A Master at last

Bad blogger. Bad! In my defence, I've been busy. There are a few things I need to photograph before they can feature in posts of their own. But first:

I'm back from Quebec. I'm also back from London, ON - I finally graduated with my MLIS. I'm so glad to be finished this degree. It was really stressful, but hopefully worth it. Convocation was long and boring, as convocations tend to be, but it was also worth it. I had lots of fun catching up with my former classmates - officially qualified librarians, all!

Got hooded in a screechingly bright yellow colour, described in the programme as "lemon." Purple and yellow are fun, though.

(Hey, at least I didn't do an MBA. Their colour has the inspirational name of "drab.")

The procession at the end of the ceremony was totally the best bit, and I have some video to prove it. The university seems rather attached to traditional trappings - we even sang God Save the Queen in addition to O Canada - so I never expected this untraditional musical choice for the procession out.



Brilliant. Made my day.

Back soon with yarny goodness!

Bonjour, etc etc

I'm safely settled in Trois-Rivières... and last night, along with about 350 other participants, I swore to speak French all the time and everywhere for the next 5 weeks. Right-o. I suppose the internet counts, but I don't think anyone is watching. Nonetheless, I'm trying to be conscientious about it since I really am here to learn - and I won't improve if I don't constantly speak French. So there it is.



Turns out that I have access to the internet in my room. Wahey! Another surprise is that the residence apartment I live in is clean and new - not at all grimy, dirty, or sketchy. Bonus. Though as the photo above shows, the view from my window is... spectacular. Ha. It's all good, and so far not too noisy.


These lovely, cute blossoms grace my walk to class. I don't know what they are, but I like them a lot. Anyone recognize it? It's a bush.

Tomorrow, a WIP on Wednesday.

Always packing.

Tomorrow, I'm going to the wilds of la belle province to do a 5 week French course. I'm excited since this is a great opportunity that costs me almost nothing, but I'm also nervous. The main reason that I'm not fluent in French yet, despite years of exposure through school, university, living in the nation's capital, and most recently working for the government, is that I don't practice speaking because I'm too scared. Until now! Or so I keep telling myself. I'm hoping this course will provide me the kick in the ass I require to use and improve my French. (I'm also hoping it will be super fun. We'll see!)

I'm going to miss watching the garden change through summer.


Nothing to do with anything, but the other day I opened the door and was overpowered by the smell of lilacs. Mmmmm.

So I'm packing. Whenever I try to fit things into a suitcase, I'm reminded of how much unnecessary crap I have. I'm a failed minimalist, since I don't WANT to be a person that owns a lot of stuff, but somehow I collect it and I have a hard time letting go.

I'm trying to pack as for a 5 week vacation, but I keep thinking of this as a packing dress-rehearsal. I have a huge trip coming up a few weeks after I return from Quebec.

In July, I'm going to the UK for an extended period of time. I'm actually moving there, although saying that still sounds impossible. But an extended stay of 2 years + counts as moving, right?

Seriously, that's a logical trajectory. Learn French - Move to the UK. Haha. Whatever. I've been planning this for literally years -- ever since I went on exchange, fell in love with a local boy, and realized that this relationship is worth much more than two or three visits per year. Until now it has been a distant hazy future sort of planning. Now that all the paperwork is sorted, it's starting to feel real, and there are real details to line up. It's all very serious and life-changing, and whatnot. But mostly exciting and terrifying. This is the trip I'm really excited about. And this is the trip that is looming in my head, even though I have a significantly shorter trip coming up tomorrow.

There will be time to sort through my entire collection of worldly possessions when I get back from Quebec, so I don't really need to think about that now. And yet, whenever I look at my suitcase, I start dreading that process, instead of worrying about what I'll need for 5 weeks of university accommodation, cafeteria meals, and weekend excursions.

Not sure what the internet situation will be for my time in Quebec, but I'm bringing my laptop along and hoping for the best. I'll aim for some travel blogging, but not going to make any promises.


Violets are my birth-flower, and we have lots of them in the lawn now.

Sigh. Packing beckons. Enjoy your May/June, everyone!

Thursday Word: Cachinnate

Tomorrow I will attend my last class of graduate school, which has turned me into a complete crazy person for the last few months or weeks. So today's word is appropriate.

Cachinnate
laugh loudly and in an unrestrained way
~Free Online Dictionary

I predict much cachinnation tomorrow starting at around noon. Possibly accompanied by consumption of fine ale, but maybe not. There might be cachinnation before that coming from various faculty members as I do one final group presentation... but that's kind of a worst-case scenario, since database design turns out not to be that funny.

What's a word for a mixture of excitement and trepidation? Because that's what I feel right now. So ready to be done this degree...

On repeat

Essay time. Ugh. I have such a bad attitude about my studies at the moment. Not sure if I'm prepared to enter the working world in earnest, but I am definitely ready to finish graduate school.

