Caveat Lector

One hundred seventy-two tables just shipped.

Deep-fried brain has just been roasty-toastied. (Happy Halloween!)

On the plus side, I’m three-quarters done with this job.

Must take nap now.

One hundred twenty tables yesterday, and still fifty to go in this batch. My brain isn’t just fried, it’s deep-fried.

But all is going well. When this batch gets shipped, I’ll be roughly two-thirds done, which means just one or two more batches, nowhere near the size of this one.

Can I really ship and bill this puppy in another week? Wow.

Hit campus early today to deal with my course-management problem and dive into some homework. Turns out Library Hi-Tech did a whole issue on web accessibility late last year, with several articles specifically on databases. I got that sinking “oh, no, it’s been done” feeling for a moment, but I needn’t have worried. The studies I’m seeing are incredibly small, and nobody’s asked the question I want to ask: are for-free resources maintained for the love of the thing any better?

I do, however, plan to severely reduce my sample size on the basis of what I read this morning. There’s just no need to go through dozens and dozens of sites. Now, of course, I have to pick selection criteria, which is never fun… but I’ll figure something out.

I also churned through a chunk of my collection-development assignment for intro, and dug up some more William Morris stuff, finding a remarkably cogent summary in, of all things, a 1973 dictionary of biography from McGraw Hill apparently tailored at K-12. Why has no one else thought to use the word “versatile,” I ask you?

If you’re following my Quark saga, you may recall that I fired back my Quark 6 upgrade. My husband got a phone call from Quark yesterday, and what he relayed to me was that there was a “problem with the return.”

Oh, no. You guys are so not going to charge me twice. No way.

But it turned out not to be a problem. I called a very nice person in shipping named Duane, and he just wanted to know what was up. I told him, he said he’s going to get my refund processed, end of “problem.”

Wish it had all been that easy.

Right, back to tables now. The latest batch has 169 in it (!).

That better not be my hard drive squeaking. It just better not be, that’s all.

Methinks it’s time somebody did a backup to CD.

“I need you to make some changes,” read the email from Wonder-Client today. “I’m really sorry to do this to you at this late date, but I’ll make the changes to the ones you’ve already done…”

Oh, boy. Never what you want to hear. I made a face and kept reading.

These great and horrible changes? Different extension on the output files, and a smidge of extra text at the beginning and end of each file.

Um. That’s it? That’s, like, three minor changes to my Python output program. Absolutely, positively no big. Dude. Quit scaring me.

And for stuff like this, I can rerun the old tables in five seconds flat any time he wants, and I told him so. The joy of a program whose results don’t need hand-tweaking, you know?

Well, seems I can’t take cataloguing after all, because I’m missing a prerequisite. I know I’ll simply add it to my schedule next fall, but I’m still bummed. I really wanted to learn to do that. As in, now.

Plus, of course, I get the lovely hassle of getting the schedule-amendment forms signed and turned in. Be still my heart.

So I just ran into a person in the 1920 Puerto Rican Census whose native tongue was actually—I swear—listed as “Papiamento.” Which is just plain bloody cool. (Not sure what Papiamento is? This isn’t a bad summary.)

Except that the census supervisor went and lined it out, so it probably won’t appear in the final data. Bummer.

Up with creoles!

Took my second and last midterm today. The one that was open-book, open-notes, and only 10% of the final grade. As you can guess, I wasn’t overly worried. Or indeed worried at all.

It went fine. Two essay questions, no big deal. I sort of wrote myself out on my first answer, but the second one has a snazzy metaphor, so it’ll do.

That being that as far as midterms go, now I have to start in on all the rest of the semester’s projects. Last night’s little Four Patrons essay finished off my reading and article-reactions for reference, but I have plenty of William Morris work to do yet, and the group-presentation PowerPoint to finish putting together. Three short assignments (though one is collection-development, which means lots of sorting through reviews) and the take-home final for intro, one research proposal and the final project for virtual-collections.

And, um, actually that’s it. The virtual-collections final project still scares me a little, but knowing me that’ll go away once I actually get started on it, because I will doubtless find something to get hopping mad at.

In answer to Katz’s chapter on bibliographic instruction (he’s not a believer, and I am), I just rewrote the Four Sons parable from the Haggadah into the Four Library Patrons.

Man, I am taking this reference librarianship thing way too seriously for someone excruciatingly unlikely to become a reference librarian.

The scary thing is, it wasn’t a bad essay; bit off-the-cuff, but polish it some and it’d be quite readable. This blogging thing, it does resurrect one’s writing from failed-grad-school jargon-laden turgid pseudo-academic pedantry. I haven’t written a single word of that this whole semester, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

My mother-in-law calls my husband every Sunday morning. They talk for twenty minutes to an hour and a half. I’m kinda jealous, to tell the truth; I can’t imagine having that much to discuss with my parents.

Today, though, David cut off the call quite quickly. As it turned out, he’d been talking to his father, not his mom, and to butter up his father’s ego he’d asked for (unnecessary) advice about graduate school.

And his father’s response was that as soon as David had his Ph.D in hand it was time to start a family. Since that was what good old dad had done, don’t you know.

Ugh. I apologized to David.

“No, no,” David said. “One of these days I’ll tell him it isn’t happening. But I want to be prepared for it.” I agreed. Definitely one of those things where you want to set the stage, not let it be set for you.

I guess I’d feel guiltier if I thought that either my parents or my in-laws had a child-shaped hole in their lives. But, frankly, they don’t. My folks are happy with their gardens and their house renovations, not to mention that my dad is getting heavily arthritic and doesn’t need kids climbing around. My in-laws, especially David’s father, really don’t like kids a whole lot more than I do.

But it’s the Thing To Do. Or something. And because it’s the Thing To Do, David and I are in for some unpleasantness. Maybe a lot of unpleasantness. Oh, well, I can’t say I didn’t know it would happen. Best I can do is try to be ready to let it wash off.