more than is humanly possible to fit into a 24 hour day, and the result was a few papers typed out franticly that barely made it to the deadline. Luckily, I also have a habit of researching deeply and throughout the semester, so I already had all of the information I needed, but had to scramble to organize it properly.

When I submitted my paper I was very disappointed with it. I realized early on that my intended paper would have to be 30 pages or so to fill it with the information I gathered, but the assignment called for 10. I cheated and made it 14, simply because I didn't have the time to streamline it any more than that, and submitted it with a wince.

I just got the results back and apparently my professor was impressed, because I got 35 out of 30 possible points and was told to seek publication. My face as I read that e-mail probably looked something like this:

Definitely a happy surprise.

Inception

2010-11-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

I have been on an Inception binge lately. Because I've had the soundtrack on infinite loop and have been scrounging around for clips and screenshots, I inevitably checked to see if there was any theater still showing it. Apparently it's running in dollar theaters now (Which are now $2.50 theaters, but still) so for a study break I drove down and watched again.

A second viewing confirms my initial impression of Inception. It's a great movie, and all the details are all fucked up. The great thing about it is that it doesn't matter that a few moments of objective questioning will point out hundreds of places where the movie defied its own logic. The logic was not the important part of the movie. The story was. And the story was why the Inception was so good. It was psychologically driven, where every scene had a storytelling purpose, even if it didn't all mesh into a cohesive 'universe'. When I watch, there's a part of me that's going, "Wait a second..." but it's drowned out by the part that REALLY wants to know what's going to happen next, even though I've seen it before.

And of course there's also the part about it being fucking sharp style wise.

Inception: Badass men doing badass things in badass ways.

$2.50 well spent. Inception will probably be the next movie I buy, which is saying something, since I rarely buy movies. I think Shoot 'em Up was the last one I picked up, which was almost three years ago, and before that was Rajio no Jikan, which I bought in 2004. So yeah.

2010-11-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

So... Damn... busy!

I'm rushing this out in the 10 minutes or so between all of the upkeep I've been doing for various project and rushing out the door to interview for the first 'real' job that has called me back in all of my eager searching.

First, not so awesome Archives:

US Loses Archival Matrial - Kind of lame.

Second, the 'capstone' speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity, by Jon Stewart.

"And now I thought we might have a moment, however brief, for some sincerity, if that’s ok; I know there are boundaries for a comedian, pundit, talker guy, and I’m sure I’ll find out tomorrow how I have violated them.

I’m really happy you guys are here, even if none of us are really quite sure why we are here. Some of you may have seen today as a clarion call for action, or some of the hipper, more ironic cats as a clarion call for ‘action.’ Clearly, some of you just wanted to see the Air and Space Museum and got royally screwed. And I’m sure a lot of you are here to have a nice time, and I hope you did. I know that many of you made a great effort to be here today, and I want you to know that everyone involved with this project worked incredibly hard to make sure that we honor the effort that you put in and gave you the best show we could possibly do. We know your time is valuable, and we didn’t want to waste it. And we are all extremely honored to have had a chance to perform for you on this beautiful space, on The Mall in Washington, D.C.

So, uh, what exactly was this? I can’t control what people think this was, I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies. But, unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24-hour, politico, pundit, perpetual, panic conflictanator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected, dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those titles that must earned; you must have the resume. Not being able to be able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves, who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate. Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more. The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker, and perhaps eczema. And yet, with that being said, I feel good: strangely, calmly good. Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a fun-house mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller, but the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month-old pumpkin with one eyeball.

So why would we work together? Why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin-assed, forehead, eyeball monster? If the picture of us were true, of course our inabilities to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution, or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own? We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe torn by polarizing hate. And how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is, we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here or on cable TV. But Americans don’t live here or on cable TV. Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done, not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.

Most Americans don’t live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, or Conservatives. Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do. Often, something they do not want to do, but they do it. Impossible things every day, that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

Look. Look on the screen. This is where we are; this is who we are: these cars. That’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car. A woman with two small kids, can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swaying, I don’t even know if you can see it. The lady’s in the NRA and loves Oprah. There’s another car. An investment banker: gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan. But this is us. Every one of the cars you see is filled with individuals of strong beliefs and principles they hold dear. Often, principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers. And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile-long, thirty-foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved by people who by the way I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Ah, well that’s okay, you go, then I’ll go. And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute. But that individual is rare, and he is scorned not hired as an analyst.

Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes, it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together. If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you, I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted. Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. And to see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you.”

Jon Stewart at The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, October 30, 2010

There was a satellite rally in Denver, but I was busy training to volunteer at the local animal shelter and only managed to get there when everyone had already left. Oh well.

Today is NaNoWriMo kickoff. I went to a kickoff party, which was an excellent choice, as at midnight some 30 people went utterly silent and started getting to work. I wrote for an hour and a half, almost making the mark for the day, and then drove home before I felt like I would be too tired to do so. I don't know if this NaNo will be a success, but I'm already off to a better start than usual.

A -lot- more happened this week, but I don't have the time to talk about it. I'm very much looking forward to the winter break, where I can catch up on things and maybe even clean my room.

FUUUUUU

2010-10-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

How fast can one learn French? 6 months?

Context: There's a paid summer internship at the National Gallery of Art for their rare books department, but "Advanced skills in a language other than English are essential."

Maybe I should have studied romantic languages. Maybe I should have concentrated on history. Maybe I should have picked up more area studies specialization.

There's too much to know and too little time to learn it!

Fun Weekend

2010-10-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

Huge congratulations to The Private Library for reaching post 500. There was a time when it was likely that the blog would become a static resource, but public outcry provided the impetus to keep things going. not only was the author, L. D. Mitchell, kind enough to post one of my own articles there, but he enhanced it with dozens of links to extra resources that I didn't even know existed. As one of the blogs that really cemented my decision to go into LIS and work with rare books, The Private Library will always have a special place in my heart.

And now for more fun links to break up the long, rambling posts about my hectic days:

In an extreme example of the maxim, "If you want it done right you have to do it yourself," Calum MacLeod built himself a road that was so successful the government appropriated it later.

An awesome Gallery of pictures with a woman shooting a bullseye almost every year for 70 some years. The other galleries in the parent site are fun to look through too.

===

I've been busy for the last few days. Yesterday was the beginning of MileHiCon, where I volunteered by helping set up the art gallery (don't know why that's so fun) and timing a few panels for the presenters. The highlight for me was Donato Giancola, who did a talk on the classical influences of his art, and had a painting up for auction valued at 7k dollars depicting George about to do battle with the Dragon. Giancola is still an oil on canvas guy, and his work in person is exquisite. I only wish that one day I'll be able to have a nice sketch from someone as skilled as he is, but until then I can stare at the art in the galleries.

Today was Zombie Crawl Day. I went with a bunch of library science students, and although I didn't have the time to zombify, I lifted some fake blood off someone else and had some nice bloody smears across my face. Here are some highlights:

Oh God they're breeding!

Awesome Archival!

2010-10-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

Here's something to watch for:

"The NHPRC and UVA Press will create a new web site which provides access to the fully annotated published papers of key figures in the nation’s Founding era. The project is designed to include the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin...Through this web resource, users will be able to read, browse, and search tens of thousands of documents from the Founding Era."

I am looking forward to seeing how this little (up to $2mil) project is executed. What I would love to see in an online archival site such as the above is something beyond a simple display of materials, even if they do provide 360 degree viewing and 4000x zoom. I'd love to see more curational context (which can sometimes be kind of sparse in websites) AND links to research, published material, and people who have made use of these documents. In other words, a reverse bibliography. How hard could it be? And how fascinating to follow a document from its simple state as a piece of old paper to a piece of some interesting historical puzzle?

If anything, that sort of approach might more immediately illustrate just how useful these materials have been (or how little has been done on them if you find 0 citations!) It would be a good way to advertise the value of archives while at the same time using the power and flexibility of the web to add value to a product, not just make it available.

That's my futurist archives rant for the day.

Day from Hell/van

2010-10-14T22:24:00.000-07:00

The bookseller Ed Maggs on books:

"Maggs says he enjoys the process of discovery behind letters and books. 'I'm a frustrated historian or novelist,' he says. 'Books and manuscripts are the greatest repositories of history and history, maybe, is the most important thing of all for giving meaning to our lives.'"

Today was one of the most fascinating and educational days of my LIS career. I needed to observe a library for not one, but two projects, and had spent some time looking for a library that would fit with my interests. After sending e-mails around about the possibility of there being an archives in Denver with an Asian bent and getting nothing, it was serendipitous that during a completely unrelated meeting of a publishing group I mentioned wanting to work with Asian collections and someone mentioned that UC Boulder actually had an Asian special collection. After a few e-mail exchanges I was in contact with the librarian in charge of the Japanese/Korean portion of the collection, and arranged to meet him. That happened today. The interview I had with him, and subsequently UC Boulder's Archivist down in the library basement, was worth an entire semester of classes.

The only downside to this facinating education was that it took twice as long as I had been anticipating, and I had expected to be able to finish to projects before class that evening. Instead I got to enjoy a leisurely ride through 20 some miles of rush hour traffic, and banged out a somewhat unprofessional bibliography in the hour I had before class. The assignment didn't carry too much weight though, and what I gained today was more than worth it. I am absolutely exhausted, so I'll have to go into more detail tomorrow (but not too much. I don't kiss and tell.)

Hnnnng

2010-10-13T22:40:00.000-07:00

Nothing warms you up like trying to pedal a bike with a flat tire. I filled the tire with air (75c for air! What is the world coming to!) and it went flat again immediately, so it looks like I'm going to have to replace a tire.

