I have been pretty frantic this semester with school and my new Chair position with the SAASC, but sometimes it really does seem like I am on the right track, especially after weekends like the one from which I just returned.

I attended the Western regions Archival Associations meeting in Las Vegas.  As a member of the Society of California Archivists, this was a prime opportunity for me to meet many members and introduce myself to the new President of the SCA. (I was also able to get my book signed personally by the SAA president, Randall Jimerson – I’m such a geek!)  Association connections are important as they are the real life link to my future career possibilities, something that keeps me up at night!  With about 250 people at the conference from all the Western states from about Colorado, west, there were plenty of people to chat-up about how they got where they are now and where are they going. 

There were some great talks including the key note speaker, Wole Soyinka, who is the 1986 Nobel prize winner in literature.  He was an elegant speaker and his melodious voice was divine!  You can listen to him here.   

Other sessions addressed various subjects and challenges within the archival discipline including the issues of Archivists as Historians.  I am still wrestling with my desire to do research and how I can balance the two or incorporate the two into one career, which may mean a second masters in history. (poor Reeves, I don't know if he could handle me taking another few years to finish school, my stress may kill him! ;)

I went to the conference with a new friend, Sarah, who was the former Chair of SAASC and who now works at Stanford in a couple different archival positions.  We had a good time and did manage to get away from the conference long enough to walk around the strip and spend about $10 each at the slots!

This was just the first conference of my archival career (although I did quite a few with Gartner - very different A-type people at those however) - the next conference looks like I will be going to the SAA conference in New Orleans (in August, yuck!) – this is the ‘biggie’ conference of the year and our chapter (i.e. me) will be presenting a student chapter poster at the conference.  So much stuff, so little brain power!! :)

....after a very stressful and busy midterm session with school, I think it has paid off.  So far I have received all A's on my paper, quiz and 2 mid-terms.  I am just waiting on one more grade...... 

What a week away from reality!  We had a fabulous vacation in St. Thomas at one of the loveliest spots I have seen.  The house in which we stayed was a three level Mediterranean-style home with 7 well-appointed bedrooms and a great open style living/dining/kitchen which was conducive to a reconnecting family of 8 adults and 6 children.  Off of the lowest level was a deck the width of the house with a nice sized pool, hot tub and built-in grill. The best part about the house however was the location.  The house was set into the side of a hill that looked West across Magen’s Bay.  The deck of the house, with a gazebo for the hot afternoon sun, was set far enough above our private white-sand beach we could watch the sea turtles and rays swim in the waters just below.  The color of the bay ranged from cerulean to turquoise bleeding into sapphire near the center of the bay while the white sand bottom created an ethereal translucent quality to the water. 

In addition to the tranquil surroundings, we had many fun outings and events, including…..

• Meeting friends from NYC for pool-side libations at their hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, who were coincidently visiting St.Thomas at the same time
• A pair of jet-skis which we had for a full day to speed around our bay.  They were delivered right to our beach!  We had an inner-tube to tow the kids, although a few adults took a turn.
• Snorkeling right from our beach.  I don’t think anything will ever quite compare to snorkeling in the Red Sea, but we did see a few pretty fish and many sea cucumbers!
• A boat trip over to St. John for a bit of touring and lunch. 
• Tour of the historic Fort Christian which was begun in 1672. It was actually used as the local jail until 1983!!!
• A little bit of shopping around Charlotte Amalie – it was less quaint and local than we like, although they had lots of great name-brand deals.  (no duty or taxes on items and almost everything can be bargained down from the US retail price)
• Several great restaurants including the Blue Moon Café which was looking over a small bay on the east side of the island, The Old Stone Farmhouse for an adult evening out, and Cuzzins, an island-inspired Caribbean cuisine, my personal favorite.
• And of course, many hours relaxing by the pool and the beach!!

It is hard to believe it is already over and we really hope to return to the Virgin Islands some day.

If you guessed the Stairmaster, you are right!  Since I have been working out almost everyday I have come to crave the exercise and feel like a slug if I don’t.  Now, I just don’t want to lose my momentum.

I have also found this is a good way to manage stress.  I use my 45-60 minutes for ‘me’ time to just let my mind relax and wander.  Especiallly since t-minus 4 hours till my mid-term!  (side-note, I think it is appropriate that there is a severe storm/wind warning that starts in the bay area at the same time my mid-term is supposed to begin! =)

This weekend I worked very hard so I could go out and play with my friends, and it was well worth it.  We had cocktails at our SF friend’s place near the Castro and then had great conversation and cuisine at Cote Sud, a French Bistro near their house.  The evening was capped off by a rousing game of Cranium and we found out which of us were the kids in school who ate the paste anyway when they were told not to!!

So, after today’s exam, only a quiz and mid-term left till a week of relaxing – yeah!!

