In theory there are two and a half weeks left of this semester, but in reality most of the big end of semester projects are due too soon.   Though I still think going to school is easier than working at a job I didn’t love (and in fact I told that to my group last night as we were moving our sticky notes around for the endless upteenth time during our seventeenth and eighteenth hours of working on our affinity model) I am getting fatigued.  I can’t sleep for trying to keep a list in my head of all that still needs to be done.  This morning I’ve been awake since 3 and I have come to the conclusion it’s better to just get up and get something done.  So I am printing out articles still to be read, thinking about that final reference assignment that requires me to spend too much time at the graduate reading room, planning what I’ll say this afternoon at our affinity walkthrough, and realizing deep in my heart, after attending the peer review yesterday, that my long paper for 504 which was 2/3 roughed in needs to be totally reshaped.  Oh, and there is that little 501 paper, twenty pages long, that has yet to be thought about.  And the multiple data entries still required of me for my digital library class. And I think there’s a paper due there as well.  So, if I start now and don’t sleep for the next 10 days I think I should be on top of things.

Good news from yesterday was a meeting I had with management at the Ann Arbor District Library, about 5 blocks from campus.  I am going to be doing a field experience project for them next semester.  I’ll be researching what library systems around the country are doing to provide library services for the home bound.  This is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to do in the future, so it’s a great opportunity for me to test the water and to do something that really matters for a library.  Of course it also adds ten hours of work a week to my school load, but I think I can handle it. 

Right now I am more excited about the new semester, new classes, new professors, new topics, and the great unknown than I am about finishing up the projects that are midway completed, not started at all, or possibly not even thought of yet that are due in the next two weeks

The neat thing about being a student vs. being an employee is that this stuff ENDS sometime and you get to start fresh!  At work if I were working on some project that had grown stale and unappealing I couldn’t hope that it would end one way or another in two weeks.  It had to get done, and worse than that, it probably MATTERED how well it was done!  In the world of academia there seem to be ends to our responsibilities and endless possibilities for projects of the future.  Its not real world but its more fun!