I was doing a little RSS reading after coming home from class and came across a list of resources for job searches in the library field. The first link was for North Suburban Libray System. Their front page reads " On May 31, 2010, all NSLS full-time employees (except delivery staff) were laid off. The only member service NSLS will provide in the immediate future is van delivery. This scaled down version of the NSLS website will remain up until further notice."

FUUUUUUUUU

Well, here's hoping that in two years there will be employment prospects again. I should really get started on cultivating expertise somewhere to make myself more employable, but I find it difficult to find the time in between the classes I am taking, which are are as introductory as you can get (with the possible exception of Organization of Information, but that one drives me a bit nuts.)

I am still holding out judgement on this whole ten weeks a semester thing. Way too short in my opinion, but then again, I am looking forward to taking classes that are more relevant to my focus.

I am currently in the interview process for two different jobs. Both are full time and rather decent. What I -really- want is a call back from the libraries in Rangeview, but I'm not sure if that would happen. I turned in three separate applications to them on Monday, and because the computer was having a terrible time interpreting the file I had to go over every little check box individually and double check that it wasn't changed from the last time I loaded the file. I realized after I had printed that I was not thorough enough and one check had gotten through, and then, when I could not find any white out, decided to fix the issue when I got to the library I was submitting everything to. Of course by the time I got to the library I had forgotten about this, and so two applications say that I was previously an employee of Rangeview and one says correctly that I have not. I literally did not have a moment to do anything today, so I guess tomorrow I'll have to call them and set things right. Bleh.

So far I've gotten a whole sentence translated of the Japanese book I'm trying to go through. I don't think I'll get very far, but some Far East Language skills would really help, and I need to brush up VERY badly.

CALCON Report

2010-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

PHEW. The last three days have been the most busy since I drove West, and considering the fact that I have been intensely busy for months now that is an achievement. I was up in Loveland volunteering my time at the CAL Conference since I couldn't justify the cost of simply attending, and, as I mentioned before, events are just more fun when you're working behind the scenes. That's where you meet the cool people

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.

2010-10-03T15:52:00.000-07:00

This week has been a bit of a roller coaster. I think I am going through the phases of grief in terms of my job search. I was firmly in the Anger zone on Friday, and am anticipating a long stay in Depression land, but am doing my damnedest to ward off the mental and physical stagnation that this usually brings on. Having so much that simply needs to get done helps, but my meals have been taking a bit of a hit.

This last week I:

Spoke to a Chinese teacher and realized I was -really- overreaching, so I'm sticking with Japanese for a bit
Attended an amazing concert of Brahm's German Requiem in a beautiful cathedral
Ate at a "fast food" Japanese restaurant that almost killed udon for me
Restarted an old project (because that's what I do when I'm stressed, start projects) that has nothing to do with anything else I'm doing currently but will be moderately time consuming
Submitted more reviews for Tangent Online, which, by the way, has now published everything
Started doing research on grants and linguistics, of all things
Got furniture for my room, including a dresser, which remains empty as I choose to leave everything strewn across the floor
Finished up my first group project of the semester just in time to dive into the second
Bought something to transfer my photos onto the computer and realized immediately after that my computer has a SD cardslot compatible with my camera.

The living room, with Rufus giving the tour in the corner.

The little dining room right behind it. The roommate I replaced took that table, so now it's just open space.

The kitchen. You can't see them but some of the things on the fridge are hilarious.

Lord of the domain, Rufus.

Rufus lording over me as I try to do work.

The catlord is pleased with my obedience.

===

So that's that. A few book/archive related links for today:

http://stackedup.tv/#read Quick interviews with writers and other bookish creators.

http://eap.bl.uk/index.a4d The endangered archives program. Some of these projects sound ridiculously awesome. Going through them keeps me focused on gathering up the skills/qualifications to participate in something like this.

===

And now I'm finishing up a conference for group project two and have to set up and go to a paper writing group. If I could get a publishable paper out of this semester that would be great, but I really have no idea how to go about it. Hopefully this group will help.

Awesome Archival!

2010-10-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

For this week, the evolution of a service medal, the first presented by the fresh new country of the U.S.A. This is one of the great things about archival; being able to follow the thought process of those who are long dead and gone.

http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/2010/09/libertas-americana/

2010-09-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking deep thoughts lately. Among them, why do we never see squirrel poop? You see bird poop all over the place, and dog poop is pretty obvious, but I've never walked down a sidewalk and noticed squirrel poop. Do squirrels hide their poop? Do they disguise it so that that what we think is bird poop isn't?

===

RadioLab is basically the radio I've been looking for for a long while. I don't know how I feel about the direction where voices overlap in the narrative, but the content is just what I wanted. Now I might have to consider an MP3 player.

===

Continuing my love affair with all things paper, this guy combines the art of paper cutting and folding into ridiculously complex pieces borne out of a single sheet.

===

It appears that I didn't bring the proper USB connection with me for my camera, so photos will have to wait a bit until I can go out and get something. When I do get the right cord I'll post what I have so far, but it isn't much. My photography has slipped to nothing since I've returned from Japan.

2010-09-26T13:48:00.001-07:00

MAN am I out of shape. Fidez' grandparents, being the amazingly generous people they are, 'lent' me a mountain bike so that that my commute would not be 30 minutes on foot anymore. After spending nearly as much on a lock and helmet as I would have spent on a night parking pass, I set out on this bike and was quickly reminded that I have not exerted myself physically in any form for a very long time. My legs were not happy with me, but I was happy with the bike so they can fall off and die. I also realized, as I was biking, that the handles were not in alignment with the wheel and the seat was not in alignment with anything. Those were both easy fixes, but they were also things it would have been nice to notice before I started peddling. At least I had the good sense to test my breaks -before- they were needed.

===

Here's a project to watch: http://www.thismustbetheplace.tv/

The first film is great. I really hope they upload more.

===

I don't know why but I find that it's much more satisfying to work behind the scenes at an event than it is to simply attend something. I always get bored just 'attending', but when I'm given a job to do, even if it inhibits my freedom to enjoy all that an event may provide, I'm always so much more satisfied when I'm done. Maybe I should go into event managing. Career change!

Nah, volunteering is one thing, running the show is another.

Anyway, I will be attending the Colorado Association of Libraries Conference as a volunteer. I'm not signing up to attend any of the big events, which I don't usually enjoy, and instead will be running errands for three days.

===

I'm curious about how blogger decides what blogs to associate with mine. When I hit the next blog link, which I do often, I constantly end up on blogs about either alternate education or Christian homemakers. While I have nothing against elementary education or Christian homemakers, I can't say this blog is about either. Maybe I'll have to go through some of the nuts and bolts and figure out what's doing this.

On a similar note, I am heavily considering investing in a domain and some virtual server or something somewhere and rekindling a website. It might make sense professionally, and it never hurts to update old skills either. The question is when I will find the time.

===

I continue to bleed money with association memberships and household necessities and a rather contorted job situation that's starting to annoy me, but my solution has been to start applying full tilt again. I have a minor advantage now too, because I have access to more trade information and have discovered a number of library based job leads.

I also think my right wrist is starting to develop carpal tunnel, so with a six page paper due Monday, and two other projects due Thurs, this week might be a bit of a challenge.

Awesome Archival!

2010-09-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

From the Library of Congress, a reenactment of the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Very impressive axework!

2010-09-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

BBC Headline of the day: Fire death baby accused in court.

I have discovered the most amazing shortcut for word processing. Alt+Ctr+Shift+V = formatless pasting. Having to reformat text every time I cut and paste from an outside document was driving me crazy, so I finally went looking for a solution, and sure enough, there it was.

I was flipping through the Chronicle of Higher Education while waiting for a meeting yesterday when I came across an ad that amused the hell out of me. Apparently Xerox is very upset with the fact that its brand has been appropriated to simply mean copy, and is actually spending money to advertise to whoever it is that reads the Chronicle of Higher Education that they'd really appreciate it if everyone only used the term Xerox when referring to the brand itself. There's something about how Zipper was once a brand, and now it stands in for, well, zippers. You would think a company would be happy that their brand was synonymous with whatever it was that brand did, but I guess not. Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes at business.

I have never lived with cats, but since coming to Denver I haven't spent a single day without one. My roommate's cat, Rufus, is a real character, and after a few jittery days where he did nothing but stare at me he's now decided my lap is the happening place to be. He also doesn't seem deterred by the fact that there is a computer on my lap and I am trying to do work. I thought if I stuck my elbows out and just kept typing he would get the hint, but he just straddled my left arm and lay down on top of it. I'm too much of a push over to shove him off, so one half of my lap is cat, and the other is computer, and I have yet to figure out a comfortable way to accommodate both.

Today was my first advising appointment of my masters career, and it was probably the best advising appointment I have ever been in in my entire life. My high school counselor was bad to the extent that she could not spell the subject that I wanted to pursue in college. My college counselor met with me something like twice in the four years that I was at school, and did little more than make sure I had the credits to graduate. When I tried to transfer my major to Japanese in my freshman year the Japanese advisor looked at me like I had grown a second head, asked me why I'd want to do that, and then told me to wait. I had my little battle with Japan after that and dropped the idea.

But today I went in, was asked about my intended focus, my intended career, was advised on classes I should be taking in and out of the program, e-mails were sent on my behalf as we discussed things, possible employment, internships, etc were brought up, and I left knowing what to expect for the next two semesters, and what would take priority in my work outside of class.

I don't know if the Grad/Undergrad divide has something to do with the massive difference in treatment, or if the hundred or so library students divided between 5 or so advisors makes the difference when the entire Asian Studies Undergrad department had a single advisor (I think) or if I have grown so much as a student that I'm better equipped to look for what I want and to go for it than I was back in Hawaii. All I know is that things are already feeling more productive than they did in Hawaii.

