December 30
I spent most of the day at work branching in Lapeer with Mark. A lot of the computers needed updates for the Library Guardian internet security software before the New Year. Otherwise it would ceese to work. Kind of like the whole Y2K scare from a few years ago, except on a smaller scale. Anyway. There was no way that we could get to all of the Lapeer branches in one day - the driving times alone between them made that impossible. Lapeer is a largish county and the branches are pretty widely spread out. We did get the two biggest branches, de Angeli and Metamora, done. De Angeli is the closets thing to being the "main" branch...it is the largest one (the one that looks the most like a "real" library) and is in the county capital (and pretty much the only "real" city) of Lapeer. (yes, I know... not a very original name) Metamora is a very cute little storefront library in a very cute little town that is basically a couple of crossroads and a stop light. This, the second largest branch of the Lapeer District Library system, was smaller then the tiny litle Willoughby Public Library, one of the smallest branches of the Cleveland Public Library, that I frequented while I was growing up. Man. Differences in scale, I tell you....
Lapeer may be a very downplayed and rural county, but you should see some of the houses there. This is where all of the rich people (well, not all of them, but certainly a lot of them) who work in Oakland live. Lower taxes, you know.
Mark and I will try to hit most of the rest of the branches on Friday.
This is such a wierd week... two days off right in the middle of it because of the New Years holiday. It makes it difficult to get reak work done and get into the swing of the work day.
December 24 - 28
Ah, the whirlwind of the holidays and going to spend them with family.
I did in fact get all of the cookies bakes and all of the presents wrapped and my apartment cleaned and everything else that needed doing done before I left for Cleveland on the 24th. Didn't quite get it all done on time, though... my original estimated departure time was about 9am. Ha ha! What a nice dream that I would be together enough to be able to hit the road that early! As it is, I was only an hour and a half late, which wasn't bad.
As soon as I pulled in the driveway of my parents' house in Cleveland (Willoughby Hills, actually) it started to snow. Thick, heavy, wet, lake-effect Cleveland snow. I wanted a white Christmas - it just doesn't quite feel like Christmas unless there is a blanket of snow covering everything - and I got one. It didn't stop snowing until sometime late morning on Christmas Day.
My family traditionally spends Christmas Eve with my Mom's family - everyone gathers at Granny and Gramps's house and has a nice boisterous celebration. Complete with a good Slovak holiday feast. Which involves a little too much cabbage and sauerkraut for me. The bubulki (little poppy seed and honey rolls) are good, though, and so are the whitefish and perogies. (One year there were sauerkraut perogies mixed in with the regular potato and cheese ones) Still, Christmas eve I mostly eat cookies.
One of my little cousins, Ethan, is about three this year. Finally old enough to be entertaining. My brothers and Mom and I were playing a lot of backgammon during the evening. And Ethan decided that he wanted to play too. But since three is way to young to start learning somethign like backgammon, Kevin let Ethan "help" him play, and Ethan bacame the official dice roller. Rolling doubles in backgammon is always good, so Kevin kept encouraging Ethan to roll doubles. Ethan liked to call out what he was trying to roll. And because he is only three, he is not pronouncing all of his letters correctly. Like the "f" sound. When he tried to say "double four", it came out sounding like "double whore". Which we all (my brothers and I and my parents and some of my aunts and uncles) found absoutly hilarious. We encouraged him. And Ethan yelled out that he was going to roll "double whores!". And we laughed and laughed. And Ethan's mother, my Aunt Carolyn, just looked pained because she knew that she was going to have to explain his new favorite phrase to his preschool teacher. By the time that everyone was leaving my grandparents' house later that evening, Ethan was wound up tighter then a watch spring.
After we got home from Christmas Eve, I started to help my Mom get Christmas morning brunch ready so she wouldn't have to run around trying to get it all done in the morning between opening presents and going to mass and everything. I was cutting up fruit for a fruit salad. And I was very tired by then. And the knife was very sharp. And I was not paying as much attention to what I was doing as I should have been. And I sliced into my finger. It was pretty deep (but not deep enough for stitches at least) and bled a lot. That was the end of helping get breakfast ready. I gave up and went to bed. And endured jokes about how I was not allowed near knives the rest of the time I was home. In the morning when the bleeding had stopped, my Dad used superglue to tack down the flap of skin and flesh that I had sliced most of the way down so that it would heal straight. Superglue is a wonderful invention. I still have a band-aid over it - mostly so that I remember not to pick at it.
