Sarah RULES!

I got back from laundry to discover a note on my door – I had a package at the front desk. Lo and behold, Ms. Sarah sent me a beautiful bouquet of roses with a very positive and supportive note.

The roses are currently adorning my room, and I’m the envy of my floor. My room smells nicer too.

Thank you, Chica.

A picture of this wonderful surprise is now up on the gallery, along with other new pics.

Greetings from the Basement of Wardall Hall

…where I sit, typing away, as my laundry gets done. Thank God for wireless, right?

I should be working on my paper, but at this point if I look at one more DMCA article, I will go crazy. Instead I’m working a bit on our group project on the Open Archive Initiative. I’m supposed to do the group web site and hand out.

Sorry I didn’t post yesterday. I woke up at 6:30 AM with the firm intention of working on my paper. We didn’t have class until 3:30, so I figured that would give me plenty of time do to my work. However, as I got into the work, and as the band camp on the floor below me began to tune their oboes, I realized that the real challenge of this paper was to search, find, weed out and summarize when there is so much on a particular topic and there’s so much to write about. I mean, the DMCA, it’s HUGE. So I had a mini freak out. The workload, all the information to process, the noise, the paper – all this stuff added up to a “What in the hell am I doing?” moment. Obviously, I’ve worked through that.

Once I got to the computer lab to print out my draft and saw that some people were just beginning to work on their research, I felt much, much better. Other people were also struggle with the amount of information and issues that surrounded the topics. It was comforting. What can I say? Misery truly does love company.

I had lunch, and by the time I got to class, I felt a little better. Class went well, and so did discussion, but I’m a little frustrated by how discussion appears to be working. They asked us to do all the reading before we showed up, and then they ask us to do very specific reading-oriented activities in discussion. Like yesterday I was supposed I was a particular author we read and talk about the future of libraries with the advent of the Internet. That would be fine if I hadn’t read that article 3 weeks ago. I’ve been skimming the articles nightly to refresh my memory, but these tasks really seem to favor the people who do the readings for the first time each night.

Anyway, after discussion, I went to dinner with a bunch of my colleagues at a pub on Green Street. It wasn’t the most awesome place, but it worked. I had a burger, fries and a beer for $7, and really, that’s all I wanted. What was interesting is that during dinner, all we could talk about is the stuff discussed in class – the beliefs and profession of librarianship – not ourselves. We argued whether or not certain books should be taken off of shelves in certain contexts, professional perception of librarians and the role of support staff in libraries. It was like class, only with beer (which I’m all in favor of, by the way).

So after dinner, I came back and continued to pound on this paper thing. I did get a very rough draft done, and huge thanks to my editors extraordinaire, Phil and Sarah, for volunteering to look at it for me. At this point, fresh eyes are required.

I went to bed around 12:30, and I seriously planned to get up at 6:30 and work out. I couldn’t do it though. I was really tired for some reason, so I slept until 7. I got to class at 8:30, afterwards our group met and laid out our plans for the project, I grabbed a salad at the crappy McDonalds in the Union, and headed here. My hope is to get a little of the web page for the project done and to do some more editing on my paper before class at 3:30. I’m still feeling a little stressed, but I do feel like I have things somewhat under control. We’ll see how much longer that feeling lasts.

I still haven’t updated the gallery. I hope to do that tonight, so check back with it later.