Category Archives: Blog administration

Blog administration, Graduate School, Librarianship

Year Two, and Year Fourteen

It has been quite a while since I’ve posted here, but there is a good reason: in September 2018 I started graduate school in pursuit of my second master’s degree, and since then I have been trying to master the balance of full-time job, part-time graduate school, and living my life to its fullest.

Happily, I survived my first year of school, and on Tuesday I will be beginning my second year of graduate school. As these things tend to go, I’m hopeful that my second year will be less stressful and more manageable (one can hope, right?), the theory being that after surviving one full year’s cycle, then I’ll have the skills to better anticipate challenges and scheduling conflicts.  Stay tuned to see if that theory proves correct…  🙂

It’s been interesting going back to school as a middle-aged, mid-career adult, especially since most of my classmates are in their 20’s and 30’s and are new to the field.  I’m attending Simmons University as an online-only student, and I am working towards a Master’s in Library and Information Science.  As the title of this post suggests, I am about to reach the fourteenth anniversary at my job as the head children’s librarian in a public library, so some of what I am learning in school is not new to me.  The Simmons program is quite challenging, though, and I am being exposed to many new ideas, theories, and practical concepts, which is making this degree more than worth the time and energy (and money) that I’m spending on it.

For the fall semester, I am taking my last required core class, Technology for Information Professionals, which is a little daunting but also very exciting.  I’ve heard rumors that the final project for the class is to build a personal website from scratch, which definitely intrigues me.  And given that this class focuses on technology of all kinds, this seemed like a particularly good moment for me to resurrect my blog.  I’m going to try to post at least once a week, perhaps more frequently, and to include posts about what I’m doing/learning in school and also posts about what is going on at the wonderful library where I work.  And, of course, there will be posts about cats…  😉

Blog administration

It’s been a while…

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Yes, I have been very neglectful of my blog for the last year and a couple of months – life has simply been too busy, and I have been wrapped up in doing very important things.  But I wanted to post a quick update to say that I’m still here, still a children’s librarian (ten year anniversary at my job was in November!), and that I will write a more substantive post when life circumstances allow.  And meanwhile I am working hard at bringing some new things to my library, things that I’ll be enthusiastic to write about in the future!

Blog administration, Summer reading

Ten days!

Ten days to go in this year’s summer reading program!  It’s been a whirlwind – never a slow moment – and Jim and I are planning a fair amount of down time in our upcoming vacation (a stay-cation).

And the program I most looked forward to this summer is coming tomorrow:  Wolf Talk!  Yay!  If I get any good photos of the wolf, I will post them here.

One last thought: I really, really wish that the spammers and hackers would leave my silly little blog alone.  I’m really getting tired of people trying to hack into my blog, and I do wonder why in the world they bother with me and my domain.  How hard is it to get your own website, spammers?  Please leave this lowly little librarian alone.  🙂

Blog administration

Some changes here

I have recently upgraded to a new theme for this blog, and there are two changes to be noted:

I consciously changed the comment settings so that readers can only comment on posts that have been published in the last fourteen days.

And, I have noticed that this new theme has a habit of splitting words at odd points to justify text.  For instance, in one past post, the word August was split this way:  Au  gust, with no hyphen after the Au.  When I have more free time on my hands, I will try to figure out how to fix this (if it can be fixed), but for now please know that it is the software and not I who is splitting words oddly.

I hope you enjoy this new theme as much as I do, though!  I especially like the random rotation of header photos when you click on one of the pages.  The photos are:  Moses as a wee little sprite of 6 weeks; crocus in our yard; and the odd duck that we saw a summer or two ago when kayaking on the Concord River.

Blog administration

Winning?

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I wish I knew.  Things here in blog-land have been a little under assault lately, and hopefully are now fixed.  Many thanks to D. of my hosting service, and to my brother for his sage advice; I’ve done everything that I know how to do, and with luck, there will be no more troubles.

Yes, this post is a little vague, but that is intentional.  🙂  I’m actually running my own sort of test to see if blog-land is happy again.

Blog administration, Cats Dogs Plants Animals

Kittens and Computers

One thing I’ve learned over the last few months is that three kittens don’t coexist very happily with a laptop computer – between the jostling to share my lap and the temptation to chew the power cord – and, as a consequence, my poor blog has been gathering virtual dust.

But yesterday I upgraded to WordPress 3.8.1, which promised to be compatible with mobile devices.  So here I am, with eleven pound eight month old Moses in my lap, typing this entry on my iPod Touch…which is proving to be one of my more frustrating experiences of recent months.  Give me a real keyboard over a delay-ridden tiny virtual keyboard any day!  Blech!

