KJ

There is no heat in my office. It's not working anywhere on the floor. It was out yesterday, too. This isn't the problem here that it would be in, say, Maine, but still. Not good.

My nose is cold. I had to put my coat back on. I'm drinking tea like there's no tomorrow. People are raiding the lost and found for scarves. It's getting kind of ridiculous.

I'm off to boil another pot of water.

The second storm is upon us now. I can hear the rain and wind on the roof, although it's not nearly as heavy as it was yesterday. That was a nasty day, especially in the morning -- public transit snarls, everyone dripping wet, lots of power outages. Nothing that touched us here, fortunately, although we did go grocery shopping at a store that had been without power earlier in the day, and it was weird. Lots of closed or empty freezer cases, most of the fresh fish gone, all the poultry packed in extra ice.

Today isn't supposed to be as bad, although the weather report says there might be thunderstorms (which are rare here). It'd be a great day to curl up with a cup of tea, a book, and several blankets, but new faculty orientation waits for no one.

Working on Saturday, even just for a few hours, makes for a really short weekend. I came into the library this morning and it was like I'd never left.

Break in two weeks... I had been planning to work all of it, but maybe I need to sneak in a personal day. We'll see how it goes.

There are two other events going on in the Baltimore Convention Center: a cheerleader competition, and some sort of Mary Kay meeting. A rather incongruous bunch of folks to combine with librarians. It's pretty easy to tell by looking who belongs with which organization...

Tomorrow is the last day. It's been a good trip. Met lots of useful people, mostly other librarians who work for my company, saw some interesting presentations, sat on a couple of helpful round tables. As always it'll be nice to get home, although I'm dreading work a little bit. (Not for reasons I'm comfortable talking about at the moment. Maybe later.) But husband and cats and my bed will be good. And chorus starting Monday, and being on my own computer. (This laptop is on its last legs. I think a MacBook is in my future. My very near future.)

I hope everyone is having an excellent weekend.

There is a big giant spider on the wall right next to my desk.

I can't stop looking at it. It's very distracting. (At least I haven't run out of the room shrieking.) I kind of want it gone, but I can't bring myself to kill it and would feel like a true idiot asking the student to do it. We can't really liberate it either -- I'm on the second floor and the windows don't open.

*shiver*

Today was koshkalet's wedding, a lovely affair well-attended by good friends. The venue was at a beach house in an Oakland park, with a lovely outdoor garden and a great view over the small lake. Sweet ceremony, with an interesting blend of religious traditions, followed by a light buffet and much conversation. I got to see a number of folks I only speak to rarely. T and I were seated with R, S, E, and the minister, which made for an intriguing mix. The pastor was perhaps a little taken aback to be surrounded by people who knew each other so well; eventually I took pity on him, and informed him that most of us were former housemates who have been friends for better than a decade. But he ended up being an excellent tablemate. The party wrapped up around six, when R & S invited people back to their place. We accepted, along with SE, SF, and plantgirl. Once we'd gotten some food into T (emergency sushi pitstop), we made our way there, and the bunch of us spent most of the next couple of hours in a rollicking discussion of grammar (yes, really) and other weddings we'd attended. T's sushi created a craving in the rest of the party, so we all went out for a Japanese dinner and more conversation and companionship. A grand day out overall.

I wore my burgandy velvet outfit and received a number of compliments. Note to self: wear fuzzy clothing more often.

So the wedding was a bright spot in an otherwise fairly lousy week. Mostly due to work stuff that I can't really discuss publicly and that I hope will get better soon, or at least more manageable. I hate being under work stress; it spills over into the rest of my life in ways that can get really ugly. I do have a break to look forward to, though: a conference in Monterey, week after next. I know that's not really a "vacation", but it is a change of scene and a break from my extra work responsibilities, and that can only be good for me, I think.

Last but so most certainly not least, I would like to say hooray for peace, love, and understanding.

Ever have one of those days where you feel like you were going non-stop but didn't manage to get anything actually accomplished? That was yesterday. It might be because I spent so much of it on my feet, giving presentations (including the exact same presentation twice in two hours). And most of the rest of it was training, which is extremely important but not really productive in the same way that doing my own work would be. Now my feet hurt, I had strange dreams about getting lost in New York City, and today promises to be more of the same. Not to mention that I need to work from 8am to 7pm. (My compensation? I don't have to work Saturday. Yeah, that makes everything better.)

Okay, enough with the bitching. Gotta finish getting ready to start that long workday. I wish I could say the sooner I start the sooner it would be over. Stupid steadiness of the passage of time.

Not the boys, me. Why am I so tired? I started to crash around 10 last night, then roused myself briefly but still ended up in bed before midnight. Now I'm fighting to stay awake when really all I want to do is curl up on the floor and take a nap. It doesn't help that the library is quiet -- if it were busy and I could run around doing stuff, that would perk me up.

I suppose it also doesn't help that I haven't had any coffee yet. And that I have a headache. These things may be related. Then again they may not.

Probably it's because I've had to open so much lately. Between my boss going out of town, my rehersal schedule, and the library tech being sick, I've had to open the library almost every day for what seems like the last three weeks. Which means being here before 7:45. And circumstances keep me staying up too late. I should probably go to bed earlier, but I feel like I lose so much of my personal time when I do -- time to write, to chat with people, to spend with T, etc. The never-ending struggle between sleep and time. Sometimes I think I would be happier if I didn't need to sleep at all.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could go home and crash after work, but the Requiem is tonight, so not only can I not go sleep, I have to be "on". I'm sure I'll be peppier by then, I always am, but at this moment it is the absolute last thing I want to do. Maybe I'll put on the CD; that should inspire me.

I was walking by a classroom to make some tea and overheard one of the Medical Assisting instructors giving a lecture. The topic was on proper office management procedures, and she was telling the students about the importance of doing inventory, keeping track of what items are running low, not running out of key supplies, and so forth.

Then I went into the employee breakroom and used the last sugar packet.

Ahem.

Edit: Another class is doing CPR training. Overheard from that side of the building:

"Everybody grab a baby. Make sure not to break their arms and legs off."

(More lines. I'm mildly surprised one of these is still unguessed, although not as surprised as I was by the Police song that never went last week.)

My work keyboard died a few days ago, and they salvaged me another one. It's a real MS Natural keyboard, which is a definite improvement over the weird Belkin thing they bought me way back when. But I'm having to get used to it -- the other keyboard had some weird key layouts, which drove me nuts for a long time, but I eventually adjusted to them. Now I'm having to readjust to normalcy.

A little nervous about today; I'm helping one of the instructors run a resume-writing workshop. It's sort of a dry run for our big career fair next Wednesday, where I'm going to be in charge of one of these sessions myself. That'll be nerve wracking. On the plus side, I get to use my fancy degree initials in the career fair program since I'm presenting. I never get to use the fancy degree initials.