Everything must go

Rising sense of mad trolley dash again as I try to tie up loose ends on a Friday afternoon… taught some S6 school pupils today, just for an hour to give colleagues a breather – they were very nice actually although I don’t know what they thought of my bizarre ad-libs. Don’t think I yet have all my security filters on ready for term time, am just saying things that come into my head without checking for due appropriateness or relevance… waxed lyrical about pilchards and semolina among other things…

Been a few rounds with CELCAT, champion supersystemweight timetabler, all horrible and messy and I don’t wanna play no more. Considering pushing Touchpaper call management system into second place in my Most Hated Applications league.

Frantically doing last minute prep for CDG Officers’ meeting on Monday – out all day tomorrow doing a charity walk round Loch Faskally, then Sunday morning I leave for the long journey to London. I suppose it wouldn’t be a genuine meeting without a few last minute changes or additions to the agenda … in this case I will have to try and tidy up a wee misconception as efficiently and non-controversially as possible… looking forward mainly to the glass of wine following the meeting and the reading time on the train!

Have yourselves a merry little weekend (not too merry, right kids – I always preferred Pippin to Merry BTW)

All issues big and small

According to this week’s Big Issue, it has been a ‘bad week for Library fines: an American student was handcuffed and thrown in jail over two overdue library books. Heidi Dalibor owed £20 after failing to return books by Janet Fitch and Dan Brown on the due date. Cops jailed her, forcing her mum to pay £100 to bail her out.’ I will make no comment on whether her reading choices justify such treatment. But it’s a safe bet that the library service won’t see that money again (we wouldn’t). It will probably go towards leather sofas in the Principal’s office…

I see the World Mind Sport Games are about to take place in Beijing, including bridge, chess, draughts and Go. No Sudoku or Scrabble though. Nor Risk (which has nearly broken up several marriages to my certain knowledge). Nor 221B Baker Street. Nor even WOW as I believe the in-crowd call it.

I was reading these snippets on the way home from a particularly well attended but lengthy CDG Scottish Division meeting. (I am partly to blame for the length, I fear). We missed one train and were forced to chat in the pub for a full 45 minutes after the meet.

Train time now and maybe eke out an hour’s useful CDG work tonight…

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight

If the post title means nothing to you, try either getting up much, much earlier in the morning (even earlier than Olympic Breakfast) or reading/watching the wonderful Kes / A kestrel for a knave. Yup, it’s the shipping forecast. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the resit computing assessment board, whiuch for mysterious reasons I got invited to and couldn’t quite bring myself to decline. Names: they read rhem out. Grades: they read them out. Discussion: minimal and inconclusive. Same old issues. But then right in the last 5 minutes the external examiner brings up referencing and I have to jump to attention to have my say. How can it only be 3pm? A member of computing staff has just invited me to a meeting for 4 hours ago, so his brain is clearly equally addled by the shipping experience.

This morning, met with manager and colleagues to start thinking about the next implementation plan. But we haven’t implemented the stuff from the last implementation plan yet. Should we rename this new document the ‘Fantasy plan’ or the ‘Completely unattainable bloated targetfest’? Feeling overwhelmed by targets, interim targets, personal objectives, oh and a truckload of actual normal work which still needs my loving attention. How on earth am I going to get everything done.

As a completely side issue, the Foo Fighters: what are they for? I don’t get them. I must have been three sheets to the wind when I agreed to be vocalist for a gang of 30- and 40-something rocker guys. Have made it abundantly clear that Cookie monster vocals were not part of my choral training. But the FFs I just don’t get, pure and simple.

Ho hum. Time for a bun. Or more likely time to get back to populating my graduate attribute maps. Don’t ask. Involves pink and green and all manner of wondrous commitments.

Warmups required

Teach summer school students today for 2 whole hours and realise I am definitely not match fit. Keep launching into long explanations and then having to stop and catch my breath. Completely bamboozle thewm about e-books, referencing and all kinds. A few little surprises too as I test drive the new library web pages and discover various Shibboleth nasties.

Not much else to report. Tum ti tum. Completed my papers for officers’ meeting over the weekend, so hoping for a quiet week or two on the CDG front.

Goldfish and paracetamol

Annoying day in which I continually seem to be at the wrong end of the conversation and drift through the building in a puff of cluelessness.

