Opal

Moody Blue
Originally uploaded by jessajune

My parents gave my sister and I each a piece of jewelry to celebrate finishing grad school. Alicia knew pretty much exactly what she wanted, and got hers almost right away. I waffled for a long time... it didn't take me long to decide I wanted an opal, but it took me forever to find a piece that spoke to me. This was made by Artisan Impact, who I found via Etsy (of course). Sometime when I am less caffeinated and excited I will try to take some better close-up shots so you can see the lovely detail. Today, I can only really operate on the level of excitement! blue! sparkle!

It all really happened. I have my degree, and I'll think of that every time I wear this lovely piece.

(Yes, the stone is manufactured. No, I don't care. It is fiery and blue and large and perfect and I have wanted one ever since I was a little girl.)

Confusion

The headache can't be that bad if you went into the bathroom for aspirin and then forgot why you were there.

Or maybe I'm just completely befuddled because I just TURNED IN MY LAST PAPER EVER.

That's right - there is not a single thing left for me to do. I have just finished grad school.

The Holidays are Looming

Laurie writes:

Can you believe it's just a week-and-a-day until Thanksgiving? If only holidays were meant to be spend under a blanket watching Spencer Tracy movies and knitting and drinking warm tea spiked with calvados while the cat sleeps on your feet.

To which my initial response was... aren't they? Because that sounds pretty awesome to me. Okay, I'm more likely to drink coffee spiked with whiskey and cream or a glass of red wine. And I tend to put my blanket under the Xmas tree. But still.

I am looking forward to the holidays as only a student who has submitted her final project can do. Now if I can only get that pesky last paper written (for my internship) I will be finished! And desperately thinking about the holidays rather than job finding. Ahem.

November Stress

Between the elections today and my project for school plus the usual suspect triggers... I have been smitten with a migraine. But my ballot is safely cast. So that's good.

Now I'm going to bed.

Blogkeeping

It's like housekeeping, only online. I've taken down some of the linkage and whatnot in the sidebar, and added a Flying Spaghetti Monster banner (motivated by this story, because seriously, how awesome is that? hat tip to Ari) and a master map of all my tags. It's an enormous list, which meant that then I had to go back and re-sort things to remove a lot of the one-offs. I didn't start with a plan, I just kind of made them up as I went, and you could tell. All the onesies should be gone now except for Music and Theater, and I'm keeping those because I want more music and theater in my life. If I succeed in that, I'll have more posts under those categories.

(Oh and Creepie Crawlies is still there because I love it as a tag name. So, uh, yeah. Maybe I'll post about that salamander E and I found a while back. It belongs under CC for sure. )

Yes, I AM supposed to be writing a paper. Why do you ask?

Escape Opportunist

Loki got out this week - I apparently neglected to make sure the back door was completely latched. One assumes he had a merry old time, because ever since he has been INSUFFERABLE. He goes from door to door, meowing, and scratching at them all to make sure he can't pry them open. It might be funny if I weren't trying to work on my portfolio and feeling irritable.

This cat needs more space than I have in this tiny cottage. He is stir crazy, and he wants me to know it.

Postscript

I am embarrassed to admit that I spent a lot of time writing the post below when I was supposed to be reviewing example portfolios so I can get my first competency paper drafted. It's a pity I had so much to say about a topic that I WASN'T supposed to be covering for the final project.

Also, as you can probably gather from context, school has started. I have 2 papers a week until end of October to write for the portfolio (after that I'll be revising and doing re-writes as necessary). Except this week - I gave myself the first half to find my evidence and only set myself to do one paper. Which, by the way, I'm behind schedule on. Back to work!

General Life Update

School starts in just over a week. My internship is lined up, and the school-side orientation has been attended. I should be chatting more with my library (Santa Cruz Public) this week. I've printed out my "core competencies" so that I can start lining up school assignments for evidence this coming week while I'm staying at the beach house of some friends. (The printout is backup in case there is no internet access... not sure what I'll find when I get there.)

Fortunately, I juuuuust started to get restless as summer came to a close. Good timing, self! It means I did a bunch of prep the last 2 weeks that I'm going to be glad about next month.

