Caveat Lector

My now-former place of work gave me another party yesterday. Cake (with my name correctly spelled, which is never a given), a slideshow that included Marvin the Martian standing on a cheese wheel, lots of hugs, and the DC Comics Encyclopedia. Do you see why I call him the World’s Coolest (former) Boss?

Bigger turnout than I thought there’d be, too. “There isn’t a person here who isn’t sorry to see you go—which is not something that can always be said at these things!” said the WCfB. I’ll take that. I am a cantankerous old crab, more than I’d like to be sometimes. But I did work pretty hard to make myself useful and pleasant, and it’s good to know I can do that when it’s called for.

It was an oddly stressful day, for reasons having nothing to do with my now-former colleagues. I took care of the last few item edits, took myself off the relevant workflow lists, put the finishing touches on the handbook for my replacement, printed it out and put it in the file cabinet along with the licenses file, burned a CD with stuff my replacement will need, went to the party, came back, called David to help me cart stuff home, wiped my user accounts off Nova the PowerBook and Trogool the iMac (I’d set up dummy admin accounts first, of course), tidied up a bit, packed up my Kinesis and my trackball, and went home.

Shouldn’t have been stressful at all, but it was; I was consciously relaxing my muscles all the way home.

My parents came by last night to deliver me a (boxed) bookshelf for our new place, and take us out to dinner. Unfortunately, Noodles and Company was packed to the gills by a frat fundraiser, so dinner was noisier than I generally like. We’re picking someplace else this evening!

I packed all our plates and some other odds and ends in the kitchen today, along with all the pictures and wall-hangings we could manage to find a box to fit. (We’re still figuring out what to do with framed posters and a couple of oversized mirrors.) I also packed my Survival Suitcase: a week’s worth of clothes plus towels. David gets to pack sheets in his Survival Suitcase. We have one more Survival Suitcase for the cats (food, a cleaned-out litterbox, and clean litter to put in it as soon as we arrive), and the fourth checked item will be a picnic-bag that has enough plates and cutlery for us to survive the next week, and will also fit a couple of pots and other kitchen oddments.

The Goths got suspicious when we started packing books a few weeks ago, but the Goths are not terribly literary, so they settled down when nothing else disappeared. Today, however, Dream just plain wigged out, as various things His Nibs is used to looking at and sleeping on disappeared into boxes. Didi, ever the fatalist, curled up on a fleece bathrobe in the bedroom and ignored the whole thing.

The vet told David yesterday that Didi may have asthma. Sounds like a shrewd diagnosis to me; she does wheeze. The new apartment has hardwood floors, as opposed to the carpet in this one, so with any luck, that will help. Dream is in fine shape, although it appears that weight standards for cats are at least as bizarrely cockeyed as for humans; they say he is “ideal weight” when he’s so scrawny his bones stick out. (Nothing we can do about it, really; he’s on health food as it is.)

Movers show up a week from tomorrow. Here’s hoping we’ll be ready…

Two days ago, Caveat Lector turned five years old. That doesn’t make it an elder statesblog exactly, but five years is still a respectable age for a weblog.

Two thousand seven hundred thirty-one posts (give or take; I don’t know if that number includes the five I’ve got in various states of draft). A few hundred trackbacks, from the days when trackback wasn’t a spam vector. No comments. (Still.) No ads, no tip jars; blogging is my private vice, and I see no reason anyone but me should pay for it, and plenty of reasons they (for various values of “they”) shouldn’t. A semi-respectable Google PageRank of 6 (I’ve occasionally flirted with 7, but I can’t seem to keep it).

CavLec has outlasted four jobs, one master’s degree (from soup to nuts), one move (soon to be two), one blogging platform (seriously, does anybody use Movable Type any more who isn’t forced to?), at least three webhosts, and more blog-drama than I like to contemplate.

Putting things in perspective, however, CavLec is one-seventh the chronological length of my life, only five-eighths the length of my marriage, and a bit less than one-third the length of the relationship that includes my marriage. Hell, my tubal ligation is older than CavLec; that’s just the kind of stubborn old bag I am.

Rather to my dismay, CavLec has become far more of a professional blog than I ever imagined or wanted. (”Professional” in the sense of “engaging with professional issues,” not in the sense of “paid to blog,” because I’m not that last and don’t aim to be, either.) There’s a life-balance issue lurking there. I’ve spent too much time in the last couple years couch-potatoing at home because it’s just such a pain in the rear to go anywhere in the vicinity of Washington DC if one doesn’t drive. I’m hoping the move back to Madison will wake me up a bit, and get CavLec back to the usually-cheerful miscellaneous geeks-and-their-cats haven it used to be.

