At Work Upstairs

Vera Baranova’s Neo-Carrel

It’s far too early in the term for me to have encountered sleeping students but Vera Baranova’s design for a chair that supports napping caught my eye.

Its lattice work is interestingly reminiscent of Rennie Mackintosh chairs. And in this photo (via Simmering Ideas), you can see its woven seat which echoes an element of Arts & Crafts chairs.

This post from Harvard’s Library Lab sums up the designer’s goals in creating it and includes a video of it in use.

Most years Douglas and I try to come up with a good things/bad things list. It’s always a mix of the important and the mundane with the bad things usually falling into the mundane side of the account.

This year’s list is both shorter and sadder than usual. It’s been a hard year.

I tend not to talk much in public places about the details because they are tied to losses that cannot be undone: death and the dementia. Turning the pain of these very ordinary experiences into something redeeming eludes me much as my mother’s smile eludes my camera.

Each visit I take a dozen photographs trying to capture that moment when she notices someone is there greeting her and grins. I have a small hoard of blurry half smiles that don’t convey the moment of happiness that was disappearing just as the camera appeared. Most of the time, though,  I capture blankness, distraction, or sadness, and every once in a while, anger.

So: a hard year balanced with getting a job, completing my degree, and the ordinary happinesses of everyday life. In the new year, I hope most for more ordinary happiness: small things that pass unnoticed in the turmoil of life.

Lately when folk ask me what I’ve been reading, I’ve come up short. It used to be a fairly normal and easy thing for me to read a hundred new books a year—a mix of popular fiction and serious with generous additions of non-fiction and comics. The last couple of years, reading time gave way to school work and since finishing the degree, I’ve started but usually not finished much pleasure reading. Part of difficulty is that much of what I used to read to fill my downtime doesn’t hold my attention anymore. This stalemate has happened in the past and it’s usually broken when I become interested in a new genre or a new topic: mystery novels gave way to manga; Antarctic exploration gave way to Canadian communists.

No sign yet of a new topic, largely because my thinking brain is taken up with adding to what I understand about the possibilities of my new profession. There’s a project brewing that builds on archival work I did over the summer but I’m not sure yet what shape it needs to take to be useful to others or to be publishable. I suspect it will need many more hours in the archives and more time spent working out theoretical and historical underpinnings.

Over the holiday season I have the luxury of time off but instead of working out those underpinnings, I’ve given myself the gift of sleep and idle time. Our holidays have always been spent very simply: the most visible outward signs that the routines have shifted would be the overflowing compost bowl and the new stacks of books. The largely idle days have been filled with reading.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kamome/13698712/

Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch was once again amusing and I still regret giving away my heap of Pratchett novels as part of the pre-move down sizing.

Caroline Moorehead’s A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France has sad and hard subject material but is marred by repetitive writing and an avoidance some of the intrinsically difficult questions that come with survivors’ accounts. A review which I’ve lost track of has pointed me to Charlotte Delbo’s accounts which I might pick up in the New Year. As well, I’m curious about whether any history of book folk have looked at the ways in which the resistance created and circulated pamphlets, posters, and newspapers in Paris during the Occupation.

Pat Barker’s Union Street has been on my to read list for a long time.  It’s grown on me: I’m not generally a fan of short stories and Union Street is very much a collection of linked stories organized by the age of each story’s protagonist. What grew on me and will likely lead to a re-reading is the opening story which contains parts of all the other stories.

I was very impressed with one of James Meek’s earlier novel (The People’s Act of Love) and was looking forward to The Heart Broke In. Its portraits of sexual misconduct at the BBC, the excesses of celebrity culture and tabloid journalism, and the clashes between fundamental religious beliefs and scientific thinking resonate rather well with recent episodes in Britain.  All in all, it left me a little cold — partly I suspect because I wasn’t in the mood for social satire in which the unpleasant, usually male characters, drown out the not quite so unpleasant female characters.

And tonight I’ve finished Toni Morrison’s Home, with its echoes of Marilynne Robinson, is going to need a re-read and a long think. It’s deceptively simple.

We took a short vacation to see family in Kingston a couple weeks ago. Douglas had been back a couple of times since we moved here but it was the first time back for me. The visit was a mixed affair. The travel days were long and involved multiple forms of transportation—cabs, buses, planes, cars, trains—everything except a ferry (perhaps the next time we’ll fly into Toronto and close that gap).  There was sadness since it was the first visit after a family member’s long illness and too quick death. The nieces and nephew have sprouted up and everyone’s a little bit of a stranger and yet almost exactly the same person they were. The latest batch of fosterlings were charming and heart breaking. There was much good food and lots of talking. All in all a good visit.

Then on the flight home: the cold descended. The next week was spent in bed and the cough arrived. For comic relief, my voice was transformed into that of Patty and Selma Bouvier with bad chest colds. The week after that was spent at work trying not to cough on people and wishing that I could take cough meds without making myself much much sicker. Exhausting, annoying, nasty.

I’m finally on the mend with a voice that’s almost back to normal and a cough that’s soupy but infrequent. November is turning out to be the month of not getting things done. It’s twitch making.

