telophase | (no subject)

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... I've been wearing my jacket inside-out for the past five hours and didn't notice it. I definitely need more sleep.

On the bright side, although I got nowhere near enough sleep last night, I managed to remember to put the wee pot roast into the wee crockpot so I woke up to a very yummy-smelling apartment. Although I'm heading out to dinner with friends tonight, so it gets to be tomorrow's lunch instead of tonight's dinner (I was going to cook it during the day Monday and kept forgetting, and it had hit the cook-or-freeze point).

Yay for boring domestic updates!

Everyone on the reading list is posting their dreams so I shall announce that while I did dream and it had something to do with pencilling manga, everything other than that was blasted out of my head by the smell of morning pot roast the instant before I hit consciousness this morning, so you shall be spared.

And to hopefully spur some sort of action in my inbox since I'm about to go sit at the Ref desk for a while, I shall paraphrase a meme that's going around and say: Ask me questions! I shall, however, reserve the right to refuse to answer anything that falls under the category of I Don't Discuss That In Public, although I shall be cruel and not tell you what those categories are. :)

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What was your favorite book when you were little? and now?

What is the strangest thing your cat has ever done?

What is the strangest (Discussable In Public) thing YOU have ever done?

-- Alan Mendohlson, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater. As for now ...? hrm. It changes so often and so fast that the question doesn't really apply at all. I'm currently groovin' on Jared Diamond's Collapse, about how societies handle environmental degredation and survive or fall, and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, about the spread of fads and other information analyzed as if they followed epidemics, and Blink about how many assumptions and decision-making goes on beneath the level of consciousness. All of which are MUCH MUCH better than my quick descritpiosn make them sound. I've been reading a lot more nonfiction than fiction for the past few years, because there hasn't really been a whole lot of fiction that I like to read published. But Alan Mendohlson is still a favorite, and Pinkwater's book of essays Chicago Fish and Hoboken Whistle is excellent-o reading.

-- My cat hasn't really done anything out of the realms of normal cat behavior, but her quirks include dragging paper out from wherever she finds it, sitting on it, and proceeding to shred it into little tiny bits. And not liking most meat, including tuna, or milk or cheese or ice cream. She prefers taco chips. Especially if the taco chips have fallen behind something, are covered in dust, and are at least a week stale. And I feed her hairball treats every day after I get home and if I tease her I can make her drool. She's very drooly.

-- Strangest thing ever done? Well, aside from discovering Hitchhiker's Guide in 7th grade with a few other friends and spending most of our lunch periods that year outside trying to fly by throwing ourselves at the ground and missing, I have to say ... discovering and then losing a skeleton. Probably that of a dog. I hope. It was back in 5th grade or so, and a friend and I were messing about in a leaf-covered creekbed behind a nearby school's playground. We saw what looked like bones under the leaves, and Kathy, my friend, got a big long stick and levered it under the bones and pulled up ... a spine. And a baaaaaaaad smell. She dropped the stick and the spine and we ran like hell, didn't tell anyone that night, and forgot about it. A few years later I tried to find the site again, but between erosion and rain and drying up again, I couldn't. It was a big spine, to us, and I'm perfectly aware that it was probably only a foot or two long and in my memory is magnified but ... I still have a vague, nagging feeling that maybe we discovered human remains and didn't tell anyone about it. It was like 25 years ago, and there's not likely to be anything left by now, but every so often I wonder if there's anyone I ought to tell, and if anyone would take me seriously or if they'd assume it was a dog or something (the house whose fence backed up to it had a number of loud barky dogs, which is why I think I assume it was probably a dog).

So. Not really a strange thing I've done, but certainly something I experienced.

telophase, you don't mind if I answer these three too, do you? If so, I'll delete this comment ... but if not:

1) Anything by Heinlein. I read Stranger when I was five, and was then hooked. He quickly became the basis of my political and moral views, which is still generally true to the present.

2) I am unable to count the number of times my cat has set herself on fire. This generally happens at least once a month.

3) I once gave away everything I owned that didn't fit in a backpack (including giving away a car and quitting my job) and went and lived on the road with a bus full of Deadheads for three months, all after having just met them the day before when the bus broke down outside my place of employment.

