I think the intarnets are getting weird enough that this journal is going Friends Only. If you're not in on the friendship but are reading, let me know and I'll add you. Assuming I know you and you aren't an ax murderer. I was going to put "knife weilding psycho" but I know too many of those who are on the list.

The other morning I woke up from a dream in which I was apparently doing some sort of delicate in painting. In front of me was an array of paints, although now I couldn't tell you whether they were acrylics or watercolors, but I suspect watercolors in tubes. In the dream, I remember reaching for a paintbrush from a cup clearly marked "Color Brushes"... as all such paintbrushes are marked in any lab I've ever been in. As my fingers close around a brush, Karen, one of our professors, yells "NOT THAT ONE" and indicates that I can't use that brush with the specific pigment of watercolor I had selected.

I'm obviously working too much. I'm taking this weekend off whether or not I can afford to.

Oh Texas folks:
Is there anything really persnickety I should know about driving from the campus area to Austin Bergstrom International? I'll be doing it during Friday's rush hour, and you guys know me and my loathing of traffic. As long as I'm prepared I'll be ok, it's just knowing the things like "you must be in the left lane for x turn" which they never deign to tell you in Texas that get me...

In an effort to clear my plate for the weekend, I'm going to have a busy week. I got my paper case for my alum tawed thong binding done today with only one or two major goof ups. That's why we do the first one in paper, though, so you goof up on that and not the expensive parchment. I'm doing leather dying Thursday morning, possibly redoing my photos for my Dallas Botanicals collection book, and deciding whether or not I need to shoot detail aftershots to go with my Sam Houston letter: www.ischool.utexas.edu/~megbrown/samphotodoc.html. Whatcha guys think? I've got some before shots of things like the signature, address, and a couple of the joints where the page was broken that I could do afters of as well, I just don't want to overload the page.

I'm completely ignoring research and mostly ignoring Users this week. If only all the users projects weren't due in the near future...

I am produductive, but only though the utter denial of the fact that I have a research project. It doesn't exist! la la la la la

But Users crap is done for the week. I think. It's hard to keep track of all the stupid little projects with their required stupid 2 page papers and idiotic number of required power point presentations. The entire class thus far has been a series of glorified book reports that I really don't see the point of. Hell, I don't see the point of the class, as virtually all of this was covered in Intro to Research. But, alas, it is required, so I do it.

It's good that I'm pretty much caught up though, since Alex is coming down this weekend. Happy dance! First visit from Obiefolks down to The Land of Heat and Tacos. I'm excited because this is the perfect excuse to blow off work and get around to doing some stuff I've been wanting to do for a while, like, you know, relax. I don't have a whole lot of plans, but my favorite bar is hosting a fundraiser for Blue Dog Rescue this sunday. Live music, free food, and all the money you spend on tasty beer goes to help puppies. Hard to argue with that. I'm also thinking breakfast tacos and maybe a trip out to the Salt Lick are in order. We'll see.


In about half an hour I'm going to go talk to a prof in the English department about taking his Bibliography class next semester. He actually teaches book history. At UT this is a part of the English department rather than History. which I find interesting. Should I be taking 4 classes next semester? maybe not. But I've been missing book history something fierce, and I want to try my hand at the real academia stuff again. Perhaps it will talk me out of the strange urge to find a PHD program in book history. I need to convince myself to get out of school while I can.

Tonight Austin made me think about friends I haven't seen in a really, really long time. Specifically, I was thinking about Tony while eatting a slice of gluten-free, wheat-free, coulda-been-dairy-free cake. It was one of my housemates' birthdays, and M*, my sweet housemate, decided to bake a cake. S*, the housemate whose birthday it is, is not allergic to wheat. M* doesn't have a car, so she looked in the general vicinity of our house for cake mix. Two CVS's and the Co-op Grocery later, the only cake mix she could find was the above wheat/gluten/dairy free one. So she made her famous chocolate cake-with-cream-chese-frosting with that. mmmmm. It's good to come home to "Hi. There's cake in the fridge." Am I stress eating? You betcha.

Being proactive about the future is ... stressful. We have to pick our top three internship sites and send out letters by the end of the month. I'm definately sending one to NY Public, but after that I don't know. The funding for Cornell fell through, and I don't think I have the where-with-all to live in Ithica without any money coming in. I'm going to look into Princeton, and some stuff like the Morgan. I might look at the Folger for shits and giggles, but NARA is more likely if I'm going the DC route. I'd like to put at least one medium-ish university on the list, since that's where I'd like to end up, but if I'm not looking in the NJ/NY area I need something with some cash flow. That's why I was so excited about the Cornell project. That and the fact that it had to do with East Asian collections. Sigh.