It used to be that my parents would have to tell me and my brothers not to wake them up before 6am Christmas morning. Now they have to drag us out of bed at 7:30 so that we can do presents before Christmas morning mass. How times have changed. :) I remember that I sued to get up around 3am Christmas morning, go downstairs, turn on the tree lights, and curl up on the couch with a blanket and a book and read and doze until it was time to get up.
On Christmas morning (after mass) my family always gets together with the Bononos. Either they come over to our house or we go over to theirs. We have been doing this for years... it started when we lived next door to each othr, but that fact that my family moved has yet to put a halt to these visits.
Christmas Day is spend at my Grandma's house with my Dad's side of the family. This year it was a very small and quiet gathering. My cousins Jenny and Marie are out west working on some organic farm... I don't get along with them. I think of them as basically crazy people whose greatest ambition is to be the equivalent of migrant farmers and they think that they are the new hippies, or something like that. I did not miss them. My uncle Tom and aunt Anite and cousin Mike did not make it either... they made it as far as the end of their block when they hit black ice at a stop sign and had a close encounter with a telephone pole. No one was hurt except the car radiator, and they were able to turn around and limp the block back home. And uncle Don, aunt Pierette and Stephen and Andrew never make it in before Boxing Day. So it was just Gramdna, my family and uncle Jim. Uncle Jim was more lively and talkative then I have ever seen him. He has been very very busy and was very eager to talk about how busy he has been... I think that he is trying to keep as busy as he can so that he does not have enough time to think about that fact that this is the first Christmas without aunt Carol.
I rarely get a chance to sit down and relax when I go home to visit. I spend significant amounts of time in Cleveland so rarely that my Mom feels a compulsion to squeeze every last bit of fun and togetherness out of the minutes. It always makes me feel guilty that I don't visit more often. Friday we went down to University Circle and went to a couple of antique shops and went to the art museum to see a photography exhibit and went to the botanical gardens. On Saturday we took Granny out to breakfast and went clothes shopping and made a facny dinner because Grandma and uncle Don and aunt Pierette and Stephen and Andrew came over. Like I said. Busy. :)
And I got the usual "Cleveland is a great place to live and work" spiel from my Mom. She really wanta me to move back to Cleveland and is subtly trying to put the pressure on. And with Brian moving to California (San Clemente. He said that he just got tired of winter and snow and wanted to try something new) - he heads out January 2 - she feels even more of a sense of urgency that one of her children should settle down close by. I dunno. I just don't think that I am in a position to look at moving back to Cleveland. Besides, I like living in Ann Arbor too much to want to leave anytime soon.
I brought my laptop home with my because I was entertaining a fantasy that I would get work done on my application essay while I was home. Ha ha! What a funny idea that was. I didn't even take my laptop out of its bag the whole time that I was home.
Saturday night, the night before I left to come back to Ann Arbor, was the only non-family thing that I did... I went to Ennie and George's house for a "Coventry Family" get-together. Friends from high school and friends I met while hanging out at the Arabica coffeehouse on Coventry. It is so easy for me to loose touch with people as I move from one place to another or one stage of life to another... I really don't want to lose touch with everybody from my past.
So by the time I got back to Ann Arbor Sunday afternoon I was simply exhausted. I need a vacation now to rest and recover from the vacation that I just had.
December 23
The oddest thing... while I was sitting at my desk at FALCON working this morning a ladybug (yes, a ladybug, and not one of those biting asian beetles) appeared out of nowhere and landed on my shoulder. It was kind of dusty looking, so it was probably living up in the ceiling tiles or something. Pretty surprising that it had managed to live until late December, no matter where it was hiding out. Still. Ladybugs are good luck. Must be a good sign - though whether it is a good sign for my new job at Diamond Bullet or for my SI PhD application, only time will tell.
Or it could just be a sign that I will successfully complete all of my remaining pre-Christmas baking (2 batches of cookies) and present-wrapping and other assorted last minute things before I take off for Cleveland and family tomorrow morning. Heh. :)
I ended up putting the ladybug on the poinsettia plant in the office.
Happy Holidays!
