The push

Now comes the school stretch. As pleasant as Thanksgiving weekend was, there were two trips to campus for information supplies and an afternoon spent at the Goat. I had a goal of having the rough draft of my term paper done on Sunday, but it was left woefully incomplete. Yesterday I worked on it for an hour before work, and then from 5 until 10 at the office. I stayed because I kept hoping to finish and turn my attention back to the illustrations, which I've been scanning out of atlases. I STILL didn't finish.

I fairly collapsed when I got home. I thought my bike ride would give me at least a half hour of energy to work on it. Nope. Part of the problem is that I have little investment in the topic of the paper. It's really hard to write when you're not interested in the topic anymore. Don't get me wrong--the fire class has been really interesting. Writing the paper, however, has not.

Giving thanks for dead birds

We had our feast on Friday as people were driving down I-5 on Thursday. The PDX portion of the family has a retail worker, so J delayed her trip by a day. It gave us a chance to work on homework for the first part of Thursday (including a trip to the office to use the big scanner and snag a couple books). Late Thanksgiving night I put the bird in a brine of pineapple sage, bay leaf, and apple cider. Yesterday morning I got to work as everyone else went to breakfast. The menu:

• The turkey
  which came out great. The first time I stuck the thermometer in, it was at the perfect temperature. Moist and well-salted, the only problem was that the skin didn't get a chance to brown because I left the bird covered the whole 3.5 hours. I put it under the broiler for a few minutes, but that didn't really satisfy.


• Cornbread stuffing
  which was added to the family when my mother, who was a home ec teacher for years, taught in an African-American high school. They told her, apparently in no uncertain terms, that she left several key dishes off of the menu when planning the Thanksgiving feast. Hence, we've been having cornbread stuffing ever since. I made mine with canned green chilis in the cornbread, and added eggs to the stuffing for the first time. They added some nice body to the mix.


• Mashed potatoes
  naturally. We may have gone without, but a special chanterelle gravy was made for the token vegetarian. She shared, and it was awesome. The mushroom juice was leftover from the roasted chanterelles we based a risotto on several weeks ago. The shrooms themselves were gathered by neighbors. The vegetarian raved (and shared too).


• Beet and potato gratin
  with swiss cheese and gleaned rosemary from down the block. No one in Eugene should ever buy a $2 plastic pack of rosemary.


• Glazed carrots
  with just a touch of balsamic vinegar. Not quite sure where I picked this one up.


• Chard and leeks
  a 2 minutes veggie side that we picked up from neighbors of said mushrooms. L has fallen in love with it and requests it every winter.


• Apple salad
  with pomegranate and candied pecans.


• Pumpkin pie
  

All this was served on new china and eaten with Grandma Jablonski's silver, which was mailed just last week. The Christmas tablecloth sort of camouflaged the whole arrangement, so the photos don't really tell the story. But it was a lovely dinner. None of the nieces misbehaved. And we ended the evening much, much later after hours of visiting.

Dating Japanese maps

Here's one for the map librarians out there. (And probably for catalogers too!)

Japanese maps typically have dates on them that use the reign of the sitting emperor for the year. So 昭和25年 would be the 25th year of Showa, aka Hirohito. Since he took office in 1926 (year 1), a map showing the above date would be from 1950.

This all comes up because it turns out I can read numbers and dates in Japanese now too. Pretty cool eh?

Responses and organizing

In response to a previous post, Kramer asked if I developed an alter-blog ego while in China at growblog.com. NOPE. That's not me folks--my Chinese isn't that good.

My Chinese homework this week involves finally getting around to translating the comments from over the summer. One down, 3 to go. Please stand by.

And I'm sure you've all been anxiously awaiting the results of last week's time exercise. It was a 56 hour work week, not including weekend hours. But 7 of those were for preparing a presentation that was at least as much as a geographer as it was for work--so let's call it an even 50. Conclusions? Well, I haven't spent much time looking at the distribution of tasks yet. I do know that there are 2 important parts of my job that I spent zero amount of time on during those 50 hours. I also know that there is almost no down-time. Almost every moment is accounted for. In fact, I find myself chafing when people stop me to chat. I am almost 100% on task--or walking from task to task. I keep meaning to wear my new pedometer (that L brought home as schwag) to work. Coffee breaks amount to the time it takes to walk to the coffee shop that is about 25 yards outside the front door.

While chafing last week (and I counted 2 quarter-hour increments of people engaging me in conversation), I finally admitted to someone that as I sit at my desk, I can't help but glance out the window at people walking by. I try, I really try, not to resent the co-workers I see strolling towards the parking lot at 3:45 ...and 4:15...and 5:30. Sure, they may have gotten to work at 8am. or 7:30. or 7. But some of these are people that I have attempted to get ahold of at 8:30 and 9 and 9:15 and have failed. On any given day? No. But patterns emerge. This afternoon I attempted to find someone in their cubefarm, and then jokingly wished out loud that they had an aboard/ashore board (something the Navy uses to make sure the boat doesn't leave without someone important), because no one could tell me if this person had left for Thanksgiving weekend or not (it's Tuesday, btw). A very amusing conversation ensued, but I found myself semi-seriously relating a story from China. During one of my visits, I was treated to lunch by an assistant director. This was an expensive hotel lunch that I was really surprised that a librarian could afford. And the lunch conversation was one of the more serious that I had, and if she had an expense account, I'm sure it got charged. Anyway: on the way out of the building, she asked me to wait a minute--the then strode across the atrium and punched out.

