etc.

The Ph.D. Trap Revisited, Wilfred Cude
Published October 2000

If you’ve ever been mildly critical about the doctorate-granting academic behemoth that is the average North American institution of higher learning, you will love reading Cude’s take on the institution and why anyone who ever considered a Ph.D. ought to take a good, hard look at their reasons why first. Cude brings into question everything from why undergraduate institutions require their instructors to have an advanced research degree, to how university faculties and departments came to embrace the draconian systems they have in place for granting advanced degrees. If you are seriously considering doctoral work, run, don’t walk, to your local library and get your hands on a copy of this book.

I think we can all agree that it’s important to challenge assumptions and behaviour patterns. Some years ago, when I lived a lot more urban than I do now (while I still live in the city, I don’t do city things like I used to, like take the transit and walk places), I used to walk a different route from home to the bus stop, and from the subway to school/work everyday. It was my conscious attempt to defy routine and embrace change on a daily basis, and sure this sounds like a whole lot of inspirational-speaker crap, but it was good for me. These days I’m feeling the burden of working 65 kms away from where I live because one highway can get me there in 45 minutes and 65 kms, but it makes for an uninteresting commute and the routine is starting to feel a bit stifling. The trade-off is taking any number of more interesting routes and staying off the highway, but I’m already burning way more gas than I’m comfortable with so it doesn’t feel like a viable option. So this is me saying I’m on the hunt for a happy median.

And since there’s no good way to bridge a highway story with a squirrel story, I’ll just tell you that we think that the squirrel we found trapped in our furnace last weekend has climbed his way into an equally problematic rock & hard place location. While I was putting the finishing touches on my LIScareer article last night, I heard a lot of high-pitched whining and trapped-animal scrambling beneath the floorboards of the study. I’m usually pretty kind to all of god’s creatures, and as much as I keep telling myself that they were here before us (on the land, not in the house, although they were probably in the house before we got here too ), the milk of human kindness is definitely souring around here. I can’t wait to rip the shingles off this place and have a good hard go at really patching it up.

Also, I did some work on blogwithoutalibrary.net yesterday. It looks great on my screen, but I’m not kidding myself that it looks good on yours too. Let me know.

For the simple pleasure of it, I passed an hour with Bede’s Lives of the Saints a few days ago. It’s a seldom mused fact around here that before I came to be a bookish librarian I was a bookish medievalist, devoting all of my attention to Medieval hagiography, female mystics, and devotional literature. How lofty! I don’t keep up with the literature as much as I’d like to, but it certainly was nice to dip back in for the pure self-indulgence of it. I might make a habit of it.

And you know as well as anyone that real-world habits become blog habits before long, so I combed through the Catholic Web for today’s saint (the Catholics have the Web covered pretty good) and today’s installment of Medieval pop-info is St. Adela, youngest daughter of William the Conqueror, canonized in 1137. My own attachment to Adela is shamefully earthly — she married a gentleman from Blois, which is a lovely little town on the banks of the Loire that we spent three days in some years ago.

Oddly, it all comes back to me. Which is a suitable, if clunky, segue into my resume update, complete with anchors and annotations. I’m not looking for work currently, which makes this the best time to update doesn’t it?

Also, in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s grey tuesday.

Discovered yesterday that one of my favourite sounds is the low rumble of fresh-cut vegetables boiling in a pot of stock and spices.

I’m detoxing this week. Vegetable soup by the bowlful and fruit and vegetables in unlimited quantities. By this time next week I expect to feel energetic & toxin-free.

This time today however, I’m slowly trying to recompress after a three-day weekend. Many have trouble decompressing after long stretches at their workaday jobs. I on the other-hand have no trouble at all sloughing off the stresses of work, it’s the recompression to a frenzied pace that I need to work at. I’m not at all unhappy about this. Part of the weekend was spent organizing various closets and putting the finishing touches on spring cleaning that I am way ahead on this year. Some parts were spent reading, and other parts were spent trying to corner and outsmart the squirrel that’s trapped in our furnace. Some parts were more successful than others, but by far my most favourite parts were spent walking in our neighbourhood park in the springiest of Spring weather and having breakfast with a couple of the coolest librarians I know.