The only problem is that none of this is guaranteed to translate into employment. It is an employers market still, and people who are far more qualified than I am are coming up empty. At this point the only option is to move forward though. There's no point in wasting time, making little money, and hoping some day it gets better.

2010-09-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

The best things about school are the things you discover when you're studying.

I'm doing research on Net Neutrality and am starting with a few historical and comparative communications policy stuff. Right next to the relevant books I found a telegram dictionary. Back when the telegram was the primary method of quick, long distance information, word space was a message writer's biggest concern, so a huge lexicon was created to replace standard phrases with a single word each. For example, "Emprestado to lendel close scanbiare" means, "Is it imperative to be prepared to close as soon as transfer books are closed." At least, I think so. My handwriting is terrible and there may be grammar rules or something I'm unfamiliar with, but that's the gist.

I would really like to learn Morse, but there's Gregg Shorthand to master first.

The other interesting tidbit I came across as I was studying was a reference to the work conditions of a federal office during the great depression. In the process of creating the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 cots were set up to help people work around the clock and 72,000 hours of unpaid overtime was performed in the first year. I wonder if we could get any good legislation going if Washington put itself to work like that again.

And, it turns out there's a large Russian population in Denver. I have to do a little bit of research on that for a project where I invent an imaginary patron, so maybe some interesting facts will rise to the surface there too.

==

Refs(mainly for my benefit) :
Lindblom & Cohen, Useful Knowledge and Useful Problemsolving

2010-09-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

Compared to the chaos of the last few days today has been pretty excellent. One interview, where the only real hitch was that I found out I had left my belt up in Dacono and had to rush out and buy one before driving out. I guess I'm set up with a temp agency now, though I'm not expecting too much out of it. Work for job number 2 doesn't start until next week, I'm munching on what's left of my spring rolls, and my to do list is actually starting to shrink!

I've had three hours of unmitigated sitting, which I have enjoyed thoroughly, and now I'm off to make yet another feeble attempt and shopping for work quality clothes. I hate shopping with such a burning, angry passion, but t-shirts and pants with holes in the behind are not cutting it anymore. Speaking of which... I need to see about some patches...

... but I hate clothes. Blegh.

2010-09-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Oh man. I don't think I can recall any other week in my life where I have been this busy. On top of preparing for and attending my first classes, trying reel in all the lines I put out for work, familiarizing myself with the area and its grocery stores, trying to cook and failing, and otherwise putting all the disparate pieces involved with moving to a new city and starting a new life into place, I have had maybe one hour total with which to rest or fool around on the computer. My mind is so revved up that it's taking me three or more hours to fall asleep after I lay my head on the pillow, which is something I -really- hope changes once things get more settled.

I've had a two day grocery ordeal involving a Japanese food store near downtown and two meals that I managed to only buy half the ingredients for each. Today I resolved to pick up the missing stuff from a local store, and set about making spring rolls. I've had a real hankering for spring rolls since I mentioned them before, something like a week ago, and have not managed to scratch that particular itch since I was denied them. When I was in Japan I had made them with my host mother, so I though, hey, how hard could they be? You don't even have to cook anything but the shrimp.

Well... It turns out I didn't quite remember what went into them, so I forgot some of the flavoring, bought cabbage instead of lettuce (I guess I'm making a cabbage dish soon) had absolutely no idea how to prepare avocados and didn't know I didn't know until I had mangled one, and ended up buying shrimp that was too curled and too small to be laid out the traditional way. Youtube gave me a crash course on avocado slicing, and after some experimenting the shrimp worked anyway. What was irredeemable was the sauce. It was terrible and I ended up just throwing it out. Without the sauce spring rolls are really bland, and without the greens they're even blander. Good thing I don't mind tasteless food. Plus, by the time I was done making a dozen of them I was too hungry to care.

I've taken a picture of the results of my exploits, along with a few shots of the interior of the apartment, but my usb cord is (hopefully) still sitting in my trunk along with a few other excess effects that I have not bothered to move in yet, so all that will have to wait. I also noticed that the lens of my camera has managed to pick up even more black spots, even in the protection of its case. Somewhat annoying, that.

I've now taken two of the three classes, and predict a heavier workload than I expected initially. Since the school runs on quarters, each class is only 10 sessions long, which sounds a little crazy, and probably is. Within those 10 sessions we're expected to do a large paper, a group project, and a few other assignments. I'm thinking I will not be able to pull of the procrastination game this time around.

There's probably a lot more that I'm missing, but that will have to wait for another day, as I'm tired, and want to spend at least a minute of this day doing nothing (probably will work on my budget spreadsheet instead). So here's a quick list.

Stuff I like about Denver so far:

The road I take to school has a bike path, so when I get a bike the commute will be perfect.

Driving back from part time job 1 I saw an entire family of prairie dogs chilling by the road. I think that's the first time I've ever seen a live prairie dog, and there were more than a dozen. Unfortunately one was flat on the shoulder. =s

The people in general are all pretty cool, and the drivers are pretty sane, even considerate sometimes.

All the curbs are slanted, so that I can relearn my parallel parking and it's cool if I go a little too far.

There's a Japanese food store in the city. It's not really that close, but it's there, and it has a lot of good stuff.

Stuff I don't like about Denver so far:

It's almost all road related. For one, I can't seem to get onto I25 south without spending 10 minutes criscrossing the damn thing. Ironically, the one time I did get onto I25 S without a hitch I really wanted to go North.

There is no parking anywhere at all. I hate city parking.

The building where I have my classes is as far from my apartment as it can be without being off campus. Ok, that's not completely true, but it is on the wrong side.

I still don't have a room of my own. I'm managing fine, but I am really looking forward to being able to have a real space, and be completely moved in.

Phew, 11PM already. I've got an interview and a class tomorrow, and then I think I will set off on another culinary adventure.

2010-09-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

Nothing says "it's official" like a 6 hour orientation. My behind is sore but after weeks of preparation, being at the school and hearing my professors talk about the coming semester woke me up and gave me a nice shot of energy. The bumper to bumper traffic back to Dacono sucked most of it back out of me.

In less than a week I'll be attending classes, and then I can judge if this little gambit really was a smart move.

2010-09-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday was break day. Instead of sending in a ton of resumes I went out with Fides, his mom and her boyfriend to check out the King Tut Exhibit. While the exhibit was certainly interesting, I suppose I've been spoiled by the Louvre and did not think that the additional admission fee was quite worth it. My childhood fascination with the Egyptians was rekindled to some degree, and I can't say I've ever seen anything that belonged to King Tut's grave before, so that was a treat. And Fides shared with me the fact that this would be his first museum visit ever. The very idea stunned me, and it stunned Aram when he found out too. Twenty three years and not a single museum! I'll be dragging Fides around to more of them in the future, for sure.

Once we had gotten a museum education in Egyptology and boggled at the $46k coffee table book on sale at the gift shop (I don't care if Zahi Hawass -had- signed it) Fides and I checked out the Taste of Colorado festival going on right across the street. The food there is beyond expensive at two times a reasonable price at least, but I decided to splurge and try a Buffalo Steak Slider. It didn't taste much different from beef. Oh well.

I would have liked to check out the vendors a bit more, but the sun was on a mission to set us on fire and poor Fides was drooping fast, so we got in the car, got lost, and made it back home in time to play some Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for a few hours. It's been a while since I've enjoyed myself with a single player game so much, and the great part is that when I finish with my Nosferatu I'm replaying as a different clan for a very different play experience. I'm thinking Toreador. Can't get much opposite than that.

Labor Day weekend for me has meant job applications. Bro called during the Feast and let me in on the festivities via staticy cell reception. I had forgotten it was feast day. Felt a bit bad about that, but the gesture was appreciated.

Now I'm worried about whether or not it will be feasible to go home for the Christmas holiday. It will depend on the job I get. I'd be willing to fly out for just a few days if that's what it took, but there's no use speculating.

Applying to an average of 10 jobs a day maaay be paying off. I finally have a reply. There is no guarantee that a callback means a job, but the position looks like a great one, and just the prospect of having work is catapulting my spirits. Here's hoping.

2010-09-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

When you hand your whims the reigns and let your curiosity lead you unfettered sometimes you end up in strange places. If you told me I would be spending any amount of time in a small town in the middle of the American West I would have rolled my eyes and said, "yeah right," but here I am, chilling in a barn-cum-guest house while I prepare to move down into metro Denver in a week. I've been here almost two weeks now which means it's about time for my bullish insistence that it will all turn out alright is now locked in mortal combat with the bear of 'WTF was I thinking?'

I only have two major concerns, but they are major. The first is about the job search. I've never had such trouble landing a job. Sometimes I would drag my feet about getting one, but since high school I have been able to find work when I needed to find work. Two weeks may not seem like a long time to the objective observer, but for someone who is going to have tuition and rent to pay soon I am seriously starting to wonder if there is something in my resume or approach that is sabotaging my efforts towards gainful employment. Considering I am using the same resume build that I did when I almost got that job back home, I don't -think- there's anything in there screaming "Stay Away" to prospective employers, but who knows. Maybe the job market is just that terrible. The only thing that can be done is to drive ahead and keep my eyes open for my chance. I did find a hidden pocket of library assistant jobs for some law firms, so maybe something will come of that.