Things I have learned during the enforced idleness:

• Honey and lemon toddies are amazing
• Honey on its own can stop a cough for about half an hour. No idea how to quantify the negative effect on dental health.
• You can never have enough pillows or kleenex
• Netflix and a private VPN are great things but it is possible to overdose on mindless, formulaic television and movies
• You’d be amazed at how many lines of T. S. Eliot’s poetry have stuck in your memory
• A closed office door doesn’t really spare your colleagues the sound effects
• Students will come for help even they’re forewarned that you’re hacking up a lung
• Old UNIX skills come back
• Setting up a development environment takes less time than the dozens of seemingly random MSFT updates and reboots
• Resting on a rainy weekend day is less annoying than resting on a sunny weekend day
• Having someone at home to take care of you is an amazing thing

It’s been two months since I started my contract at Dalhousie and one month since I graduated MLIS in hand. The last two months have been a bit of a blur. Most days, I have students in my office for individual consultation and a reference shift of one sort or another. Most weeks I’ve been in at least one class introducing library services and covering basic information literacy tasks. I’ve written a unit review and several course assessments, participated in an ALA accreditation visit, re-written a small stack of policies, and started to learn more about the data-driven work economics students do. A blur.

While my weeks haven’t settled into a predictable pattern yet, I’m starting to get a sense of the new rhythm and a new sense of space in my brain. Two months in I’m starting to notice that I have free time. I remember the same sensation of space from the last time I finished graduate school: the lessening of the pressure to fill every hour with the work needed to complete the degree.

It’s a brief hiatus though. I still need to find a more permanent gig and I still have a too long list of projects I want to nudge forward. Too many projects I expect. First I’m going to tackle learning some PERL to see if I can solve a limitation in our link resolver. This will be monkey see/monkey do coding since I know zip about PERL at this point. I foresee a significant amount of swearing. And like a crazy woman, I’m also going to expand on the archival work that took up much of my summer and which will let me grow my baby SQL skills and, with luck, will let me start thinking about, and playing with, data visualization and network mapping. No idea how far any of these projects will get, but I’m looking forward to tinkering and pushing the brain in some new directions.

I’ve got a part-time job in a technical services group this summer and I’m slowly rebalancing day-to-day living. Part-time is a good fit for me since I’m also working on the last course for my degree. The part-time gig is basically digital publishing in a library context. I’m setting up OJS-based site for a well-established but print-only journal.  What I’m enjoying most is that there’s a good mix of things I already know how to do (project managing web publications), things I’ve recently learned and want to grow some more (manipulating data with XML), and things I haven’t done much of (garden-variety digitization).

Last week I built the shell of the journal: this was mostly tire-kicking.  Building the site itself wasn’t particularly tricky — the look and feel are pretty straightforward and required fairly minor CSS tweaks. There are stack of things that I still need to test and set up.  Setting up the financial backend looks like it will be more or less straightforward as long as all the plugins work and the server cooperates. And nerdily enough, I’m looking forward to sitting down and trying out XML batch importing.

Photo by bridges&balloons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This week after a little flurry of copying and backup making,  I got my hands on the files that need to be migrated and discovered the fly in the electronic ointment. I knew going in that there were a range of file states we’d need to deal with (little pdfs, big pdfs, image files) but it hadn’t dawned on me that the files wouldn’t be accompanied by some sort of externalized metadata set. So. Rekeying everything isn’t practical or particularly good use of my contract time. So this week I’m building a more detailed project plan, figuring out mechanics, and coming up with a kludged way of building a metadata set.

I fully expect that once I’ve built out and tested some processes, I will discover easier methods but for now it’s kludge and learn time. Persistence and a tolerance for rework are going to come in handy. Progress since the light dawned on the fly has been okay and slightly less linear than the steps suggest:

Step 1: Finagled a license for the software I’ll need to manipulate the pdf files. The machine I’m using is not the speediest or shiniest but so far it’s grudgingly tolerating the increased workload.

Step 2: Software in hand figured out the most basic steps of splitting some of the very large PDFs (200+ pages) into individual items. It’s unlikely that I’ll be splitting up more than 10 years worth of the most recent files.  Bonus round: I’ve got a rough estimate of how much time to allow for minimal file splitting. Tomorrow or next week, I’ll sort out it any other file processing falls within the project budget.

Step 3: Decided we needed an accurate list of the files we had and a better sense of the state of each group of files. Old DOS skills come back but only after they push themselves past not quite as old UNIX skills. I accomplish a list. And since it’s a list of everything (including duplicates), it’s massive (~10,000 items).  But the shaggy data is now in a spreadsheet and I can bend it to my will.

Step 4: Griped about the wildly inconsistent filenames which make sorting volumes and issues into any meaningful order impossible.

Step 5: Put off dealing with changing any of the actual file names and used the powers of logical find and replace steps to come up with a sortable list. Lists are magic.