Heck, no, join the fun. Just means more mail in my inbox for me. XD

My cat has not yet set herself on fire, but she's got much less of a sense of balance than your normal cat, so I have taken to leaving the toilet lid down because I've seen her almost fall in, and I don't want to deal with seven pound of wet, hissing fury rebounding off of every surface in the place.

#3 - impressive. :)

rachelmanija spent part of her childhood on an ashram in India, and I have a friend from grad school whose parents are hippies - she grew up in the Rainbow Tribe - and was a stoner from just about the time she could walk until the age of 27, dropping out of school at 16, and when she decided not to do that anymore, got her GED, BA, and MA in rapid succession, and is now teaching art over in Dallas somewhere. But both of them were dragged into the alternative lifestyle by parents instead of doing it themselves. :)

Speaking of toilets and cats, have you seen this (http://www.scienceinpublic.com/freshinnovators/2005/Jo/jolapidge.htm)? :)

I've heard of toilet-trained cats before, but hadn't seen anything like that. :) I think the expression of the cat on the lower left picture says it all...

I've got one of those electric litterboxes that combs the litter some time after the cat's done her business, which freaks her out a little bit. She's also got this habit of digging and moving and scooping the litter a *lot* - she has to arrange it to her satisfaction before she goes, then afterward spends hours, seems like, shifting it all from side to side again before deciding that it's OK and wandering off.

I had one of those, but it eventually died. Now I do disposable litter-boxes. Cheap biodegradable large plastic tubs with lids, that I cap up and toss every couple of weeks replacing with a new one. Weekly cost: $1.10, well worth not cleaning the box.

When I got my motorized box, my cat's water intake quintupled for the first few days. 10 minutes after she went, it's do it's thing, and she immediately would investigate and go again ... and then 10 minutes later, etc etc etc

My cat still perks up and stares at the bedroom when she hears the box go, even though it's been several months.

I got it because with the pulled ligament in my back, leaning over and scooping or attempting to switch out the litter was agony - this box is *so* much better. :) Unfortunately it's loud, and there's no place other than my bedroom I can put it, because the bathroom and kitchen are tiny and I refuse to have it featured in my living room. Strangely, while I'm getting used to it so that the box going off doesn't wake me up as much anymore, my cat's endless digging and scraping *does* wake me up, at least more often than the box.

On the up side, at least you will have escaped the notice of any malicious Sidhe in your area.

This is why they call me an optimist, I guess.

*laugh* Just what I was thinking.

True, there is always a positive to just about every situation. :D

Did you want to draw comic books when you were a kid? Or was it always the shiny manga stuff?

I mostly hated comic books as a kid. :) Except for Elfquest. If shoujo manga had been available to me, I'd probably have loved it, though. The art impulse and the storytelling impulse has been with me for a good long time, though: I remember bullying a friend into designing characters so I could illustrate them and she could draw them, although that burgeoning collboration died an early, fiery death due to creative differences - i.e. we totally disagreed about one character and had a meltdown about that (we avereaged about one meltdown a month, though, so it wasn't unusual). And another friend and I wrote silly continuing-story scripts loosely based on a sort of amalgamation of Doctor Who and Hitchhiker's Guide where we tried to write each other into corners. I suppose they *could* be called fanfiction, beause they often starred two people named Ford and Arthur, but that was about the only relation they had to canon, and neither I nor my friend was under the impression that we were writing something that had anything to do with Hitchhikers, other than screwball comedy.

I wanted to be a filmmaker and an animator for a while. I got sidetracked out of the entertainment/publishing industry in college, when the art department made me run screaming to the relative safety of Anthropology, which led to a number of years of messing about until that art/storytelling thing popped up again. And which means I'm now locked into some serious student loans so I can't make an effort at being a full-time pro artist for about a decade, by which I'll probably have bought a house or something and still can't do it, but hey.

Cool. How did you go from Anthropolgy to the reference desk?

Fairly logically, actually.