I found this today, and have been listening to it over and over. So fun.



If an angry mob ever tracks me down, I hope they are as cheerful as this one. And I hope there are drumming bears and skeletons involved. Awesome.

never a lonely knitter

I think whenever I'm lonely I'll sit in a crowded place knitting.

In the last year I've started knitting in public more that I had before: on the bus, on the train, at knit nights / meet-ups, in the park, in the lobby... I've gotten used to most of the weird looks and comments - usually positive, sometimes perplexed. A man on a train a few weeks ago leaned over me to plug in his laptop and said "If you knew there was power, you would have brought your knitting machine, eh?" To which I laughed nervously and didn't explain that's not how it works.

Today I brought Vivian sleeve #2 to university so I could knit a little when I needed a break from the computer lab. Sitting downstairs behind the Tim Hortons, I attracted the attention of one of the Tims ladies who exclaimed she used to knit when her children were small, but she doesn't remember a thing anymore. I don't know why, but it made me smile. I said something dumb about how she could learn again, but she was off.

Anyway. Little moments. Back to work now.

finishing

November is nearly over. No more inane daily blog posting for me? Haha.

I'm excited for December for a number of reasons, in no particular order:

-end of the semester
-4 weeks off before my last semester of grad school!
-going home, where this year there is no bus strike
-winter (maybe even snow)
-going to England for Christmas!

In preparation for the above, I am working hard to finish:
-2 gifts
-2 presentations
-some blog posts
-1 digital library
-1 final paper
-Vivian

So that's where things stand here. In terms of my workload, the worst is over, and although I'm not looking forward to the inevitable scramble before the very end, from this vantage point it all feels so manageable. :)

labour disputes follow me around?

There's a bus strike in London. When a strike was on last year in Ottawa, I managed to miss most of it by moving to London... But I can't escape this time. On the bright side, I live reasonably close to everywhere I need to go, so I'll be fine. I need to get more exercise anyway.

I'm preparing a seminar presentation for Thursday, and I just read Private Peaceful, by Michael Morpurgo, as part of it. It hit me harder than I thought it would. Simply written, not very long, and even though I'd read dozens of summaries and reviews, the ending shocked me. A look on the author's website shows that he and his wife started Farms for City Children, a charity that lets children from cities stay on the farm and experience farm work for a week at a time. Very inspiring.

Knitting librarian

One term down in library school and I'm totally absorbed in library geekery, giggling about bookish, cutesy book, and pretentiously radical librarian shirts. (Although I'm not too keen on this, even ironically.) I'm not the only one: we pass around library youtube videos on the class listservs and spend our facebook time poking fun at ourselves and the whole library structure while simultaneously embracing it.

TT820 Classy Knitting, recently of Decimal fame has a run of awesome librarian-inspired/related sweaters and the like. Before I realized her blog name was TT820, I saw Decimal and thought, "DEWEY" because that's how my brain works right now. Of course, when I saw TT820 it looked familiar; after all, I wrote an essay a few months back on knitting in the Library of Congress Classification. Hurray, I am in on the joke for once?

All this to say, I love the library knitting aesthetic right now, and I'm looking forward to the patterns for Harriet and Myrtle.

It's okay to deny old librarian stereotypes while still living in great cardigans, right? Hell, I wear my hair in a bun frequently but that doesn't mean I'm not fun. Right? Right? Hah.

In other news, my epic adventure of today was transporting my computer chair by bus to its temporary home. And saw some people walking down the street with a canoe earlier - I kind of wish I was part of THAT adventure because it was probably more epic and provoked less dirty looks than mine.

Success?

After a jittery morning, after lots of interviews over the last few weeks, after some strained and stressful resume editing and cover-letter compiling... I have a co-op job for the summer! I didn't expect to get this particular one, but I'm excited about it. I think I'll learn a lot, and as terrible as it sounds, I'm anxious to leave town. Not so enamoured with London, ON.

It's all contingent on marks, though, so the pressure is on. This one paper gets my nearly undivided attention for the next while, and Strunk & White once more becomes my bedtime reading.

And I want to work for them this summer...

Politics alert!

In February, at the urging of the graduate student society, I did something I've never done before.

That's right, I emailed the prime minister. Ha! As if that's going to do any good, but I thought I might as well exercise my civic right in these troubled times.

I wrote an eloquent (ha!) email voicing my concerns over provisions for $87mil towards graduate scholarhips in the budget of which the extra 20% allocated for Social Science and Humanities grants would go entirely to business students. Outrageous! More business students sitting around arguing about the economy will not improve it, I say! Anyway, I sent off the email, and received a reply a week or perhaps more later from an aide saying my concerns had been forwarded to the minister in charge of the portfolio. They said it was Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources Development etc etc whatever they call it these days, and I paid it no more attention.

