Caveat Lector

Well, Ruritania didn’t make me an offer. Their other candidate had more library experience, they said, which makes perfect sense to me; it’s what I suspected might happen.

I was pretty lucky to be in the top two, really. Five years from now, as I think I said here before, I’ll be their perfect candidate—and by all appearances that’s what they’ve hired: me with a few years’ experience.

Onwards, then…

ETA: A comment via IM that made me chuckle: “No matter how good we become at something there is always going to be someone better, and usually they’ll turn up wherever it causes us the most inconvenience.”

Ain’t that the truth.

I won’t be giving away much of a clue to Rohan’s location if I say that to get here I flew through the Twin Cities, as one can’t fly Northwest Airlines and not fly through either them or Detroit.

However, tonight that means I am well and truly stuck in Rohan, because the Twin Cities got socked by snow and winds earlier today.

As “stuck” goes, though, this is a pretty sweet deal, even though Northwest isn’t paying my bill and I doubt I’ll be able to convince Rohan to do it. I snagged a hotel room for half what I thought I’d end up paying, and the wireless is fast and free. If I get to feeling ambitious, I’ll go out and forage for dinner—but with the winds what they are, I may just splurge and order in.

To Northwest’s credit, they rebooked me for flights tomorrow morning without any active intervention from me whatsoever, so if all goes well I’ll be home noonish.

I had a good interview today; I think people liked me, and I look forward to seeing several of them again at ACRL next month.

In other news, David passed his second Ph.D prelim this morning and is now officially ABD! (He won’t tell you, so I have to, because I’m very proud of him.) His dissertation proposal may have to be revised (ugh) because apparently an extremely recent dissertation may have covered some of the same ground—but we’ll figure it out, one way or another.

April may indeed turn out cruel. In addition to all the stuff I simply have to do, if offers are going to come, that’s when they’ll do it. If I don’t blow interviews, I may have a lot of thinking and hair-tearing to do.

For the record:

• Ruritania: could make offer as early as tomorrow; likelier to be next week or the week after, if it happens at all
• Rohan: campus interview tomorrow
• Oz: phone interview Monday
• Avalon: collecting reference letters

Would you believe I’m still collecting places to send résumés? I don’t want to count unhatched chickens.

I get the impression that Rohan has quite a few more candidates than Ruritania did, and one or two of them may be internal. I’m not counting myself out, but I’m not exactly counting myself in, either. We shall see.

A number of people, in varying ways, have told me “Well, they’d be crazy not to hire you.” While I appreciate the support, I wish it wouldn’t take quite this form. I know what I’m competing against (in general terms, anyway). If there’s a field in this world with better people in it than librarianship, I don’t want any part of it, because I’d be left in the dust.

I’m making no assumptions. Some mighty big ponds out there, and I’m not that big a fish.

Rohan feels quite astonishingly homey, for a place that isn’t home. Familiar weather, familiar flora, familiar main street. David would quite like the Thai place I ate lunch in.

All the interview stuff is tomorrow, so today is mostly hanging out and hoping David does well in his defense tomorrow morning. One nice bit, though (and no, I didn’t get a picture or I’d share it, even risking blowing Rohan’s identity): on the road-tour around town, we stopped at a Scenic Outlook, and a whitetail deer came shyly to cross the road in front of us.

Could definitely get to like this town. No question about it.

I think I’m nearly packed. This is a shorter trip than the one to Ruritania; I’m out tomorrow and back late Friday.

Got clothes, got shoes, got the camera, got maps, got some reading material, got the boarding passes, got a couple bagels to take along for breakfast tomorrow since I have to leave at an ungodly hour, got the key drive (which I forgot to bring to Ruritania and then really could have used), got sufficient money, got travel docs so I can beg for reimbursement (thank you, state legislatures, this is what your belt-tightening means to the unemployed: potentially getting stuck with job-interview travel bills), got the usual sense I’m missing something, but it can’t be all that important if I’ve got all this other stuff.

Whew. I think I’m going to call that “packed” and forget about it.

The bad side of all this job-interview foofooraw is that David is defending his second Ph.D prelim paper and his dissertation proposal on Friday, and I can’t be there to glare a quelling sort of “pass him or his wife goes postal” glare at his committee. Not that I’ve much fear on that score, but it never hurts to have your wife glaring at your committee, you know?

Just to put the wee bit of cosmic-irony spin on things, the defense was supposed to have been last Friday, when I was perfectly free to have gone. As they’ve done all along, for reasons variously silly and selfish, his committee delayed the date.

By way of bias disclosure, I’ve had Dr. Kristin Eschenfelder for (um, counting up…) three classes now, and she’s one of the poor souls I’ve tapped to field job-recommendation requests. (I need to figure out what I can give these people. They’re getting hammered, I’m afraid, and they’re all being remarkably gracious about it.)

Even if that weren’t so, this Library Journal nod would still be wondrous cool.

And since it is so, I can go ahead and say that Kristin adds a gutsy, grounded teaching style to her active research agenda. I’ve been quite happy with all the courses I’ve taken from her, I actively recommend her courses to other students, and I’m only sorry I won’t be around longer to take more.

I’m thrilled to see her getting this kind of recognition, and I hope it keeps up. I don’t know whenabouts she’s coming up for tenure, but in my opinion UW-SLIS would be wildly insane not to freeze onto her for life and be glad of the chance.

I was feeling more than slightly stressed by that to-do list, despite making an appointment for Monday with my search client (yay!) and knocking off a page and a half of the associated project paper just on noodling in my head about how to figure out what my client actually wants.

(Reference librarians will be familiar with this process, of course. All I have from my client at this point is less than a sentence of topic description, and if I took that literally, I could bring an entire research library’s worth of material crashing down on the client’s shoulders in two seconds flat. So I was thinking about the right questions to ask to narrow the topic to something workable.)

So I trundled myself over to the public library to de-stress a little. My gosh, I love my public library branch. It rocketh most mightily.

I found a municipal map of Rohan that I photocopied to take with me to this week’s job interview. (No phone book, unfortunately, but one can’t have everything.) I found some new and interesting graphic novels (dunno who does the graphic-novel collection development, but whoever you are: you rock!), and some new feminist sci-fi. I found a movie in Sanskrit (!) for David, and a couple of Bollywood movies for me. And I saw that David’s book has two local holds already despite not having hit the shelves yet, which is pretty darn cool.

And I walked out feeling a lot better. It’s all just work, after all. I can do work.

No, it’s not too early. It’s really, really not.

• LAN design assignment for networking class.
• Chapter 8 handout and presentation for networking class. (Plus a little something-something for fun. Dunno what’s fun about network segmentation and networking equipment, actually, but I imagine someone, somewhere enjoys it.)
• Annotated-bibliography assignment for search class.
• Problem-set 4 for search class.
• Scholarly-communication presentation for the folks in Minneapolis (and hey, Krista, a great article just came down the pike on this).
• The budget section of the library-redesign report. Ugh.
• Get started on the term project for search class, if I can connect up with my client fast enough.

I’m guessing I’ll be staying out of trouble over Spring Break…

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog is finally a real weblog! With feeds and everything!

This absolutely makes my day. I hate the way the URLs are separated from the annotations in the email version (which I’ve been reading through Bloglines anyway, because I’m just that much of a blogtool geek).

One more fish on the line (checking references), and “Avalon” is a lovely code name for it, because it’s a school I’d never heard of before in my life.

Nifty job, though, and they’re certainly responding quickly. I sent that résumé in barely over a week ago.

I certainly can’t complain about my ratio of lines cast to fish hooked. Dear me, no.