My second concern has to do with the location. I like Denver, a lot. It's a beautiful city with a beautiful backdrop of mountains and plains and a strong public transportation system, which I still consider essential even with a car. The problem is that I love New York City, Seattle, and New England too, and am wondering to myself if I should have gone somewhere that had what I was more specifically interested in rather than somewhere that was just new and challenging. For example, if landing a position at the library of congress was my dream job, would it not have made sense to try getting into a program closer to the library of congress? Or if furthering my education in East Asian studies and Asian languages was something I really wanted to keep up with should I not have held out for Seattle? My decision was ultimately influenced by the fact that Denver accepted rolling admissions while every other school I was considering did not, and I was on the verge of going nuts if I was going to spend one more month languishing at home but in hindsight I wonder if I couldn't have exhibited just a little more patience.

That's not to say that I think my choice was a bad one. Every road to something leads you away from something else, and I simply have the time now to look around and wonder about what I am passing by in choosing this particular path. I expect that once I moved down into Denver proper and start meeting the other people in my program I will know more firmly whether or not the leap of faith I have made here was an intelligent one.

---

I've also learned a lot of things from my life as an undergrad in Hawaii. I know what works and what doesn't. I'm looking forward to my time as a graduate being, on the whole, much more satisfying than my time as an undergraduate, but for that to happen I will have to work at it and resist the temptation to fall into a routine and drive through the next two years with blinders on.

So I'm keeping my eyes open for stuff to do and people to meet. There was an advertisement up for a language event involving food and free 30 minute classes, so I thought, what the hey, I'll go down, check it out, and maybe meet someone interesting. Turned out that the event was tailored to an older crowd as an extension of the adult learning program and the classes they were selling only met once a week. You can't get much done language wise once a week, but I've had such an itch to study -some- sort of language I was still considering signing up. Lucky for me the choice was taking out of my hands when the classes I was interested in were scheduled at the same time as my grad courses.

I am still heavily considering finding some way to start learning Chinese, but am trying to focus on the job front first, and -then- I will find new and exciting ways to spend my money.

Dreams and Reality

2010-08-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

The last few days have been on foot job canvasing days. Forty five minutes into the city, hours asking for applications from every store that I would possibly consider working for, and then the drive back. Today I turned in the applications I had collected in bulk, and tomorrow I track down the Barnes and Nobles stores I did not hit. I haven't turned in any online applications in a few days, even though I've still been collecting listings, so now there's 10+ e-mails to send out, cover letters to write, and tedious application forms to fill out that ask for all the things the resume has in it anyway. I'm considering not making a tailored resume for jobs with application forms, just because I feel like I'm doing the same thing twice every time, but even though the resume is optional I don't want to put myself at any disadvantage.

The job hunt today also included a trip to the library to take a test for a sorting position. I was given a sheet of ten problems, with ten items per problem, and asked to alphabetize everything. I got a 91%, which is as embarrassing as hell. Still passed, but it appears I need to retake kindergarten.

I have a guest blog up at the Private Library. I had been meaning to write the article ever since I had picked up a half dozen catalogs from the New York antiquarian book fair, but the thing that spurred me to finish it was the need for a writing sample in a job application. I've been wanting to write something on unconventional and 'exotic' binding practices too, but that will require more research and resources than I have time for at the moment. It's still in the back of my mind.

So far I have gotten two call backs for 'jobs'. One was for a speech recognition service. It isn't a job per se. When I fall into the right demographic range they give me a call and I read stuff for them in my East Coast accent. Given that I am constantly being told I don't have the Joisey accent I guess I won't provide them with the most stereotypical data, but whatevs. It's 40 bucks for a 45 minute session. The other job is as part time as it comes. Occasional yard work and mending for a doctor in the DU area. These things might provide for a little, but I'd still love for a JOB to call me back.

It's gotten to the point where I've had dreams where I'm asking some anonymous employer why they aren't contacting me and they're giving me some speech about 100 applicants yadda yadda yadda. Dreams are times for floating ships and pirate islands, not more job searching.

Anyway, to move away from the depressing, some quick notes:

I still can't believe Denver spends money on buses that go up and down a single street and stop at every corner every minute.

There are pianos standing along the 16th ave. mall for anyone to come bang on them for change. They are painted all sorts of gaudy colors and some people really can play.

I had a real hankering for spring rolls and immediately ran into a Thai food cart selling spring rolls.

I then waited 20 minutes to order said spring rolls only to be told they were out, so that part of the day wasn't as awesome as it could have been.

My friend's grandma is essentially adopting me and is treating much better than I deserve.

After living with 4 cats and 2 dogs for a week and a half I want one of my own. =x

Even though the job stress has been driving me a little nuts, I'm enjoying the freedom of exploring the city and chillaxing with Fides while I gear of for class. I'm crossing my fingers that the classes will be worth the move and the financial wager.

Chugging along

2010-08-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

I feel as if I haven't played a computer game in ages. There's a Oregon Trail tribute game online I've been using to let off steam between applications as I spend my days looking for work and writing reviews (4 in two days. That was pushing it.) But other than that I haven't had the time for much leisure. Austin's mom took us out to the movies two days ago, where we saw the Expendables. It was a perfectly straightforward action movie that probably would have been ten times more awesome had the director given us a few straight shots of the action. Also, Jet Li got a terrible part. But overall the carnage was satisfying, and the plot just there enough to keep it all together.

It appears that I have a place in Englewood. I am knocking on wood until a lease is actually drawn up, but unless my possible roommate completely changes her mind, everything is good to go. School is likewise in set it and forget it mode. I -still- have to register, but it seems that I will be able to register for 7PM classes almost exclusively, which keeps my job options at maximum. Again, knocking on wood.

What I would really like to find would be a job with a publisher or a library, but beggars can't be choosers in this economy. As long as I can stand it (and I can stand a lot) and maybe even learn a little while on the job, I will be happy. And of course it would be nice to end up with a salary that will actually let me pay my bills.

Amongst this all I have not read a page of my book since I set off. The Shouwa emperor is just going to have to wait.

YESSSSSSS

2010-08-16T22:16:00.000-07:00

Every day since my application has been complete I have looked at the status page on the DU site. It's an informative little page, with a two column table noting each element of the application and its status, including acceptance. Every day I've seen the acceptance field set as 'pending', sighed heavily, and moved on (until 2 hours later when I had to check again real quick).

Today, like every day before it, I check the status page and saw 'pending'. I let out some steam with a grumble, and prepared to do something else, but first I scrolled down to the very bottom of the page.

There were two buttons down there that I hadn't noticed before, marked "Accept offer of admission" and "Decline offer of admission" respectively.

So I hit Accept.

So now I guess I'm accepted. Great news just two days before I'm scheduled to set out for Denver. I promptly told everyone I knew the news, and now my optimism meter is a full.

This means that the 10+ applications to work that I submitted are probably useless, but ah well. I had broken down and submitted an application to a winter internship in LA too, just in case I didn't get in, but now that's no longer an option.

===

My brief foray into 'freelance writing' died in utero, which I do not regret at all, and after deciding that if I hated BSing for a grade I would hate BSing for money, I fell into an opportunity to write for real, albeit for free, when a request for reviewers was put out by the proprietor of a Spec. fiction review site. I had the itch to write, and my article writing skills -were- rusty, so I applied, and now it seems I will be reviewing for Tangent Online. The guy who runs it seems like a chill dude, and I'm going to enjoy the opportunity to read new stories and gain a little experience as I do so. Who knows, I may just find a doorway to something even better here.

===

I got a guest pass for SCII so that I could play some vs. with friends, and after the lan ended checked out the campaign. As annoyed as I am about Blizz's marketing direction, I have to admit that I like the campaign a LOT. I also am reminded at each mission how much I suck at SC. I tunnel vision too much and cannot run a base and a group of units at the same time. Period.

Unfortunately, you can't play single player without being connected to bnet, and bnet was down, so I got denied play time. The movement gaming companies are making to require that people are always online, even when they are playing a game that should have not problem running offline, really irks me. I don't think I'll be buying SCII with the way it's set up. I'll probably just play on someone else's account whenever the urge hits.

If Diablo requires 24/7 online access I am going to be PISSED.

2010-08-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

First, in gaming news, and interesting post from Neuroskeptic. Some Korean scientists are trying to develop a drug from video game addiction. Their subjects are cited as being so hopelessly addicted that they play at least "4 hours a day". Four hours! If that's addiction I'm in huge trouble. Of course the article goes on to say that these subjects have dropped out of school or lost wives due to their play habits, so I suppose I'm safe yet. Plus, I don't play Starcraft.

These last few days have been extremely active (not quite productive) to my pleasant surprise. I finished three more job applications yesterday and have signed up to contribute to a F/SF review site on the side. While there's no payment involved, there are galley copies to be had and my name in the byline for future references. My last published article is something like five years old now, so I figure it's about time that I added a few more writing credits to my name.

I also did some vague checking into freelance work. Online freelance is a domain so choked with land mines I don't think it's worth the effort, and many of the big freelance sites looking for writers are either looking for people to write student papers for them, or want 5 articles a day on random subjects for the sole purpose of boosting Google traffic. I can feel the suction of hell on my fingertips when I browse through stuff like that. And yet, I almost want to try. Would I be able to write 500 page articles in less than 15 minutes 5 times a day about random crap? (That's the speed I'd need to keep up to get get at -most- 8 bucks an hour) I don't know if my BS powers are -that- strong.

2010-08-12T11:08:00.001-07:00

Ah, the job search. What an adventure. I'm looking for work at full speed now, and have been quickly reminded of how painful it really is.

The first job I applied to was fishy at the very beginning. There was 0 information about the business in the ad, and they had posted it on Craigslist. But at 16 bucks and hour full time I couldn't resist sending off a resume anyway. Today I got an e-mail back from them saying thanks, they really want to interview me but could I just sign up to this credit verification website that tricks people into paying monthly fees first?

Oh well.

I have not gotten anything back from the second job I applied to last night, so I figure that's probably a good thing. And while I would like to stop using Craigslist, I don't want to miss a thing. I'll be canvasing for jobs in person when I get to Denver, but the sort of job you get that way is usual retail or food.

