Caveat Lector

Walt called me out in the latest Cites and Insights for a comment I left at T. Scott’s blog. I reproduce Walt’s comment, with its quotation of my comment, in full:

I do consider Dorothea Salo a friend but her comment on Scott’s post left me lukewarm:

Um, the identity of the AAP’s PR guy didn’t bother you? Or the particular tactics he was endorsing?

I wasn’t thrilled by Smith’s presentation either, I may say; it was at the very least unacceptably racist. But a thoroughly tasteless analogy is still a bit less than an open lie like “OA = government censorship” in my book.

“Wasn’t thrilled” is a little short of the flat denunciation Smith’s presentation calls for. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

Walt’s right. I was wrong, for more reasons than Walt even knows about.

Reason 1, I hadn’t even done due diligence; I didn’t read anything more than T. Scott’s blogpost, and he (as is his way) had been fairly pianissimo in his recounting. I didn’t realize that Smith extended the metaphor ad far-beyond-nauseam; I thought it had been one quick sentence. I reacted far too fast, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine.

Reason 2, what Richard Smith said (now that I know what he said) was wrong, deeply wrong, well beyond rhetorical excess into flagrant offense. I do understand intellectually why he picked the slavery metaphor; the superficial similarities are tempting indeed, and (being more than a little given to rhetorical excess myself) I know how grabbing for a quick emotional response can be a useful communication tool.

But some lines you damned well don’t cross if you want to be considered a decent human being, and Richard Smith crossed one. If I rip on Michael Gorman for calling hip-hop aficionados stupid, I have zero excuse for giving Richard Smith a pass. Mea maxima culpa.

Reason 3, I have an obvious interest in smart, articulate arguments for my side of the OA debate. Insofar as Richard Smith smeared us with mud—and he did, no question—he didn’t do me or OA any favors, and I didn’t do myself or OA any favors by letting it pass. Quis custodiet? I wasn’t, and I should have been.

I know why my knee jerked the way it did, for the little that’s worth. T. Scott has a talent for assuming the worst of OA advocates (I mean, look at the post title: “Sinking to a New Low.” What were the old lows, pray?), and for downplaying the very real and cogent reasons libraries have to fear, distrust, and (yes) hate big for-profit scholarly publishers. I guessed wrongly that he was doing the same dance again.

(I’m mendacious because yes, I’ll work for the elimination of six-month embargoes after they were forced on me in the first place? All-righty then. I’m mendacious. Just please let me tell my part of it: that although I hope and strongly believe that scholarly-publishing business models based on access limitation are doomed in the medium- to long-term, and I will enthusiastically help doom them—partly by my own writing, speaking, and political efforts, but mostly by helping provide workable alternatives to them—I also accept embargoes as a rough-and-ready transition tool in the short-term. I’m a practical repo-rat. I know it’s the best we’re going to get right now. It’s just not a stable or especially enviable compromise.)

Moreover, the equation drawn in T. Scott’s post about Smith set my teeth on edge: a one-off offensive analogy on the part of a single person (or, it’s fair to say since Smith runs PLoS, a single OA publisher) is somehow morally equivalent to a calculated, bought-and-paid-for campaign of lies and smears by a trade organization representing a whole host of publishers. I still think I’m right about that at least. They aren’t morally equivalent, though they’re both despicable.

But that isn’t what I said in my comment. It’s just l’esprit d’escalier, what I should have said. What I did say was wrong, and I’m sorry for it, little though that apology may weigh given that it wasn’t offered until after Walt called me on the carpet. I will do my best not to be so stupid again.

My sincere (and public) thanks to Walt for what he said. I don’t want to hitch myself to Richard Smith’s wagon if I can avoid it, and far be the day when I lose my temper with a friend merely for pointing out my mistakes.

Meredith’s put together a great wrapup of the Five Weeks to a Social Library course, as well as a discussion of decisions made and lessons learned. My thoughts aren’t as cohesive as hers, and Five Weeks was really her baby from start to finish, so go read her ideas first, then come back.

