Since I discovered that they are in fact webworms and are devouring the redbud tree that hangs over my car and front walkway, the tiny white fuzzy caterpillars no longer seem cute.

Early webworm instar

Yesterday I tore out all the nests I could reach with a rake. This is the first time I’ve seen these guys since I’ve lived here. Since “the pupae over-winter in cocoons in the ground. Pupae may also be found under loose bark and in leaf litter,” I’m going to blame this infestation on the nasty, ugly mulch with which the landscapers covered the area between my front walk and street last winter, killing the lovely moss that was growing there.

In addition to killing the moss and (likely) introducing webworms to my trees, the mulch looks like a tree-eating dinosaur vomited in front of my house. It is so much uglier than whatever they thought needed fixing. They also planted several bushes in the area, all of which have died. Ugh.

In addition to battling webworms, yesterday I also cleaned and refilled the back birdfeeder, cleared leaves from my (hopefully one day) moss garden, started a compost pile, began creating a brushpile for wildlife behind my house, and arranged some things to try to mitigate the erosion due to lack of downspouts on the corners of my front porch. What I would really like are some rain chains. And to create a dry streambed to shunt the runoff around the driveway to the sunny part of the slope where I could put a rain garden. But I run away with myself…

Today’s work excitement: cataloging research blitz, at which I was a “blitzer” who “blitzed” on the topic of our e-book cataloging coverage and what SerialsSolutions ebook MARC service has added.

Tomorrow’s work excitement: emergency response walkthrough. I’m not sure what that is, but it sounds exciting. I’m sure it will be less exciting than it sounds, though.

Well, that was some week.

Tuesday I got thrown for a loop when students started emailing me wondering why the website for the online course they’d registered for didn’t seem to exist. Well, that would be because I signed a piece of paper saying I’d teach a face to face class on Wednesday nights. There were a lot of personnel changes going on in the department, so I’ll chalk it up to that. I regret that some students had to drop the class, but you really just can’t pull an online course out of your ear on -1 day’s notice.

The course format announcement didn’t get made until Wednesday. I spent all day at work that day, yet put 0 hours on my timesheet because the entire day was spent putting out class-related fires. That’s ok, because I’ve banked over 50 hours of “in case” time off that needs to be used up before I either get replaced or hired. But personnel did call and ask me for my references.

If I get hired, I’m buying myself a bicycle and a new vacuum cleaner. It is highly unsatisfying to vacuum when you can feel the machine spitting stuff out on your toes as you walk behind it.

Class itself was fun, though I’m not used to standing up for 2.5 hours straight any more and it reactivated my lower back pain. Lordosis doesn’t do well with standing around, and I get distracted enough in the classroom without pacing. A lot of stretching has been in order.

I’ve been trying to get more sleep, as I was averaging about 6 hours a night there for a good while. The frustrating thing is that after 7-8 hours, it is much harder to wake up and maintain focus through the day. I think perhaps I really need 9 or more hours (which just isn’t going to happen until my dissertation is complete), and stopping at 6 interrupts the sleep cycle at a point more amenable to waking.

I forget the days now, but there were Treasures to Report.

A mockingbird feather found. A pigeon feeding its babies. Flitting dragonflies. The full moon peeking out from behind layers of clouds. Enough life in the air that it is possible to believe there might ever be a chill again. Butterflies moving on to different bushes with small purple flowers. A little girl climbing a tree more bravely than any of the little boys. A resurgence of local blueberries. Falling asleep with the windows open to the sound of cicadas, crickets, and frogs. Goldfinches at my backyard feeder. Tiny fuzzy white caterpillar with black eye spots.

A sad thing is that I can no longer smell the oaks in McCorkle place because there is always too much nasty Axe body spray/Bath and Body Works hideous synthetic nose burning miasma lingering from the bodies of undergraduates.

A good thing is the word miasma.

The return of the undergrads is always a good exercise in remembering just how much farther there is to go in being equanimous and opening in love to every moment. You’re not really suffused with loving-kindness when you feel like clocking someone in the head with your parasol. The alternative is to really look at them and take them in, which can be overwhelming because the vast, vast majority have so much pain or fear or emptiness about them and yet they are trying so hard to project otherwise. Of course you can really say that about any group of people almost anywhere, no?