December 22
Oye. What a weekend. I love the holidays, but damn... the pre-holiday preparation stress and busyness...
Well, Friday night was great. "Return of the King" is an awesome movie. Minas Tirith was exactly as I had always pictured it, and the scene where Eowyn kills the king of the Nazgul was so well done... I have always loved that scene... "But I am no man"... Go see it. I cannot wait for the extended edition DVD to come out...
The rest of the weekend. Busy. And harried. And full of stupid mistakes that I should have been able to avoid if I had been paying sufficient attention to what I was doing rather then trying to do everything at once. I made a couple of batches of cookies (pizzelles). The first batch was totally ruined because I accidently used too much salt and had to be tossed. The second batch I brought in to work where the piranas made short work of it. I kept forgetting one ingredient here and one ingredient there and had to make many trips to the grocery store.
I have to make another trip tonight. But this time I have a nice list of everything (I think and hope) that I am still missing so I can get it all in one fell swoop.
And I have still more baking to do. When I talked to my Mom over the weekend and asked if she needed me to bring anything when I go home to Cleveland on the 24th, she said that she had had no time to do baking and asked me to make cookies. So far I am committed to a batch or pizzelles and a batch of snickerdoodles and (maybe) a batch of gingerbread cookies. That is gonna be a lot of baking.
And I wanted to put together unique Christmas/goodbye presents for my coworkers at FALCON and decided to do a pysanky for each - not traditional designs, though. Snowflake/star designs that I worked up myself. That took up most of the weekend. I really enjoy making pysanky... it is very relaxing and meditative and I enjoy the smell of hot beeswax. And you really need to be relaxed when you do pysanky. If you flinch when you drip hot wax on yourself or singe yourself on the candle flame, then there goes your egg. Too bad so sad. Anyway. I made one batch on Saturday. Then I sprayed them with shellac to help preserve the designs. But I hadn't been paying enough attention and accidently got white gloss enamel polyurethane instead of clear. Ruined the whole batch. Started over. Got the second batch done. Sprayed them with clear gloss enamel. Blew out the yolks. Put them in a padded egg carton. Carelessly put the carton a touch too close to the edge of the kitchen counter, with predictable results. Only two ruined (broken) eggs this time. *sigh* I give up for right now. When I get back from Cleveland I can make a new batch and give them out as New Year's presents. Meanwhile, the surviving two eggs will go to my Mom for Christmas. Remaking the pysanky will give me something to do on the 31st and the 1st (both of which I have off) while I am hanging out at home.
And Sarah will still be in town then. Maybe she would be interested in pysanky making... and showing her how to make pysanky would be more fun then going out with her to try to get me a bride's maid's dress.
December 19
I officially title this log entry "Random Musings". Work is really light around here...the usual pre-holiday doldrums.
What is it about snow that makes people forget how to drive? Yes, it is snowing. Yes, the the road had some snow and slush on it, but there was no ice and it wasn't an excessive amount of snow... typical early winter weather. But people on 23 were still doing about 20 miles per hour under the speed limit and I passed about five cars that were either off the road or had been involved in accidents. What's up with that? And if it is this bad right now on a day of fairly light snow, how much worse will it be in January or February when Michigan is getting smacked with the really nasty winter weather? Well, I won't have to worry about it - by then I will no longer be making the commute from Ann Arbor to Flint and back again each day. I gotta say, that it will be nice to be able to walk to work from my apartment. And if I am walking to and from work each day, then I won't have to work myself up to go jogging in the evenings after I get home.
I am peeved at SBC right now. Last Saturday I went to the Cingular store to port my home phone number to a wireless account. My rationale is that I am seldom home during normal calling hours so I end up using my Nextel cell phone a lot and I don't really care for either my Nextel plan or the Nextel customer service. So I am planning on ditching it as soon as my contract expires in early January. I like the convenience of a cell phone, so I want to continue to have one. I don't need a home phone if I have a good cell plan, so I want to end my SBC service. But I don't want to have to give out a new phone number to everyone I know and deal with, so I want to keep my current home phone number even though it will be on a wireless account. My wants for a wireless plan are simple: no roaming, good coverage everywhere I think I might be traveling, no long distance charges, and plenty of minutes. End of backstory. You would think, what with the FTC ruling that was handed down over a month ago that the various carriers would be pros at porting numbers from land-line accounts to cell accounts. Not so. The status of the porting of my home number to a Cingular wireless account is "ETA unknown". And has been so for the past week. So I am pissed. Maybe I can have my Nextel number ported over to a Cingular account so I don't have to go without a cell phone while I wait for SBC to pull its head out of its collective *#$&^!*!(@& and port my home number. Then when the porting on my home number is ready to go, it can just be overlaid on the Cingular account and my Nextel number can die. Yeah, that could work. Note to self: go to the Cingular store tomorrow and talk to the sales people there.