B.A. Anthro -> M.A. Anthro/Museum Studies -> Slide Curator in architecture library -> MLIS with concentration in Digital Imaging -> I.T. Librarian -> 5 hours on the Ref desk per week to keep me honest.

It's certainly more logical than my career path!

XD I think I am my father's daughter: he always said he changed careers every seven years whether he needed to or no; it's just that he was lucky enough to find a position where it was the same employer. (He was a prof at Texas A&M, and managed to change his research interests completely every so often. Oh - his BA was in physics, his PhD in ecology, he worked in the wildlife science department, and by the time he died, was nibbling at the edges of artificial intelligence, and how it could be applied to modelling animal behavior.)

And your career progession is...? :)

Your dad sounds incredibly cool.

My careers, euphemistic as possible to protect my Sekret Identity: commercial writing, project management, graphic design, back to commercial writing and more project management (in PR, the one job I swore I'd never take when I got out of college!). So far. XD

I've always wanted to work in a library. Is it hard to get started?

Yes and no. It depends on: do you have an MLIS, and what sort of library you want to work at.

If you want to work at a public library and you're willing to volunteer for a while, you can do that and wait for a position to open up, and libraries are usually more likely to hire someone they know.

Without an MLIS, you're mostly limited to library technician positions, which tend to be either the same job as a librarian only paid less because they're trying to save money, or someone who is mostly on the front lines at the Circulation desk.

With an MLIS, it's pretty competitive (the 'volunteer until you get hired' thing is still a good strategy to add experience to your resume), but once you manage to get hired you'll get paid more if you're degreed than if you're not.

If you want to work in a specialist library - corporate, law, K-12 school - then you'll need to get an MLIS that specializes in that sort of thing. If you want to work in an academic (college) library, it helps to have a degree in another subject as well as the MLIS, and to have had experience in an academic library, although you can get that by volunteering or working as a student while you get the MLIS. If you want to specialize in cataloging, that requires taking certain classes and somehow getting experience in it as well.

It's also easier to get a job if you're willing to move, and willing to move to a small town. I spent 11 months looking for work (8 of them after I graduated), but I probably would have been hired sooner if I'd been willing to move to sompleace other than Dallas/Fort-Worth, which has *two* library schools pumping out graduates.

And don't believe the hype that all library schools are spewing about how all these librarians are retiring and there's gonna be a huge boom in library jobs. Many places aren't hiring librarians to fill those positions, or they're hiring part-time, or they're hiring technicians instead of full librarians, or they're just not hiring at all. :)

I worked/volunteered at my little local Texas library all through high school. BEST JOB EVER. But yeah, all my real librarian coworkers said the job prospects were sucky. (Not that my soon-to-be BA in English Lit - Creative Writing is one of "WOW! LOOK AT ALL THE IMMEDIATE AND GREAT JOB PROSPECTS!" Eep.) They had a high turnover rate in the children's librarian position, because the librarian would get there, discover that the library was nice but the town was tiny and boring, and leave a year later.

I can't work at the college library here because I don't qualify for work/study; I'll still get little pings of envy when I see the student workers there.

BA Anthro: "Would you like fries with that?" Which is why I went to grad school the first time. :) Only to discover that entry-level in museum terminology means "M.A. required, slightly above minimum wage with no benefits, and did you say you were sucker enough to take out student loans?"

Really? The student workers often look so miserable or bored, I don't envy them, although I've always thought working in a library would be a fun student job. Although maybe that's just because they're having to work, and the college library's not the most "alive" library.

I prefer the St. Andrews library because it's always full of people. I like to know that I'm not the only one studying. Also there's a chance of seeing the Prince on your way in -- which has happened to me :)

Agreed on the 'willing to move' stuff-- my small town spent months without even a candidate on their library search, but it's a part-time position that doesn't pay a ton.

What's the best / weirdest excuse for a lost / overdue library book that you've ever heard?

I don't really deal with Circulation, so I don't get to hear much of that. However in my previous job as Slide Curator, where we checked out slides to professors, I got to deal with primadonna professors who insisted they'd turned slides in when they hadn't (and who found them in their offices later in the semester), and I once had the morbid job of going through the office of a professor who'd died (COnstruction Science guy, and fell off a roof at a job site he was inspecting), looking for slides he'd checked out and never returned.

