( SPN--'Changing Channels' )

In other news, there is no other news. Oh. Except that the Governor of Massachusetts is apparently thinking about shutting down the State Library, which is kinda not cool. I mean, you don't just toss out almost 200 years worth of something, just like that. (Though I'd like to see some other verification of this; the news I was seeing on Google all seemed to be about statewide budget cuts to library funding and nothing specific to the State Library.) I'm not even going to talk about my own state where that certain sneaking deathly fear has once again blown in amongst my colleagues due to all the revenue shortfall and expected budget cuts.

You know what? I'm sick of the shitty economy. I'm sick of blaming everything on the shitty economy. I'm especially sick of people using the shitty economy to cut cultural institutions. I'm sick of this being the norm, and I want some damned better resolutions. Now if only I could think of them.

Also, ABC has apparently pulled their online Eastwick episodes, which is just doubly shitty since that's the way I've been watching the show. Wah. Woe me. I need to get my priorities back in order. I also want to burn something in effigy. Hmph.

I have a long and highly personal relationship with Gravity. It mostly consists of Gravity throwing things at me and me telling it sweetly, "Fuck you, Gravity."

I just had a different sort of pear with my dinner tonight that I picked up at the store on a whim. It was the most boring fruit I have ever tasted. I didn't know fruit could taste boring. So it was disappointing on multiple levels.

This was also a very stupid day at work. Not finding the paperwork I needed; collections popping up in places they shouldn't or not being where they should; hauling boxes down from the fifth shelf and scraping my arms and fingers on the cardboard and the metal; the ladder catching on boxes as I shoved it down the too-narrow aisle; the stupid laptop running slowly or not at all; nothing new or unusual in all this but I just was not in the mood for it today. And then to top it all off I lost my key card. Which somebody promptly found and returned, thank goodness, but at that point I just sort of wanted to call it quits, go home, and crawl under the covers.

Actually, that still sounds like a good idea.

For one week, recommend/share:

Day one: a song
Day two: a picture
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day four: a site
Day five: a youtube clip
Day six: a quote
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy

Since I missed yesterday, I shall CHEAT and do both days three and four in this post. (It doesn't count when it's honest cheating. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Any fic I could rec? Has probably already been recced by the fandom in question to death, since I usually come by fic via other people these days, rather than seeking it out myself. (Apparently, in college? I had a lot more time to goof off online seeking fic. Which astonishes me since I remember never having any time when I was in college.) So, a book that I like to mention every once in a while: The Shoemaker and the Tea Party by Alfred Young. I do not actually own a copy of this book, and that should probably be rectified, which is why I have just added it to my Amazon wishlist. A treatise on memory, memorialization (that is too a word), who makes history, and how we write about it. Oh, and a bit on the American Revolution too.

Other history books I'd recommend: The Refinement of America by Richard Bushman, looking at material culture and how during the colonial period Americans acquired more beautiful things and why they did it, and Gay New York by George Chauncey, which would probably be incredibly helpful if somebody wanted to, I dunno, write about Jack Harkness in New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Just a thought. Ho-hum. I would whistle innocently here, if I could whistle.

Now, for a site recommendation, and this is probably also a CHEAT since it could possibly go with the book/fic/ebook recommendations instead: Girl Genius comics. Agatha rocks like a rocking Mad Scientist, and I kinda love it when Gil is a complete dorkface. They've been working on this comic for I dunno how many years now, so there's a lot of canon to work through, but I've honestly forgotten probably most of what happened in the early stuff and am still enjoying the hell out of the storyline currently going on.

Okay, an "actual" site I'd like to share is IDEA, which gives you sample dialects from around the world of individuals speaking English. Very cool, and very useful particularly for VA and writery things (or, okay, that's what I think of when I think to use it). Also, I just today noticed it was housed and operated by the University of Kansas, which is probably cooler than it should be.

The Invisible Man comm hot_donuts is hosting a ficfest and is looking for prompts. You don't have to write in order to submit prompts. DOOOO IIIIIT!

(I should go submit some myself.)

Some of my best trip-planning happens almost entirely spontaneously. Just over a week ago a friend of mine said "We should do a road trip! STAT!" And instead of hemming and hawing as I normally would I said, "Tempt me some more!" And she said, "Long weekend!" And I said, "I could fly back instead of trying to drive back!" And now this weekend, I am going to Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. I've never been to Arkansas! I was in Tennessee for approximately three hours once! I was only in NOLA for about five hours once! This is going to be awesome. And dizzyingly quick.