By way of preface, I’ll say that helping with Five Weeks was an exhilarating, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, and entirely fulfilling experience. I’m not alone in coming to librarianship hoping to do good things. Five Weeks was a big good thing. Not only do our participant comments (a selection of which Meredith has posted) back that up, but our outcomes prove it. Five Weeks has already been responsible for several useful blogs, wikis, Flickrstreams, and RSS mashups. Just you wait six months and see what Five Weeks is responsible for then.

Said more succinctly: WE DAMN WELL DID IT. GO TEAM US! With an added serving of “major kudos to Meredith.”

I think Five Weeks fits into a newish but growing model for conference and training delivery: the small, home-grown, cheap, less formal, interaction-heavy, half- to all-spontaneous con. DASER. Code4Lib. HigherEdBlogCon. Access Hackfests. BarCamp. It’s important to note that small-group experiences have always been a part of even the largest conferences; JCDL 2006 was huge, Tim’s and my preconference tutorial quite tiny by comparison. What’s new (at least to me) is that folks are looking around and asking themselves, “Why do we need the herd-of-cattle part?”

I have a certain bias in this matter; as I’ve previously said, I don’t much like cattle-car megaconferences. I’ll speak at them when asked to (barring time conflicts, ethical issues, or gratuitous speaker maltreatment), but that’s the only thing that’ll get me there. Despite my bias, though, what I’m seeing feels real. The enthusiasm and engagement I saw in myself coming back from DASER, or my colleagues from Code4LibCon, or our wonderful Five Weekers, heavily outweighs that of (for example) ALA attendees I know.

On the whole, I find the small-conference movement a hopeful development for the profession. We aren’t sitting passively in hotel ballrooms waiting around for satori; we’re rolling up our sleeves to do stuff together. The question in my mind is the appropriate growth model for these conferences, as more people become interested in them. Just making them bigger will break them; we couldn’t possibly have doubled the participant pool of Five Weeks and had it remain Five Weeks. Screening participants (as we did) can work, but at a certain political cost and in some cases (not so much Five Weeks, as we didn’t by and large know our participant pool personally) a very high likelihood of cliquishness and other bad sorts of exclusion. Replicating mini-conferences in space and time has promise, and I myself think it’s the way to go, but at what point will the replicants compete too much with each other and collapse from insufficient demand? And will all replications be of equal quality?

But no, to answer a question we got, Five Weeks isn’t entirely sui generis. We share with the other conferences I mentioned a high interactivity quotient, much higher than the more traditional talking-head-at-podium conference. Notably, the interaction in Five Weeks went several ways: participants with organizers, participants with content producers, participants with each other, and participants with the larger librarian and social-software communities. Interactivity, even Internet-mediated rather than face-to-face, worked. Participants, organizers, and content producers enjoyed it, valued it, learned from it.

This answers another question we got with some regularity: no, we didn’t offer Five Weeks as a self-paced on-your-own tutorial. Frankly, I don’t think Five Weeks works that way, and I’m personally dubious that most such things should. I know plenty of people outside the participant pool have been watching the screencasts and reading the readings, and that’s great and I would never discourage it—but if that model worked for everybody, our participants wouldn’t have needed Five Weeks, because all the raw information is already out there for the taking. Interactivity and presence matter.

(There’s also a question of whuffie involved. Librarians are professionals. We’re supposed to be professionally active, which means an added injunction to prove we’re being professionally active. Individual reading and learning is not subject to proof and cannot therefore be used in, say, a performance review or a résumé. Five Weeks can, and in fact a few of our participants actually earned CEUs out of it.)

So in terms of size and interactivity, Five Weeks has peers and colleagues. But it’s also different from what has gone before it in some interesting ways.

First, its participant group. I make no bones about our goals: we’re disgusted by the professional divide between those who can afford conferences and training and those who can’t, and we intentionally chose our participants from those who (mostly) can’t. This did mean stubborn technical difficulties with a few participants, ranging from “the school I work at firewalls most of the Web and all of the social Web” to “none of the machines I have access to will play screencasts!” We got around it all one way or another, but if you’re thinking of following in our footsteps, be prepared for this.

