This morning I was able to recall my dream. It probably helped that I woke up to my own laughter. I apologize in advance for doing a dream post, I am compelled…

I was sitting at the smaller of the two reference desks – the one normally reserved for handling the majority of phone calls – when a youngish hipsterish type couple with child in tow approached and began speaking to me in low voices. I couldn’t hear a word, and said as much, to which the lady of the duo said – it‘s so quiet in here… – which, in point of fact, it was definitely not.

While they continued to soft talk, a line started to queue behind them. The low rumble of multiple bodies in proximity began to grow. I continued in vain to try to understand exactly what the soft talkers were after – beginning to lose my patience. Some of those in the queue took rest in the seats provided on the other side of the reference desk.

“look – I can’t help you if I can’t hear you – you’re going to have to speak up.”

Then – looking over with concern to find their child who had wandered off some distance – I noticed that another member of the queue had taken the liberty of resting in my chair, which I had vacated so that I could lean in to try, oh how I tried, to pick up any syllable of these mumblers. And she was eating cake! They were ALL eating cake! (It was pink cake, for the record)

For some reason this struck a nerve.

“Excuse me, if you could wait on the other side of the desk, and really – there isn’t supposed to be any food by the computers…”

At this point, shit got real. The growing noise of the gathering masses was beginning to tweak my senses. It was then that I realized that in addition to the shuffling, breathing, mumbling, childing, waiting in the queue conversating – a familiar crescendo of music was rising. All of a sudden, the track lighting began to dim and brighten – like it was some laser show spectacular – over the reference desk – in time to the music – which was similar to Pink Floyd’s “One of these Days” – but different.

I looked over my shoulder to see my brother, Willishrinx, seated before a lightboard – with his familiar maniacal grin face – rapidly manipulating the dimmers in time with the music. This brought on a slight sense of panic – and I quickly looked towards the main desk as if to say “I don’t know what’s happening – I’m SORRRRRRRRY” – before looking back at his shit eating grin and just breaking out in laughter.

That’s when i woke up.

Should be an interesting day.

External Hard Drive

Back in December my external hard drive ceased to be recognized by my tower. I’ve had it for quite some time and use it mainly to store my music files and my iTunes library. When it went, panic set in, and eventually I had to accept that I was going to need some outside assistance to get it back up and running.

Thanks to twitter I know somebody in the business and put my trust in him to set things right. After picking up some chazzano coffee I dropped off the external hard drive, watched him run a quick ear test for the dreaded click of the dying drive, and then left it in his hands. A couple days later he let me know that the data was fine – it was just the enclosure that needed to be replaced.

This led me to go all in and agree that establishing a backup system would probably be the bees knees. I’ve got too much music on that drive to let it all go to waste. So we’re in the final stages of that now. He’s ordered a secondary drive for the tower and a new enclosure for the hard drive and all of that should wind up, at long last, before this weekend with some backup software installed.

No word on the cost yet. It likely won’t be cheap. But data recovery never is.

Furnace

I can’t say that I’ve been too concerned with the data mess. The holidays came and went and I got to spend a lot of quality time with my family. As I continue to grow into my old man years – my love for my family grows exponentially. It was incredible to hang out with seestore, willishrinx, the nephews and my in-laws, including my new seestore-in-law.

A couple of highlights include their first dining experience at Slows BBQ, sledding on the hill of doom with the nephews, a visit to the DIA to see the Fakes and Forgeries exhibit, taking in True Grit, Bloody Marys on Christmas morning and a heckuva lot more.

Shortly thereafter, the parents left for their new snowbird home in Florida. I woke one morning to a rather brisk bedroom – and as I descended downstairs, to an even brisker family room. Something wasn’t right. I still wasn’t awake, but if you ever need a jolt stronger than coffee to knock your senses around – try staring into a thermostat that’s supposed to read 60 and get 46 in return.

The furnace wasn’t keepin on like it’s supposed to keep on. It’d rumble for about 45 seconds and then cut back out. I ran through the troubleshooting in the manual, but nothing seemed to be taking. I’d have to put in a call for maintenance.

