Remembrance


This is a picture of my beautiful friend Casey whose death this morning has left us all feeling like the sun has gone out.

Ask and ye shall receive

Mt. Rainier for Justin.

On the phone, talking to her uncle

"Ha, that's funny. It sounds like Marcel Proust."
...
"Proust. He's an author."
...
"He...nevermind."

I'm so proud.

Glad that's over
Boy, you take a seven-day-a-week work schedule for a couple of weeks, throw in some sort of sore-throat-producing virus, some insomnia-producing-anti-throat medication and a pulled muscle in my thigh (ask me about THAT sometime...) and the whole working world seems out to thwart you. Once I got my knickers out of the the complicated twist I'd created, I requested a meeting with my new temp boss and his boss and we ironed out most of my concerns. I didn't bring up the raise, but my hours are better and I have permission to proceed on the projects most dear to me. Now I am just looking forward to the 22nd, which I am taking off and am not getting out of bed before 8. I can hardly wait.
In the mean time, winter has snuck up on me. We have had several nights in the 20's and clear (which is unusual for us this early). The result has been watching the sun rise over Mt. Rainier the last few mornings. I have never seen a dawn so rosy as this morning's and I wish you all could have seen it. While we were at the beach this past spring I meant to get up to see the sunrise over the ocean once, but couldn't quite do it (although I did almost stay up late enough). Another time perhaps...but when?

Small frustrations and patience has never been my strong suit

On my desk I keep two fortune cookie messages from my first two meals in Seattle after returning home.
They say:
Your genuine talent will find its way to success.
AND
You may have the be patient; think, listen, and heed signs.

In the last two weeks my boss (who was new-ish and very progressive within our organization) was fired and my only regular coworker decided to retire. Next week. So my big plan for building a new catalog is on hold until the new boss is hired (as is the raise that former boss agreed to give). What's more, temp boss is a challenging personality. I am trying to get a better handle on him, but it mostly seems that he sees the library as a passive institution, the repository for dead works. When I asked him about the budget for materials and mentioned that former boss agreed to "agressively expanding" the collection by buying three books a month, he told me that didn't seem cost effective, better to wait for someone to ask for materials before we buy them. My coworker seemed to have some sort of kindred understanding of this man and now she is leaving, too.
And I am currently making more money doing laundry part time than I am at the library.
So, I guess my strategy is to build a compelling reason for why we MUST modernize and why we should have the funding and staffing to do it well. It is just going to take more work than I thought to convince the status quo that progress is needed.
It would just be so much easier if everyone did it my way to start with...