May 2016

There were 2 posts published in May 2016.

the week that was

photo of me in VPR studios taken by Jane Lindholm

So hey last week was nutty! In a mostly good way. The Vermont Library Conference happened and I received an award for Library Advocate of the Year, an award given out irregularly and last given to Bernie Sanders in 2003. This was mostly for the advocacy I did around the Librarian of Congress over the past year. What made it extra special was that my friend and neighbor Virgil (also VLA president) was the one who gave it to me. And that my local librarian Amy gave me a heads up that I’d be receiving it so that I would come to the conference earlier than she knew I would otherwise, so nice of her. The town library gave me a shout-out on facebook. People have been wonderful.

The next day I was interviewed on VPR’s Vermont Edition show about library stuff, the award, moss, the gamut. You can listen to the interview on their site and I should be getting a transcript up in a few days. I was nervous, like I always am, and carried a little card with me that said DON’T SAY UM and DON’T SWEAR and it went well. Jane is an incredibly gracious and friendly host and helped me be my best self. As a token of thanks I made her a Wikipedia page. Vermont being in a tech shadow often means that people who would otherwise deserve pages there aren’t represented. I can help with that. And when the page was reviewed and slated for deletion (“How is this person notable?”) I had the photo of her ready plus my librarian skills to make the case.

The funny thing is, I think the reason that I was on VPR has as much to do with this goofy tweet I made than anything else. A lot of the opportunities I’ve had lately have been “right place, right time, open to anything” sorts of situations. I got to meet Jane because I was willing to drive all the way to Colchester instead of sitting in an empty studio with a headset on in Montpelier. I got to talk to the White House because when someone gave me contact information for someone there, I followed up on it and when they said “Are you free for a phone call tomorrow?” I said “Yes!” even though I wasn’t really free, I just made the time. This is not, at all, to say that there wasn’t a lot of luck (and the privilege of being able to make these sorts of choices in the first place) that helped me out here. But also that there are ways of “forcing luck” if you’re already in a position to take advantage of it. I think calling myself lucky does gloss over some of the work I’ve done to make some of these things happen. But saying “I worked hard for all of this.” isn’t quite true either. I mean sure I work hard, but so do a lot of people.

This next week starts a whole new challenge which is teaching graduate school (for University of Hawaii) online and asynchronously. I am nervous, like I always am, but made a really nice website and (I hope) some good choices of what to talk about and how to talk about it. Site isn’t finished yet but you can look at it here. I’d been putting off working on it because I was so mad at the Course Management Software I couldn’t really think straight. So I just asked myself “Well if you could use whatever tools you wanted, how would this work?” and came up with this. I hope it works. I think it will. I’m lucky like that.

offline projects

envelope with a man's face on it on top of a painting endpaper from an art book

Continuing the quest for offline hobbies and activities I’ve added a few things to my “stuff I know how to do” list. Last week I was in Westport and instead of getting the lawn guy to take down the sea grass that grows really tall in the backyard (you can see it in this image only now it’s taller and dead) I decided I’d try to do it myself. This involved learning to use a hedge trimmer which I’d never done before. Internet randos claim this isn’t a skill–“Is mopping a skill?” they’d ask–but it felt skillful to me. Especially since I did what every novice hedge trimmer user does and chopped the cord clean off. “Why is that part of the hedge on fire? Oh…” I presume this is something everyone does because 1. that is what everyone told me and 2. it has a replaceable cord. So that went mostly well. Jim helped a lot with the clean up. Always save some time and energy for the clean-up. Advice I used to ignore and now mostly do not.

This week I was back at home and had a week with multiple hours of (mostly good) online meetings and I needed a thing to do which was offline and nominally creative. At some point I need to go mossing but the outdoor weather hasn’t been quite there yet. I went by a thrift store to drop off some stuff and found a cool book about as old as I was, full of art photography. I decided to revisit an old hobby which was making envelopes out of nifty old paper. So I spent the time in-between my sub shifts at the library cutting and folding and gluing. I took a few photos and put them online and people asked for more detail so I supplied it in the form of a HOWTO set. And then for laffs I made an animated GIF of all 40+ of my envelopes. I think they look pretty good. Now I need to write some letters. Fortunately this is not difficult.