Schedule for the evening: "Return of the King"! Aw yeah... 7:30 showing at the Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor. I will forget my troubles in an excellent movie.
December 18
There is such a thing as too much chocolate, and I think that I have found out where the line is. The line is that one last orange creme-filled chocolate thing that I split with Ingrid and afterward started to feel distinctly queasy. I have been doing nothing (well, nothing other then my regularily scheduled work) all day but eat chocolate and other assorted junk food - biscotti, krispy kreams, mixed nuts, cookies, you name it - and now I am feeling a serious craving for some fruits and vegetables.
I don't even know why I have been bothering to eat breakfast and bring in a lunch when the holiday season bounty is spread all over the table in the GDL kitchen and on the conference table in the FALCON office.
Good thing I am not diabetic, though I may very well end up there after all of this. I can only hope that I have enough apetite left over for all of the bakery and candy that will be available at relatives houses when I go home to Cleveland for Christmas next week.
The good thing is that the sugar high kept me going long enough to crank out the final couple of pages of content for the Research Central website redesign. The site looks nice, and I hope that it will prove to be useful to students who have no idea what an ALA formatted bibliography should look like or how to use footnotes. I wish I could be sure that all of the information I am giving there is good nformation - I mean, I am not an English teacher or a reference librarian.... I don't know what kids are supposed to know when they go about writing research papers. I only have my own expereinces as a writer of research papers to draw from here. Too bad that none of the people at Baker College, Kettering University, Mott Community College, Lapeer District Library or Genesee District Library who I emailed for content help responded to my initial calls for assistance. Tomorrow I am going to put the fleshed out site out for overview and (hopefully) helpful commentary from the same group of people. After all, I don't want to give them the excuse to say that they were not included in the process. I honestly don't think I will get any more responses from them now then I did before. I hope that they aren't holding their silence now so that they can complain about it later....
December 14
Well... okay, it has been a while. So, I have been busy. But what is a blog, really? fifteen minutes to a half-hour a day? That is about it. As long as my life is interesting enough to merit fifteen minutes a day. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Lately though, life has just been really really busy.
Went
caroling with the Cynnabar Colegium Musicum this afternoon. We started out
at Heartland, which is a nursing/assisted living center in Ann Arbor. The
main reason we started out there, besides the fact that the old folks are
a great audience, and they really like sining for them, is that Katy's grandfather
and Martha's dad are there and we wanted to sing for him. Then we moved
to downtown Ann Arbor and staked out a street corner and sang there till
we couldn't feel our fingers and toes anymore (which took about an hour
and a half). It was cold, but last year was colder. This time we had a bigger
audience anyway. There was this one guy in an overcoat and top hat who listened
to us almost the whole time we were out there. We love our loyal listeners.
:) Especially since most of the stuff we sing isn't exactly 'popular' holiday
songs. Very few of them are in modern English...most are in Latin, Middle
English, German, and French. There is one very beautiful Basque traditional
tune we do, but since none of us really know how to pronounce Basque, we
sing that one in English.
Friday two things happened... my folks came up for dinner and a water main broke on my street, and the road crew tore up the entire section of street right accross the entrance to my complex. So, no entrance or exit. This took me kind of by surprise... especially since I only knew of that one entrance to my complex. Yes, there is a back entrance. And yes, I did eventually find it. And so did my folks. Which was a bit of a relief.
