Change Is Hard

This morning before dawn Katie and I are up and out the front door.  I’m looking for the newspaper, Katie is looking for the perfect spot.  We come back inside reluctantly, it is so warm out, and the moon and Venus in the eastern sky are beautiful.  But I must tackle that paper before I head for work this morning.

I sit down resolutely.  I think I can finish the draft before I leave for work at 10:30.  Something catches my eye and, glancing over, I see Katie standing there silently, one of her favorite toys held in her mouth.  She isn’t crying or jumping, or bumping me with her nose.  Just standing there, ears drooping, tail hanging down.  She seems to know that there won’t be any playing this morning. 

My heart contracts and I reach for the toy.  Sitting on the floor in the living room I toss it across the room and she joyfully bounces after it.  As she prances back to me, tail up, ears forward, eyes bright I reflect that there are priorities in life, and life is the first priority.

We play like this for perhaps ten minutes until she is tired of the game.  She sets the toy over in the corner and comes to climb on my lap, pushing her nose into my neck.  I rock her there for a moment and then she bounds off, looking for a new adventure.

I go back to work on that paper.  We are both content.

Today I worked 7 hours on the public desks of the library and attended a 3 hour lecture with a professor that talks so fast I can’t keep up.  Tonight during a lull in work I typed up the notes from that class.  Five pages of typed notes.  Toward the end of the lecture I was getting confused and started not listening;  it was as if the mind shut down, and any further information was just going to push something else, equally vital, out of my brain.

Tonight between patrons I am trying to read the text and make some sense, but my eyes are watering from exhaustion, and the phone keeps ringing.

I STILL have to finish that darn paper that is due Tuesday, I’m working Saturday and Sunday, I need to figure this class out and I think I have two other classes to worry about!

OK.  Enough.  No more stressing.  Why do you do this to yourself (I ask myself!) every semester!  You will be fine.  You will be fine…you will..really…be fine.

I’m sitting at the library on campus.  Though I don’t have class today until 2, and no reason to be here prior to then, Katie was in rare form and I had to get away.  I drove down to Ann Arbor this morning and have been working on a paper (the same one I was supposed to be working on yesterday morning) that is due next Tuesday.

The paper is for my archives class; we are to review three archive websites and critique them.  I chose university special collections, and I have been spending some time be-bopping around the three sites, Auburn, Michigan State and Rutgers.  Why those three you ask?  Because I was curious what three land grant universities might have in common in their special collections.  Turns out nothing!

So I’m writing this paper, and for some reason I start thinking about the whole special collections theme as sort of your kitchen junk drawer.  You know, the drawer you dump stuff into when you don’t know where else to put it?  That’s the feeling I had about special collections.  And I expressed it that way in the paper….also described the collections as an “ecclectic (thanks Paul for that word) group of valuable and more dubious materials, sort of like a crazy aunt’s memory institutionalized by universities.” 

I have a few days to edit…the paper is far from done.  In fact after I got to the crazy aunt part I sort of stopped to ponder. 

Do you think professors have a sense of humor?  

This must be what being a grad student is really like.  Total exhaustion.  With a seemingly never ending list of things still to be done.  Whatever made me think that working 19 hours a week while attending classes wouldn’t really change how this school experiement will go?

I worked yesterday prior to my class and again after.  I worked till 9 p.m. and worse (for me) till 9 p.m. in the youth department.  Alone.  On an evening when there were 50+ adults and kids and their tutors working in the library, many of them in the youth department.  On top of the usual number of parents and kids looking for stuff there.  My.

Well, at least that shift is finished!  I’m now trying to write a paper that is due next week.  Sounds like I’m ahead doesn’t it?  Well I would be except that the reason I’m writing it now is that I am so totally booked for the rest of the week that I don’t know when between now and next Tuesday I’ll have four hours of uninterrupted time.  So here I am, Wednesday morning. It’s still dark out, and I’m trying to wake up my mind to write a paper.  I haven’t read the material that is supposed to make this easier, hoping that writing skill alone will get me through.  No time to read any supporting documents!  Of course not!

And puppy Katie wants something.  Just to play I think, because we’ve already been outside two times and it’s barely 7:00.  We built a pen outside for her, and when she’s in that I get a lot more work done, but it’s dark out and somehow I can’t quite put her out there in the dark.  I know.  Spoiled puppy.  Silly puppy mom.

I caught just a few minutes of a PBS show tonight after I came home from Ann Arbor, so I went to the web to see the web version of the same piece.  It’s a fourteen month investigation of the trucking industry in Texas, done by The Dallas Morning News, a paper out of Dallas.  It’s a piece in a series that PBS is showing called Expose, Investigative Reports.  The short version is on the web at:  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/expose/episode213/index.html  Click on the “watch episode” tab at the top.  You can view the entire episode by going to the right on the website under “watch more video.” 

I think maybe I could use this as the basis for discussion on a speaking tour.  If I can get permission from PBS and whomever else is out there for the copyright issues.  And we have to focus on what it is we want people to do.  Is it help us fight Mexican trucks?  Get more money from somewhere to hire more state police to do truck inspections, or keep more truck weigh stations open?  Try to get federal legislation through to have onboard recorders required on all heavy trucks? 