One of my co-workers found a manuscript of a spiritual written in 1832. "Second Great Awakening!" I cried in excitement. Apparently the son or grandson of the guy who wrote this spiritual was an atheist. "Because he grew up during the Second Great Awakening!" I cried in excitement, and our supervisor laughed. Some days, going to work really is worth it.

I am not in Austin this week for the Society of American Archivists' meeting. I am not in Chicago this week for Vividcon. Instead today I:

* Got up before 5:30 in order to take a 100-question multiple choice exam in order to become a certified archivist
* Bought a DVD/VHS combo recorder so I can maybe finally transfer some stuff from tapes to DVDs (I'm looking at you, Homefront, oh god the quality's going to be total crap if this even works)
* Bought a stand thingy to put in my kitchen so that I can maybe finally have more COUNTER SPACE because I have not yet met a kitchen in an apartment or townhome that had enough counter space
* Went to the library and dropped off the interlibrary loan books on archives (and I am not reading another book on archives for a long, long, looooong time)
* Wandered around the gardens associated with a local house museum, and drove around some of the prettier and more historic neighborhoods in town, just because I could and rarely do
* Have remained awake all day, while probably everyone else who was up before 5:30 to take that exam with me went home to bed
* Went to Panera just so I could get an iced chai latte. I was hot by that point after all my wanderings and retail therapy.

I haven't had to take a multiple-choice test since the GRE. However, I am reasonably certain I passed. I probably shouldn't say things like that, since it will no doubt jinx me.

Shoebox blog: a bad way to waste even more time at work.

Also, I haven't seen anybody mention this about David Tennant, PBS, and Hamlet. Yay for next year?

I have reached the point at work where I am threatening to put a box on my head. An acidic one, naturally, as we have to save the acid-free ones for the records. Also, my cubicle, once pristine, now looks as if a state agency crawled in and died there. A small state agency, but one nonetheless, with really crappy acidic boxes. That I have so far refrained from putting on my head. (But it's been close.)

And finally, the meme du jour of the moment because I am BORED and avoiding doing other things: my fannish top 5 whatevers. Give me some to ponder. I shall gladly ponder.

"T," I said to my co-worker today as we were passing each other, "I have a confession to make. I think I might have killed Scully."

"I did find her lying down, stunned," T replied. "Somebody had put her up on top of E.T.'s head a while back. I left her where she is, for now; you know how it is with head injuries."

"Make sure her neck is stable," I agreed.

"I knew it must have been you," she added, "I saw you walking over there."

"And I had to tell you before you came up to me and demanded to know why I'd done it," I told her sadly. "I had to be the better woman. I'll make sure not to close the drawer so hard next time."

"I'm going to find them all lying on the ground dead one day, and I'll know it was you," she said.

"It's an earthquake zone!" I told her.

We were talking about the toys she has sitting on top of a filing cabinet I have to get into with some regularity. Also? I work in an office peopled by geeks. Okay, not surprising when they're all librarians & archivists, but the sci-fi geekiness comes out in really surprising ways. Like when one of the reference desk people was an Andorian for Halloween last year, or when the former admin assistant had the TARDIS as her screensaver. Or, y'know, E.T. is dangling Mulder upside down on top of a filing cabinet.

So, appropriately, I leave you on this note.

Oh gods, it's true, it's all true, you can't change your patterns. I went to a thing after work that the division director was holding at her house, a TGIF little get-together for staff, and I know for a fact I was the youngest person there because the third project archivist on our grant didn't show. So I sat down in one of the dining room chairs with my Fat Tire beer, and then I noticed that some of my co-workers were sitting down on the carpet, including a couple very definitely at least twenty years older than me, and I felt horrifically guilty. So then when one of my co-workers was saying she needed more crackers to go with her leftover cheese, and another one asked for more chips to go with her salsa, I sprang up to fetch it for them. Because that's what I *always* do at family get-togethers because I'm always Young Legs (as my dear Aunt June used to call me).

Actually, the thing I finally realized a couple weeks ago when I held the Family Extravaganza, and maybe it's something I would not have been old enough to realize or appreciate any earlier than now--I come from a family of know-it-alls. This explains a lot. Including why I feel like I'll never catch up.