December 11
So. Yesterday I gave Ingrid my final answer about the job. Which was that I was going to accept it. I am not entirely happy about leaving FALCON - FALCON is a great project and I really like everyone else who works at FALCON and this program is something that the Flint area needs so badly. But the administrative atmosphere surrounding FALCON - it is just crushing. There is almost no administrative support at all. Which is too bad. I have a worry that with Wayne leaving and me leaving and Ingrid retiring in a couple of months that the project may die. And that is really too bad. If there was more admin support for FALCON and if there was a lot less general time wasting and tail-chasing and navel gazing by the governing board and the FAC and - heck... if there was a lot else different then I would probably stay. But that is not likely to happen. Too much flux. And no sight of any of it settling down anytime in the near future. And I just don't think that I can afford to stay in this sort of situation. As Ingrid said... "You have to do what you feel is best for you and your career." And I know that taking this offer is the best for my career... but that doesn't make it any easier a choice of make me feel any better about the choice.
It was hard telling everyone, though.
And today was the 'staff appreciation day' at GDL. Kinda awkward since I was getting ready to leave - but maybe I was the only one who felt awkward. *shrug* It was more or less what I expected out of the GDL get togethers... gotta work in some sorrt of diversity activity. Heh. The whole thing was interesting. And good food. The fact that there was going to be food is probably about the only reason that most people showed up. Ah well. And of course the rest of the day was more or less shot - after spending the morning eating the rest of the day more or less passed in a haze.
December 3
Today was nice. Just really really nice. My Mom came up from Cleveland for the day. We got to visit and wander around downtown and do some Christmas shopping and have lunch at Zingerman's. I love it when my Mom comes up for a day. But the days are just never long enough. Especially since she has the three-hour drive here and then the three-hour drive back to Cleveland. Which kind of limits the amount of time she can be here in Ann Arbor.
While we were downtown we dropped by the DBD offices to say hi to people. Which was also nice, and pretty much solidified my descision to say yes to Tom's offer.
December 2
Tom Brink, my old boss has contacted me about coming back to Diamond Bullet as a permanent, full-time project manager. And I would get to do other stuff - coding, and usability analyses, and interface design, and some sysadmin stuff... it sounds very very good, and I am very very seriously tempted and considering it.
<excerpt from an email I sent to my friend Clay>
Mmmm.... you know, I like being a librarian. But sometimes I wonder if maybe
I like the idea of being a librarian more then I actually like being
a librarian. There is a big gap between the chick in "The Mummy" (remember
her?) who proudly and drunkenly proclaimed "I am a librarian!" and the daily
reality that you and I and Erica have to deal with. You know what I am talking
about... the massive generation gap between us (the recent library grads)
and the rest of the librarians, the (remaining, though only small) notion
that being a librarian is a woman's job (and thus not highly regarded),
the general techno-fear that other (older) librarians display, the way that
they look down on the computer/techie librarians as being somehow lesser
then them (even though we have the same degrees), the less then generous
pay scales (because providing such a valuable service ought to be reward
in itself - never mind decent compensation).... I could go on. Oh yeah.
And the lovely backstabby library politics. Do I sound a bit disillusioned
and bitter? Probably because I am....
And thus I am contemplating tossing over the library for the slightly
greener pastures of IT. I like the work I am doing here at the library,
and I think that it is important stuff - caring for the online catalogs
and databases - but it isn't quite what I expected, and there are a lot
of things about the place that I would like to see changed. Plus, the
whole department is being restructured in some unfathomable way (as in
the directors are "discussing" things but that actual people who work
here are being kept in the dark), the project director is retiring, the
network administrator is leaving, and the evil Executive Director of the
library is trying to drag away the sysadmin and the main tech into her
own private little IT department. Which would leave pretty much just me
here by the time the dust settles (if it settles). Everyone else's job
has been threatened (directly or indirectly) so mine will probably be
next...
<excerpt>
This is kind of a crossroads. I can choose which path I will ultimately follow - the more "traditional" library path or the IT path....
Oh yeah, and so far everyone I have told about the whole situation and the offer has told me to go for it. And one person (Josh) said that he would reach out through the cable modem lines from Philly and slap me if I don't take the offer. Yea, Josh.
When I told Ingrid (my FALCON boss) about the offer, she just put her head down on the table. Then she said I had to do what ever I felt was best for me and my career. Which, while it is the "right answer" doesn't make me feel any better about abandoning her and the rest of the FALCON team (yes, I feel like it is abandoning them - I have a wierdly well-developed sense of loyalty about some things). I told her that I had not made a decision yet, but I feel like I will take Tom's offer.....