The group was also rather more diverse in experience, outlook, and work environment than in previous programs of this type (such as Helene Blowers’s inspiring and often-replicated Learning 2.0) which have usually taken place at single workplaces. We had everything from library-school students to folks with a couple decades’ experience, from school, public, academic, and special libraries. Most of our participants didn’t notice, didn’t mind, or actually valued the diversity, but we did get one or two comments indicating that a more homogeneous group would have felt better.

I personally come down on the side of heterogeneity, at least in this context and with this material. Sure, it’s nice to talk turkey with folks just like you, but there’s more to be gained (especially in terms of mental flexibility around new software) from seeing what happens with the same software tool in wildly diverse environments.

The other big difference between Five Weeks and a lot of attempts at distance-ed is that we did it on the cheap as regards technology infrastructure. No high-priced consultants or consultant-ware. No mondo server farms. The BSA can audit us all they want; we didn’t have to pay actual money for any of the software we used.

With the exception of one piece of the puzzle, we used open-source software, commodity hardware, and freely-available web services. We were able to switch horses in midstream when necessary, too; Odeo crapped out on us, but blip.tv was right there to pick up the slack. The missing piece—and it’s a vitally important one—is live webcasting, for which we turned to OPAL. This is a bottleneck, and a bad one; I don’t envision free services becoming available for this, because it’s too bandwidth- and development-intensive, and (frankly) too much of a cash cow for providers. Library associations or consortia wanting to know how they can facilitate more programs like Five Weeks would be well-served to look into providing this service, or contracting with OPAL to provide it (because boy, has OPAL ever got it down to a science).

(But don’t, for heaven’s sake, do not buy some piece of megagonzovaporware that does webcasts, podcasts, wikis, blogs, hosting, content management, window-washing, and more. If you do that, you have not been listening to us. You will pay far too much for software that does too many things you don’t need, and does most of them badly to boot. Just plug this one hole and use open-source software and free services for the rest, okay?)

The difficulty with on-the-cheap infrastructure is that you have to install and run it, and if it breaks, it’s on you. Meredith was too kind to say so openly, but I was the one who broke Drupal into a million bits the first week of Five Weeks with the Akismet plugin. It completely hosed the chatroom, and threw approximately forty billion PHP errors before Meredith killed it. So what did I do? Tried to live up to my own words, that’s what. Took responsibility, apologized, and got on with things. And you know what? It was all right. I’m still alive, aren’t I?

But don’t even think of doing this without one organizer who can sling a webapp, and another who can fiddle with computerized audio and video. Experts you don’t necessarily need (this was my first experience with Drupal); people comfortable with FTP and a command-line you do. We had several, and we needed all of them. At the very least, find a webhost who can one-click-install most of what you need; they exist, and they’re even cheap.

So that’s Five Weeks as it compares and contrasts with similar efforts.

Now I want to emphasize the sheer time commitment involved in running Five Weeks. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a small conference isn’t a conference, or that an Internet conference isn’t a conference, or an on-the-cheap conference isn’t a conference. It is, and running any conference is a Sisyphean undertaking. And, a tip? Don’t move across the country while you’re running a conference. I’m just sayin’ here.

I spent a metric ton of time reading applications and typing numbers into Google spreadsheets. (Judging proposals wasn’t nearly so bad, actually; we didn’t have the two-to-one ratio of proposals to available slots, and nearly all the proposals we got were useful.) Coordination time pre-conference wasn’t too bad—a few IM conferences, but mostly email and one-on-one IM questions.

Putting together my half of one week’s readings and activities wasn’t bad; this is what del.icio.us is for. Still, it took time.