Life otherwise has had some ups and downs, but nothing too horrible. I got to see some old friends this weekend, and it was nice to be reminded both of how much I like them and their quirky ways, and that it's not a bad thing that I don't hang out in that crowd anymore. Sometimes when I'm worried about the future, it's easy to take a rosy view of my "hippie" period. But really, I wasn't happy a lot of the time when I was living that life. I need to build my own happy medium, since I haven't really found a good local community that matches how I want to live. I need to remember that this is not a bad thing. It just means I have to work a bit harder at it.

So onward and upward, into my last semester of grad school! May I come out on the other side in 2009 an unscathed, graduated, balanced person, ready to look for gainful employment.

Not Dead Yet... I think I'll go for a walk...

Yeah. So um, hi. That whole "if you don't have anything nice to say..." rule makes for a crappy blog. Also, I've gone back to using Twitter as my primary status source, it seems. I am apparently getting better at short-form posting.

Quick update:
- My mobile phone is dead. It was in fact, my only phone, so if you need me, send a tweet or email. I hope to get a new one over the weekend.
- Big mystery project is still only 3/4 done and I haven't worked on it for weeks. I need to drop all other procrastinatory hobbies and get back to it. I'm kind of over this and ready for it to be finished. I still think it's going to be awesome, it's just... sooooo time consuming.
- I managed (after much last-minute scrambling) to submit my intent to graduate or whatever-the-heck-it's-called for December 2008. Why December graduation stuff has to be filed in March (aka 9 months in advance) is beyond me. Scheduling completion of a master's degree should not the temporal equivalent of birthing a baby, IMO.
- There's a big meet-and-greet for the applicants for the Saratoga Cemetery Board happening this Friday at 6pm in the Saratoga Senior Center. If you're a resident of Saratoga or Monte Sereno, or have friends/loved ones/acquaintances/enemies/pets/etc. who are, come on down and talk to the folks! It's only an hour, and we want the community to use this opportunity to give Supervisor Kniss their feedback.

Top of My Head

Loki is laying on my lap, leg dangling over the edge, as always, purring and kneading the air. It's about the cutest thing ever, especially considering that he was driving me NUTS this morning with pulling things out of the trash.

I've been forcing myself to get ready for the upcoming semester - which is good because it starts next week. I've been thinking about it for the whole of January but not DOING anything. Having a life without much imposed external structure is nice, but damn if I can't get ANYTHING done without more in-your-face deadlines. This self motivation thing is tough.

Especially when there are other things being impressed upon me from other areas. I'm not complaining about it (well, ok, I'm complaining about the whole land use issue, but I think that's reasonable), but when the motivation for everything else I need to do has to come internally I have a hard time prioritizing. It will be easier once things start and I have clear deadlines to work towards.

I'm also way behind in my budget - went on something of a post-holiday spending binge it seems... I think what really happened is that the holiday spending (which I did have a separate budget for) broke my new habit of frugality and I just sort of forgot that I can't just buy things the way I did when I was employed. I mean, I KNOW that but until I sat down and tallied things up I didn't realize how much I was just spending without thinking about it.

I've also been in a panic about the Large Project (tm) - I knew it was going to take a long time, but when a single pattern repeat takes an hour and a half and is only an inch high... getting to 6 feet by a very firm deadline is something of a problem. Particularly as much of my impulse spending was on yarn, and I have several projects I want to work on for myself. With one large exception (photo upcoming, I hope) I am not allowing myself to start them... which makes the knitting, which I am supposed to love, into something of a chore.

None of this is earth shattering, it's just what's in my head. Maybe releasing it into the wild will help me buckle down and get things done. You never know.

Digital Preservation

Other than the complete and total angst this paper is causing me, I absolutely love it. For my preservation class, I've managed to wrangle a research paper topic which focuses on exactly the problem I'm interested in.

Of course, I don't have a SOLUTION for the problem. But I'm enjoying poking holes in other people's so-called solutions.

(Disregard the bad writing, this is still my first draft.)

Some choose the goal of the physical preservation of the bits as all that can be managed, relying on future efforts for managing the “logical preservation”, or ability to render the bits into comprehensible data. “Not only is it a good bet to assume that technological innovation will continue and afford us the ability to decode the data later, but we should also assume that entirely new kinds of software may, through new types of data mining, find entirely new types of valuable information and expressiveness in preserved bits.” (Smith, p. 7) This is an understandable position, as it requires the least amount of time, effort, and budget from library institutions, which have many other tasks to focus upon. However, the assumption that is being made in this line of thought is a very big one indeed. While it is a possibility that the technology will be available to decode bits in the future, it is unlikely to be an easy task. And unless very good metadata is kept, and kept in readable format, it will be impossible for these future efforts to select which bits to rediscover.

