Grad School: Day 2.

On Saturdays I have two courses: Reference and Information Services and Technology for Information Professionals. What is obvious by looking at the titles of those courses, and became glaringly apparent as I attended my classes today, is that I am about to be power-leveled in my expertise on information. This is going to be quite a bit more intense than I thought it was going to be...and I had no doubts that it was going to be pretty intense.

It is also going to be very fascinating, though. There is a lot of information out there stored in a lot of different ways in a lot of different places. There are also a lot of different types of users looking for an interface with various samples of all that information. This program is going far beyond simple vocational training. It is going to be about understanding the theory, construction, and practical use of data generation, storage, the liaising of data with people and more data, and the evaluation of all the above.

I see where this road is heading, and it is both exciting and dangerous. Kerry had already pointed out that a librarian makes a very boring drunk, as after a martini I was going off about action research vs. usability testing. I'm plunging into this profession, so I hope I made the right choice.

If you read this blog, you might be interested to know that I now have a twitter account, @snookju. It is apparently a tool relevant to librarians.

Grad School: Day 1.

So the first thing you should know is that on my first day of graduate school, I was sick as a dog. I have one of those sinus infections that has my cheeks and forehead swollen and throbbing, and my eyes on the verge of popping out of their sockets. So I put some Tylenol sinus and a bottle of blue stuff in my briefcase (along with a schedule so I could take the maximum dosages), popped Kleenexes in my coat pockets, partitioned off a part of my briefcase to be a paper/snot receptacle, and shoved off at about 7:30 yesterday morning to beat rush-hour traffic.

As it turns out, there is no rush-hour traffic between Worcester and South Hadley, so I got there and hour before orientation registration started. I did however, realize my mistake halfway there...at the point when it started snowing on me. It's been warm here recently, so I hadn't taken weather into account. No snow brush. No de-icer. No hat. No scarf. Ah, well. I arrived without incident and enjoyed a nice Irish cream (syrup) Cafe-Au-Lait before making my way to the conference center.

First point, Mt. Holyoke campus is beautiful above and beyond any university I've ever seen. The buildings are all incredibly old, dark brick, classical edifices...surrounded by equally classical trees. Seriously, one tree was so large that they had scaffolding set up in the branches to trim it. The campus has a stream with a waterfall as well, around which is built the conference center where we had our orientation.

After arriving at the center, signing the honor code, and getting my ID made (I looked good), it started to snow in earnest. So while listening to explanations about courses, advising, program goals, organizations, acronyms, events, etc., I got to sip on chamomile tea watching snow fall into a waterfall. Orientaiton talks were supposed to be delivered by multiple faculty, but they were all sick...so bravo Terry Plum for taking care of it all for us.

After orientation talks, we had lunch. My academic advisor was also under the weather, so that is forthcoming for me. My next big event was a library tour, which was absolutely astounding. The campus library spans three buildings, one of which is seven stories tall. The central foyer looks like the anteroom of an imperial castle, and the functional bits come off of it like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle--making it feel even more castle-like. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I would rank their main reference room on par in beauty to the National Cathederal. It had nearly a three story vaulted ceiling with ornately carved strutwork, massive thick glass windows with thousands of tiny little panes, real dark-wood bookshelves, and random windy little wooden staircases that led to reading balconies big enough for one. It is like a book cathederal. I could go on about the rest of the library...I'll just say that it was all amazing.

After the tour, we had a couple-hour orientation to the various technological tools available to us. We mingled for a bit and dispersed, thinking that the snow was over.

The snow was not over. After enjoying a corned beef sandwich from the Tailgate Picnic, I was walking back to the GSLIS office when the whiteout hit. It came from behind me, so I didn't even see it before it hit the back of my neck and head. I turned around to see that the world had transformed into a ghostly white. Teeny tiny particles of snow were falling in such quantities that I couldn't see my own hand at arm's length from my face. It was neat, but very cold and windy. So I read Peter F. Hamilton on a couch in the office until class started.

My first class is Evaluation of Information Services. From my first impression, it is going to be all about using qualitative surveys and quantitative statistics to evaluate the efficiency of library systems. So I get to learn about statistics and bibliometrics. Yay. That'll be new. I've never been a big numbers fan, but I am a little excited about this. For my first project, I think I want to try to compare the relationships between collection development expenses and staffing expenses in Massachusetts public libraries as they change based on the size of the library and the number of patrons they serve. I honestly really want to graph this.