Today I received an email from this particular minister's office saying that my concerns about scholarship money had been forwarded once more, this time to Tony Clement, the Industry Minister, and apparently the one who is actually responsible for the portfolio.

It appears nobody is quite sure who is doing what in this government. I certainly had no clue SSHRC fell under Industry until I looked it up today after receiving that unexpected email. Turns out Diane Finley's aides have some idea of what's going on, thought it's not clear why they sat on it for a month. I can only hope they had to sort through a deluge of concerned emails about Canadian Graduate Scholarships that got mistakenly sent to them by some loser in the PM's office.

Actually, I don't hope that. Not that it would do any good, since the budget passed and is rushing through all levels without much modification.

But my little voice got stalled in the ether for over a month due to the PMO's total incompetence. Help, help I'm being oppressed! I almost think it must have been intentional - misdirect the complaint and claim it never happened. ;)

Hello World

As usual, I'm at the point where a few solid hours work would probably result in a finished product. Maybe not a brilliant finished product, but one nonetheless. And yet the thought of getting my notes out of my backpack, opening a Word document, and starting to reorganize all the crap I am tentatively calling a literature review makes me shudder. So I am blogging. (Typical.)

I spent a good solid 5 hours on the computer earlier. I got so much done today. Just a little more... Until tomorrow. And the day after. Sigh. Whine whine whine moan moan moan. Okay, I'm done. Down to work.

Searching the literature

It amuses me that the engineering building looks like a church. I'm going to call it the Church of the Engineering from now on. Now for utterly unrelated ramblings...

I ought to have suspected that a general search of LIS literature relating to the internet would be interminable. Since apparently LIS is collectively obsessed with the internet. Come to think of it, most people are obsessed with the internet, but in reading these LIS studies I'm finding that there is a sense of urgency. Everyone is terrified of becoming obsolete, and yet many are clinging to traditional forms and catalogues that require some foreknowledge to use effectively.

Reading these studies is a somewhat disorienting experience, not simply because of their length (though they do make my eyes water from compuer-gazing), but also because I can see myself in their analyses of clueless undergrads engaging with the library catalogue for the first time. Honestly, I've learned more about the intricacies of effective searching in the last few weeks than in the past four years. Nobody claims Carleton had a particularly brilliant library; in fact, I believe the words normally used to describe it are something along the lines of... well, something impolite. (mumble LEARNING COMMONS?!). But I used it, and I'm pretty sure I never used a boolean operator on the catalogue the entire time I was there. Never mind truncation!(In my defense I did employ boolean operators when on the internet). I don't think we ever had an instruction session from a librarian or anything, although it's not clear if that would have helped.

I don't really have a point, other than to say that I think in undergrad I took shelter in the inadequacy of my research. It was a deliberate choice to pick JSTOR and stick to it, only reluctantly using other databases. I never once got an interlibrary loan, nor did I use any journals I could only find in print. Good thing I didn't do a thesis, right? Learning how to actually make use of the wide world of library before me is kind of terrifying, but obviously liberating. My disbelief in the extent of my own library incompetence is mitigated by my recognition that I did it on purpose. I chose to only look in easy ways, and I managed -

But now I'm left with this endless literature search of doom, and I can't fall back on these artificial limits: I feel like I have to find EVERYTHING in order to make up for my past inefficiency. When will it end? How thorough is thorough enough? Gah.

Discouraged

I ran out of yarn knitting Tempting II. I have an inch more of yoke to knit, and then the neck band, and then I'm done. Lately, in my frugality, I can't seem to buy enough yarn. This happened with Liesl as well - not enough yarn, had to cannibalize the sleeves. It's slower going with tempting, though, since I didn't realize that frogging from the cast-on edge isn't as streamlined as frogging from the bind-off edge. It never even occurred to me, to be honest, until I painstakingly undid the sleeve edge only to find that it didn't all come undone easily. I left it there, shoved it back in my drawer, and moved on. I am so close to finishing this thing that I really don't want to just leave it, but it's turning out to be more effort than it's worth.

To console myself I ripped into my Gilmour vest, and discovered that I am a failure at proper frogging, too. Lame. It's not necessarily my fault. The yarn is very sticky, so even frogging it takes awhile. Lots of coaxing and untangling. I hope the yarn is fit for use after. (Notice, I didn't rush out to the LYS which I still haven't explored, to snatch up luxury fibres that I know are there. I'm still being good. Nearly).

I'm doing all this in between short spurts of actual work. They've got me in a panic over the workload, even though when I look at it rationally it is totally doable. And I'm doing it. But I'm not so keen on the essay parts so far - I aimed to leave this behin at least for a while. Oh well. The presence of essays continues to define my existence. What else is new. Blah blah blah.