The last piece of my university application puzzle was submitted two days ago, and now the ball is entirely in DU's court. Considering that there are only 3 weeks until the start of the semester, I don't have my hopes up too high, but considering that I haven't gotten a letter saying no yet, I'm still looking for a miracle. If I get in I may be able to find work on campus, which would be a double blessing.

It's about time I considered what I would be taking with me to Denver, but I haven't started bothering with that. I don't need much to live. The only minor challenge is making sure I have enough to keep from freezing to death in the coming winter. Not looking forward to that at all.

2010-08-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

For the past few years now I've aimed to read about a book a week. Last year I only managed about a book a month, and the year before I don't think I actually kept a record.

This year has been pretty slow too. Technically I'm on my 14th or so book, and I don't think anyone needs to do the math to realize that we are not in the 14th week of the year. I've been reading consistently, but the books I have been picking up were not easily digestible. Typically it would take me a month or more to finish one, and then I would sit down with something short and finish that in a single sitting.

This time I spent about a month or so slogging through London, which was not nearly as good as what I've been reading lately, and the next item on my plate was a quick novel by Asimov that I finished in a few hours.

What I have been consistent with is writing reviews for each of the books I finished. I think so far Les Mis has been the only exception, and I have exempted it because I am still writing the review in my head. It's such a good book that I want to do it justice. All my reviews are linked to my account on library thing, and one I add one the widget on the sidebar is updated. The last few have been lazy, but I'm trying to up the quality into something that people might actually consider reading. I figure if that's almost all the writing I do, I should put more work into doing it well.

I myself don't usually read reviews of anything unless I have already read it or am in the middle of reading it. I use them not so much as a guide to what I should read next (because I have a list that stretches 100 books long to do that for me) but as a way to check my own impressions and understanding against some outside experience. And, I do get some bit of egotistical pleasure from reading reviews by people who really didn't get it too.

Next on the plate is Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Lately I've been trying to brush up on my academics, listing Kanji compounds, practicing reading, etc... so it's good timing to read a book with a focus on Japan. Maybe I'll keep up with the good habit of updating this damn thing and put some notes down as I go through. I do this on paper as well, but true to my disorganized nature I keep forgetting which notebook I'm using for the purpose, and so my comments on books are spread out on random pages of random notebooks and are almost impossible to reference properly.

2010-08-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

I was watching Inception, and every time this dude came on screen I felt this small tug at my memory. I knew I had seen him from somewhere before. I KNEW it, but could not for the life of me place his face. Well now, a week later, as I was doing something completely unrelated to anything, it hit me. It's Tommy from 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Looking through his discography, 3rd Rock was the only other thing I've seen him in. So now every time I recall a scene from Inception I see Tommy, the alien with long hair, running around in people's minds. Wonderful.

And no, this is not particularly blog worthy, but I'm trying to build up a habit again.

Books Books Books

2010-08-03T17:27:00.000-07:00

Why do I love books? Because these sort of things exist:

The Voynich Manuscript

And

Codex Seraphinianus

2010-08-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

I was reading this blog a while ago and it got me thinking about many things, which is something I find DFW does whenever I run into him. The source article is worth reading here. At this point I'm blogging about a blog about a blog about the original text, when it's the original text I'm looking for, but I suppose that's how information travels nowadays, and since I don't have the money, time, or space for a new book at the moment an excerpt will suffice.

The important quote is here:

Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.

Pointing to Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot, Wallace asks:

Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile…. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this…who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?

My first urge was to say that this was true, but then I wondered if the books I have read really support it.

What have I read that's both Serious Lit and recent? By recent I suppose Joyce is a good cutoff.

We have The Fountainhead, DFW's own Infinite Jest (Though only a small part of it, as true to the joke I didn't bother to finish), Invisible Cities, a good smörgåsbord of HS required reading, like Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye... And even among these titles the only ones that might not be considered old is IJ, which was published in the 90s, and Invisible Cities, which was published in 1972. In other words, I have no idea what passes for a Serious Novel nowadays. If it was written before I was born I probably have not bothered with it.

For a while I've noticed that I simply do not like 'modern' novels and have been struggling to understand this bias. For the most part I have assumed that the problem was in the sheer number of novels being published and the fact that the cream has not yet risen, which means the modern reader is slogging through the crap that has been only somewhat sifted out by the publishing industry. The democratization of publishing has exacerbated the problem. When I went up to Lunacon there were a number of authors peddling their small press publications. I purchased a book and found it riddled with basic grammar and copy errors before I even realized that as a story it wasn't any good.

If you go to Barnes and Noble, where the stock is more closely curated, you will still find that 99% of the titles are completely mediocre. Slogging through a minefield of duds is not my idea of a good time, and so I've stuck to what I know will at least give me something, even if it's nothing more than a stronger historical perspective or a familiarity with a title that has had an effect on literature as a whole. Even then you have duds. The Octopus was not worth my time, but the chances that I wonder why I bothered drop considerably when I go back 50 years. So, as a reader I'm not really equipped to talk about the situation of modern Lit.

I think the reason I feel so inclined to nod my head at DFW's position is that I can see the influence of the thought he is expressing in my own writing. Perhaps it's because I'm a denizen of the internet, where expressing passion is akin to being trolled, but it seems almost impossible to hit earnest without slipping into shrill. Perhaps it's because I'm an intellectual child of the 1900s that I struggle with the mores of my own time, but I would like to write something earnest and forward and true to an older aesthetic without having it feel pretentious and out of touch.

2010-07-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

When things get complicated. I go quiet. Right now things are getting moderately complicated so I haven't been posting much. Here's a short update.

I tried near the beginning of this month to induce a radical change of habit by writing five hours a day. The first day I managed 2 hours, the second 1, I skipped the third, struggled past 1 hour on the fourth, and have been writing in 10min fits and starts for the past 2 weeks since. Ok, this last week I didn't write a single thing that I can recall. Today is Monday, so maybe this week will be a little better.

A while ago Blizzard decided the best way to make people civil towards one another on the internet was to make them sign their full names to any statement they made of the official forums. The idiocy of asking people to out themselves to a community that is notorious for immaturity, flaming, and ridiculous vendettas that sometimes span years and servers should be self apparent. I and enough other subscribers canceled our subscriptions and gave enough negative feedback that the decision was reversed within three days, but even so the thread announcing that reversal is going strong at 300+ pages. To put it into some context, the initial thread where the change was announced was locked as it approached 2500 pages. Considering it was open for only 3 days, that's 833 pages a day, 35 pages an hour, and about half a page a minute. This does not take into account that this is only discussion on the main thread. New threads were popping up every second and being deleted just as fast. Like many other posters mentioned, I've never seen any large community react so negatively and so unanimously about an issue on the internet.

Even though Blizz backed down my account remains canceled. I've been hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to renew it. On the one hand, my mage has hit a dead end. There is no raiding in my guild to speak of, and I don't care to RP in the server I'm on. If I walked away from him now I wouldn't feel all too bad. I've given up on seeing the Lich King by the expansion, and no one even seems to be looking at the Ruby Sanctum.

On the other hand I've been getting a hankering for moving away from PvP and spending some time RPing again. For me this means going back to Sentinels, and while RP is a lot of fun, and a lot more creative than anything else I've been doing lately, it also is intensely time consuming. I'll just have to see how I feel when it comes time to pay again.

And, I'm moving out to Denver in a few weeks. That's the complicated part.

2010-07-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia sometimes introduces me to fascinating things.

Juan Pujol

Another good link for posterity:

Rules for writing fiction, by writers, to writers.

Hitting 'next blog' up in the blogger dashboard is probably the most useful aspect of this little pre-fabricated blogging service out there. Sometimes you can stumble upon interesting things, like unschooling. I personally think this is a great idea, but requires a certain sort of family environment to be really effective.

2010-07-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

June had 0 posts. Why? Because it was a terrible boil of a month and its end was an immense relief. July is building up slowly, but with a transfer request and college application pending things are looking up. Another difference: I struggled through The Education of Henry Adams all through June and finished it on the first of July, along with the quick read Taroko Gorge. Taroko Gorge was an early review book for librarything, and as a rule I am suspicious of anything free, but it turned out to be a decent book, and being able to read within five hours was a nice change of pace after the 2 month task of The Education.

I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle now, and anthology of his works that includes the novella The Last Unicorn. I used to watch the movie adaptation religiously as a kid, so I'm looking forward to revisit the story through the original telling.

2010-05-17T19:14:00.001-07:00

My room is now cleaner than it has been in over 4 years. The massive amount of crap that has been slowly pushing me out of my own abode has been defeated, for a time, until by my fatal neglect allows its inevitable return.

Work has started scheduling hours again and I am anticipating a paycheck fatter than $50 again. This is a good thing. I already miss the spare time, but only to a degree, and God willing things will keep moving forward and all this halting and waiting is in the past.

Work itself is the usual. The books and the co-workers make it constantly enjoyable, and I still learn new things from the various customers that come in looking for this and that. Because of our proximity to Princeton we get every sort of reader, from every corner of the earth. It's a good job for the Observer. The only thing that gets on my nerves are the people who collect half a shelf of magazines, sit down with their cheap latte for 4 hours straight flipping through everything, and then wander away without even closing the last thing they read, or even worse, dump their magazines in front of other magazines in the stacks as far from where they belong as possible, as if somehow this will wipe their bookstore karma for next time. Nope. If I ever procure the power to kill with my mind, you fuckers are the first to go.

