Princess Sparklefists

I've suddenly become busy with having a social life on top of my already busy schedule, so I haven't had any time to post!

I am just 14 days away from my very last MLS class, which is exciting. Meanwhile, instead of actually finishing any work, I've been going on day trips to Delaware, going to game night with friends, or letting myself be persuaded that watching Season 3 of Buffy is a better way to spend an afternoon than writing a paper. And since I'm now dating someone in my college, I've had a fun week of all my friends asking "So what's up with you and..."

At some point over the weekend I lost my school ID, so I currently can't ride the bus to campus, which is annoying, and I can't get in any of the doors at work, which is super annoying and means I can get locked in a hallway. Replacing those things costs 20 bucks though. What a rip-off!

No I'm off to campus to hang out at the performing arts library and hopefully actually write my paper on music classification. I hate to go to campus when I specifically took a day off work to write, but the construction noise at my apartment is too loud to tolerate all day.

And there you have it, my exciting life!

Someone (*cough*d4ni*cough*) sent me a message on Last.fm the other day, which reminded me of its existence and its OMG STATISTICS. I have sunk into an all new spiral of obsessing about what I'm listening to, and I've spent more time than I care to count over the last two days tidying up my metadata in iTunes. Because, you know, it's really important that I correctly separate the massive "Alternative & Punk" genre out into "Anti-Folk" and "Piano Rock" and "New Wave."

None of this is helping me write a term-paper proposal for my classification theory class. Oooh... sudden thought! Maybe I should write about classifying music! I could talk about how it's hard because the categories are all nebulous and overlapping, and compare the genre type tagging versus classification by musical feature, like my fave "extensive vamping" from Pandora. Hmmm.

You know what would be great? If I were as good at organizing my actual life as I am with metadata. Just sayin'.

Whew, it's been a busy weekend.

There was an archives happy hour after work on Friday. It's been awhile since I've gone, and I'd forgotten how much fun they are. I visited with some old and new friends and tried some new beers... all in all a good time.

Saturday we had about five inches of snow. Not so odd for January, except for the fact that it was nearly 70 degrees at the beginning of the week. I split and took the train to Virginia, where my aunt and I went to the mall for our now standard weekend entertainment of dinner and a movie. We saw It's Complicated, which I thought was really funny. John Krasinki's character is especially hilarious. He actually reminded me a little bit of my sister's boyfriend. Anyway.

I'm still not really back into the swing of this school thing. I did some reading over the weekend, but perhaps not as much as a should have. Today's avoidance technique of choice was cleaning. The kitchen is a wreck because of a complicated situation involving a wet floor and walls getting knocked in, so I spent a bunch of time cleaning it. Then I cooked dinner and had to clean it all over again.

Good news though... me and the roomies are getting along okay right now. I brought home a recliner with me today, which certainly doesn't hurt. (Also we've been united by the kitchen!fail.) This evening everyone was actually hanging out in the kitchen/living room cooking/eating/watching the Grammys. That doesn't usually happen, so that's kind cool.

Sleeeep now. I've got an early meeting tomorrow and for the first time ever I have an item on the agenda. And my boss won't be there, so it's all on me. Wish me luck!

I love it when things work out.

I was flipping through the guide on my cable thinking how it was too bad that Bones doesn't air on Saturday night... then lo and behold, two reruns on one of the local channels. Hurrah! I'm a bit obsessed with this show at the moment. (But it is totally obsession worthy, as this squee-filled post about next week's promo from fiery_twilight will attest.)

Theoretically I'm also working on a final exam at the moment. It's a group final, and my group came over her last night for about four hours so we could review all of our drafts. Now I'm working on expanding and revising, and figuring out how to draw organizational charts on my computer. Fuuuun. There is my awesome Saturday night guys! :D

Also, it snowed today. It won't stick around, cause it's still too warm here, but at least now it's seems like winter has started.

Tonight in class we watched this documentary called Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu about the last night of hot metal typesetting at the New York Times. (It was in 1978; after that they started using computers.) We've all heard how print newspapers are dying, which I think is a shame, so I thought it was pretty cool learning how the type was produced and put together to print the pages of the paper. Yeah, I'm a big nerd. I know it.

"etaoin shrdlu" is a pre-qwerty character string from the keyboard on a linotype machine. Apparently there is an operational one at a museum in Baltimore that they'll let you play with if they're not busy. I kinda want to go there.


Photo by splorp on Flickr.

In other news, I've been in the new apartment for a week and things are going well. We got internet (and cable) hooked up and it's sooo much faster than the DSL I had before. To celebrate I've been watching lots of 30 Rock and Merlin when I should actually be working on my final paper for History of the Book. I'm sure it'll come together though. These things always do. Now if only this cold/sinus/allergy thing I've got would go away!