***

I don't remember Hyvee being a particularly high-end or classy grocery store, but the one here in town--well, I think this one's run and staffed by pod people. Seriously, they're all constantly bright and cheery and enthusiastically helpful. I was wandering past the deli looking for veggie dip when I heard the man behind the counter pontificating, "If you're looking for something low in salt, than you should try this." I was in the health food section picking up veggie burgers when I found somebody restocking and talking to another customer. "We just ran a promotional thing to find out what people really wanted, so we'll be making some changes here shortly." It was unnatural. And yet, I can't stop going, it's all so shiny.

***

Pushing Daisies is over. :( I finally got around to watching the last episode last night, not really having had time before now. It was such an awesome, awesome show. I want my characters back.

And because I have to share the insanity.

The Natural History Museum whale in New York twitters. Apparently, all the staff denies any of them are doing it. It's the most philosophical whale I've seen since that one that fell through the sky with the bowl of petunias. You know which whale I'm talking about. (My favorite tweet so far: In water, you can spin and twirl and dive and climb. Here, I just hang, with y'all.) (Found via the Museum Audience Insight blog, by the by.) (Also, when even a whale in a museum is twittering and I'm not? There's something wrong here.) (Also also, STOP USING THE PARENTHESES.)

Digitization is going to save civilization as we haven't known it in centuries! Or something. I...you know? I'm still ambivalent about digitization. It is awesome the stuff we can find online now and make available to researchers and blah blah blah, but this idea that it's going to make every single scrap of paper/parchment/vellum/papyrus/sheepskin/etc EVAH available is the same idea people had about microfilm, and the printing press, and other technologies in the past. I was just reading a bunch of writings by Sir frickin' Hilary Jenkinson (OMG, after reading Margaret Cross Norton a couple weeks ago, I want to shoot myself, or at least read an archivist whose writing style is not over fifty years old), and he discussed the issues with attempting to print primary sources from the medieval period. And the arguments he was making--too little time, too much money, not enough staff, never going to be able to tap fully into the huge breadth of sources available--still ring true today. Digitization might mean we can access more information than we ever could before on the document itself, and it might even make some things more efficient, but you're still dealing with historic documents that require extra care and energy, and not everybody has that kind of time and money. At my place of work, our digitization project has so far put I think about 8,000 items--individual items--on the web. Out of how many millions of pieces of paper that we have lurking about in unexpected corners? (No, actually, some of them really are lurking about in unexpected corners. It's very trying.) Not to mention the the thousands of photos and objects and other miscellaneous bits and bobs?

Um. I really hadn't planned to rant like that.

Actually, I really do feel sorry for the pig.

And then there's this. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the above, as it's actually about preserving electronic records, but...uh...you kinda have to see it to believe it. And then possibly see it again because I still don't believe it.

Actually, the first session I attended at that conference last week was about video preservation. It was presented by a vendor, a very well-spoken man in a lovely suit, but as he got deeper into some of the lingo and some of the issues involved in preserving it (dude, I didn't even know there was such a thing as digital betacam; this is so far out of my scope), I could just see him hanging out at work in jeans, tinkering with his stuff to make it work right. He was such a geek. It was awesome.

Okay, and I am a sheep and am on dreamwidth. So, uh, if I haven't friended you over there yet, could you find me? (I have no plans to move. I'm just, y'know, a sheep. And as Digiman would no doubt tell you, backups are always a good thing. Uh-huh.)

I get to sleep in tomorrow. I think that might be the only thing that sustained me through a lot of this week.

I'm still alive. Barely. I was at a conference for, er, 2.5 days and then I was wandering across the state visiting friends and I waited till my wanderings to actually drink alcohol (vodka, WHY IS IT ALWAYS VODKA) and did not get home till the wee small's and now today I mostly want to die temporarily in a corner so I can really wake up refreshed and human again tomorrow. Just in time for work.

It probably is a good thing I made it home last night instead of this morning. Probably.

I'd never noticed my travel curse until I started flying regularly a few years ago. But no, I have always had a travel curse. It's just that when I'm driving instead of flying, the travel curse manifests itself in rainstorms that make it impossible to see two feet in front of the car when driving through major city traffic. I have come far in accepting my travel curse though because I handled it this time with barely any ruffling to my dignity and good humor. (Which probably means on my next road trip there will be an earthquake in an area where no faultlines had previously been detected. I'm sorry, future road trip destination, whatever you are, I DON'T MEAN IT.)