I think I kept that politic, instead of saying what I really feel, which is "How can you be so stupid and irresponsible? 'Not my problem, kthxbye!' does not good librarianship make. Also, did no one ever tell you "assume" makes an ass out of you and me?"

Smith, A. (2007). Valuing Preservation. Library Trends, v. 56, p. 4-25.

Second Life University?

There seems to be a big surge in educational institutions trying to get into Second Life. The San Jose State library school opened their online campus last year (search the map in SL for "SJSU SLIS"), and tomorrow, Santa Clara University is doing the same ("Santa Clara Island").

I don't really get the appeal myself yet, but if you're into that sort of thing, you can come check out the California Legacy folks doing some readings from our radio show on the new virtual campus at 11am and 12:30pm. (For more info on the SCU SL virtual campus, check out the SCU announcement.) I'll be there as "Jejunet" - my Second Life name is a mashing together of my real life moniker. (I've always been amused that "jejune" (definition) could be easily made from my name by dropping a few letters. )

They did make us some spiffy California Legacy t-shirts to wear, too. Just in SL, though. Pity.

I Just Realized...

When I move, I will have no cat-free space for blocking, unless the item in question is small enough to fit in the bathroom. (And really, that will only be... socks and hats. Assuming I advance to these shapes in my new school-only life. Scarves will be too big!)

The shawl (it needs a name, I think) is 2 towels long. That's some seriously large cat-free space. As you may have noticed, I barely had room for it in my current apartment.

Maybe if I'm nice to my Bucket, he'll let me block things at his house. Hmm...

Exam Thoughts

Are you allowed to ask about the differences between JSP and ASP on the final exam if there was only one fleeting mention of ASP in the entire class, which went something like, "JSP was developed in response to ASP"? 'Cause that seems kind of bastardy to me.

Thank God for Google.

Confirmed

I am so clearly meant to be a word person rather than a numbers/code person. Seriously. I keep thinking, "No, I should get farther into coding!" and then I run into a situation like this... I have a written exam for a coding class. And ye gods, it is SO MUCH EASIER to talk about programming than it is to program. Seriously.

This explains why I freakin' rock at business analysis - I am really good at translating between development and business units. Because I understand both business: "we want X" and dev: "X is not possible" enough to know that sometimes you can get to X if you wiggle things around a little bit and approach from a different angle. And I almost have enough technical savvy to understand where that angle might be, and enough politic-ness to suggest it to both sides, though please, please don't ask me to do the actual coding.

I can't tell you how nice it is to be reminded what I am good at.

Now I just need to find a better way to harness that.

Advanced Basic Knitting

So I am sitting here, cat in lap, laptop balanced semi-on top of cat (there isn't really room for both of them in one lap), rather precariously knitting and reading Crazy Aunt Perl, with my new found "it's almost sort of possible to read web pages and knit at the same time, if you're willing to stop knitting and scroll every few stitches" method of entertaining myself.

This is a site that I stumbled upon one day during one of those periods of internet serendipity, which I promptly sent to Eddie saying "this is awesome" and which he now has an RSS feed for and reads obsessively every day while I have been back, maybe, twice. But Aunt Perl is awesome! And my lack of blog reading does not reflect on her quality or interestingness as a blogger.

And I think I have spent too long on her site this morning, because I am starting to sound like her.

Anyway, I ran across this post, about being an Advanced Basic Knitter which I have definitely seen before, but it is just striking me again how much this applies to me. I tell everyone - I pretty much only knit rectangles. I love knitting, I love the texture and feel of it, I love digging through my stash, I love the colors, I love making something useful out of something pretty. But this is not a hobby about "how can I stretch and challenge myself more" because let's face it, between the freaky stressful job, and the grad school, and everything else I am SO FREAKING CHALLENGED ALREADY. I want something nice and calm and non-stressful to do in the times that belong to me, so I can say, "when I do have downtime I do this fabulous relaxing and yet worthwhile thing with it. "

And you know what? That's okay. It's okay that I have an endless supply of scarves. They make me happy. They give me a productive reason to sit on the couch with my cats and play with fiber. And scarves are AWESOME. And my downtime is awesome. And that is a very good thing.