(The vacation from open-access wrangling has been nice, I must confess. I completely missed the latest Harnad-Velterop green-versus-gold exchange, and I couldn’t manage to be happier about that if I tried my level best.)

I ought to give the poor old thing a redesign for its birthday; it’s still, well, terribly rectangular and all. (Hello? The late ’90s are calling, and they want their squared-off visual aesthetic back.) I don’t want to ditch the William Morris entirely, but I think I can contrive something a bit more in touch with modern web design. Maybe when I get settled in Madison—though another project is hanging fire for that, and it really ought to get done first.

We’ll see. I can at least assert that scars and all, CavLec will keep its dusty little over-Latinated corner of the blogosphere open for business.

A few things happened around me at Open Repositories 2007.

One of them was an oft-expressed wish for some kind of venue for repository-rats to talk to each other. Sure, if you have a software problem, there’s usually help—but if you have a policy question, or a copyright concern, or something of that nature, you’re you-know-what outta luck. When rubber meets road around an IR, nobody’s talking.

(The current situation is somewhat fragmented, because user groups have formed around specific pieces of software. The thing is, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using DSpace or EPrints or Fedora when the question is repository policy!)

Another was someone saying to me, “You are DSpace to me [because of Caveat Lector].” That felt all kinds of wrong. I’m not DSpace. I’m not a committer, I’m not working on DSpace governance, I’m not even a major figure on the mailing lists. What I am is the only blogger talking about DSpace on a regular basis—DSpace’s unofficial, entirely off-the-record web presence.

In fact, I’m pretty darn close to the only repository-rat blogger there is. Talk about your pluralistic ignorance.

This is a sad state of affairs, and I do not approve of it. Therefore, when it became clear that our new OA journal wasn’t going to be able to use the domain I had reserved for it, I asked the rest of the board if I could use the domain for my own nefarious purposes, and they agreed.

Enter the IR-Managers website. It has a blog (though that’s mostly for my convenience; I don’t anticipate actually blogging there, though I’m open to others doing so). It has a web forum. And it has a mailing list. I don’t know if all of these organs will survive; as usual, I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Mark well, IR-Managers is not an open-access advocacy site, so don’t come there to beat your breast or pontificate, because I will smack you down with a quickness. No green versus gold. No “what about the publishers?” No “this is the death of peer review!” No “the poor, poor scholarly societies.” No “we must all have mandates!” No legislative advocacy. None of that stuff. There’s other places for it (try SPARC OA Forum or JISC-REPOSITORIES). We repository-rats, we know where we stand, or we wouldn’t be doing what we are.

That said, strategic concerns (”I want a mandate. How should I go about getting one?”) are welcome; that’s part of rubber-meets-road. I don’t mean that IR managers should go head-in-the-sand ostriching. I just want to point the ideological wrangling elsewhere.

Technical questions are also welcome, but I don’t promise anybody can answer them. The real nitty-gritty software stuff is best taken to the appropriate list for the software you’re using. I’m hoping, though, that IR-Managers can be a clearinghouse for folks who haven’t yet chosen IR software and have questions about it—from the phone calls I keep getting, that’s an immense unaddressed need.

If your repository isn’t institutional, you’re still welcome. Disciplinary repositories, industry repositories, dark archives, whatever. A lot of the same issues still obtain.

So. Come help my spaghetti stick to the wall, won’t you?

Boxes. Everywhere. Up to my ears and a bit beyond.

But we’re almost packed. We’re getting down to the odds and ends, and I’m even packing tiny boxes into bigger ones just to make life a little easier. Finishing up tomorrow won’t be a problem. The movers show up Friday. We bug the heck out of here Saturday.

I’ve gotten all the utilities turned off here and on there… we’ll just have to wait and see who can apply clue and who can’t. We found a spare DSL modem while we were going through miscellaneous electronica, and we’re borrowing a spare computer from a friend, so if the phone company has half a clue, we’ll have connectivity on arrival.

The Goth-kitties are putting on their very best tolerant faces, the ways of housemonkeys being unaccountable. They’re hanging out in the bedroom a lot, as that’s the room that has changed least. The plan for Friday is to pop them into the walk-in closet with their litterbox and some fleece; that way nobody can escape, nobody can accidentally get underfoot, and nobody gets panicked by strangers. They’ll still be unhappy, but such is life.

Folks are checking out the new IR-Managers site; I expect word will get ’round as time goes by. I RSSified the forum today, so if you just want to track it, now you can. Posting thus far is fairly reticent, and I don’t have a whole lot of time to juice things up for all the obvious reasons, but Amazoogle wasn’t built in a day, and neither will this be.

I will be very, very glad when it is Saturday and we’re in the new place. These last few days are just tiresome.