But, oh yes, it was awesome. Caught up with a bunch of friends in and out of the profession, attended good sessions, met new people, and only occasionally acted like an incompetent un-social ass. I call that a win. (Considering how I usually behave at conferences? Definite win. It helped that I had a friend from grad school there.) I also got to wander around one of my favorite cities (if only for the intense nostalgia) in neighborhoods I hadn't seen for probably ten years and bits I'd never seen before, so it was all very yay.

Also, I went WHOLE DAYS WITHOUT THE INTERNET. It was an experiment to see how bad my addiction was. It would have been useful to have access a few times, and I was a bit twitchy without it, but I survived. So there, internets addiction. SO THERE.

Now I'm going to go watch telly. Online. Ho hum.

Go, shoo, go read Recriprocal Quandaries, the first chapter anyway, of the fic I got for tardis_gen. Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie, and Two's stovepipe hat. (I did ask for silly hats in the prompt.) It's marvelous and deserves more comments.

Today at work I found a 1970 investigative report about unrest at college & university campuses across the state and I found an article from 1941 on how to live with your cell mate in a penitentiary newsletter. Some days, I totally love my job.

I'm sure there were loads more things I wanted to say, but I'm too tired to think of them.

So many choices! I could go with Barney Miller, he'd be very understanding and compassionate. Dalziel & Pascoe would be alternately witty and crass but they'd have my back (if they thought I deserved it, anyway). Emerson and Ned and Chuck would sort it all out, and I'd probably get pie. But I think I want to go with Albert Campion. After all, he's a universal uncle. I've always liked uncles.

*

I was just reading Dr. Seuss poetry. Which may or may not explain why I wrote the above paragraph the way I did. (At least it involved no rhymes?)

*

I spent today up to my eyeballs in microfilm. My eyeballs hurt.

I'm still getting used to the cubicle thing. I see out of the corner of my eye people walking past and get easily distracted. One of my co-workers sort of glides exactly the way a character from an animated Monty Python sketch would. (As if my headspace weren't surreal enough.)

*

I like to use my bookstore receipts for bookmarks. They're a handy way to remember where I was when I got a book, a way to ground me--Ohio when I found that Doctor Who novel, Colorado when I picked up that book on architecture with a gift card. My mom uses anything she has at hand and leaves it in the book for the next person to stumble across--I've found appointment reminder cards from the dentist or eye doctor, a note from my brother, a hall pass I had my senior year of high school because I was in NHS, even a picture of me from a play in high school. (I swiped that one; it's hanging on my wall now.) It's a bit like finding signatures or notes from people when browsing at used bookstores, glimpses of whole other lives that have been lived.

*

April may or may not kill me. It's my fault for scheduling so many things, but April may very well kill me. And if it doesn't, May and June come close behind...

So the building housing Cologne's archives collapsed yesterday (two articles from the same English-language paper, one focusing a bit more on the human angle, the other a bit more on the archival angle). It's gut-wrenching; they were apparently the largest municipal archives in Germany with their oldest document from 922 CE (922. Grief). And...just...fuck, man. I would be heartbroken if I worked there. I feel awful even from this distance. I'm glad most of the people in the area got out okay, at least, but all those documents and other materials...

*

Archives smell. I walk down one aisle at work and it's like Easter when I was a kid, dyeing the eggs. (This is not a good thing; you don't want your microfilm smelling like vinegar.) I walk down another aisle and, for some inexplicable reason, it smells like puppy chow. (No, I really don't know what that's all about.) Yet another aisle, one full of old ledgers, and I feel like I'm back in my Uncle Buddy's house again, must and dust and mysterious, interesting old things.

*

A perpetual calendar! For all your historical fic-writing (or other) needs.

*

Prompt me, people. I want to write and I'm failing terribly. And I want to write something other than Doctor Who or SG-1, just to see if I still can. I was doing awesome at the end of last year, and then January rolled around and the creative centers of my brain basically shut down. So give me something. I make no promises about actually coming *up* with something, but I usually come through, even if it sometimes takes a while. Fandoms...er, suggest one and I'll see if I know it?