Now get this. The guy they sent out was actually named Sammy Lovin. Not McLovin, just Lovin. It took the keen eyes of a good friend to point this out to me when she happened upon the receipt – but I’m glad she did. What a name!

Sammy rigged it so the fan would stay on until they could order a new control board – which meant I had heat over the weekend – but that my electricity bill is probably going to take a hit. That Monday he came back with the new control board – and after $395 – I have a heated house again. Oof.

Heated Car

So the house is heated and all is starting to be right with the world again when what should happen but another heat related catastrophe. Whilst out with said good friend, after a delicious encounter with dessert and drinks at Cork Wine Pub, the fan in my 2000 Ford Focus went schizo. When I moved the switch from 3 to 2 – it cut out, and then full on blasted – and then cut out again, for good.

I just finished piecing that back together. It started with a $25 resistor, as I’d replaced that part before and it was my prime suspect. No such luck. Had to pull the blower motor. Took that up to O’Reillys auto parts, where they were having some problems getting some juice into the motor to test it. They kept running the wires to it and to other things and were having no luck. They were at wit’s end and even at the point of giving up, suggesting that perhaps it was the $81 motor. But one guy kept at it, improvising with some motorcycle jumpers – which created a delightful shower of sparks – but also spun that motor to no end. It wasn’t the motor.

That left the switch. That simple thing on the console that goes from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. I had to special order it but it was delivered this morning. Picked it up and about two hours later I had heat coarsing through the car. Awesome. $26

Headed to work and realized the turn signals weren’t working. Not a good thing for the anxious. I just finished one of my worst shifts ever in the public librarian realm — came home — popped out the stereo and saw that I had forgotten to hook up one of the wires. That’s done.

Wire DVD

Speaking of wires… After much urging I decided that I’d take up another friend’s repeated suggestions that I watch The Wire. Apparently people that watch The Wire must make other people watch The Wire. She has the complete season – and had lent out Season One to the friend that had introduced us.

Tiny Apartment #103: “The Wire” from Tiny Apartment on Vimeo.

(video via said friend)
I’ve misplaced disc two of season one of The Wire you guys. IT’S NOT LOST. It’s just misplaced. If, for some reason, it doesn’t reveal itself soon — I’ll likely be purchasing Season One of The Wire. $30.49. Or losing a friend. She really wants to not be my friend right now because of this.

So that’s another 1000 word update. Sorry it’s not quite so uplifting as the last.

(Update) Found it. Hiding under the keyboard.

In case you don’t already know – I like to occasionally document the weird and wonderful objects that make their way into my mailbox at work. It had been a while since I last checked my mailbox, but to my delight today I unearthed from its depths a couple of handwritten thank you cards from authors Jennifer Brown and Robin Brande. Both were thanking me for my part in serving on the Michigan Library Association’s Thumbs Up! award committee.

Jennifer Brown’s Hate List won the award and Robin Brande’s Fat Cat was an Honor book winner.

Kinda made my day you guys.

I also had two valid reference questions today that I totally rocked out. The one I’ll mention was from an education student at a local university who was looking for information on Resource Rooms in Special Education.

I have no idea what Resource Rooms in Special Education means – so I did a quick google search and fell onto the about.com web page that gave me a little bit of background. I knew pretty much off the bat that we weren’t going to have much in the public library on the topic, especially in our print materials. The student related that she had already been through WilsonSelect and ERIC without much success. She said she had found one article that she Interloaned from 2000, but it wasn’t enough, and that she wasn’t finding much at her University Library.

I did a quick keyword search for “resource room special education” in ERIC and came up with something from 2008. But she was right, this was gonna be a little bit narrow on the results. I’m not familiar enough with educational terms to do the whole synonym thing – so my next step was to head to Google Scholar with the author’s name as a search.