During the conference? Well, here’s my weekly to-do list:

• Compose and send out a reminder email to my group each Monday about the week’s activities.
• Watch/listen to the week’s material, and skim the readings.
• Hit at least one of the webcasts, preferably both.
• Attend one or more presenter chats. (20/20 hindsight: I wish we’d worked out a schedule to divide these among ourselves, because I think they needed a facilitator. I got to as many as I possibly could, but I didn’t make them all.)
• Run the weekly small-group chat.
• Answer email. (There was quite a bit, and—again with the hindsight—I don’t think we divided email duties entirely fairly, with me being one of the slackers.)
• Check the Drupal admin queue daily for anything anomalous or otherwise problematic.
• Clean out comment spam. (Meredith and I ended up doing it by hand after the Akismet debacle; whichever of us saw a spam comment first blitzed it. It was okay. We got a few small-scale spam runs, but nothing appalling.)
• Read the blog and leave comments, at least daily. This was fun, and RSS feeds helped—but like everything else, it takes time as well as brainspace.

Like I said—a cross-country move in the middle of such a conference is a bad idea. Meredith and Amanda did a fair bit of covering for me. They shouldn’t have needed to.

My suggestion is to have a bigger organizer/helper pool than you think you’ll need. Some organizational slack is a very good thing; extra work will invariably come up to fill the slack available. Not everybody will pitch in on the same level—but somehow, it’ll all work out, if you just have enough human resources.

I note with sadness the rather high attrition rate—one in four of our selected participants did not complete the course. We frankly weren’t expecting that, or we’d probably have let more people join in anticipation of some attrition. We don’t entirely know why it happened, either; like a certain other set of attriters I know about from experience, attriters don’t usually tell anyone (much less anyone in perceived authority) why they left.

I’d like to know. Not because I’m angry with anyone, not because I’m upset, just because it’s important. I’m just not sure how to ask without giving offense. If you’re reading, and you’re a Five Weeks attriter—email me, won’t you? From a throwaway address if need be. Just let me know what happened, with both barrels if you need to fire ‘em.

We do know that some of the barriers aren’t what you’d think they’d be. At least one of our attriters was extremely leery of learning in the public eye—the idea of writing a blog post that might contain unfinished, unrefined ideas created terror and disgust. By and large, I think the public eye was good for Five Weeks and its participants, and if I had it to do over I’d make all of it public again, but we probably should have made this aspect of the course clearer. (Telling people they’ll have to “write on a blog” once a week won’t register if they don’t know what a blog is!) Similar programs may well legitimately decide that a private conclave suits their audience better.

One potential concern turned out to be no concern at all. The quality of contributed content to Five Weeks was astonishingly high (and is available for reuse, too). The beauty of it to me was that we didn’t have to pay big bucks for big names in order to get phenomenal content. Some big names contributed; check out the Five Weeks LJ Mover and Shaker contingent! Just as importantly, though, folks who aren’t (yet) big names can and do produce amazing stuff and give very generously of their time, and grassroots efforts give them a chance to prove it.

I don’t think this would work in a paid-conference model—at least, not as well. Exploit content producers (by charging buckus maximus for what they’re giving free, or by not treating them fairly), and you lose a big swathe of content producers. Exploit participants (overcharge! keep your books opaque!), and people like the Five Weeks organizer crew won’t want to do business with you. Try to do the right thing by everyone, and things work out. They really do.

So that’s my Five Weeks brain-dump. The key takeaway to my mind is that it can be done, and you can probably do it if you want to badly enough. We don’t have to sit back and put up with overpriced cattle-car conferences with mediocre content (not to mention the food), or expensively empty exercises in glitz and glitterati-basking. We can do better. We should.

To do the latest biblioblogosphere meme, I had to pull up my non-work Gregarius install. For obvious reasons, all my work blogs have to do with libraries, librarians, or markup!

Five blogs I read that don’t come out of librarianship:

• Norm Walsh’s blog, which has no title other than its URL. I know a surprising lot of top-tier markup slingers, among whom Norm “Mr. DocBook” Walsh has no trouble whatever holding his own. Plus he’s a nice guy who has a Goth-kitty of his own and is good with a camera. Norm’s on my work blog list, but he still counts, because he’s not a librarian!
• Tenser, said the Tensor. Linguistics and skiffy geek stuff, often combined.
• Feminist SF - The Blog! Not as frequently updated as I’d like, but it’s got some amazingly thoughtful posters.
• Vitia, by a rhetorician whose research interest (which I am about to butcher horribly, I’m sure) is the intersection of labor theory with the writing classroom. Don’t miss the latest ongoing Friday-fiction series.
• The Madison Wisconsin Housing Bubble Blog. Do I live here? Yes, I do. Am I thinking about buying another house here? Not until the funny money’s flushed out of the market and the shadow inventory (especially those condos) gets taken care of, no.