I would like to see Dean Winchester trying to do research on microfilm, only the film won't catch on the take-up reel the way it's supposed to when he starts winding, and then when it finally does he realizes he's put the film on backwards and then when he's trying to wind the film back up on to its reel so he can reverse the roll it gets all tangled and he has to start rolling it up manually and carefully while praying that some librarian won't come his way to see if he needs help and has seen what heinous act he has done to the microfilm (because Dean knows what those librarians are like when you tear microfilm), and then when he finally gets it all right and straight and proper and looks at the film, it doesn't actually have the information he wanted anyway.

Hey, buddy, you wanted research, you frickin' got it. *grumbles*

Now for the meme of choice (at the moment):

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

ionlylurkhere gave me these five topics to ponder

( Middle school Who (I would be secretly fascinated to know if you have Opinions on books v audios) )

( beta reading )

( academia )

( working environments )

( fave baking recipe )

Right, so, I am either a) going to found the vampire museum or b) open an all-night bakery and coffee shop because going to work at eight in the morning five days a week is NOT CUTTING IT FOR ME.

If you have any wooden stakes/Hammer Horror clips/black capes you would like to donate, please let me know.

I haven't been this reflective about my life and what I'm trying to do with it since, uh, grad school, I swear. Or maybe when dealing with that flood a couple years ago, which was practically still grad school anyway.

( History museums, objects, and you. Well, me first. )

Mmmm, professional wankery, it's been a while.

From bigfinishlove, this post here discusses an announcement for the upcoming Eight audio:

( Read more... )

Have I mentioned lately that I love Big Finish? It needs stating, like, every quarter or something because they can be JUST THAT AWESOME. *still needs to buy that Vala SG-1 audio*

***

Best discovery I have yet made at my new job: Gordon Jump was at the dedication for the new museum building in 1984. GORDON EFFING JUMP. Mr Carlson, of "I swear to God, I thought turkeys could fly" fame. I am still torn between delight and horror over this discovery. I shall probably remain in this frame of mind every time I remember stumbling across the press release and giggling maniacally in a corner of the stacks. My co-workers must be terrified of me.

***

Regarding Pushing Daisies last night and the idea that a historical society might have money to throw around for a reward: HAHAHAHAHAHA OH HELL NO. Ahem.

I broke my back at work yesterday (okay, really, I broke it 3.5 years ago in a previous life as a box monkey, but yesterday still had my back going, "OW NO DON'T DO THAT AGAIN") and I had to get up stupidly early this morning in order to drop my car off to get it fixed. I backed into a pillar (it was holding up a hotel) a couple days after Thanksgiving and cracked the panel over the front driver's side tire. GOOD TIMES.

(Oh, OH. And last night, stretching out my back, I rolled over and whacked my hip on the bed frame. Grace, baby, grace. Crawling into bed basically consisted of me whining "owwwwwww" a lot.)

I've never directly had to deal with the insurance company before; last time I had an accident I was still under my parents' coverage. The claims adjuster gave me a check for everything but the deductible the day he looked at my car for an estimate. Is that normal?

Aaaand it went from the mid-40s yesterday to a dusting of snow today. Thank you, midwestern weather; you never, ever bore me.

Things about my job that are weird:
1. Running water.
2. I have a cubicle rather than an office.
3. People. So many people that I have not met them all and do not remember most names yet.
3. There are IT people. To fix things for me. (They also have to give me passwords. Which can be frustrating when I have to wait.)
4. Internet in the stacks. Sure, it's hard-wired and means 100 foot extension cords and ethernet cables, but I can still access the Internet. (Kinda have to in order to access the database I'm working with.)
5. Working with a collections management database that is still in development even as we use it. (Things change! Within minutes! That wasn't there five seconds ago when I opened that other record!)
6. MARC tags and subject headings. I DID NOT GO TO LIBRARY SCHOOL. Yet.

Things that are not weird about my job:
1. Box monkey.
2. Weird interpersonal dynamics among the staff.
3. Did I mention the box schlepping? Working in tight and awkward corners? SO FAMILIAR.

After living month-to-month, pretty much literally, for eight months, thinking a little more long-term is...odd, again. I can bake again (most of my baking stuff I left in storage). I have SPACE again, to run around and dance and be stupid in my apartment. I shall be able to decorate again, at least in the half-assed way that I usually do, whenever I get around to that sort of thing. This week is crazy due to overwhelming newness on all kinds of levels, and I'm just waiting for my brain to reset, I think.