And when another prof died and his family gave us his slides, we found ten softcore 70s-era porn slides that just happened to be stored with his construction slides. :)

Ah -- Overdue! A good story: the slide collection is located in the architecture library, and while I was there, we had a family return a journal that had been checked out 67 years previously. :) The guy kept it, adn after he died the family found it and returned it. We actually made international news - it was obviously a boring news day - because a New Zealander on a mailing lsit I was on told me that she saw a blurb about it in her paper.

Porn slides in the construction slides! (No one's ever going to look there!) Guess that's what you did before the Internet if you didn't want the hassle of hiding or disguising magazines and tapes.

Apparently. :) There was one cheesecake shot of a naked blonde, back to the camera, looking back over her shoulder, and the THE END were written on her butt, one per cheek. I'm thinking he used that one to end his presentations back in the day, before more women got into the field. XD

Yeah, these days "PowerPoint with Porn" wouldn't fly. Not that I'd complain if they showed us some yaoi to end a boring presentation -- I'd stay awake for that!

Hah. Faculty members are the worst, because you can't go after them tooth and nail when they don't return things (and bizarre as it sounds, students are just more conscientious as a group about returning books, possibly because they think they'll get in trouble if they don't). When I would check stuff back in, I saw cards for items that had been taken out by professors years ago; my boss had basically given up on getting things back from them.

Students at the slide collection I was at weren't that good - they could check slides out for two hours for presentations, but for nothing else. And invariably they'd whine and plead to be allowed tot ake slides out for longer or for another purpose, and *every* *single* *time* I bent the rules, they kept the slides out far longer than they said, in some cases even overnight. So I became a hard-nosed bitch about it.

Mind you, the profs never turned them in, either, but we didn't pretend they were going to. XD They placed boards marked with their initials in the place where the slide was supposed to be, and so other profs could see who had it out and go get the slide themselves. Our policy was not to get in the way of that sort of thing; it'd only get our heads bitten off.

When I was in high school, I bought a book at a garage sale that turned out to be 46 years overdue from the local library. I returned it with great fanfare, and got a small mention in the local paper.

Everybody else is asking insightful questions that will help us to know you better as a person. >_> I will not do that.

A) What color are your roots?

B) Are they the same color as the rest of your hair?

XD

A) Ash brown.

b) Nope. :) Started dying my hair in 8th grade had haven't looked back since. Being ash brown means I have ash highlights in my hair that look grey under flourescent lights, so you can see where I was motivated to start coloring in 8th grade after a week in which three people mentioned my grey hair.

My roots look a bit ashy right now because my hair's dyed darker than it really is (dyed a somewhat dark red, natural color: used to be blonde, now I think it's very light brown). I used to dye my hair blonde so I was used to dark roots. I've always noticed that blondes or very light-brown-haired people have gray-looking hair when they have a buzzcut.

Eww. Working in a library is going to mean a lot of time under fluorescent lights, too.

(I've had strawberry blond hair my entire life, but it darkened a bit in my late teens. I was unutterably depressed the first time someone said my hair was brown "No. It's red, jackass. RED. Here, let's go stand in sunlight, so you can see it better. You call this brown? Huh?")

Yup. Hair dye is my friend!

Strange about the red: I get people calling my hair red even when it's not red, but brown. I have witnesses - my friend Jennifer has been present when other poeple called me a redhead and we stared at each other in incredulity, because it was manifestly brown.

Might be the ultra-pale skin and green eyes fooling people into thinking I've got red hair.

Anyway, my color now is a rich dark brown with red highlights, so people are allowed to call me a redhead again with me thinking they're insane.

Jacket, huh? That's okay....I found out today that an end cap sign that's been up for 3 weeks had the freaking product name misspelled (HansOn's instead of HansEn's.....Yeah....freaking moron....)

Hmmm....can't really think of any questions at the moment, so I'll spare you. XD

Completely off-topic, but your icon is cracking me up. *dies laughing*

lol, thankees. I fell off the couch when I noticed the kid poking him (granted it was at least the second time I had seen that episode...)

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