One of these days I should go looking for more non-library blogs; the non-work Gregarius install is pretty light. Some writers’ blogs are phenomenal (I ran into Deep Genre in the course of working on That Dratted Book, and quite liked it), but the thing is, I’m not a fiction writer, so I don’t need and have only marginal interest in the advice those blogs tend to (very kindly and patiently) shovel out with a backhoe to the many aspiring fictioneers.

But the above gives you a general idea of the sort of thing that catches my eye and holds it.

Number of minutes it took me to walk to work this morning: 32

Number of minutes early I arrived for my first (nominal) appointment: 28

Number of communiques waiting for me on my new desk: 4

Number of meetings I am scheduled for this week, discovered via the aforementioned on-desk communiques: 4

Additional meetings or lectures set up for this week today: 2 (plus one tentatively for April)

Number of forms duly delivered to human resources: 1 kajillion (approx.)

Number of forms still awaiting action: 1

Amount of time previously logged as a UW System employee: 1.54 years

Percentage of my disability-insurance premium I have to pay out of pocket: 0

Percentage of said premium I’d have to pay out of pocket if not for amount of time previously logged as UW System employee: 37%

Number of people who stopped by my new desk to say hello today: 2 dozen (approx.)

Number of campus photo IDs now in my possession: 1

Number of bus passes now in my possession: 0 (but I’ll pick it up on my way to work tomorrow)

Number of work-related email addresses I theoretically have: 3

Number of work-related email addresses I actually have access to: 2

Work-related email address listed for me in the campus directory: Guess.

Number of emails waiting for me on login: 83

Number of emails left untrashed: 12 (this place could REALLY use some RSS!)

On a 1-10 scale, decency of this first day as compared to many, many other first days I’ve had: 8

The biggest hassle right now is my “netID,” which thanks to the marvels of computer databases dates back to my very first grad student days, and thus contains my long-outdated maiden name. I’ve put in a trouble ticket on this one, because the way the local calendar system and DSpace authentication work, some folks actually need to be able to associate this netID with me, so a renaming would appear to be in order. (”Rovner? We have a Rovner on staff?” Uh, no, no you don’t, in fact.)

But everything else is falling into place. With luck, I may even be able to log in to DSpace soon!

So, hey, I must have pushed my good moving luck, because our phones suddenly quit working. Internet is fine. The phone, she is dead.

SBC—oops, I mean AT&T—has a website that is a total nightmare. A couple weeks back, I couldn’t sign up for service via the said website because no matter what I told it, it couldn’t grok what apartment I was going to live in, even though it clearly had the apartment in its system. But the woman I eventually called was nice enough, and the phone was working when I got here, so I shrugged and put it down to business being business.

Getting the DSL connected went through some Flash monstrosity off AT&T’s website. Nearly drove me to distraction several separate times, but I got through it, and now the DSL Just Works, as it ought to.

Today David got an email from his mom, who tried to call today (as is her usual Sunday practice) and couldn’t get through. Is the Internet working? I ask. Yes, it is.

Try to get help for a dead phone line via that horrendous pile of steaming effluent that AT&T calls a website. Just try. For added spice, try when you’re a new customer. If you go through the Repair steps, you land on an extremely inhospitable screen saying “Sorry, no dice, we can’t help you because your service just started up. Try calling us.”

If I could call you monkeys, I wouldn’t have to call you monkeys. Construe the syntax in the previous sentence however you choose.

So I try another route into the customer-service system. AT&T asks me for this gizmo called a Customer Care Number that’s on top of my bill.

Right. The bill I haven’t actually gotten yet because I haven’t had service long enough. That bill.

Sigh. After considerable additional experimentation, I finally manage to coerce the site into letting me send an email to customer service. Shortly thereafter, a roboanswer lands in my emailbox. They’ll get back to me in 24 hours, they say.

