Finals Time at the Library

It’s about the end of the finals time here in Madison.  The libraries have been packed for the last two weeks.  College Library has had several promotions for the students, and I volunteered for coffee night at Memorial Library.  We got coffee from some nearby cafes and served it to the patrons for a couple hours one night last week.  I asserted my dominance over the half and half early on.  One of my veteran coworkers warned me that the half and half is a precious substance that must be rationed in a miserly fashion in order to avoid gluttonous half and half chaos.

Besides the crowds one of the marks of finals time in the libraries is that all the books that streamed out earlier in the semester come flooding back right before the winter break.  I must have checked in over 300 books during my circulation shift earlier today.

Happily, I did not have finals.  There aren’t final exams in the library program.  Final papers and final projects yes, but I finished all of mine before the due dates because I wanted to try not freaking out over deadlines for once.  Next semester should be more hectic though because, as it stands now, I will be taking four courses: collection management, government information sources, GIS, and information architecture.

Holiday Cooking

I made cookies with my roommate last weekend.  I tried making biscotti.  I’d never made them before, and they turned out really well.  They were really complicated, but I like making complicated things.  I had to be really careful with the dough because it had a lot of eggs and was really sticky.  I had to bake it as one big lump, and then cut it into strips, bake them, turn them over, and then back them again.

I’m going home for the holidays and am excited about the cooking.  I don’t have as much patience as a should, and my technique is not very good.  I am getting better though.  I am making sauerbraten and beef wellington this year.  Not on the same day thankfully.  I’m also making more biscotti because they were fun to make and a sour cream apple pie that I made for Thanksgiving last year that turned out really well.  I’m very excited about the beef wellington.  I’ve looked at lots of different recipes and videos on youtube and am going to try to mix a lot of the tips together to try and make it as perfect as possible.  Hopefully, I will have victory photos to show.

Hopefully This is A Phase

So, someone broke into my car sometime between Saturday and Sunday.  I wasn’t the last one to use the car, so not sure if the door was locked or not, but when I went to use it Sunday morning the door was slightly ajar and there was stuff strewn on the floor.  Luckily I don’t keep anything valuable in that heap of junk.  There were no windows broken or anything.  I know that no car is theft proof, but mine is so old and beaten up that it’s hardly even worth scrapping for parts.  I contacted my landlady about it, and she had heard from someone else in the building.  I’m a little peeved that she didn’t send me an email when someone else reported their car broken into, but I let my roommate know so that she can watch hers.  Also, this morning at 5 am I was woken up by someone’s car alarm.  This car alarm must have had a feature where once it went off, it continued to go off every half hour unless the owner came and turned it off because I heard it at least 3 more times.  When I was getting ready for work this morning I heard yelling from the parking lot, so perhaps I was not the only person annoyed by this.

This is the GRAD STUDENT mailing list, for Pete’s sake!

I am getting the most entertaining emails right now.  Here’s what happened:

There is a list serv for graduate students on campus run by this group that is sort of a grad student union.

Somehow a really obvious spam message got through the list serv and was sent out to everyone.

People started unsubscribing to the list serv, but they were clicking reply all, so their disgust at the one spam email is actually creating an avalanche of emails coming into everyone’s inbox.

A couple people sent out emails telling people not to reply all, but people were still doing it.

I am still getting emails, but one of the most recent ones demonstrates the situation pretty well I think:

READ THE INSTRUCTIONS. This is the GRAD STUDENT mailing list, for Pete’s sake!To unsubscribe, you have to CLICK THE LINK AT THE BOTTOM. Please quit responding to the whole list. It doesn’t do anything but send an email to the whole list! Y’all are driving me nuts!

Click the unsubscribe link at the bottom, then follow the directions on the web page that opens. It will take about an hour for your request to go through.

First Blizzard of the Season

So, last night we had 16-17 inches of snow in what one of my supervisors referred to as a class 3 kill-storm.  The university was closed today, but I didn’t have any work or class today anyway.  I was hoping to go to the grocery store and maybe get some work done in the lab, but the buses aren’t running and there is no way my car is getting out of the parking lot until our landlady gets the plow through here.  Oh, how I long for indoor parking.  At least I have off street though.  The people who park on street have to move their cars to the opposite side of the street every night so that the plow can come through.

I did walk to the laundromat.  Several large branches have broken off the trees in my neighborhood, and I’ve heard that some power lines have fallen as well.  Thankfully we have not lost power.  Both my roommates took the snow day to work on papers, which would have been hard to do without electricity.

I have been getting some of my holiday reading done.  Every year I read David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice, and earlier this week I read A Christmas Carol on Google Books.  Even though the libraries I work at are involved in the Google Books project, I still don’t always think to look there.  I thought about asking for a Kindle for Christmas this year, but think I’ll wait until I get an iPhone or something and use that.