Regardless, I got fired up about the issues again.  I need to get a lot of homework done this weekend, and this is something of a distraction.  Still…I sent the producers of the episode an email with questions about how or if I could use it.  Don’t know when I’m going to have time to do this library thing if I get wrapped up in truck issues, but maybe it will all work out together. 

I went to bookclub last night after class.  It was interesting to sit with 5 other women, most still employed in the banking field, still stressed by what they do for a living.  Though I think they like what they do, I felt relieved that I am no longer one of them.

The book we discussed was “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy.  McCarthy doesn’t write anything that is uplifting or outright hopeful, though I supposed the fact that the little boy survived at the end of this walk through a world left devestated by some sort of apparently man made disaster is hope in itself.  Though few others survived, maybe mankind will, and maybe mankind will be a bit nicer if it springs from this youngster.  We discussed the sides of the nature v.s. nurture argument, as the young boy had never known the world prior to the disaster, had never really seen anyone care about anyone else, yet he cared about animals and people they cam across.  Where did that come from?  His father taught him not to trust anyone, to hide from strangers, yet this little boy cared about the blind man and the dog that wandered into the story.

A good book, but one I was glad to finish.  Sort of like school.  It’s a good run, but I’m ready to be finished.

I’m sitting in the “DIAD” which is a computer lab reserved just for students from my school.  I’m waiting my turn to run a DIALOG session, an expensive, subscription search engine.  I’m in a class to learn this dialog language so that someday I can use it to search for things my patrons ask for.  It searches academic journals and the results should be more authentic than searching the web at large. 

I was here Monday at a practice lab that didn’t go well, so I have a high anxiety level as I wait my turn.  This lab will be graded, so it matters that I turn out something useful.  To make matters worse I have to do it using a MAC computer, which I’m not at all comfortable with.  I’ve found that within the boundries of UM there is an entire MAC world, and it makes me nervous!

More later, after the lab.  I’ll let you know how it went.

PS:  It’s now almost 8 p.m.  I successfuly got the lab to run, got it saved and printed for class.  I feel pretty good about it, just have to type up my analysis for Friday. 

Relief.  Now…to get through another hour of work…in the Youth department.  You all know how good I am with youth.  Not.

Here I am, Monday morning, at UM.  I don’t have classes here nor do I work in Ann Arbor on Mondays this semester, but here I am anyway.  I wanted to attend an extra lab session for my online search class, and those are Sundays and Mondays.  Since I was out partying with husband’s 92 year old birthday girl aunt on Sunday, I am here today to do the lab. 

I’m glad I came in for the lab.  It didn’t go well, and now I know what I need to figure out before Wednesday when I have my real, graded lab.  I need to figure out how to get the thing to type up the results and then I need to successfully save it to my memory stick.  Today I only got the last page saved.  That won’t win me any points with the professor!

So now, my purpose for being here is finished and I am sitting up on the fourth floor of the UGLI (Undergraduate Library) in a window seat, a glass outcropping of sorts; a table sitting in a bumpout surrounded by floor to ceiling windows with a wonderful view of South University, the Law School, trees changing color, the Union tower complete with the big M flag, and students wandering to classes.  I haven’t had time to do this yet this semester, and it feels good to sit here and read undisturbed by any fuzzy, four legged, wet nosed, hyper pet.

Today we took husband’s Aunt out to eat.  It’s her 92 birthday!  She looks amazing for 92, and acts much younger.  She says she feels like she’s still in her 60’s, and it’s just her body that is slowing her down now.  I want to be like  her when I’m 92!

After dinner we went for a ride,  she likes to “get out and see the country” as she says.  It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the blue sky, some of the trees are turning.  We drove by her sister’s old home, and then we just headed west, ending up in Howell, where I grew up.  I haven’t been past the house in many years.  I have declined to go there because I wanted to remember it the way we knew it, with the woods and stream intact nearby rather than filled with the subdivision I’ve heard is there now.  So I wasn’t too happy when we arrived in Howell and husband wanted to drive by to show his aunt where I grew up.

Surprisingly it was OK.  I didn’t stare at the subdivision in the woods, but did at the house that Dad built for us in the 60’s.  I really didn’t have enough time to look at everything, but the impression I got was that the front yard is much smaller than I remember, the houses next door much closer, and the house itself much shabbier.  The lake looked the same though, at least the glimpse I got of it from the moving car. 

It was OK to see the house again after more than ten years.  It’s been almost 30 years since my family lived there, almost twice as many  years of someone else living in it than the years we occupied the property.  Seems like yesterday.

Today I planned on getting two of my four homework assignments done.  I have several large projects looming, and need to get a jump on them.  I had a huge long list of things I just “HAD” to finish today.  It’s now after 8 p.m. and I have finished just one.  The reason?  KATIE!  She has exhausted herself (and me) by keeping me company all day. 

Eventually husband got up and tried to distract her, but she insisted on bringing her toys to me to play, pushing them into my lap and crying as I sat at my keyboard.  After that didn’t work she’d drop them and leap onto my lap, pushing her head between me and the keyboard.  I’d try to take her back to husband, but it didn’t work. 

She’s sleeping now.  I want to sleep too! But better use this time of peace to get some more work done!