I'm undecided about whether or not I'll destroy the kids who come in and study out of our test books for the entire day without even considering purchase. One the one hand they waste our time and our space and never put the books back. On the other hand those things are kind of expensive, and become useless after the test has been taken. On the super secret third hand, libraries exist for a reason. I think I'll destroy them too.

My book reading has crawled to a halt with Adams. I need more of an education on America in the 1800s than I have to get much out of it, so for the most part all of his references fly over my head. Without the context The Education of Henry Adams is not much more than a guy saying stuff like, "I went to France and kind of wasted my time there. Then I went to England and didn't do much there either." What actually happened, if anything, is hard to pick out.

I commit hyperbole here, but even the introduction is an apology for Adams being so "allusive" and "obscure", so I'm not off by much.

2010-04-17T02:48:00.000-07:00

Did I get what I was going to get done done? No, but in not doing that I got something else done. I keep trying to cultivate something like artistic merit but the stop and go method that employ means I don't improve all that much. So for the last 24 hours or so I've been in go mode and drawing bad pictures in the hope that they will lead to better pictures.

I also found some interesting things on the internet.

A book on (unintentional) innuendo in Christian imagery. Good for an irreverent chuckle.

A video of many nerds recreating a scene of A New Hope. I hope the full film becomes available.

2010-04-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

Today I resolved to do four things: mail a package, get some car soap, check my work schedule for next week, and use up a gift card for Rita's Ice.

The post office at the store was closed when I got there, the store sold no car soap, I have 0 hours scheduled for the second week in a row, but at least I had enough money on my card for a custard.

So far my day is 1 for 4.

I'm going to go wash my car with soapless water to at least get the bird turds and tree leavings off, and then do some research for a project that I'm hoping will occupy me during the jobless week.

Cool Link of the moment: http://s.xdg.us/ An online music radio run by a bunch of people with very eclectic tastes. I'm on the DJ list, actually, though only for the duration of my hourless unemployment.

2010-03-22T14:51:00.001-07:00

What a weekend.

Friday I had planned to go north to Lunacon for the day. To force myself to actually go when the time came I had preregistered, and told my dad to pick me up for the 7AM train into NYC. The week before I had destroyed my sleep schedule with an all night LAN and a 7AM shift almost back to back, and did not get to sleep until 3 or 4 AM. That gave me three hours of sleep before my dad was at the front door. I had planned to bring a number of things with me on my trip. Camera, a few copies of my resume, a snack for lunch to save some money, and a birthday card for my friend, who I would be meeting the next day. I realized before we had even made it to the train station that I had forgotten all of these things, and on top of that I had forgotten my belt and my voucher indicating that I had pre-registered. I was confident that the voucher would not be a problem, but I did end up spending the whole day hiking up my pants like a high school nerd.

The trip from home to Port Chester took about 6 hours. I loitered in NYC for a bit to get an offpeak ticket, and decided on the 30 minute walk to the convention from the train station, since I was so early.

At that point I was under the impression that the convention would start some time around noon. When I arrived I immediately realized that something was off, because it was around 11:30 and there was no convention to speak of. Sure, there were enough people that looked like they belonged to the convention to assure me that at least I had gotten the date and the place right, but obviously I had gotten something horribly wrong with the time.

Turned out that the convention didn't actually start until 6PM. I was 6 hours early. So I spend most of my convention time helping people set up. Everyone there was nice, I picked up a number of books by independent presses (more on that later), talked to some people, hung up some art, played a game of Fluxx, and then left at around 7PM.

The question now was if I was going to make my way all the way home, or stay in NYC overnight so I didn't have to come back the next day for my friend's birthday. I ended up staying at a cousin's apartment in the Village. The noise from nearby bars is constant, and was like a lullaby to my ears. There is something about the dull murmur of a city seeping through the walls that puts me in a state of utter peace similar to the sort of feeling people attribute to the wilderness.

The next day was much more sensible than the 7 hour, 80 dollar trip to hang up art that I went through on Friday. I realized that morning that I had agreed to go to a barbecue restaurant during Lent, when I don't eat meat, but there was enough veggies and fish to sustain me. We did a good amount of walking, stepped into the library, Forbidden Planet, and the Strand, had a pizza supper at Joe's Pizza, which is run like the pizza version of the soup nazi's place, and then went home. I managed to get back just as my phone died, and passed out immediately once I got home.

Fun, but a rather expensive way to spend my weekend. Certainly not something I can afford doing often.

Cool link of the moment: The Owl Box. It's just a webcam in an owl box, but if, like me, you are a fan of birds, it's neat to see an owl up close as she chills out and fusses over her chicks.

2010-03-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned before to my mother that the headlines on the BBC RSS are their own special sort of crazy, and today a perfect example came up. "Missing woman police target clubs." That is a noun pile, and has been covered by linguists who know much more about this sort of stuff than I do, but I wanted to point it out because I know you read this mom, and here is what I was talking about. Now here's the question: What would an article with that headline be about?

My second attempt at a permanent break from WoW has been successful so far, but I am still struggling in the resulting time vacuum. I installed Ubuntu on the laptop and have not been able to find anything scratch my gaming itch so far. Civ IV steam edition doesn't work. My Sims 2 ISOs (don't judge me) were lost, since apparently I did not back them up. While I have been reading more, I still lack the proper attention span to read at length. I've starting writing more, but again, I've noticed that my ability to concentrate is nothing like it used to be.

Here's an interesting book tidbit from another excellent Book Blog. The author of Bambi also wrote a well known German book of erotica. The world is wonderful and multifaceted.

This site is an oldie but goody, and with my ample free time I've been feeding in random lines and enjoying the results of the translation. Movie and book quotes are perfect fodder.

Dollars and Sense

2010-02-28T15:48:00.001-08:00

The hardest thing about the book selling business appears to be in gathering the will to sell a book that I have not yet read. I pick up all this books and think to myself, "I'll put them up for sale... after I've gone through them." Never going to be a bookseller if I do that.

My old domain, the one that I had been using before I was a fool and let it expire, was scooped up by domain squatters some years ago. Occasionally I go back to see if they've given up on it, but there is still a large 'for sale' button where my site once was. Today I did a little snooping around to see how much they were 'selling' the domain for. The price I turned up? 4,000 dollars. Considering it costs about 10 bucks a year to register a domain, and I am one hundred percent certain that my domain gets 0 visitors besides myself when I check it once ever few months, that asking price is retarded. IMO, that sort of domain squatting is up there with telemarketing in terms of 'business ideas that will be sure to land -someone- in hell'. It's the fishing for easy profit without producing anything of value whatsoever that enrages me so much.

And at the same time the domain, who's name I liked quite a bit, has been locked out of any use and if I ever do decide to purchase server space again, I am going to have to come up with something else.

Bits and Pieces

2010-02-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes headlines are just too stupid not to enjoy:

"European Union foreign ministers condemn the use of forged passports in the assassination of a top Palestinian militant."

Hey guys, way not cool that you used our passports there, but good job on killing a guy, well done.

Fun fact, there are, according to the autobiographies in circulation, at least three 'last men who knew everything'. Athanasius Kircher, Thomas Young, and Joseph Leidy. There may be more, but I can cay with certainty that there hasn't been any men who know everything in quite some time, and until the internet explodes and we are thrust back into an informational dark age we won't be having one again.

This video of a 1940s printing press is sexy as hell.

When I grow up...

2010-02-16T21:00:00.001-08:00

Something else I absolutely must have when I grow up.

There are people who actually have secret bookcases and book levers. Those people are my heroes.

Awesome Link

2010-02-15T21:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.molleindustria.org/en/home

Some people are just too creative.

When I grow up...

2010-02-10T11:40:00.001-08:00

Someday I will have the means to win an auction of something like this:

Heritage auctions apparently takes interns. I wonder what sort of qualifications they look for. Time to shoot out an e-mail.

Dedication

2010-02-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Last night, as I was walking from the store to my car, I passed someone outside with his laptop sitting on the cigarette tray playing WoW. It had snowed two days ago and was still frigid outside, but there he was, sucking on a cig, presumably for warmth, and pecking at his keyboard with gloved fingers.

We have a couple of guys who take advantage of our free wi-fi and sit in the store for hours on end playing WoW, but this is the first time I've seen someone willing to stand outside in the cold to play. I'm not sure if he's impressively dedicated, or impressively addicted.

Feb Update

2010-02-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

Happy February. February is one of the hardest months to spell. It's Feb-you-air-ee. Where the hell did that R come from?

Anyhow, my job has been excellent, though lacking hours enough to provide more than gas and bill money at the moment. At least it's something, and there are the added perks of human interaction (with interesting and nice humans, no less) and a reason to get off my ass and do something. It is in no way a permanent solution to my career woes however. I'm growing more certain that a library science degree will be for me. We actually had a library science student come into the store yesterday doing research on the differences in costs/risks/services of libraries and commercial bookstores, and it's a shame that I will probably not get a chance to read the resulting paper.

The major hurdle to a masters at the moment is the GRE. Taking it will not be an issue, but I've been trying to get the UH financial aid office to contact me about a fee voucher and they have been dead silent. If I get nothing from them by march I suppose I will just shrug and pay the 160 dollars. The price tag isn't too awful for me, but it was still a surprise. For people who have not been able to rely on the support of parents an entry fee that steep on a test that important has got to suck.

I am almost done with Les Mis. It will be almost certainly finished by the end of this month, and then I will be reading Infinite Jest. The amount of reading I have been doing this year has been pretty steady, but I have failed ten times over to write with any consistency. I find myself again wondering if abstinence from the computer might fix that, but I don't think I have that sort of will power.

I have however developed a semi successful method for getting things done. I've set up a few school-like periods where the 'class' is something like 'clean' or 'write' or 'study language'. So far, only the 'clean' period has gotten me to do any work. The other too are too early in the day or something, or I'm just too lazy, and artificial deadlines or schedules have never worked for me.