Sure. I’ll believe that when I see it.

The one mild form of pleasant schadenfreude I take from this annoying experience is that libraries and library associations are not the only organizations in the world with websites that just plain suck.

(That will never make the title of a song in a Broadway show. Oh, well.)

I can unconditionally recommend Schroeder Moving. They were awesome. All stuff is here, no stuff is missing, no stuff is broken that wasn’t broken already (we being of the, ahem, bohemian school of decorating), and their folks were pleasant and highly efficient.

The kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom are now quite usable. Living room and office are utter disaster areas. The Goths went all freaky again at being shut in the front closet for half the day (oh, hush—it’s got a window and we left plenty of nice warm bedding in there for them), but they’re out and exploring and seem pleased to have their favorite bits of stuff back. In Fairfax after Schroeder left they were pulling a Captain Jack Sparrow: “But why is the STUFF gone?”

I have been an exceedingly bad correspondent this week. I know whom I owe email to, and I will try to catch up tomorrow. Tonight, though, I’ve messed up my other shoulder and I’m tired to death, so it’s an hour or so reading in my own beloved tattered armchair and then bed—in my own bed—for me.

We’ve got red-winged blackbirds in our back yard.

Red-winged blackbirds. In our BACK YARD.

Too cool.

Finally, the United States has a signable electronic petition urging public access to publicly-funded research.

I would consider it a personal favor if every single States-based reader of Caveat Lector would at least go read this petition. If it appeals to you, sign it.

If you are an academic librarian, please bring this to the attention of your library’s and/or your institution’s administration. Open access to taxpayer-funded research is the wedge issue that brings us closer to a solid resolution for the serials crisis. Without your support, and your institutions’ support, we’ll be stuck in the same old stalemate we’ve endured for three decades.

Please. It’s time, and past time. Read, and consider signing. Thank you.

We’ve been knocking off as many getting-settled errands as we can before our stuff arrives Thursday and I go to work next Monday. We have a credit-union account (though it’s more or less useless until the eleven-day hold on our first check clears, sigh), I have a library card and his is set in motion, we’ve got curtain rods for when the curtains show up and a shower curtain for the bathroom, and tomorrow we’ll go check out the nearest vet so that we can (with luck) get Dream’s heart-meds continued.

And around the important stuff, we’ve been fitting in plenty of plain old fun—which sitting in an apartment (however cute) with no more furniture than a futon is really, really not. So we poked around in the art museum and got ice cream at the Union on Sunday, we went to the zoo yesterday (aided by a downright freakish warm spell), and today we strolled Monroe Street and commented on how much it’s changed, ducking into The Dardanelles for lunch.

Frankly, this move has meant throwing around money like a drunken sailor. The UW’s relocation allowance doesn’t cover all the movers’ bills, never mind airfare, and for the sake of the Goths’ sanity, we splurged on the nonstop. We left the falling-apart yard-saled futon in Fairfax; a brand new futon and frame are on their way. One of the downsides to having a ton of windows is needing a ton of curtains for those windows. And I self-funded Open Repositories 2007, because I just do not have the chutzpah to ask my employer to pay for a conference when I’m leaving in a month. Haven’t been careful since I got here, either… but, you know what? This is me not caring. I don’t move often, it’s stressful, and if some extra eating out helps, I’m not going to quibble over the bill. What’s money for? It’s not like I don’t have it.

The Goths are less freaked than they were; I think they’ll be all right when Their Stuff comes on Thursday. (We only think it’s our stuff. The Goths, they know better.) Used to be, the least noise out in the hall would send Didi burrowing under the comforter on the futon; now, she usually hangs out in the bedroom door instead, to see if it’s really anything dangerous. They’re both walking rather than skulking about the place, they’re eating again, and Dream seems to have remembered that Didi is his sister and not his sworn enemy.

And I keep finding more reasons to like this place. The nice woman at the hardware store, for one. Wood screws? In back, right here. Shower curtain? Here you go. Curtain rods? Downstairs, let me take you there as it’s a bit messy… hm, we don’t quite have enough, but we’ll order more for you and they’ll be here Thursday. Anything else? Say, do you live around here? Because we have a neighborhood discount.

