Caveat Lector

I’ve had myself quite a year, here. Well, and there. Not just here.

I began it getting ready for my last semester of library school and fretting about the librarian non-shortage and what it meant for my just-launched job search. It’s a rollercoaster, job-searching is. It’s putting yourself on the altar and handing knives to random passersby. It’s spending two of the most intense days ever, traveling and meeting people and talking and eating and minding my manners and trying to be impressive while still being plain ol’ me… and then doing it again, and again.

And then there’s moving, which is intensity of a completely different sort, a calculated frenzy of planning and fussing and annoyance that is probably the way it is to distract mercifully from the altogether different intensity of leaving a place you’ve lived in for eleven years.

There’s been some intense anger this year (and you should all be glad I kept most of it off-blog), some intense physical pain (though it only served me right), and some intense joy I’ll remember all my days.

All in all, I think I’m a little tired. I’ve been reverberating, sometimes as out-of-tune as the strings on my door-harp. If I’ve a goal for 2006, it’s settling down, letting the intensity go, and remembering how to tune myself to the right note, my note.

With the gift-card my secret-prezzer from work gave me, I treated myself (okay, and David, seeing as how he lives in the same place as me) to the full recordings of the Fellowship of the Ring score. So I am now firmly ensconced in the Realm of Ultimate Squee, because this is some shiny damn music.

(Yes, I am mixing my fandoms. Cope.)

I apologize to my downstairs neighbors for polkaing the night away to Bilbo’s party music. With any luck, they aren’t actually home.

I missed a chance to sing the orchestral suite; the chorus I’m now in did it last May. I shall just have to ask around to see if anyone will sell me their score, which has been on my I-want list for a while. I hope there’ll be another chance someday, because completely aside from getting to sing kick-ass music, singing words my husband translated would just, well, kick ass.

Since it will be fresh in their minds, however, I’m emailing the chorus manager to see what we can give them for their silent auction in February.

As consolation, I am busily teaching myself all the parts to “The Passing of the Elves,” which is the real reason I had to have this recording. David, bemused, kindly went into his files to find me the words…

I trucked out to a distant part of DC today to try to give an assist on some web issues for a small business known to a work colleague. Unfortunately, the site in question is kind of a mess, its documentation is worse (several domains spread across at least two webhosts and a shopping-cart server, some passwords are lost, need I say more?), and it’s really more than I can take on by myself.

I’m not sorry I went, though, because I spent a lovely afternoon looking at wonders of professional photography, and came home with so much swag I’m embarrassed to describe it all; it was entirely out of proportion to anything I did. I wish I could have done more.

Now, the person I had my sights on to take on this project professionally can’t do it either. If you’re a DC-area webmonkey with decent info-architecture, HTML/CSS, and SQL skills plus a smattering of Photoshop and a lot of patience, please get in touch with me; a brilliant photographer who is also a lovely and generous man needs your help.

You will be paid in more than swag, but trust me on this one—what the client will give you out of the goodness of his heart is worth way more than whatever you’ll end up billing.

(Which is not in fact a Googlewhack, but should be.)

We got erroneous information that the ape movie was showing at the little movie theatre south of campus, and didn’t find out our mistake until we’d gotten there. (It did seem strange, since the little movie theatre is generally second-run, but who knows?) David had a small part in putting this movie together (though I don’t know that they even bothered crediting him this time), and I’m nothing if not a fan of Andy Serkis, so we’ll just have to find another time and place to go.

Our original intent thwarted, we stopped in at the comic shop (it’s a good one, though it ought to stock Dr. Blink Superhero Shrink and doesn’t), picked up a bit of lunch, and strolled back through campus to get the bus home. On the way, we stopped to stare at a pair of wee-tiny birds with yellow mohawks that turned out to be golden crowned kinglets. Cute as small feathered buttons.

No trip is a total loss that has golden crowned kinglets in it.

Back in the dawn of time, when librarians shushed everybody and libraries were intensely quiet places (they aren’t any more, as you’d know if you’d go to one, you slacker), one of the marks of the librarian was that she (almost invariably she) was allowed to make noise.

She didn’t talk above a whisper herself, oh no. She had a little gizmo called a clicker that made noise for her, so she could call another librarian for that impossible reference question.

Because my husband is kind enough to be indulgent about how stupid proud I am of this whole librarian thing, he got me a couple of library clickers in the shape of frogs.

I have the best husband ever. I just do.

It’s a dreary gray rainy day here in the Unfrozen South, a day for crawling into bed with a Goth or two for a nap, which I duly did.

