This Side of Lost

Most people I know complain of never having enough time. I am sometimes tempted to do so myself, but I know it would be untrue. Because I misspend a lot of mine. So I apologize to those of you who have been neglected by me recently. I'll try and be better.

To my credit, I did add another 16 hours of responsibility to my week. The threatened fourth job has finally come to pass. This is mostly a good thing, because I am finally feeling secure about my finances. (This has also been assisted by the fact that my loans also came through last week -- yay money!) The job is nothing to really write home about -- I'm basically a glorified mail opener for the main library. The wage is commensurate for the job (read: pretty crappy). But it's good, mindless work, and I get to see almost every new book that comes in. I got the job because part of the job is opening the Slavic shipments -- the books are printed in the Cyrillic alphabet that most Slavic languages are in, but the invoices are transliterated into Latin alphabet. So my three semesters of Russian from St. Olaf come in handy.

So, for those of you who are counting:

1. Research Assistant for Gary Wiggins. 4-8 hours a week.
2. Instruction Assistant for the libraries. Sporadic and infrequent.
3. Lab consultant for SLIS. 8 hours a week.
4. Monograph Receiving. 16 hours a week.

It almost adds up to a full four days (the number of days I don't have class).

Classes continue to plunk along. Cataloguing is cool. I'm learning a valuable librarian skill -- I can't really complain. It hasn't gotten hard or too much work yet. The web course is still all project planning, which is getting very boring. Can't wait until the nerdy stuff comes. But I'll have to wait two weeks -- Elijah's off at a conference next week, so no class. Whee.

We've managed to be pretty social almost every weekend so far. Last weekend was the busiest. Friday was Mari's SLIS potluck, which went swimmingly, expect for when Samantha tried to cut her right index finger off with a broken wine glass. Ouch! One trip to the ER and eight stitches later, she is doing fine.

Saturday we saw The Corpse Bride. I liked it a lot, Samantha not so much. I think I'm easier to please at the movies. Also, we saw the first opera of the year -- Cosi Fan Tutte. Very impressive, as usual. I must say, Mozart is becoming a favorite opera composer for me -- though I am in the infancy of my opera fandom. Sunday we went to an orchestra concert, though mostly that's the program was very familiar to me. They played Brahm's Symphony No. 1 and Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, which are both pieces I played in my high school orchestra. So it was orchestral nostalgia day for me.

And yesterday, we went to Whitney Buccicone's place for a small-but-raucous SLIS gathering. There were a couple new slizzards, three of whom either are from or went to college in Minnesota. Crazy. A Johnnie-Bennie couple (who are totally stereotypical for each school) and a Carleton grad. I wonder what it is about this program that attracts Minnesotans.

Other items of note:

• Storyhill launched their new website sometime last week. Looks pretty snappy. They've got t-shirts now -- too bad, since I've already got an awesome one. They also have a new album coming out in February. All this accomplishes is making me want to work on my lyric database more. Like I have time to do that.
• I got a bike. Well, I didn't get one as much as I fixed up the one that I found on the property of the house I used to live in. *shrug* That's about all I can say. It gets me from Point A to Point B faster than walking, so that's cool.
• Fall has finally arrived. Aaahh. I don't immediately start sweating when I walk outside anymore. This is a good thing.
• The most interesting meal we've made recently was a recipe for nutty rice burgers taken from our favorite vegetarian cookbook. They are mainly bulgur (our new favorite grain!) and brown rice, with some grated carrots, zucchini and onions, and some whole wheat flour and Egg Beaters to hold it all together. Fry them in a skillet for ten minutes. We were a little skeptical, but they were surprisingly good. Mmmmmmmm.

That is all. We are off to watch Clue (the movie), which was recently purchased at Best Buy for the paltry sum of six dollars. I've paid late fees worse than that. Peace, all.