A. Neighborhood. Discount. I ask you!

The local grocery is fairly small, and has a name for being less than optimal, but I like it. It’s got what I need, and it’s also got little extras like chocolate-covered raisins in bulk. It and I plus the Farmer’s Market when it starts will get along just fine.

The zoo has added lots of birds to its aviary, some of them (notably a striking magenta fellow who followed me around) not yet labeled. They’re in the middle of building a new kiddie zoo, which means some of the fun is curtailed a bit, but I think it’ll be a substantial improvement when it’s done.

And where else could I pay normal rental prices and still live a block from the lakeshore? Madison rocks.

We were early touching down at the Madison airport, and for a wonder the baggage folks had our stuff on the carousel before we could even get there. (We were in the back of the plane, but it wasn’t that big a plane!)

The friends who had good-naturedly agreed to waste half a Saturday picking us up arrived shortly thereafter, and we performed feats of geometric virtuosity in sqwunching into a single car three large suitcases, one picnic bag (chosen because it came with enough plates and cutlery to make do with for a few days), a backpack, a battered Land’s End bag, an eMac (theirs), four humans, and two pissed-off cats in carriers.

We found our building without difficulty, found the key that our landlord had kindly hidden for us, hauled all the stuff in (including the eMac, which is being lent to us until our stuff gets here; see post title), turned the Goths loose, and let our friends get on with their Saturday.

Then we just gawked. The new place? Is beautiful. It’s a bit more than half the ground floor of a 1930s-vintage two-story house. It’s got windows galore, huge windows, so it’s light and bright and airy. It’s got a working fireplace, though I don’t anticipate using it as such. (”Hey, dear! We can have crossed swords over the mantelpiece!” I quipped on seeing it.) What was billed as an eat-in kitchen actually is one—and there’s actually room to cook in it; this is no galley we’re talking about here!

The new place is not perfect. The kitchen counters are 1950s blue formica. There is no air-conditioning, which means I am looking into thermal curtains for the many windows lest the place become an oven in August. The hallway to the bathroom and second bedroom is so narrow that the second bedroom probably can’t be used as a bedroom because we can’t get the biggest of our clothes bureaus into it. This leaves the smaller bedroom, which is rather small, and also a bit drafty because it’s clearly a later and rather shoddier add-on. We’re thinking the solution may be to use the small bedroom as our bedroom (I like to be cool at night, so the draftiness isn’t a huge drawback—and we’ve a space heater if need be) and put a couple of the bureaus just outside it… in what is nominally the dining room, but we just don’t do formal dining, so it may actually become the office.

That room is painted in what can only be described as Wisconsin Blaze Orange. David says he likes it. I’m dubious, and when I get to the hardware store later today (we are a block and a half from an honest-to-goodness hardware store! joy!), I am going to be looking into a sedate dark red or something of that nature. At least for two or three of the walls!

But every drawback here can be lived with, and the whole is still utterly charming. We’re in a real neighborhood, not an apartment or condo complex. We’re a quick block from the lakeshore, a block from several buslines, two short blocks from groceries (both Oriental and conventional), a comfortable walk to campus or to the zoo, and a longish but manageable walk downtown.

The Goths are acting squirrelly. Dream has decided that Didi is his enemy, so she’s taken to hiding under whatever can be hidden under, usually blankets. They’ve both been traumatized by trying to jump onto the shelves-on-brackets in our bedroom, the problem being that the shelves are not screwed, glued, or otherwise affixed to the brackets, so a large cat landing on one tips it not genteelly at all off onto the floor. (This is another thing that will be fixed with a trip to the hardware store today.) They’re not eating especially well either. Nothing for it but to let them settle down.

Right after dark, another friend of ours came by to drop off a spare futon, which is leaps and bounds better than trying to sleep on the floor! Said friend then took us downtown for dinner, and would not let me pick up the check.

I have amazing friends. I have a good new home with a decent landlord. I could try to be happier, but I’m really not sure how I’d manage it.