When I got up, David came out of the office and said, “So should I go peel up some potatoes now?”

I blinked, it being 2 pm. “Um, not yet, though I suppose you can have your latkes early if you want them.”

“Oh. It’s so dim out I thought it was later than it is. No, I’ll wait.” And bless him, he looked disappointed.

Yeah, I’m obsessive; wanna make sumpin’ of it?

• Get the conductor’s markings into my copy of the music for this spring. (I have to do this, actually; first rehearsal January 2!)
• Upgrade all the yarinareth.net blogs to WP 2. (Except Adrian’s. He can do his own.)
• Get textartisan.com’s website functional again. Adrian did me this fantastic new design that I haven’t even used.
• Pursuant to the above, start a wiki on publisher self-archiving policies and contacts. It’s past time the profession had one; SHERPA is great, but far from comprehensive, and we repository rats spend much, much, much too much time looking up and contacting publishers.
• Probably another few hours of work for my TAG client. The worst of that is over, fortunately; it’s all cleanup from here.
• Handle a job for another TAG client. Yes, really, and it’s a rush job, so it should be done by the time break is over.
• Do a favor for a work colleague. (Wednesday the 28th. Must not forget.)
• Get my play-by-email Ars Magica game back into playable shape. (I may be looking for players, either as new characters or to take over existing ones. If you’re interested, let me know.)

Don’t worry; it won’t all be work. I’m going ice-skating with David tomorrow afternoon.

As if I needed any more reasons to become an anti-travel curmudgeon, there’s the bureaucracy at MPOW.

I ask permission to go to DASER on MPOW’s dime. I duly receive said permission. I go to DASER. I get my reimbursement form signed by my boss and take it in to admin.

Wrong form, says admin. Didn’t you get the email? No, I didn’t get the email, because it was never sent to me in the first place. Oh, okay, I’ll forward you the email. Yeah, thanks.

So I pitch the reimbursement form, fill out the form the email says I’m supposed to fill out, get it signed by my boss and hand it in. Well, great, where’s your reimbursement form?

The one you told me was the wrong form the last time I was in here? Uh-huh. I left the room right then, before I lost my temper. I’m going to have to fill that sucker out AGAIN and get it signed AGAIN. Honest to goodness, for the piddling amount of money we’re talking about here, it’s damned near not worth my trouble.

Is having a clear procedure and documentation thereof really too much to ask? Grrrrr. Maybe I’ll just never leave home again. I’d like that.

If there’s one thing about my job I genuinely dislike, it’s having to play copyright cop. At least I’m not the official campus copyright cop; that’s somebody else.

I got a bunch of great lesson-plans and supporting material from an NEH Summer Institute last summer for the repository. One of the files, though, I had to pretty much eviscerate, because it had a bunch of song lyrics, pictures, and other things that were in copyright. No chance of clearing it all; at least one picture repository charged mucho royalty bucks, and I have no budget. So I hacked it out and posted what was left. (I shan’t inquire too closely into the source of some of the unattributed stuff, either. In my best professional judgment, it was old enough to be public-domain.)

I hate doing that. I so much prefer remix culture. I feel like I traduced a really great teacher, only I had no choice in the matter.

Creative Commons can’t catch on soon enough.

I managed not to make a complete ass of myself, apparently, because I am now singer number 349.1 (”looks like a Dewey Decimal number!” I quipped) in the first-alto section of the Fairfax Choral Society.

The director, a tall, soft-spoken man who reminds me a lot (and in good ways) of my well-beloved high-school choir director, ran me through my range, exuding a comforting sense of ease about its limits. I really wish I’d stood where I could see the piano, because I don’t have perfect pitch and so I don’t know what my range now is. I’m sure it’s higher than it once was, though; I was popping out some high Gs and As that I know for dead certain I didn’t have in high school or college. (I used to squeak out at an F. Hey, I bet I can sing Gilbert and Sullivan lovesick-contralto arias now! Cool! Never could before.)

He told me I have a soprano in there waiting to break out, $DEITY help me, and vacillated between dropping me into the mezzos and leaving me with what I’m used to. In the end, since I resolutely refused to express an opinion, he let me keep my good alto name untarnished.

(Seriously. Anyone hearing my speaking voice would never peg me as a soprano.)

I didn’t embarrass myself singing the “prepared” piece or doing the sightsinging, and while it turns out I can’t go up a tritone by half-steps and return to my original note (?!), apparently I pass muster.

This is going to be fun!