Trains not working due to flooding on the line, so day starts with a nice comfy lift and chat with my hubby. Then again we need the extra time to clean up after poorly pussycats.

Help an Msc student with referencing. He has major problems with very basicv things. He claims never to have been aware of any of my classes though I ran several fir his group and know for a fact they were heavily promoted by academic ataff.  Where has he been all year? Why can students not extrapolate from examples to further instances. How many times do I have to demonstrate the order of names? He’s using a copyright online image without permission as well, so I open that can of worms right up.

Look at a colleague’s holiday photos from Australia. Miss most of the explanation of the picture where people’s feet appear to be being massaged by fish. Some sort of fish spa apparently. Always wondered what sushi was made of: clearly the answer is ‘little piggies’.

Attend 3 meetings relating to 3 different summer school programmes, and develop headache and mild panic about what needs done for all of these and what order they should be tackled in. Then again have a useful discussion with member of our academic support service, looking at what we are each covering and how it all fits together. This is definitely progress.

Won’t even broach the depressingly numbing topic of document storage management – manage to escape that meeting early as double booked.

Subscriptions and renewals just won’t behave and lead to team-wide headaches. No one ever sends the right or the complete information. Crucial people never where you want them and prices never what you expect. Gah. It’s a miracle we can get access to anything at the moment.

Lots bubbling under on the CDG front – submitting our ideas for the Umbrella conference programme; pulling together some last minute event reports for Impact (forced to resort to quoting this blog…)

The end of the day is in sight, am going to knock off shortly and take in a free tasting at the local deli, handily on the way to the station…

Row, row, row your boat

Actually make it to the gym at lunchtime, hence the sporty post title. Presumably you all know the intellectual version of the song?

Propel, propel, propel your craft / Placidly down the liquid solution / Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically declaiming / Existence is but an illusion

Or there’s always my goddaughter’s favourite: ‘If you see a crocodile, don’t forget to scream’.

Anyway the Concept 2 Rowing machine is quite an apt metaphor for the work of a librarian during the summer. You feel as though you’re pulling very hard and working up a sweat but not actually getting very far…

I lie actually – today I got round to some long neglected tasks such as writing up a staff development event from early June. Also starting to get information literacy classes booked in. Attended the ORG meeting, which is a lot less fun than it sounds. Usual state of flux for most details of our service, even though registraton and induction are starting to loom dangerously large.

Sent feedback to a Revalidation candidate on their draft submission. Potentially a strong submission, just needing a bit of a tidy up and a pare down. We definitely tend to the verbose in this profession – our horror of leaving out any useful information? Or our determination to record all our activity since we went through so much blood, sweat and tears to fit it all in?

Lots to be done in advance of the CDG Officers’ meeting in September. Much discussion of agendas, which of course presuppose reports… need to schedule an evening soon to get my head together and start compiling my own report and the porposed revisions to the Draft Strategy.

Fantasy food and disappointing data decisions

Survive another early start and a meeting. Do a few of the jobs that were scribbled postits etc cluttering up my desk.

Spend lunchtime with colleagues fantasising about the comfort foods we would like to be eating. Settle on boiled eggs with soldiers. Pancakes with maple syrup and cream also feature. Leaves actual lunch of Edam, pitta and tomatoes looking rather pathetic.

Afternoon spent pegging away with the portal pages and firming up my objectives for 2008-09 with my line manager. It’s gonna be a long and full year, folks.  Discuss staff development which is a novelty as most of my out of the office time is spent developing other people – good to be reminded that I can be developed too!

Distraught to discover that Bristol Biomedical Image Archive will be no more after 31st July. I really liked this little resource and used it for teaching e.g. ethical use of images. Now I will have to rejig everything. And what happens when I need a copyright cleared portrait of Leptothrix?