Naked, David Sedaris
Abridged Audiobook 2001

David Sedaris is one of those names I’ve been feeling I should know more about, if for nothing other than to have some common currency with which I can converse with friends and colleagues who are pop culture hipper than I am. So yes, this is my first Sedaris experience, and yes the man is insanely funny, even though I’m having a hard time believing that one man can have so many outrageous & zany stories. It’s a rare audiobook that I would recommend over the printed version, not because I’ve read both, but because I can’t imagine the text being nearly as enjoyable without Sedaris’ expertly deadpan narrative style.

You know me, I love a good Heist film. And this is a damn good heist film, not the best, but damn good all the same. Huge heavyweight cast that worked well.

The mister had the best ever Valentine’s treat for me when I arrived home on Saturday from work, and me not being a fan of the holiday, we celebrated mister-was-very-good-today day instead. He had fixed many of the problems with our falling-down crazy urban house of occasional decay, and cleaned off all the winter detritus from the basement floors, and mopped things up, and finished countless loads of laundry, and cooked a lovely meal of pasta and the garlickiest garlic bread in the world.

Lucky is what I really am.

Yesterday I finally put that third coat of stain on our two night tables, and we inherited two lovely lamps for said tables, courtesy of my parents’ ongoing basement binge, and we welcomed back my world-travellin’-81-year-old uber-grandmother, and I celebrated the impending birth of another friend’s impending progeny, and it was a very good and busy weekend.

What I really am is lucky.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, Jon Krakauer
Unabridged Audiobook 1998

I’m not one of those types who accrues any sort of personal reward from testing the boundaries of my physical or spiritual abilities, but I think I can safely say that I appreciate this sensibility in others. In 1996, Krakauer accepted a writing assignment to cover the burgeoning commercialization of Everest for Outside magazine, and he got to fulfill his childhood dream of summiting the hill while he was at it. However, when 8 fellow-climbers lost their lives in a freak storm that hit the mountain during their descent, his writing assignment became very different from the one he signed on for. The real pleasure about this book was that, by some feat of literary and moral exactitude, Krakauer managed put enough distance between himself and the events of that day to speak frankly about the disastrous decisions that resulted from the team’s collective altitude-induced impairment. At the same time, he remains sensitive to those who lost their lives, and expertly explicates the confused clarity of someone who came so close to death himself. I was riveted by this book.

Does it bother me that I have to work on Valentine’s Day? Not in the least. The most regrettable thing about working today is that it is Saturday and my house is falling down and needs fixing and I’d rather be home fixing it. Falling down as in a sprung leak in the window jam in the washroom, inviting small torrents of melting snow and ice into the room. Falling down as in furniture in constant transition. Falling down as in two night tables that have been waiting a week for a once-over with fine steel wool and a third coat of stain. Falling down as in mounds of cardboard recycling taking over floorspace. Falling down as in laundry that is closing in on what floorspace the cardboard leaves behind. So no, not really falling down, just falling down in trifling yet annoying ways.

Not trifling at all is my good friend giving birth to a lovely little girl who looks like a yummy marshmallow. Congratulations Dalya & Elisha, you are going to be wonderful parents!

Your browser is working just fine. All that cavernous white space you see at the top of the page is not a slow load or a broken image. You see, I’ve been trying to come up with a new header for a while, something Springy, you already know all about the impact of the seasons on my design habits. The weather has been mild all week, positively temperate in fact, which got me thinking about the snowflakes here at etc. and how it’s probably time to retire them.

Time indeed, only I haven’t been able to come up with The Next Great Header so, in keeping with the virtual minimalism I have been creeping stealthily towards, I decided on no header at all. At least for a while. Tell me what you think.

I’ve also started thinking on more accessible terms lately so now I have some work to do. Good day.