I'm also going to be looking into taking a bibliography class in the spring. I have to ask real nicely, 'cause it's a required course for the English PHD, and they don't let many non-english folks in. I *want* to take Rare Books Librarianship, but some idiot scheduled it for the same time as Preservation Management, and I have to take that instead. Gods, it's too early to think about next semester, much less next year.

My bike route has some interesting logistics to it. ( Commuting has giving me entirely too much time to think lately... )

This weekend has been very productive, in the best way possible. I took yesterday off. pboyd04 decided that it was high time I saw Texas, and got us tickets to the Texas A&M v. Baylor game. I hung out with him Friday night, spent the night on his couch, and in the morning we grabbed breakfast tacos from a place where not much english was spoken and hit the road to College Station. It was a morning game, which meant that it started at 11:30 and resulted in several hours of sitting in the bright sun. The game was fantastic, and I was surprised at how well I could see the field, given that our seats were high enough to have their own weather patterns.

It was a very good thing I went with an alumnus, or I wouldn't have understood half of what was going on. The other reason I was glad I was with an alumn was that the alumns get to sit down. The students stand through the entire game. They also yell a lot, most of it against UT, which was strange since they were playing Baylor. I was very glad I hadn't worn my UT hat. I was equally glad I'd snagged a free hat on the way in because otherwise I would have died of heatstroke. After the game I got the three-penny tour of A&M, and we grabbed a beer at the Dixie Chick.

The Dixie Chick is a bar in which 83% of guys from Oberlin would immediately be beatten up. Ok, maybe not, but the testosterone levels were high, to put it lightly. the UT-Kansas State game was on TV, and the crowd was fulfilling the maxim, "Aggies cheer for two teams. A&M, and Any Team Playing Texas." The Aggies had crushed Baylor 41-10, and UT was losing, so the crowd was very happy.

Today I got up early and got to lab at a decent hour. I finished the endbands on my alum-tawed split-thong text-block which will go into a limp vellum binding, and cut pages for another double raised cord binding. I didn't like my tensioning on the last one and I want another go at the endbands. I have to say, I like sewing the structural primary endband on an alum tawed core... I can't squeeze the fuck out of it like I occasionally do with a cord core, and I feel like the book could make it through an eathquake afterwards. It's probably just a factor of the fact that these structures are way too sturdy for the little models we're making. It's kind of like creating a steel suspension bridge to cross a 2 foot wide stream. Fun though.

Now I'm baking bread while "doing my Users reading." yup. Look at me read...

A Note in my Usability text book, Observing the User Experience, on User Profiles:

"If you spent your college evenings acting or playing role-playing games, now may be your big opportunity to put that knowledge to use in the working world. Dust off those improv and Dungeons and Dragons skills and show your coworkers how it's done! (You may want to leave your Beckett collection and your 20-sided dice at home.)"

Yeah, this is definately one of the more readable text books.

Roomie got to write the article she wanted, the way she wanted. Mostly. Headline? "University offers affordable STI testing." They made her cut the funny line about "after a busy ACL weekend, you might need these services..." They said it was too judgmental. pah. It was funny. But at least people know, now, where to go and what it costs. Not the *greatest* article ever written, the editorial staff butchered her intro so it starts rather abruptly now, but it's informative. I'm so proud of her.

Even if she did make me the pull-out-quote. With bad grammar. oh well, I was tired when she interviewed me.

On the theory of "what? who needs free time!?" I have joined the Information School Kickball Team. It's about the level of committment I need from a sport right now. No practice, games are on Friday, and they ask that you limit your alcohol consumption to the dug-out and cans. The league has some weirdly sexist rules, but otherwise it seems like it'll be a lot of fun.

So that's right, I'm a member of The Doublin Hardcore. If you get the reference, congradulations, you're an Info-nerd. My number will (barring someone else having grabbed it first) be 098, which for the non-dewey-speaking folks is the Dewey Decimal Number for banned books, hoaxes, and forgeries. Our mascot is a pissed off shamrock, which everyone who's ever seen Doublin, Ohio, finds amusing. We're green and white, and the first game is on Friday.

When I get my shirt, I'll take a picture so you guys can see the cuteness. This should be fun.