Aaaaaahhhhhh

<nonsense>

As a child, I used to frequent East Ham Swimming Baths, usually in the company of a particular friend. The cafe did a mean cup of Horlicks and would sometimes inexplicably give you more than one cup each and only charge you the usual price. We developed all manner of conspiracy theories about this and used to work out devious methods and superstitions to guarantee the extra portions. (Incidentally this young friend and I also developed conspiracy theories about something called ‘trick bombs’, otherwise known as any old piece of junk found on the street or on Wanstead Flats, the local dogwalking haunt.) This is what happens when children are over-exposed to Marxism at a young age

But I digress. My point is that the same experience applied to my day of struggling to migrate portal pages. The web editor has a mind of its own. I have to fiddle with the HTML, then with the Editor, then back to the HTML, in order to correct the size of the section headings. When I do things in a certain bizarre order, eating pistachio nuts, humming the 1812 overture and stirring my Diet Coke widdershins, it sort of works out.

Met with one of my preferred company reps today, talks plain English, has personality, responds to your emails and doesn’t inundate you with spam, you know the kind. Also met with the PGCHET programme tutor. It’s getting complicated as I am now both a student (reluctantly) and a tutor (less reluctantly) on the PGCHET course. Not quite sure how I’m going to fit it all in next year…

…but I will have to try and fit it in due to the grand Objection setting extravaganza whereby I commit myself to 6 impossible things over the course of the year, or else get thrown off Tay Bridge. Am thinking of blowing objections/-ives list up to A1, laminating, wheeling on every week so I can laugh at what I haven’t achieved. Much as used to take place on the Friday Night Armistice back in 1997 with Labour’s election promises (anyone remember – the lovely Armando Ianucci and friends?)

Ooh and we had our 3rd Book Group meeting. Charlotte Mendelson declared generally enjoyable, good writing although most of the characters drove us batty. Am glad to be an only child. Next month we are reading Their eyes were watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Hey, can anyone out there recommend any good Big Finish Audio Doctor Who titles for my holiday? It’s a month away but I am desperate for the break already and half the fun is in the anticipation of specific pleasures…

</nonsense>

In case of emergency remove wrapper

Begin the day in stunning fashion with an Emotional Outburst at team meeting. More leaky washing machine than Trevi fountain, but still. Has generally been a fragile week as deadlines pop up like so many roadblocks. Funnily enough there are physical roadblocks around the campus too – it took me an extra 10 minutes to get to a meeting with an academic colleague as I was thwarted on no fewer than 3 of my chosen routes.

Springcleaning the e-book collections. Mapping out information literacy input for the Health Science programme. Generally doing lots of fiddling with spreadsheets on the basis that If It’s In A Document It Must Be Under Control.

And this afternoon I have the very last teaching session of the academic year – MSc Biotechnology stduents are girding their loins in readiness for the dissertation phase. Not expecting a crowd but you can guarantee at least one student will have come to all of my previous sessions and at least one will have been to nothing at all ever.

And what will we do tomorrow night with no Doctor Who? An excellent time to dust off your Peter Jacksons and settle in for some quality epic fantasy viewing.

Diod enjoy Lab rats last night, particularly the use of the Dean’s name plaque as Toblerone storage and the concept of powering batteries using lemons; also the setting of Come On Eileen to the tune of O Come All Ye Faithful… wish academic institutions were quite as cosily lazy as that!

DEFINITELY deserve chocolate today…

The shipping news

Level 5 Computing Subject Assessment Board. Not a meeting I’ve been invited to before, but in the current climate of strategic visibility, yada yada yada, I thought having been invited I should probably turn up. Spent most of an hour and a half listening to the shipping news… Smith, Fred. Fail. MF7. Bloggs, Joe. Fail. NS0. And so on and so forth until I really was drifting in and out of consciousness and was in every danger of falling into the upright nap, you know the one where your head lolls against a stranger’s and you wake up with your mouth open?

Trying to write programme report for biomedical science. It’s already about 7 pages and it was supposed to be succinct.

Finally start writing a resource evaluation for a new e-book collection and discover can’t get into said collection. Again. Gah. That’s them off my Christmas card list.

On plus side, indulge in end-of-year spending bonanza on market reports, precious things that only savvy printwise students discover (unless they come to our sessions).

Time to brave the June showers, Tesco and all manner of other obstacles before I get to the weekend proper. Off to the wedding of hubby’s PhD student tomorrow: will we be the oldest people there? Should just be pipped by parents of the B and G so that’s something to be thankful for. And finally after 4 years I get to see inside St Salvator’s Chapel.

Happy weekend everybody, go out and do something less boring than reading blogs…