Change Is Hard

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!

This morning I wrote the first draft of a fundraising letter for Truck Safety.  It will be going out to Dad’s friends and family, and our friends as well.  It’s a difficult thing to do, to fundraise, even when you believe in the cause as much as we do.  There is a sense of being uncomfortable asking for help, much less money.  But if I’ve learned anything from all this (and I’ve learned a lot!) it’s that small steps will get you where you need to be.  So it’s not that we’re asking for a lot of money from a small group of people.  It’s that we’re going to ask for a little money from a lot of people.  I guess we’re lucky that Dad had so many friends! 

Instead of beginning homework, or thinking about paper topics or even going for a walk on this finely beautiful day I am sitting at the computer writing about numbers of dead and injured and the legislation needed for change.  Amazinging I was able to write that letter without tears.  I think that’s in large part because tears are often my response to a feeling of helplessness, and when I’m doing something tangible to make changes I stop feeling helpless.

I can feel Dad smiling.

I was fooling around with “right sizing” pictures and accidently did that to this picture of Dad.  So I thought I’d throw it up on the blog just to see how that works.

This is Dad in China standing on the Great Wall.  He’s wearing a sweatshirt over his jacket. The sweatshirt says “I walked the great wall.”  That was very unlike him, to purchase something like this and I don’t remember seeing it when we cleaned out his closet after he was killed.  I wouldn’t mind having it now. 

This week during a shift at the library reference desk I was asked about the following: Information about bipolar desease because a friend of the patron had just been diagnosed with it. What the meaning of “exousia” was. Whether or not I had an pencil eraser. (I didn’t.) What the zip code was for a small town in W. Virginia. The address and phone number for the magazine Better Homes and Gardens. Where the bathrooms were. What the email address was for a former University President. How to use a Spanish/English translation dictionary. Who lived at a particular address in Ann Arbor in 1910. What the results were for a water test done on a specific drain system. Where the bathrooms were.  (again) Whether or not the library subscribed to a particular magazine. (We did not.) How to get the library to subscribe to a particular magazine. If I had a stapler. (I did.) The phone number for a friend who had moved across the country years ago. How to get annual reports from particular companies. Where to find maps of bicycle paths in Washtenaw County. If I could order a book in Spanish from another library. (I did.)

And then I got to go home.

Heard on the radio while driving home: “Walking’s easy when the road is flat but those dang hills will get you every time. The good Lord gave us hills so we’d learn how to climb.”