Stopped by Weaver Street Market on the way home tonight to hang out with a friend a bit. Had a nice pint of stout. It’s been quite a while since I’ve just enjoyed a nice pint.

And now the cleaning fluid has soaked in long enough and it is time to finish cleaning up after the cats in preparation for my own private dance party. These events have the best DJ ever.

Some days I look at literally multiple thousands of book titles. Mostly they scroll past on my screen really quickly. I’m looking for coding patterns and encoding oddities rather than reading the words. But I often do read the words. At least some of them. And it can be really difficult not to go, “oooh, what’s that?” and click on the link to the ebook.

These are some titles we recently added that tempted me.

• Dialogue on the infinity of love
• Doing psychotherapy effectively
• Discipline and punish
• The madman’s middle way
• Foraging: behavior and ecology
• You are still being lied to: the remixed Disinformation guide to media distortion, historical whitewashes and cultural myths
• Databases: a beginner’s guide
• Coaching and mentoring: practical conversations to improve learning
• The craft of research
• The dream encyclopedia
• Brothels, depravity, and abandoned women: illegal sex in antebellum New Orleans
• B-sides, undercurrents and overtones: peripheries to popular in music, 1960 to the present
• Being white in the helping professions: developing effective intercultural awareness
• Cognitive biology: evolutionary and developmental perspectives on mind, brain, and behavior
• Choosing craft: the artist’s viewpoint
• Wild justice: the moral lives of animals
• A short introduction to attachment and attachment disorder
• Brain sense: the science of the senses and how we process the world around us
• Nothing: a very short introduction
• The secret history of emotion: from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to modern brain science
• Impotence: a cultural history
• The politics of small things: the power of the powerless in dark times
• Marriage and cohabitation
• Headless males make great lovers: & other unusual natural histories
• Collections of nothing
• Ecological intelligence: rediscovering ourselves in nature
• Seeing ghosts: 9/11 and the visual imagination
• Day of the Dead in the USA: the migration and transformation of a cultural phenomenon
• Speaking of information: the Library juice quotation book
• From demons to Dracula: the creation of the modern vampire myth
• Everyday readers: reading and popular culture

Overall that’s a pretty good slice of my interests and obsessions. It all came across my desk in 15 minutes one day. I could spend half my time at work making lists of all the things I see that I’ll never have time to glance at, much less read.

This job has taught me things about letting go of information hoarding tendencies.

Have I mentioned that I like my job and I hope I get to keep it? Personnel called me today to set up a phone interview. This is how it is regularly done, apparently, but it amuses me that I will be interviewed over the phone by a group of people sitting in a conference room on the second floor while I sit in the first floor office of someone who will be away from her desk because she will be upstairs in the conference room interviewing me. She offered me her office so I could shut the door instead of subjecting my entire department to my interview conversation from my cube.

Pick me, pick me!

My temp job finally came up as a permanent position. Fingers crossed.

I think the wording, “You have successfully applied for…” could inspire false hope.

Ok, this is mainly so my mom and dad can see material evidence of something I’ve done, instead of endlessly just hearing vaguely about “this paper” and “that paper.”

(click links below to see pictures. use “back” button to get back here… but you knew that, right? )

Cover of the book I wrote chapters for

Table of contents

First page of one chapter

First page of other chapter

Bio blurb

Now, there is proof for friends and family that yes, I’ve been in grad school forever, and no I’m not done yet, but I actually have finished some things.

My chapters, aside, this is a really cool book, and I’m glad to have been part of putting it together. It clearly and practically applies research methods that LIS students often read about “in theory” only. It has lots of examples pulled from the literature of our field, and the chapters aim to make abstract things concrete.

I have worked diligently on writing, looking up page numbers in articles, and verifying citations for just over 36 hours since Friday morning. A tad over 12 hours a day. And here I was excoriating myself for not getting started earlier in the day(s).

This is ridiculous.

Every 5-10 minutes I am stopping myself from writing a paragraph that isn’t necessary, so imagine how bad it could be.