Class let out at 9:00 p.m. By then, I was ready to go home. So I chiselled my way into my car and let the defrost work for a while before driving the pike back to Worcester. I really, really hope that I'm a little better before my Saturday classes. Being the creapy guy who carries around kleenexes, blows his nose every ten minutes, sneezes every fifteen, and takes swigs from his bottle of blue syrup just doesn't suit me.

A Decade's Worth of Evolution.

We get used to changing the number we write next to our signatures, on our papers, and in our correspondence. But do we really count the years? Ten years doesn't seem like that long a time, but a lot has happened in the first ten years of the new millennium.

On Jaunary 1st, 2000, the world did not end. I was in ninth grade. I was still as devoutly religious as an angsty teen can be and halfway convinced I would end up being a Baptist preacher. I played Runesape and watched the scifi channel every Friday night at my grandparents' house. I was very proud of my 512 mb of memory and my cutting edge 1 gig processer. I thought that Yahoo chatrooms were the mecca of intellectual/religious/philosophical discussion. I worried about wearing cool clothes and looking good...despite having horrible acne problems. I still weighed in the 140's. I still knew how to do math, but I wasn't capable of growing a mustache--much less a beard. I thought that all science that didn't line up with traditional Jewish mythology was quackery, but I still hated tomatoes.

It would a year before I lost my best friend from my childhood: my Grandma. Another half a year after that before I would go to ASMS, discover people who didn't think exactly like me, declare open war on them all, and lose. Soon after, I would first begin to secretly question my worlviews upon meeting my very first gay person, becoming friends with him, and realizing that my entire religious philosophy did an inhumane injustice to him. Oh how the dominoes tumbled from there.

It would be two years before I got my truck (I'll never let you go). Three years before I graduated high school, started college, and met my best friends of today. Four years before I started dating Kerry. Seven years before I would graduate and get married (I'll never let you go). Eight years before I would work at the library in Little Rock and my knee issues would start to become debilitating instead of just painful. Nine years before moving to Massachusetts, failing to find work, and wondering what to do next, and finally deciding that I want to spend the rest of my life as a librarian. Ten years before starting graduate school.

Television had yet to be transformed by reality TV, as Survivor was still in its first season. Terrorism was a word few people ever heard or spoke. Cell phone networks were patchy at best, and text messages were just coming into their own. Social networking meant going to dinner. The closest thing our nation had come to a war in nine years was Kosovo. When someone talked about the Lord of the Rings, you knew they were a fantasy reader. And Warcraft was just that--no World of.

Yep. Things change.

A Board Christmas.

The things I enjoy doing with my family the most can be ranked as follows:

1. Sitting around the dining room table sipping beverages, eating snacks, and playing games.
2. Sitting around in the living room sipping beverages, eating snacks, and chatting.

We got to do plenty of both while I was in Bradford, but we fundamentally redefined the first. Ever since my family started playing games--which was near the end of my childhood if I remember correctly :(--we have pretty much always stayed inside a pretty safe little realm of gaming. It started with Uno. When we got a little tired of playing Uno, it shifted to dominoes. And there the great experiment ended.

I love playing Uno and dominoes with my family, but those are both pretty passive games. You are dealt a hand which dictates your actions for you, and from there you have relatively little ability to affect the game in any significant way. Being with good company is what makes those games enjoyable more than the gameplay itself.

That said, my family always got excited by throwing monkey wrenches: failing to close a double domino, opening up the lines, and wreaking havoc on each other's plans in dominoes; stacking draw cards and watching the first person who doesn't have one squirm in Uno. Since Kerry and I got Citadels and Settlers of Catan for Christmas, we decided to push the envelope a bit and try to teach some new tricks.

I suppose it still just feels awkward to entertain the notion of actually teaching my parents anything, so I was intimidated...scared that they wouldn't like it or see it is not worth learning. But it ended up being a big hit. Loren was skeptical about Catan, Mom was afraid it would be too complicated, and Dad thought it wouldn't be fun. But once we got into the swing of things, we played it for...er...somewhere around thirteen hours over two days. And then we even played a hand of Citadels.

These are the kinds of games that I love. In one game, Dad and Kerry formed a solid trading alliance and collaborated to cut Loren off from her resources and destroy me and Mom's production capacity with the robber. In another, Loren managed to build three roads and a settlement in one turn in order to cut Kerry off from a port she was after. Loren and I ended up in a road building war and Mom managed to steal all the brick. It was down to her winning the game unless I managed to do it in one turn. I lacked some resources, but a very disgruntled Kerry did not. :)

Good times, great memories...I predict that Mom, Dad, and Loren will own their own Settlers of Catan within a month.

