So, the past week I’ve been driving myself nuts working on a “Mini Project” for my Flash class. We were given a JPG file of the school mascot and instructed to include a variety of animation elements we have learned so far in the class. I submitted my project at 11:30 pm last night, 15 minutes before the deadline. Check it out and admire at your leisure. 
In other news my Meniere’s had continued to be problematic and then last week my ear started to feel funny. As in I could tell something was wrong with the opening in my ear drum. The reason why I have an opening in my ear drum is related to a device called the Meniett which I’ll let you investigate on your own if you choose. In any case, I’ve had tubes, I’ve had problems with tubes, they’ve been in and out and the last time my doctor (who is wonderful by the way) ended up having to take the tube out, he was sure that the opening would stay open. But last week on Wednesday night my ear felt funny and Thursday I woke up and was pretty much sure it was closed. Yesterday I saw the doctor and sure enough, it sealed itself back up again. Rather than have outpatient surgery to put in a fancy T-shaped tube as we’ve done the last two times, we opted for a “temporary” tube done right then and there in the office as we did with the first tube. My doctor’s theory was that since the T-tubes haven’t lasted any longer than the temporary ones, might as well git ‘er done so to speak. Well, it wasn’t fun but at least it is done and I can use my Meniett again starting tonight.
Of course I then had one heck of an earache and didn’t sleep well last night so I had to miss work today. It was nice though to sleep in and get caught up on some miscellaneous stuff. The most recent poetry collection at LibriVox filled up and just as I was about to start cataloging, I read a post from Chris, one of our brilliant programmers, that he had implemented a feature I requested that allows people cataloging collections to input a variety of fields at one time. For instance, in a collection of 20 poems, I previously had to enter manually the title, author, and source for each one into a special area called the compilation table. This makes the title and author of individual poems searchable by the catalog. And the source is important to document Public Domain status. I keep track of all this stuff on a spreadsheet and then, by my calculations, would copy and paste from Excel to Firefox 60 times. Yup, 60. And that’s just for the compilation data, similar stuff has to be copied and pasted other places for regular cataloging. Well, Chris made us a brilliant feature that allows us to copy and paste from excel and enter every single bit of compilation data in one go. It made my day. It makes cataloging poetry so much more pleasant! So, if you’ll excuse me, I have a collection to finish cataloging.
Knitting pictures coming later…
Ack, it’s been a while as Kara and Kristin reminded me. I’ve been quite busy with work and school lately. At work I wrote a grant last year for my library which we were awarded to redesign our website. My boss and I decided on a company to do the redesign and met with them two weeks ago to start the process and I can tell it’s going to be a lot of fun! I need to start rewriting some content and new stuff to fill in the design work that our contractor is doing.
Thank goodness this is my last semester of school as the burnout has reached an all time high. Thank goodness also that I only have one class and it is FUN! Library school in the 21st century is pretty awesome. I’ve learned everything I know about web design from graduate coursework and right now I’m taking a course on Flash. It’s a pretty fun way to finish out the Masters. (I’m trying not to think about the Comprehensive Exams I have coming up in April.) Flash is fun but it’s challenging too. I have tremendous respect now for some of the fancy stuff that is out there.
So, when work and school are taken care of, there is LibriVox to tend to and I found myself feeling swamped in poetry collections and barely able to keep up, let alone record something. So I reached out to some of my fellow metacoordinators for help and the wonderful Kristin (Wisconsin Kristin, not New Hampshire Kristin) stepped up to the plate and we will now alternate short poetry collections. It’ll be like a tag team and give me some breathing room which is much needed. As soon as I’m done posting this I plan on recording a chapter or two of Anne which has gone sadly neglected for weeks now as many of you have reminded me!
I’ve been feeling fried lately. My Meniere’s Disease is flaring up and I tend to try to pretend it isn’t and push through it which of course only makes it worse. It’s so frustrating to be slowed down and held back when I have so many things I want to do. Granted, one of the main things is sitting on the couch with my man and watching tv or Six Feet Under on DVD and knitting but we all need our down time. 
Knitting is my new obsession. I have been having fun with all my beautiful new yarn but I got sidetracked when a coworker and friend added a baby girl to their family two weeks ago. I went to my awesome local yarn store and picked out some pretty pink cotton and knit this up in a few nights:
It’s a pretty pink Sara Hat! The decorations were sort of accidental. I knit two rows of ribbing at the recommendation of a book I was using as a guide to control the roll. Only the roll controlled itself quite nicely and the ribbing just looked silly so I threaded some ribbon through it. The little roses I just found in my random craft stash and used them to mask some decreases that were more obvious than I would have liked. I’m quite happy with how it turned out and I can’t wait to see it on the sweet baby’s head, although I’m told it is too big. And to think I was worried it was too small! But babies in my family tend to have ginormous heads so maybe I let that factor in too much.
But now I’m happily on to my other projects again. I’ve learned some fun new stuff and will post pictures soon. And there’s your Annie update.