Step 6: Analyzed the magic if shaggy list and figured out exactly how many files of what sort we have to deal with. Excel filters are the bomb. Double checked the lists of issues to see if the scans which were done by multiple people and over several years are complete. And, yeah, there are a small handful missing.  Updated mental to do list with task of finding out if the missing issues were actually published or if we’re dealing with a garden variety journal numbering anomaly. Must add to project plan tomorrow.

Step 7: Started tracking down which of the PDF files contain the annual cumulative index. Once all the indices are in hand, I’m going to try a kludge: OCR the PDFs, grab each index in plain text, and “move” the plain text into Excel. The plain text to Excel part will be painful unless I can figure out how to add separators between title, author, and page number. This step is going to be a pain but will be quicker than re-keying. But first things first: figure out how many of the scanned issues actually captured the indices.

At the end of this, I should have enough data to plan out the needed metadata. Before I go too far down that road, I’m going to have some fun testing out what I’ve read about moving spreadsheet data into XML and from there into the OJS platform.

I spent a lot of time in my previous work incarnation cleaning up datasets and fixing metadata and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to refine my planned kludge. I can brute force the metadata into shape but that’s both tedious and hard on the hands.

It’s been a hard eight months. And silence here is partly a sign of energies directed elsewhere. But mostly the silence is a sign of how difficult I find it to talk about the losses that come with dementia. I can talk about much of it very matter-of-factly once enough time has passed after each new loss. There are times though when the losses are overwhelming.

Dementia is a long series of losses and for my mother these losses come more quickly than I expected. In September, she was living in an assisted living facility and she needed help with many small day-to-day tasks and her caregivers had known her or members of her family for many years. While she couldn’t reliably tell me who had been to visit, she was still able to move about the building, go on very short outings,  and could still initiate and maintain a conversation. Some of the conversations were reports that her mother and grandmother had been to visit—harmless delusions since their visits made her happy.

Eight months later, she’s no longer able to walk or take care of her basic daily needs. She’s now living in a nursing home where none of the caregivers have a strong sense of who she was before dementia erased much of her personality along with her memory and basic physical abilities.

During the first few months of her stay in the nursing home, I would be greeted with a huge smile and some surprised chatter about my being there to visit. As her ability to hold conversation started to weaken, we spent much time visiting the facility’s kittens and talking about cats. Some visits we would spend time watching television together and she’d alternately be disturbed by some televised nonsense about aliens visiting Peru or be fascinated by the colour of old Star Trek episodes. Innocuous and sad but not yet heartbreaking.

Monday is my day for visiting.  It’s now twelve days since it became very clear that she can no longer recognize or remember me. She’s nearly non-verbal now and a genuine smile can be hard to come by so I count the moments when I can make her laugh as triumphs. And in a few weeks, this heart breaking loss will have become one of the ordinary, everyday losses that inevitable mark our way through this awful passage.

December holidays mean extra reading time. I’ve lost track of the number of unfinished books set aside or returned to the library this year. It’s been a hard year–one with too many losses–and sustained attention for pleasure reading is a scarce thing. I’ve taken to filling up the ereader with semi-random selections from the library and every once in a while, one of the books will grab and hold my attention.

Today it was Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. It’s gotten a lot of positive press following multiple literary awards and award nominations. Edugyan’s account of a group of African American and African German jazz musicians in Berlin and Paris in 1939 is compelling but what grabbed me and held me was the language, the beautiful turns of phrase and the shifts in tone as the narrative moves between 1939 and 1992. I’m kicking myself for returning it so quickly since I travelled too quickly over sentences like this one: “A grim little room, more like a closet of ghosts than any joint for music, the cracked heaters lisping steam, empty bottles rolling all over the warped floor.”

A rereading in conjunction with Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter–a novel about Buddy Bolden, New Orleans, art, and loss–would be a fine thing.

Here’s an interview Edugyan gave the morning after she won the Giller.

Image by manavo CC licence

I know I did schoolwork today and even went to a class in the evening but it’s all a blur.

Today we took my mother to see her geriatrician. We go every six months and each time, inexorably, there are more losses to count up. Each mini-mental exam confirms what we already know.

Monday’s going to be a busy day–eldercare stuff–so a lot of my class prep for next week’s classes has to be finished up today.

First up: finishing reading another chunk of AACR, reviewing material by Chan and Taylor, and reviewing slides for upcoming class. The reading itself is dry but every once in a while I’ll trip over something that surprises me. Today it’s not so much the sequence of rules–which are in some ways very much like style manuals–but the ways in which exceptions are covered in some detail. For example, the way publication details are handled if a label has been stuck over the original publication details. (Go with the label and don’t peel it off to get at the original data – 1.4b5.) I’ve fiddled about creating a couple of records but it’s clear I’m a rank beginner.

Next up: finishing up readings for systems class. Three or four articles/chapters read. Much of the content is familiar or connects to previous work history. Some of the textbook strikes me as fairly basic stuff so it makes for quick skimming. I’ve hit a little roadblock in an assignment to evaluate a web app — the app isn’t outputting any content. I’ll give it another day before swapping topics.

And to round out the day, writing up minutes and working on recruitment for a student journal.

All in all a quiet, uneventful day. Tomorrow will be harder.