The first project successfully completed during 'clean' class has been a sorting of 10+ boxes that came with us when we moved 8 years go, and have not been touched since. Half of it was children's books, and the other half was a combination of trash and yarn.

This mess was reduced to 4 or so boxes, 3 of which are books that I'm going to sell off to make room. The living room there is now completely clean and there is actually some walking space in the dining room now. My room remains a disaster area, but that's next on the hitlist.

It snowed a decent amount today, and I got my first exercise in a good while by helping shovel the sidewalk. We live in a corner house with a good deal of sidewalk, so the work lasted most of the day. It felt nice to exert some energy though. I really need to do that more often...

Afterwards we had hot tea and nabe, which is basically a pot of boiling water plus whatever you care to throw in. Mine was full of greens, fishballs, and delicious mushrooms.

This huge thing is cut up into slices and and cooked until chewy. It's slightly sweet, and extremely delicious.

This post doesn't begin to cover what's been going on for the past month (a good thing; this means that things have actually been going on) but it's an update none the less.

Observation of the day: One of the most commonly stolen items in BnN is the Bible or its accessories.

Music of the day: Coheed and Cambria - Welcome Home. I can't figure out if I like these guys or not. Epic voice, but I can't hear any of the lyrics, and there's not much to the instrumentals at all. It verges on pop.

Work work.

2010-01-07T16:03:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I updated, huh? My bad. Seems once or twice a month is all I can manage. At least my constant griping about unemployment will be coming to an end. I have a job.

Early last month I broke down and got a car. The next day I drove up to Princeton and put in an application to Barnes and Noble (something like my fifth), and the day after I was in for an interview. I was hired along with a small army of seasonal temps, but put my best foot forward and made gentle reminders to my managers that I was looking for a permanent position, and so now I'm full time part-time. About 25 hours a week. Not enough to move out of home with, really, but enough to whittle away the debt and keep me from being a total leech on my family. And, most importantly, I'm finally getting book selling experience and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

The commute is 30 minutes, so either I develop a tolerance for the radio or get a mp3 adapter for the car asap.

In a bout of ambition, I also wrote a list of 'resolutions', which looks almost exactly like the sorts of resolutions I always write at various times throughout the year when I suddenly have an urge to get off my but and do something. A book a week, 100 words a day, 3 meals a day (which is now a lot easier, what with having a schedule and all), draw once a month (I guess I haven't failed that one yet. Soon) Etc...

The book a week is going to be a minor challenge because I'm stuck in the middle of Les Mis, which is not the sort of thing to be consumed in a week. I figure it will take the rest of the month to finish. As far as writing is concerned, I figured 100 words is small enough to not feel daunting, but may spur me into more writing. However, this is the most I've written since the new year, and as of this sentence I'm at over 300... I guess I'll refine it all as the year goes on. No reason to give up in January.

Cool Links

2009-12-04T18:12:00.000-08:00

Hitting gear cap in WoW has been a good thing. Suddenly I'm spending time doing something else, like trolling the internet.

Some cool stuff:

http://birdbook.org/
The site is awful but the birds are amazing.

http://v1kram.posterous.com/liu-bolinthe-invisible-man
Illusionist+Artist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY3wmWT-sb8&feature=related
Lipizzaner Stallions. We went to see them a few weekends back.

On the job front I FINALLY got a call back from Barnes and Noble. The position is seasonal so there's a chance I'll be done with it by January, but I can use the money, and an excuse to get out of the house.

NaNo was a bit of a bust, but not entirely. I neglected it for the entire month of November, and on the 30th decided to make a go for it. I ended at 18k words, not nearly enough for me to win, but impressive considering that they were all written in about two days. The story itself started picking up too, so I may actually have something.

I can't run a business because subtraction gives me hives.

2009-11-15T17:46:00.001-08:00

Last Sunday I finally managed to drag myself out of bed and scrounge the area garage sales for books. I figured while I was looking for a job I might as well occupy myself by seeing if reselling for fun and profit is a possibility. So far it's been fun (found a number of fantasy titles, including some obscure Tolkien paperbacks) but there's no telling whether or not it will be profitable. Thanks to the internet I have a better chance of selling, but no thanks to the internet everything is cheaper now that it is all more available.

None the less I received my first order via Amazon for a near new copy of Green Eggs and Ham, have packed it up, and am all set to ship it tomorrow. I bought the book for 75c, charged one dollar (There were 50 some listings for the same book, the uncontested mean of which was 1 buck) and am hoping that Amazon's packing credit will help me break even. In other words I don't think I'm making any money out of this book at all. But I'm not surprised. I figure I'll test the waters, get a feel for what moves and what doesn't, and if I think I can make a profit of any sort out of it I'll keep going. The used book business is a business of high volume and spotty return if my research is correct, so having only 5 or 6 titles available means that the likeliness of my seeing any real activity is very low indeed. I could buy up the tons of romance crap that seems to litter flea markets, but I don't know the market, don't care to, and have a feeling that most of those books are worthless simply due to the fact that they have over saturated the market.

Ideally I'd like to work at (or own!) a store something like Between Books in Delaware, where there is a focus on Fantasy and Sci-Fi titles. That is, if I end up in the bulk used book business and not in antiquarian books or archival etc...

And while all this is going on I'm still waiting to hear back from the office job, and still hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to forgo a very good salary and a decent position to pursue a much less lucrative but much more fun profession... or just go to graduate school.

Decisions decisions.

@#%@$!@$

2009-11-13T17:31:00.001-08:00

Turns out the graduate open house I had signed up for was yesterday and not tomorrow as I had thought.

Fuck.

Whatever. I think I am going to just go for the graduate degree. I had an interview for one job that paid a decent salary but it's office work turning over applications for ESL students and I'd be a dick if I took a job that required training and left six months later to go to school.

So I guess it's time to take the GRE and send in some applications.

Of course I don't know if I'd get in to the schools I'd apply to either so this may just be a huge effort for no return.

Basically what I'm saying is that I'm ROYALLY PISSED at missing that open house, particularly since I've been thinking about it since the month started, and I am currently in 'oh god I'm so worthless I have no redeeming qualities and will live the rest of my life on minimum wage and in complete defeat' mode.

I'm also doing horribly at NaNo.

I need a tub of ice cream.

Moving

2009-11-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

Today so far has been a productive day. I woke up around 8, had my clothes hemmed for the big interview tomorrow, tore up a ton of paper that's been piling up for months, and now am going to make yet another attempt at cleaning my room. For motivation I'm taking a picture of it every half hour to see if there are any changes.

I think the only reason I'm being productive is because I'm avoiding my Nano, but I figure I'll run with it.

Here's a before picture, let's see if there's any difference in a few hours.

Movement

2009-11-07T14:23:00.000-08:00

Things are looking up for me, maybe.

I was offered a job in Arkansas, but because it was minimum wage and in Arkansas I decided to decline. I'm in the process of being screened for the exact same job an hours drive away but don't know if I'm going to accept that one either. Location is pretty big for me.

I have an interview with another company, one that might pay me like I have a BA, this Monday. The only problem with that one is that they want a fluent Japanese speaker and I have not been a fluent Japanese speaker for almost three years now. I've been hitting the books to keep from making a total fool of myself.

This morning I finally got off my ass and trolled around the various garage sales in the area looking for resellable books. The idea is that I might be able to make a small bit of income from dealing in used book of a focused genre, most probably fantasy/sci-fi and travel/language books. I spent the better half of today figuring out Amazon and eBay, and if this first haul turns a profit, I may serious consider devoting my time to acquiring stock and setting up an online store.

My Nano is lagging, but it has started, and I plan on finishing.

Since coming back from Florida I has spent a minimum of time on WoW, and am hoping for that trend to continue. I think I'm comfortably at a point now where I can do a few dailies, raid, vend, and log out without hours and hours of badge farming or whatever. That means more time to reaquaint myself with coding, writing, etc. Good deal.

I am struggling through Frank Norris' The Octopus. Damn thing is so wordy. And I have 3 or 4 books that I still need to review and note as finished. 52 books this year is probably impossible now. I'm at something like 20.

Guess what this post is about!

2009-09-18T14:04:00.000-07:00

Employment!

For the last week I've sent in one submission a day. Hell I don't even remember where I submitted the last few days. Barnes and Noble (I ALWAYS write it Nobel), The Strand, Labyrinth Books, Oxford University Press, etc. The over/under qualified issue is still a big one. I either have to be a student or I have to have 4 years experience. Someone should have told me I'd need to be working full time as a student to get a job I was qualified for once I graduated. But whatever, I'm just going to keep applying. I cleaned my room a little more and am starting to consider selling off my high school manga. The ones I really liked I can keep, but for a spell there I was buying every title on the shelves. It got me a place as a columnest and bagged me preview swag, but not it's all taking up space and will never be reread. I figure I can try out the online book selling circut with my overstock (which, true to its name, is overflowing in this house)

So today I was doing my usual trolling for jobs and checked the Seattle Library system and suddenly there's a job availiable that pays 16-22hr and only requires a GED or higher. There were only two problems, it was a technical position that wanted previous experience troubleshooting electronics, which I only had informally, and the deadline for applications was in three hours.

So it turned out I was underqualified again, but this time in a different area, but with only three hours to decide if I was going to apply anyway I applied anyway.

There's really nothing hard about troubleshooting networks, and almost all of the hard crap about it has to do with the fact that computers are like babies, and the hard part about fixing them is figuring out what's wrong with them in the first place. I don't have formal experience with teaching people how to use computers, but I have a ton of informal experience? Doesn't that count for something?