We found the original article and I pointed out how Google Scholar shows you who has cited the article – and how you can use that to kinda expand your search. (Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten the official citation search database I was using at WSU — somebody refresh my memory please.) Then – once she grabbed the journal names that the articles were in – she could likely use her University’s resources more wisely. Her professor had enlightened her to ERIC and WilsonSelect – but something was nagging at me that she had failed to mention the specific journals as opposed to the conglomerate databases.

The end result was that she walked out with what I’m going to take as a swing in her step – a little confidence – ready to do the business herself. It really saved MY day today – almost as much as my sole.

*edit* Oh. I almost forgot to mention Google Reader Play. There. I mentioned it.

Yeah. I know. Not really all that grand right? But it’s made for some fun diversions at work and in chat, so I thought I’d mention it.

Actually, the past couple of days I have mostly spent in bed. I think between Friday and Saturday I was out of bed for about 8 hours total.

Then I went to work on Sunday. It was hellish.

So I really haven’t had a lot of time to cruise the interwebs in order to scrounge up any other tasty morsels. About a week or two ago I did manage to stumble across Programming Librarian. Immediately added it to my diet of feeds and look forward to seeing their booth at PLA (booth #1035) in a couple of weeks.

I’m also rather intrigued by this Anythink business. They’re really pushing out their message along the social channels – but I still don’t quite get it. LISNews ran a story about ‘em back in September. The comments on the story, while brief, are somewhat telling. (They seem a bit angry too, don’t they?) I especially like the “branding” comment. Right now this seems like somebody has taken a library system, changed the philosophy, and really pumped up the marketing. David Lee King did a presentation for them in October, also mentioning the word “brand” in his blurb. I look forward to seeing them at PLA as well, and maybe getting my hands on a kazoo. I kinda feel like I’ll have to watch myself though, or risk indoctrination. I really need to know more to say anything else about it.

More about PLA Portland – I’m once again working on constructing a map to guide me around town.

View PLA 2010 in a larger map

Thankfully, http://www.portlandbeer.org had already mapped out the breweries, and http://foodcartsportland.com the infamous food carts – so that saved me a lot. If any PDX residents want to drop some helpful hints on what else we should hit up while we’re there – the comment box is open.

*edit 3/12/10 3:55pm*
just came across this video

*edit 3/12/10 4:18pm*
Hidden Portland Facebook page

*edit 3/21/10 1:16pm*
Zinester’s Guide to Portland

I have sadly become one of them.

There’s a lot of stress in library world right now. What with property taxes taking a nose dive and the economic downturn as a whole, not only is the general public on edge, but your friendly, normally heavily sedated librarians are feeling the grind as well. At our library we’re looking at a 15% reduction in the budget, on top of the 5% or so drop we took in last year. Where does that leave us? Substitute librarians are a thing of the past for now. Department, committee, and any other meetings that take us away from the desk are being shuffled and cut and spaced out further and further apart. (I can’t say that this is completely a negative thing. There are often better ways to communicate within an organization than through monthly meetings. Still, the encouragement to become involved with your professional organizations or any other outside the box thinking is not as boisterous as when I first arrived on the scene about 5 years ago. Our lot has been cast, and that lot means that) Our eight hour days are now to be spent with additional hours on the desk dealing with increasing amounts of reference transactions.

Yet, even with the increased gate counts and reference transactions – libraries are taking a hit. It’s a cruel twist that in the times we’re used most, we don’t get the support we need. So it goes.

So I am pressed for time, and I’m pressed for sanity. It hasn’t been an easy three years for me. I’ve experienced unspeakable pain and loss, well, unspeakable in that I won’t talk about it to anybody but my therapist. I really had no desire to sit down here and type anything out. But the other night I was lying awake in bed and I was thinking about how good it felt to finally sit down and actually think things through and just write it out. I have a post about group/silent study rooms or the lack thereof to thank for that. I’ve read Nicole’s work on the web as far back as I can remember, but group study rooms and their demand has become such a flashpoint in the past two years that I had to respond. I was a little unfair in picking at her choice of words, but I was trying to convey that there was equal frustration on the other side of the coin in regards to what libraries can and can’t do with the space and resources that we have. I think she understands that, and I’m glad that she takes the time to write up posts that are more often than not worth the time none of us have to read.