Almost Home.

Of all the potential problems I could imagine hampering our holiday travels, I never expected what actually happened. We drove from Worcester to Hartford with eight inches of snow still on the ground with no incident. We made our connecting flight in Baltimore without succumbing to the chaos of the Christmas Eve crowds.

But if you've ever seen one of those videos of crazy crosswind landings in the rain, that is what touching down in Little Rock was like. Rain and wind. Kerry's parent's picked us up and drove us home from the airport via the bypass as the interstate connecting the airport to Little Rock proper was shut down due to flooding. Even on the bypass, the water had already risen up across one of the two interstate lanes. We passed some road construction...all their machines were under water and their timbers floating around where the access road use to be.

Off the interstate, we passed spots where water was washing over the road two feet deep and cars were lining up to fjord the rapids. The interstate was flooded between Jacksonville and Cabot, cutting off that route to Bradford. And the windy little road running through the lowlands to Cabot was in no better shape than the road to Kerry's parents house.

So apologies to my family this Christmas Eve, but I'll see you tomorrow!

Winter!

Words like snow, cold, and winter have taken on an entirely new context for me in the past couple of weeks. Snow, once denoting an occasional inch or two of white powder that would disappear before noon the day after falling, now means a foot or more of tenacious, heavy fluff that has to be shoveled, swept, and salted away. Cold, once hovering in the mid to upper thirties, seems to be leveling out at about eleven degrees.

And winter, which once served as a blanket term for the few months in which we could expect chillier temperatures, a bit more rainfall, and perhaps a snow or two, I now understand as a stretch from November to what I hear may be April of biting cold where snow is on the menu weekly (and on the ground permanently) and sunlight is gone by 4:15 p.m.

Yesterday, Kerry and I went to Rockport to do some Christmas shopping, and I saw massive plates of ice floating about in the ocean. I wore a massively thick sweater that my Mom gave to me back when I was in high school for the first time...and was still bloody cold.

Driving past historic towns like Lexington, Concord, and Salem, I saw what I'll call ice watefalls (for lack of a better word for them) poking out of the rock cliffs on either side of the road. And for the first time, I realized what winter really means in all the history I've studied--for the Native Americans, the Pilgrims, the colonists, the soldiers in the wars that made our nation...and so on. It isn't like Arkansas winter, where we can go outside before dawn and tramp around in the woods to hunt. I can honestly see now how without modern gadgetry, winter up here would be a time when all you can really do is hunker down and try to survive.

Its really, really freaking cold, and I love it.

Isn't stuff like this only supposed to happen in sitcoms?

So at about six o'clock this evening, Kerry called me and asked if I wanted to go out. We had been "invited" to go out for appetizers and cocktails with the neuropsychiatry residents with whom she is currently working. I think hard when it comes to going to ritzy places, but decided I would be a supportive husband and go mingle with the doctorfolk.

We arrived, the valet parked our car for us, and we found our party sitting around a large table with barely enough room for Kerry and I to squeeze in. We ordered our martinis and food and tried to make smalltalk. It was a bit awkward, though, as half the people were residents and the other half were some other sort of support staff. Not to mention that Kerry has only been on the service since Tuesday. So in short, the table consisted of three different groups that didn't seem to know each other.

Just when we're beginning to settle into decent smalltalk, in walks what I can only assume is the attending from hell. She pranced up to the table and declared, "Who are these people and what are they doing at my table?" Four residents immediately stood up in a panic while a fifth gobbled down his meal that that had just arrived in less than a minute. We ended up shuffling around while a solution was sought. The resident who invited us insisted we sit back down (at a different side of the table), but one of the others (techs, I have been informed) leaned over to me and said it would really be preferable for us to leave.

The poor confused waitress ended up bringing our meals to the waiting rail, while the group of four to five old crones ended up annexing the table that could have easily seated twice that many.

Experiences aside, the food was delicious. I had a group of four...things...that were comprised of asparagus and cream cheese wrapped in a thin sheet of sliced sirloin and marinated in teriyaki sauce. 111 Chop House may very well end up being one of my favorite restaurants since a good number of food items and cocktails are only five dollars from four to seven every weekday. I'll enjoy making a reservation for me and the doctor that I do like sometime.