At least Moses is happy, and now you all know I’m still here, in Kitten Land.

Blog administration, Continuing Education, Spare time - Culture

Screen Time

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Yes, I know, I have been terribly remiss about posting on my blog lately.  It’s all about screen time:  I spend about nine hours a day at work staring at a computer screen, and when I get home, I hate to spend too much more time in front of a computer screen.

Ok, so it’s about screen time AND self-control:  I should be able to just turn on my laptop for fifteen minutes to write a blog post, but it’s so tempting to just check Facebook (which I actually hate) and then just check my email (far too much work to actually answer any emails, though) and then just check my work email (as if I hadn’t just left work) and then just check the Garnet Hill sale of the day…and then the entire evening is gone and I feel like I’ve wasted my life.  And, more often than not, I never got around to writing that blog post after all.

I see this pattern with the kids who come to the library after school.  They all race here to be the first on the computer (each user gets a half hour on the computer before being bumped for people on the waitlist) and then they slump down in front of the computer and mindlessly play computer games.  Yes, I slump too.  Yes, my web surfing is just as mindless as the computer game playing.  The difference is that I’m a bit older and I grew up without computers – and I am beginning to feel more than a bit mortal and don’t want to waste what’s left of my outside-of-work life in front of the computer.

So I made a goal for myself around the time I broke my foot, mostly because it’s hard to balance a laptop on your lap when you have to keep your foot elevated (which I had to do for eight weeks).  The goal, which I have achieved, was to spend more time reading in the evenings.  It’s been absolutely wonderful – I’ve had time to read books other than the books I need to read for book groups.  I’ve rediscovered Agatha Christie, and now I’m ready to rediscover some of my favorite authors: Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

But it’s time for me to add a new goal to this goal of reading; it’s time for me to spend fifteen minutes a night writing on my blog…and then to exercise that thing called self-restraint and Turn Off The Bloody Computer so that I can read.

What do you think? Can I do it?

Blog administration, Etc.

Quiet Abby

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Yes, I’ve been quiet lately on this blog – I’m still having troubles from the wisdom tooth that I had to have removed in February (had another surgery two weeks ago today), and I just haven’t had the energy or motivation to write on the blog.  One very quick update on my tooth troubles, for those of you who might ask:  as of Monday, I have now switched oral surgeons in hopes of achieving full recovery.  I feel absolutely terrible about ditching my first oral surgeon, because she is so nice and so smart and I really like her, but I wasn’t getting better and I can’t continue on this way any more.  My first oral surgeon left me a phone message this morning, and I feel dreadfully guilty about having hurt her feelings.  Yuck.

In library news, storytimes and book groups continue on as usual, and I’ve found a new level of hyper-efficiency at work now that I live in fear of being out with dental problems at any given moment.  It’s amazing how much I can accomplish when I’m going at warp speed, which I estimate to be 200% speed (twice my usual, that is, and my usual is pretty darn efficient).  But it does leave me pretty tired and depleted on my off hours, hence the lack of blog postings.

With any luck, I’ll finally recover soon, and with any luck, I’ll be finding my librarian voice again soon to write interesting blog posts.  This has been a rough year, and I’ve become pretty worn out over the last nine months.  My apologies that this has meant inconsistent postings!!

Blog administration

In Progress

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When we switched my blog over to this new format in July, strange nonsensical characters appeared in the text of all archived entries.  (And yes, I know, there will be certain siblings who will feel compelled to make a joke here about strange characters…go ahead, get it out of your system…)  I had forgotten totally about the need to fix all of those old entries – all four years plus of old entries -until a week or so ago when I asked that my blog be listed on my alma mater’s alumni blogroll.  Ooops, I said to myself – guess I’d better go through and get rid of those capital letter A’s with the pointy hats on them that appear at the end of every sentence, and sometimes in other places, too.  So I have been chipping away at the project, going in reverse chronological order, and as of this writing I have fixed all entries back through June of 2009.  My goal is to finish this project by the end of this calendar year; until then, please have patience with me if you try to read any un-corrected archived entries.

Blog administration

Update…update…need to update…

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Now that my silly brother lives so far away (California??  ugh), I’m suffering from the lack of my WordPress advisor to help me update my blog.  I don’t know why I’m so lame and clueless when it comes to backing up and updating my blog, because I’m not a techno-phobe, and I’m not an idiot (at least, not a *total* idiot).  But I’ve been steadfastly ignoring the note that appears in a yellow bar at the top of the screen every time I log on to my blog these days:  “WordPress 3.0.2 is available.  Please update now.”

Ah, Dan, Mr. California, whatever shall I do?!?!?!?