Grow Blog

Some of the few people on campus this week are visitors–high school juniors and seniors by the look of it. Usually these folks blend into the crowd or are part of a big tour group, but this week they stick out.

Anyway, one of them just stopped outside my window and took a photo of me hard at work at my desk. Makes me want to go outside and see what I look like.

Just returned from a really, really restful week in Tucson. I brought back with me:

• A bit of gadget lust for the father’s-in-law new big-screen LCD tv.
• A new desire to sleep in every day.
• The realization that it really does rain once in a while in Tucson. (And the mountains get a very pretty frosting of snow)
• A new author to praise: Vernor Vinge. This was a boingboing recommendation.

And we got back early enough today to still enjoy a full weekend at home. I did promise to straighten up the basement, and I’m hoping to get in a good bit of thesis work as well. L brought a cold back with her. Hopefully she doesn’t share it.

Spent the afternoon at the Goat catching up on spam deletion and listserv reading. Lots of great stuff–maybe there will be a link dump post this weekend as well.

If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have taken any classes this quarter. There was a ton of follow up work to do from my trip, there’s the whole ‘transition the library to a learning commons model’ task that’s been assigned to me, and I have been desperately trying to maintain at least enough language skill to not waste my partner’s time each week.

So I never got around to translating several comments on the blog from the summer. I wanted to do this (a) for my personal edification; (b) for the benefit of my Engish-only readers; (c) so that I knew what they were saying before anyone else did. While some of the comments were signed by people I know, a couple turned out to be spam.

So, in response to this post, my friend Hui said:

每年农历七月十五日为“盂兰盆节”(佛教），也称“中元节”（道教），有些地方俗称“鬼节”、“施孤”，又称亡人节、七月半。

Which means: Every July 15 (on the lunar calendar) there is the Buddhist ‘yulanpen’ festival (haven’t been able to some up with a good English name for that. Maybe ‘potted orchids?’), also called the mid-summer festival (by the daoists). In some places it’s commonly called the ‘gods festival.,’ ‘carry the orphan,’ and ‘the mid-July festival of the dead.

I like that ‘the dead’ (亡人) is literally ‘dead person.’ Does that mean that the Chinese word for zombie is 没忘人？

That paper’s shortcomings turned out to be nothing that seven more hours of work couldn’t take care of. My schedule, though, had me working noon to eight the day before it was due, so those seven hours turned Tuesday into an all-nighter. I’m too old for this. The night itself wasn’t too bad, but the hangover was intense. I made it through about 2/3rds of the workday, but wound up going home and taking a nap before a meeting Wednesday night.

That evening saw us debating RC doctrine at the Bosco House. Actually, we weren’t so much debating doctrine, but debating whether or not we were obliged to take doctrine into account when making organizational decisions. Before any other considerations.

I thought we had a well reasoned response: the Catholic Worker isn’t part of the church; it has no central organization; and here in Lane County, the most active individuals have traditionally not even been Catholic. So no, it’s the spirit of the group that makes decisions. Prayerfully and respectfully of most of our beliefs, but not necessarily doctrinaire. I sort of thought that that is the position that most American Catholics have come to. We don’t know the rules, let alone follow them. Dogma versus doctrine versus discipline? I know about three people who know the distinction, and I’m not one of them anymore. I used to, but sometime around 12 or 13 years ago, I realized that most people just don’t care. They observe or don’t observe based on their own consciences. They have worked out a set of practices that works for them.

Why am I even worked up about this? Because Bosco has a mission that I support, and I don’t want my own iconoclastic views to hurt that mission. My opinion tells me that most of the things that I am iconoclastic about (which tend to be disciplines and not doctrines) are trivial, but apparently some get very, very worked up over them. So do I have to bifurcate my views?

Fact is, we lack clergy. And those that we have (a) are overworked; (b) contain a significant number of criminals; (c) are pretty far removed from the real life of most people. Most of the actual work in the parishes is done by the laity. Maybe it’s time to put more of those who are doing the work up on the altar. And pay them a living wage.

Speaking of a living wage, if we had married priests, could the church afford to provide health insurance for their husbands and children?

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.