Slow, but not forgotten

It has been a very crazy semester and with spending anywhere between 6-9 hours a day at my studies, the energy to blog is usuall lost by my 'free' time.  However, now that I discovered my laptop sits nicely on top of the stairmaster, it gives me a bit of ‘free’ time to do things like surf the web and type this! 

So, to recap a bit of my school thus far….

Currently, I just finished Sunday at 10 PM a paper for my History of Books and Libraries class – it was a 10 page study on a printed book (published pre-1900) of choice – really interesting paper as I learned a bunch about the origins, publisher, printer and method of  a book I had purchased in 2001 when Reeves and I visited the “town of books” of Hay-on-Wye in Wales.  The previous paper for this class was a 10 page study as well on an original manuscript, pre-1501.  This paper gave me an opportunity to use Stanford’s archives and spend an afternoon among the books. I picked an English land deed from (supposedly)1405 which was in Latin. I actually able to translate, through my limited skills as a palaeologist, that the archivist had actually dated it wrong! That was a fun and gratifying discovery.

Now I am working on a paper for Collection Development that involves the history of archival studies in a chosen under-served population – mine being American local studies in English Local history.  Now, for all you out there saying that topic doesn’t seem like an underserved population, the study of Anglo-American origins on the West coast IS an underserved population, especially when it come to English local history collections.  Even my own personal library has more books on the formalized topic than our San Jose State/King Public Library!!

I also have a mid-term in my history of books class next Monday which I am freaking out about!  Why you ask?  It has probably been, even with all the school I have had, about 10 years since I had to take an in-class, no notes, need-to-remember-everything test!!  Let’s see if this aging brain can still do this!!!!

My third class, I am now officially miffed at what I thought was a cool professor!  The class is Classification and Cataloging. (Ever wonder how they assigned those little Dewey and Library of Congress numbers to books, well I am learning, and it is not fun!!) Anyway, just last Friday the prof. announced we would have a concurrent quiz and mid-term next week that would be due the Monday of Spring break. What sort of nonsense is that!! I know this program is the equivalent of a corporate flex-policy for hours, but come on, some of us do have lives and plan vacations (heaven forbid on vacation dates!) well in advance of the date.  Needless to say I am trying to figure out how to accomplish this without having to take my laptop to St. Thomas with us!

Speaking of vacation, we leave for our annual ‘Little’ spring break trip a week from Friday to St. Thomas in the USVI.  I am really looking forward to some downtime this year and it looks like it should be a fabulous vacation.  Here is the place we are staying.  We have stayed in some very lovely places in the past, but from the looks of this place, it will be the nicest yet – with plenty of room for 14 people!

Well, back to the studying….5 days now and I haven’t left the house….I think I need to have some actual human contact soon or I am going to drive poor Reeves nuts!!