Also, new layout! I liked the old one, except the text was too small and too light, and I got tired of trying to fix it. I'm debating changing the color scheme, and maybe the font, but I don't know.

At work, scanning postcards of Monticello. I'm listening to Colin Murray from last night, and he's been sharing his thoughts on some of the Eurovision contestants. He says Russia's song was "So depressing it makes 'Mad World' sound like 'The Venga Bus.'" Was that the one where they aged the singers face on the video screen? Cause that was freaky.

I took the Metro to work this morning, for the first time in quite awhile. I really do prefer taking Metro to driving, because instead of being tense because of the stupid traffic, I can just sit and read a book. Too bad it takes so long and is so expensive, cause I don't like driving 50+ miles by myself each day. It's wasteful.

Tonight I'm meeting some friends, and some of their friends, for an end of the semester dinner/happy hour. (That's why the car got left at home today.) SAM already had an end of the year party on Saturday, but you really can't celebrate often enough after a semester like this has been. I've now completed three semesters of my MLS... and have three more to go. Part of that is because I transferred, and part is because I'm switching to part time starting now.

Is anybody else planning to watch Glee? I read an article about it this morning in the NYTimes and saw the trailer, and it looks kinda fun. I wasn't in show choir in high school (my HS didn't even have one), but I did do band and drama... they're all the similar types of dorkitude.

I am finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Today I had my very last class of the semester (yay!), and our final exam was handed out. I was expecting the worst, so I ended up quite pleased. There's only one question, and it's actually interesting. But that best part? Maximum five pages. Those words just about made my day.

Other awesome news: I checked my grade on my special topics project, and thought I failed, which was very WTF, especially since the comments said my paper was well written and made good use of the literature. Turns out she made a typo when she entered the grade, so I didn't fail! Yay!

I spent another night at the City of Fairfax Library. They play music at closing to coerce people to leave, which I thought was a kinda cool strategy. This whole going to the library to work thing seems to be working out all right so far. I'm down to one two-page question on one exam, and two three-page questions for the other. Last Tuesday I wrote more than that in less than ideal conditions, so we'll see what I can do camped out in the library tomorrow.

Also, I am contractually required to point out that Fairfax has the failiest traffic circle I have ever encountered.

What's the point of building a traffic circle at all if half the traffic goes right through the middle? Now they just have two sets of traffic lights instead of one. That's not more efficient, it's just more confusing!

In honor of the last week of classes this semester, I finally have a day off. Granted, I'm spending the entire day writing a case study about Google Book Search, but still. The whole reason I've been wishing for an extra day off all semester is that I never have time to get anything done.

Writing this paper is all kinds of fun, involving two computers (one for reading, one for writing) and about 1 billion tabs in Firefox. Our presentation was a month ago, but for that I didn't have to cite every statement I made. My partner finished her portion of the paper over two weeks ago, so I'm the lazy slacker writing hers today. Why, yes, it is due tomorrow. Strangely, I am actually not feeling stressed about this. Maybe it's left over positivity from yesterday.

"The Schedule of Classes will be available on the web February 23rd."

HEY UNIVERSITY REGISTRAR, YOU PROMISED ME A SCHEDULE! GIMME!

This actually matters a lot, beyond my normal obsession with timetables. (My college roommate and I were kind of insane about drawing up potential schedules.) The course selection for fall will determine (in part) whether I'll graduate in December 2009 or June 2010. That's a whole six months! (Which as we all know is plenty of time to relocate halfway across the country.) Of course, registration isn't for a month, so I've got time to think, and of course money is a factor, but I'm still impatient.

In other news, I was walking out of Gelman Library today and say a girl dressed in a polar bear costume walking out of Starbucks.

Yeah, okay, fine... I'll go back to reading about appraisal now.

I got eskimo snowed today in my "Organization of Information" class. *headdesk* Also, we got all that bs about how people can only differentiate between colors that they have unique words for. Gah!!! I had already pointed out several times that she was wrong about cataloging rules, but I forced myself to hold it in that she was wrong about the linguistics stuff. (Yes, linguistics makes me ranty. Don't these people read Language Log?! That class is so frustrating... which is why I spent most of it today reading the Huffington Post.

Also, I got an e-mail that started with "There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't." This is always a lame joke, but I think zankhamun and lib_chick42 will have a special appreciation for it's lameness.

My computer problems at work were fixed, then returned, then were fixed again. Now I can actually use Photoshop. That is to say, I can do my job.

I watched House tonight. Well, kind of, cause I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen to make a Turkish chopped salad for dinner, so for the first half I was mostly just listening to House. Whatever. ( This is what happens when I miss a few episodes. )

Tomorrow is my day off! Yay! I'll be spending most of it working on projects though. Were did all my time go, guys?