Wake up. Reluctantly.

Scramble the remaining eggs (two whole, two whites-only) with the remaining farmer’s cheese and a bit of the remaining olive oil in the remaining pot for breakfast. Eat, from badly-chipped breakfast plate that we’re throwing away because we bought new unchipped ones a few months ago.

“What are we going to do with the bedclothes?” asks husband. Don’t ask me, I do not say; I had planned to switch over to the ones we’ve got packed (so that we know they’re packable) a day or two ago. Say “Dunno,” instead. It’s a moving-zen thing. Moving zen is very closely related to travel zen.

Check email. Answer important 5Weeks communique. Note that phone company has graciously decided that yes, it will cut off my service on the date I requested. Check IR Managers site. Check 5Weeks. Check blogs. Sign on to Meebo, just in case anything 5Weeksish comes up. Set away message: “Packing and trying not to panic. Don’t expect quick response.”

Pack three boxes of miscellaneous odds and ends. Clear out clean laundry from yesterday. Determine what will be worn the next couple of days. Intermittently, attempt to reassure terrified Dream-goth, who is skulking about with his tail down, hiding in corners, and generally being pitiably upset about change. Pack the laundry hamper with “tall stuff” such as yardsticks, bicycle pump, box kite, cane (from the London Sprained Knee Incident), bathroom hangy-thing, and luggage-dragger.

Pull down suitcases from coat closet. Set the biggest in the bedroom; it’s coming with us. Fill the other two with Li’s quilt from the couch, my blanket and antimacatsar from my armchair, and sleeping bags we won’t be needing. Note that biggest suitcase is pretty damn big; ponder ideas for filling it.

Run obstacle course, scattering skulking cats, to answer ringing phone before it stops ringing. Tell moving-truck driver how to get here. (Get off 495 at the 236 exit. Go west on 236. Turn right on our street. Not hard.) Forget to ask him what he and his peeps like to drink. Oh, well, can make a run to the store tomorrow if need be.

Stop at computer. Note that Meebo is flashing. Answer very kind IM from Steve Lawson re: the suckiness of moving and the necessity of not panicking. Check email. Briefly skim blogs. Write quick email to IR Managers mailing list. Note that IR Managers mailing list is broken. Swear sulphurously but in silence. Put in trouble ticket at webhost, sans naughty words.

“Want to go to lunch?” husband asks. Ask where. He suggests Thai place in mall. Bleh. Turkish place nearby is much better. He agrees. We go to Turkish place, have really lovely gigantic sandwiches with equally lovely immense Greek salad, feel much better. Thank husband for very good idea.

On the way back, say “I think either quilt or down comforter will fit in big suitcase. Which would you prefer?” He says comforter. Once back, successfully stuff comforter in half of big suitcase. Rejoice! Suggest that pillows can go in other half. Dump air mattress in last remaining empty drawer; won’t be needing it. Stuff quilt in biggest remaining box.

Clean out fridge and freezer. Sad waste, but not as bad as it could have been; mostly condiments. Empty and wash recyclable bottles; put them in recycling bag. Dump the rest in trash bag. Tie bags. Clean up a small spill. Note three bags containing varying amounts of catnip that should be consolidated and put in the cat carriers. Put miscellaneous kitchen stuff (plastic containers, mostly) on top of quilt in box. Put last to-be-packed pair of shoes (his) on top of quilt in box.

Husband has dug into a packed storage container and disarranged everything. He can’t get it back in closeable condition. Offer to rearrange it; offer accepted. Rearrange it (I’m good at this stuff). Close container with an inch to spare.

Blog sporadically over several-hour period while finding more things to pack and packing them. Disconnect zootibar from computer; stash in faithful Land’s End bag which (along with cat carrier) will be brought on the plane when we leave Saturday. Take keys off keyring; put with last rent check. Put remainder of keyring on keyring-holder in faithful Land’s End bag. Nip downstairs and pull carpet remnant that I never wanted and we have never used out of storage and into trash area. Watch husband cope with a last few rolled-up posters. Close last few boxes.

Debate how to handle cat-litter tomorrow. Agree on plan. Bubble-wrap and strap cardboard to last remaining framed posters.

Finish blog post. Publish blog post. Start thinking about where to order dinner delivery from…

Hate moving. Hate it most muchly. Hate it almost as much as Dream does.

We’re here, we made it without a hitch, the new place is nice, we have phone and electricity and connectivity, the Goths hate our guts until the end of time (or whenever), and I’m terribly relieved.

More later.

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.

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.

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 got red-winged blackbirds in our back yard.

Red-winged blackbirds. In our BACK YARD.

Too cool.