It's Official...

I hate Mondays. I hardly ever have good Mondays.

I put in my request for my Christmas PTO this morning at work. My supervisor emailed me back and said that it was tentative. This afternoon he emailed me back and said that my request had been downgraded from "tentative" to "unlikely to be approved". That means I will be spending Christmas in Minneapolis. It's the first time in my entire life that I haven't spent Christmas with my family. I'm not particularly religious, but I do think of Christmas as family time and I love the warm, safe feeling that I get when I go to bed (in "my" bed with my heavy down comforter and my parents just across the way) and the smell of pine in the air. It's also my brother's birthday.

My parents are discussing what to do. My dad sounds like he wants to come up to Minneapolis for Christmas and my mom wants my brother and I to come down either the weekend before or the weekend after. It just won't be the same. Christmas Eve is the one time I actually enjoy going to church-mostly because of the candlelight. I know that I can go to a service up here, there are plenty of beautiful churches and I've never seen a midnight Christmas mass, so this would be a good time to go to one. But my parents won't be there. There won't be the drive along the lake to see all the beautiful old mansions decorated for the holiday. There won't be the opening of one present and cookies after church. Or dinner with my grandmother's beautiful china. Or my brother's annual chocolate chip cheesecake birthday cake and my annual complaint of "Can't you pick anything else?".

I know I'm welcome at Evan's family's Christmas, but it just won't be the same.

In the grand scheme of things, me not being able to actually be with my family on Christmas isn't a big deal. At least I have family and other people to share it with. There are people who don't even have that. I'm just amazed at how much this is bothering me. I've been fighting back tears all day. Yesterday I was all excited for the holiday season. I never get excited for Christmas this early. Now I don't even want to think about it and I just feel kind numb.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Have You Hugged Your Cataloger Today?

This semester of school has certainly given me a new appreciation for what catalogers do.

The Dewey system and I? Well, we get along fabulously. It's like doing a puzzle. A very elegant, nerdy puzzle. Granted, when you get into dropping digits and zeros it gets a bit confusing. And sometimes when you look at a number, you can't really figure out the thought process that the cataloger took, but I love it. A book on breeding racehorses? 636.12. You say you're interested in civil engineering as a profession? 624.023. Doing a Dewey number really reminds me of letterboxing-looking at clues, trying to decipher them to get to the right place, and the "A-ha!" moment when you find what you're looking for. You can really tailor the number to bring out certain aspects of the work. It's fantastic!

My relationship with the Library of Congress Classification System? I want a divorce. There are 44+ volumes (compared to Dewey's sleek four) and there are no instructions (the brief instructions in Dewey seem downright verbose). Granted, it's the Library of Congress and they do pretty much what they want to do and this system obviously works for them. It was created for use only in the Library of Congress and they don't really share the rules that their catalogers use. So us mere mortal librarians (and poor MLIS students) basically have to figure it out based on what others have figured out.

I've spent the past three hours pouring over various volumes of the LoC Classification System for my final exam and I honestly feel like throwing them out the window. There are directions to look at a certain table, but no clues as to where this table is. The descriptions of the headings are vague at the best of times and the indentations screw with your head. Tables are scattered throughout the volumes, so you have to go digging in several different books to find what you need.

So hug the cataloger at your local library and thank them for making it easy for you to find what you need! 'Cause it sure as heck ain't easy to do.

It's Red!

As I type this, I'm sitting in my favorite coffee shop and sipping chai. I'm supposed to be working on my final exam for my Cataloging class and looking up Library of Congress authority headings, but I'm having too much fun playing with my Christmas present to myself-a new laptop! It replaces my six year old Vaio. I'm quite attached to the old one. It's been through several moves and had even gone to Wales with me, but it was time to retire it. The new one has wireless and doesn't weigh 50 pounds. And most importantly, it's red!

It's been kind of fun going through and adjusting the settings and whatnot to my liking. When it came time to assign it a name, I christened it Childermass. My boyfriend (the man who named our home network "Voltron") saw the new name and said "Childermass? You're naming it after a character in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell?"

So say hello to Childermass!