I know it's not a contest to see who can work the most hours. But then I observe some people, who rarely return messages promptly, who scoot past my window at 3:30 on a regular basis. And other people, who appear to be at the point of breakdown, who return my emails at 7am and 8pm. It's hard not to remember that high ranking official clocking out for lunch. What would we discover if we all did the same?

Present spoiler

If you're Jake, don't read this before Friday.

Anyway, a little tear came to my eye last night when I went to Barnes & Noble to seek out birthday presents for my 10-year-old nephew. They don't really discriminate between children and young adult--they just have a section called 'Young Readers' that is labeled 8-12.

What got me all choked up is that prominently displayed was Lois Lawry's The Giver. I just read that about 2 years ago, and it's a fantastic book. My immediate inclination was to take it up to the desk and ask if it's really appropriate for a 10-year-old. They confirmed it's standard reading. And the Newbery prize stamp attests to the same. Granted, I'm not a daily part of Jake's life, so maybe this shouldn't come as such a surprise. But still--it's a serious book, and I haven't really thought of him as a serious reader yet.

Inventory: 1st day

Mondays suck this quarter. There's only 3 hours scheduled to be unstructured to start with, and today that got sucked away pretty thoroughly by GIS Day preparations. (Happy Geography Awareness Week by the way.)

Anyway: it was a regular 9.5 hour day at the office, with a 1.25 hour evening professional meeting (I gave an interview for a colleague who has a column in a library journal) and a half hour of mixed work-personal email after that. Call half of that business and you get an 11 hour day.

Cosmic confluences

Let's take a break from our time-task inventory to talk about the weekend.

Friday night I did a little bit of that web surfing that the kids are all talking about. I checked in with a few blogs of friends and then, before turning in for the night, went through some old favorites. A hometown writer, who was recommended by Kramer, is still at it. As I have always enjoyed his recommendations, I usually take a close look at his blogroll. What did I see? A link to this China blog that AZK recommended a couple months before I left for China.

Now how does that happen? And how am I supposed to describe those degrees of separation? Is it a loop? Is it a directed-node graph with me being a double parent? Or am I a convergence point in this network?

All this is perhaps in mind because I've been playing around with Facebook a bit and saw a neat-o keen Flash application that puts all your friends in a circle and maps them to each other. I got pretty sucked in.

So I started this by saying I would talk about the weekend a bit. This afternoon we took a little walk in the Coast Range with the 新朋友 and guests from Seattle. In the car on the way up, I was asked "how do you spend your weekends?" I wound up talking about chores and studying and just a bit about gardening. How boring I am.

So tonight I decided to come out to the Goat (where I am right now) and do my studying. I plowed through about 50 pages of my fire ecology textbook, and an article that I have some serious questions about. And to top it all off and make me all multi-task-y, this counts as entertainment too! Because after about an hour they started re-arranging the furniture for a show. First act: a solo singer, violist, accordian player. Very nice. (And face painted!) Now we're finishing up the second act--who I think I've seen here before. Accoustic duo (I love the accoustic bass guitar) with a singer with a pleasantly scratchy voice. And both have been talking up the headliner (one more song to go!) from PDX.

So a few minutes ago I decided to switch from coffee to beer (because really, there's only so much coffee you can drink in a night) and stick around for a few more songs. And here's where the recreational part really kicks in: the Goat hasn't always had beer. So I'm perusing the list and OMFG: they've got Lakefront. WTF? So now dear reader, I am sharing with you yet another cosmic confluence of events: Eugene bands (complete with spinny dancing and a face-painted accordionist) and a fine Milwaukee beer. How do I find myself in these situations?

Getting poop done.

Librarians are notorious whiners. That's just a fact of life (Whaaa...my job is hard. My administrators don't support me. My institution is underfunded. I have too much to do.). Today I brought this up and was basically told that this isn't unique to my profession, it's just a fact of life in an office these days. (OK, it wasn't 'in an office' it was 'in a fast paced, fast changing environment'--but I'm not willing to use that sort of crispy corporate speak.)

One bit of advice that I will take to heart, because it's not the first time it's come up, is that if I want to tell someone that I'm too busy to take something on, I have to have a bit of a metric. I have to have some facts to back up my assertion. And I also need to make some suggestions as to what needs to be done in order for me to take on another project. So.....

You, loyal reader, who so lovingly requested more blog action, are about to get to read my time inventory. It's Jon's own version of Getting Things Done (which I haven't read). But for the past couple weeks I have been trying to live by the two minute rule (if I open an email and I can deal with it in 2 minutes or less, I do it). That worked pretty well for a while, until I started avoiding looking in my inbox because I knew there were 30 or 40 things that were demanding 2 minutes of my attention.

Today though, I have a good opportunity to take inventory of the inbox because I didn't delete anything all day. So here is a typical day:

59 emails. Of which:

• 14 university, departmental notices that were skimmed and deleted.


• 10 library business that required ~2 minutes of action.


• 8 pieces of spam.


• 6 library notes that were read and saved or deleted.


• 5 personal notes (only 1 of which required action--about an hour worth of weekend planning)


• 3 notes from FaceBook (that's new for me just since WAML).


• 2 library business that required more than 2 minutes' attention.


• 1 listserv message (digest format)


• 1 'book on hold' notice.


• 1 reference question.

Leaving 6 emails from today that still require a little bit of action on my part. All total, about 2.5 hours to take care of this stuff (but the hour of weekend planning is a bit unusual).