....maybe I should start calling this blog the “Stairmaster cronicles” =)

SAASC update: Part of the things we do with the Society of American Archivists Student Chapter is to take tours of various archival repositories around the area.  Yesterday, I took a group of our members to tour Stanford Universities Special Collection’s department.  We had a great guide, Sean Quimby who is the Assistant Manuscripts Processing Librarian with their Special Collections.  He did the “wow” tour first, including letting us see, touch and hold items like an original page from the Gutenburg bible, an original Shakespeare folio from 1685, a signed copy of a first-edition James Joyce “Ulysses”, a first edition Huck Finn which was first published in England, a beautifully illuminated manuscript of the religious “Book of Days” from the 14^th Century and my personal favorite, an original and complete Samuel Johnson Dictionary!  We were also able to go ‘behind-the-scenes” and see the manuscript processing department and ask all the technical questions regarding the physical process, as well development policies.  I really look forward to many more tours like this!

Other activities going on with the SAASC – I will be attending the “Western Round-up” (horrible name) for the annual meeting of Western archival associations, including the California Archival Association, of which I am a member as well.  The meeting is in Las Vegas, April 14-16.  It will be a quick and very busy trip with little time to “do” the town, but a great way to make some industry connections.

One more paper is done with only the Bibliography (my least favorite part) to write, along with corrections from my proof-reader.

Now just two mid-terms and a quiz till we leave on vacation next Friday – eek!

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!!

After a month of organization I feel like I can jump into a busy semester, and busy year to come, with less ‘stuff’ (literally) on my mind!  Reeves and I decided to reorganize our two additional bedrooms and pretty much switch all the contents so we could utilize the space more efficiently.  I have also plowed through about a dozen projects including photo albums, file purging, closet reorganization, memorabilia consolidation and a few decoration projects.  It feels great to have had the time to get some of these things done!

BUT, school started last week and there goes all my free time! I have a strict study schedule (with small breaks for things like blogging) – in fact I spent 7 straight hours yesterday reading and doing research.  It really is going to be a busy semester! This semester I have 3 classes again including:

1)       The History of Books and Libraries (of which I am very excited – I know, I know, I am a geek)

2)       Collection Management

3)       Cataloging and Classification (very bizarre class – all about how one transcribes the bibliographic information you find on the verso side of the title page of a book – we learn were to put every space, comma and colon!!  There is more to the class than just this, but after flipping through our new cataloging ‘bible’ which is the 3 inch-think binder of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules [used by the Library of Congress], I think my brain hurts already!]

I have also taken on the responsibility of being the Chair of SJSU’s Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists.  The title is much more impressive than what I have seen of the position so far, but I am going to try and change this….in fact I have already been meeting with people to try and get our chapter more active both locally and nationally – we will see how it goes!

As excited as I am about a new semester again, it is tempered with a bit of a black cloud from the quality of the program and my feeling like a solitary student. I have one class that is totally online, one class that met for 2 days last week and now is all online and a third that attendance at the lecture-only class is optional (all the lectures are digitally archived on the web and can be accessed at any time) - I am starting to really crave some in-person interaction.  I have taken the attitude that you get out of the program what you put in, but the more I talk with other students and discover on my own, the more frustrated I become with SJSU and specifically with the SLIS.   Now the million dollar question….. how long do I push through this program to just get done, or find a program that is higher quality and has a director that actually care about the future success of their students! 

Well, enough distraction for today, the books are calling me back…..

It is now January and with the craziness of the holidays over, I can now turn my attention to organization – one of my favorite hobbies. As much as I like organization, I do have a tendency towards pack-rattery (but much less than my husband thankfully!) so I have adopted a new mantra (borrowed a bit from my friend Amy) – “If I don’t love it, it goes”.  The only caveat to that is that it needs to be eminently useful – in other words, not something that I will save for 5 years that ‘might’ be useful in that time.  So far I have divested my closet of almost 2/3 of the contents, the linen closet, parts of my office and I am about to tackle the kitchen….(who really needs 6 sets of salt and pepper shakers!!) 

I don’t start school again till January 26^th so I have a bit of time to get some things accomplished besides the daily maintenance of laundry, dishes, etc.   While in Colorado over Christmas I went through some of my old stuff at my Dad’s house and brought back with me the majority of pictures from growing up.  I so far have put about 600 pictures in albums and still have about 2/3 to go.  I have been putting them in new albums so that they will be preserved a bit better than the crumbling ones from which they originated.  I haven’t seen some of these pictures in 20 years and it has been very fun to take a memory stroll and share with Reeves some of my childhood.  I hope to start posting some select treasures - all the good, bad and ugly here, for all to share in the comedy. Stay tuned…..

Today, while out at Santana Row to get my glasses adjusted, I decided to get a Wahoo’s fish taco for lunch. While walking by the small grassed area in front of Wahoo’s, I noticed a strange flakey white substance in the air. Much to my shock it was snowing!!  If you live in the Bay area you know that today it was a beautiful sunny day which reached about 65 degrees.  You ask then, how could it be snowing???  Well, thanks to modern ‘technology’ (and according to a friend, the scientists at Disney) there were 3 snow making machines ejecting a constant stream of a substance much like soapsuds, but very fine, and from a distance, a dead ringer for snow.  Only in California would a mall spend that much money to produce a substance the colder parts of the nation spend millions trying to avoid and remove!!