So I want to start writing again.

I used to put pen to paper daily. I used to love the ink releasing and actually used to have decent handwriting. I’d go all out for the loopy letters. These days I’ve been reduced to chicken scratch. I would much rather type than pen. I think I just have to accept the new medium, but I can’t accept where it’s put me as regards to my writing. I don’t need to find the time. I need to make the time, getting back to the introductory paragraph. I don’t want to be that person who shuns off something because they feel they’re too busy. I know I can do this. I see other people doing it everyday.

There are really three things that stopped me from writing. One was the aforementioned unspeakable. I went to a dark place, and I think I’m just about ready to emerge from that. I’m not afflicted with clinical depression, thank goodness – but I was definitely not in a good place for the past 3 years. The second was the chilling effect from worrying about what work would think about what I wrote. It was doggone thoughtless to register this site and expect to write about professional matters without fearing the repercussions. I’ve got a backup plan in the works for when I feel like I need to vent, something akin to this, but not. The last reason was that I’ve become fed up with my hosting provider. All I wanted was for the lifestream to update on its own, every 30 minutes or so – but these guys haven’t been able to get it done. So – for the first time since Yezbick.com has existed (2003?) – I’m likely to migrate to a different host once my lease runs up here.

There are other things, of course. Facebook and twitter are worthwhile distractions. But they don’t give me the release I can get from pounding at the keys to usher in an 800+ word update. They distract me from that. I’m fairly convinced that this is my return. That I’ll go ahead and make an hour an evening and have a go at it. I’ve got plenty of material to rehash. For starters there’s my delicious account. I could talk about any one of those sites that I’ve found it worthwhile to store into my own personal database. It was actually my “Read it Later” queue that inspired me to sit down here tonight. I’ve let it grow and I meant to make this post an exploration of the links I haven’t quite gotten to as of yet. Instead I’m on a rant. Perhaps I’ll put that off until tomorrow. I’ve become quite adept at procrastination.

1000 words. I promise it won’t be like this every night. Not even close. More than likely it will be more akin to:

Interesting –

Social Eyes presents librarians with an exploration and discussion of new social tools and current trends. The column will address both practical and innovative uses of social technologies that will improve the quality and efficiency of library services.

Unfortunately I don’t remember where I grabbed this from – as Read It Later – doesn’t give you the spot where you actually noted it from your twitter stream or wherever. So I can’t give credit. SOZ. This isn’t the case with my delicious account. There I often make the effort to at least plug a little bit of what the site is about and try to hook up a via tag. Either way – I think there’s a lot more to be said about the things I come across – if just to make me feel better and more productive.

And here I am – closing out this rant – and it turned into something exactly the opposite of what I expected it to be. Here’s hoping I have the same resolve tomorrow to go over what I didn’t get to today.

But every superhero has their kryptonite, and the other day I ran into mine.

But every superhero overcomes their kryptonite – and this is how I overcame mine:

Sometimes it’s best to channel your angry into creativity.

I’d already posted this to twitter – but I thought I’d give the fam a taste of what I sometimes encounter in my daily life.

I’ve helped to keep score at Battle of the Books the past two years. The competition is fierce and the air is electric. This is the reaction after one of the questions — they reacted this way each time.

- Laughter Club – 3 per month – 2.5 years
- idea came from senior
- folder with “laughter club” written on it
- Senior Residence
- What is a laughter club
- Improve health
- reduce stress
- feel more positive and optimistic
- what happens
- breathing
- stretching
- laughter exercising
- good-hearted living
- Unique features
- no jokes in laughter club
- sounds of laughter and motion create exercise
- simulated laughter stimulates laughter
- laughter exercises done in group setting
- led by a certified laugher leader
All you need is a willingness to laugh
- how do you become a laughter leader
- www.worldlaughtertour.com
- What does it cost?
- $400 for training workshop
- texts separately
- $75 annual registration
- $45 annual certification renewal
- can be run for free or a fee
- Why Laughter is Good for you
- reduces stress