I suppose I'll find out if it does in a few weeks. If I do get the job I'm moving to seattle and applying to to the MLIS program there. If I don't I just keep sending out my resume.

Update

2009-08-25T07:41:00.001-07:00

After much planning my trip out west is finaly prepared. I'm going on a whirlwind tour down the coast, and will be checking out prospective employment as I go. This will be my last big trip unless I end up going to Disney, in which case -that- will be my last big trip. Either way, the push for employment starts in earnest on the 7th, the day I get back from San Diego.

August Update

2009-08-07T11:41:00.001-07:00

A month of August has passed already, and not much has happened. Obviously I have been remiss in my posting. It's surprisingly difficult to keep track of what you're doing when you aren't doing much. A quick update:

Denver was great. My initial impressions were all wrong and I fell in love with the city. If I thought I had a chance of employment somewhere I would be moving there, but I will probably apply from affar and see what happens. Spent a lot of time with Fides which was definitely the highlight of the trip.

After Denver there was almost a month long drought of nothing. I was trying to get my Dad to make plans for Taiwan, because for the first time in 16 years he, my brother and I could all go together. We ended up making it there for about 10 days at the beginning of July. The insanity is recorded elsewhere.

After coming back we hit the duldrums again. Particularly in the area of food, we found ourselves wishing we were still in Taiwan. Eating is so convenient there. You step outside and there's a place to eat every five feet. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we lived in the city, so again I found myself swearing up and down that I had to move into a metropolitan area or die trying.

Last week I finally got off my ass and went to NYC with my uncle to scout out bookstores and inquire about employment. I had intended to follow up by now but again I'm slouching. I had lost my resume in a computer wipe, and am building it back, but see to only be able to write a line every 24hrs.

On a lighter note, I was going through a book of photography today when I saw a picture of a leapord labeled 'cheetah'. Unable to let this lie I obtained a second opinion, and then did a quick spot check via the internet. I'm 100% certain the label is wrong, because it's refering to an animal with rosette shaped spots in two tones.

I wonder if I can put on my resume for library work "Dedicated to finding the correct answer for everything, even when no one gives a crap."

Denver, Day 1

2009-05-31T21:32:00.000-07:00

It's 10:30 and my first day in Denver is over. After spending the day before in a sweaty rock gym shouting over club music loud enough to clear my chronicly clogged ears and coming home at midnight to pack franticly for a 7:00AM flight, I managed to sleep the majority of the way to the city. The stopover in Dallas was perfect. Just long enough to grab something to eat and get onto the next plane.

As we were decending into Denver Airport I started to finally realize what was going on.

Denver is in the middle of nowhere. I know I joke about how Hamilton is for all intents and purposes in the middle of nowhere, but Denver is actually in the middle of nowhere. I went from the most densely populated state in the union to the 37th, and apparantly more than half of Colorado's entire population is in the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area. I've flown over this area of the US a number of times now, and have always been facinated by the vast tracks of quilted farmland stretching out on both ends of the horizon, with nothing but a few pitiful dots of forest and some jagged rivers for diversity. This time I ended up landing in it. At that point the 'what the hell have I gotten myself into' part of the trip hit me.

It was about 2PM by the time I was into the city and ready to explore. Some quick stats of day 1:

Beggars seen - 6
Ratio of people who asked me for change compared to those who were just hanging around with signs - 1:1
Libraries Found - 1
Bookstores Found -1
Libraries and bookstores that informed me that the chances of my getting a job there were worse than 0 - 2
Pictures taken - 5
Times I've gotten lost - 0 (A miracle and an anomoly all at once)
Overall opinion of the city so far, after 3 streets, and a few hours (from 1 to 10) - 3

Like Jersey and Hawaii, the state of Colorodo is in a hiring freeze. The chances that I will end up in a public library are very slim at this point, and besides, there would be an LIS to get first. I still have a number of bookstores to check out, and the college campus. There's apparantly going to be a festival on Saturday, so I'll go there too. I think at this point a lot is depending on the campus itself and the vibe I get there. This city is so tiny I don't know if I would be able to manage living here for any length of time, but life is nothing if not a series of interesting challenges!

The Photos from Today:

I wasn't very dilligant in playing the tourist snapping at everything. The area the hotel is in looks a little tougher than the metropolitan heart of the city, and so I took the inconspicuous route for the time being.

"Yaki Soba Tofu" I guess you could call this that. It wasn't bad. The tempura was surprisingly edible, considering how picky I am about tempura.

Some guy in the Japanese place playing with a twin lens reflex camera. After passing laundrymats, liquer stores, and similar institutions of the baser elements of city life, seeing someone with a TLR was my first whiff of something interesting in the city.

Interior of the Japanese restaurant. The menu was injet printer fare, did not look like any Japanese menu I had ever seen, and the man in front of me was asking if Kirin beer was some sort of Japanese lager. I had some misgivings.

A view of the Denver skyline. That's pretty much all of it. Behind that is the Rockies, which is a much more impressive view. The image of nothing but flat farmland on one side of you and a gigantic wall of snowy mountains on the other commands an apprecation for the amazing diversity of the country and geography in general.

Starting up the Rest of My Life

2009-05-30T05:07:00.001-07:00

Well, I have been home for something like two weeks with very little done in comparison to my grand plans. I realized that the most recent version of my resume had been wiped with the change from Vista to Win 7, and haven't sent any applications for job out yet. My excuse is that I'm waiting until after the trip to Denver to get going on all of that stuff.

Denver is the one thing that I said I would be doing and actual am going to do. On Sunday I'm getting up at the godforsaken hour of 5AM to catch a plane, and will be landing in the Mile High City some time around 2PM. I'll be there for a week to explore the city, check out the campus, and try to decide if it's a place I would like to live for the next 4 years or so. I'm not sure I'm ready to settle for any longer than that, but in 4 years, who knows? After that I'll be checking out Seattle/Oregon, and then maybe some place in the south. St. Lewis perhaps.

The Kindle

2009-05-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

I have been eying e-readers

Progress indeed

The Kindle and Snobbery Via the times. They are missing out on one important fact here. At $300+ per, you don't need to know what someone is reading on a kindle to know where they stand on the literary snob meter. The fact that they put down 300 dollars plus to read when you can pick up a good book for 25c at a library sale is itself a good indication of the type of reader that they are.

I wouldn't want a kindle anyway. I don't want to marry a single company just to use an electronic device. I don't care how convenient (read:easy to spend more money) they make it. I was looking at the sony reader and the cybook, and there is the possibility of reading on my DS which would be nice considering I don't use it for anything ever. In particular I'd like to try out this 100 Classic Books Collection.

Notes

2009-04-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to keep the blogging going, I present more awesome things part two!

More awesome things include:

Having a pigeon try to land on the front wheel of your bike while you are riding it. Dumbest pigeon I have ever seen.

Sleeping

Mochi Ice Cream

The semester is almost over. Throughout I've had many meandering thoughts, questions, revelations, etc... but I have been very bad at writing them down, and when I sit in front of the computer all sense of productivity leaves me. On occasion I'll bother to write down a scrap of something into a notebook, and that's all I have as proof that my mind was working for the past four months.

Such random notes include "Philosophy is to be consumed and absorbed until it becomes manifest in one's own breath," another feeble attempt to outline a parable I have been mulling over in my head for years (statues are self aware, but can only understand themselves through men, philosophy ensues), "Past-laden presents bearing various possibilities." (To be fair I think that may have been a transcription of something else), and a dozen admonitions to myself on the vein of "GET THIS DONE FFS," "Stop sucking", "WTF is this shit?" and a few "GDI"s thrown in.

Things I love in Life

2009-04-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

Midget Tandem Bikes. The people in the car with me refused to believe that we had passed one until a fortuitous red light forced them to look twice, and then a third time. Pretty damn awesome.

Cinnabon. So delicious.

Kicking a habit. I am so done with WoW.

Eternal Recurrence, aka the purging of regret.

HTML. I love a good puzzle.

Bikes. I need to bike more.

Libraries. While every other passion of mine has died down or been put on the back burner for more "pressing" priorities, my love for the library has only grown.

Looking for Work and the Employment Gap

2009-04-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

This was day one of my hit the ground running employment search. I'm graduating in about a month, and so it's time to start preparing for the next big phase of my life. Step one in that preparation is getting a job. Of course, I've been doing job research for years before this on the Publishing and Library science industries, but now I am looking for particular contacts and actually destinations for my resume.

The biggest problem so far has been that I am either over or underqualified for every job offering. Internship is big in the publishing industry, but in an effort to get free labor without being sued for exploitation, most companies will give internships to people who can be 'paid' in college credit. Therefore, if you are not a college junior or senior you can't get in on a lot of these programs.

The next most common job offers are for senior level positions. Managers, executives, etc... These usually come with the caveat 'Prior experience required.' Luckily for me, I do have some prior experience because I wormed my way into getting a position at the university press, but that is not the two to three years that most people are looking for, and at 10 hours a week it has given me experience, but not enough for me to be experienced.

All of this is making me feel as if I am being punished for graduating in four years. I worked hard to concentrate on my studies and my studies alone so that I would graduate with a minimum of debt, but I now fear that this has actually hurt my chances of employment at the moment. I'm in the ugly position of having not that many extracurricular accomplishments to illustrate my passion for books and learning, and at the same time leaving the place where I can develop my resume in that direction.

But all is not lost. The job search is frustrating for everyone right now, but if I keep at it and keep all of my options open I still have a chance at finding my in. If I can't find any traditional listings that I fit, I will simply start sending out direct e-mails to places that may be hiring, and once I graduate I can start doing that on foot. There are jobs if you look, that's what I'm hoping. Even in a recession some things just need to get done, and the world needs good people to do them.