Considering all the stories I have been hearing about my ex’s most recent romantic pursuits, I have to come to the conclusion that he has the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone.
college again
September 26, 2008 at 6:19 pm (Smith, books, family, rare_books, work)
I feel like I’m in college again. It’s so weird.
In no particular order, this is what’s happening in the next two months:
- I go to Northampton, MA on October 1 for a panel discussion on library careers. I’ll be there for about five days. And I’ll get to visit Dave, Sarah, Deiner, and Alex. AND my adviser for undergrad who is super-excited about my new grad school plans.
- On October 19, I leave for NYC for a week for Rare Book School. I have about seven books to read before that happens.
- On November 8, I take the GRE.
- By November 15, I have to have my grad school app. in order and submitted.
- By November 15, I have to give a committee for the fourth edition of A Basic Music Library a draft of choral music recordings and scores.
In the meantime I am in the midst of curating an exhibit to open in March: but getting that exhibit together involves transcribing all the text (almost done with that), figuring out the liturgical context, and finally identifying the script for the text and the script for the notation (nightmare), learning all about medieval music so I can write up the cards, and getting a case made for a giant antiphonal. And of course, I also have to come up with a snappy title (enter Krummel…Lynne? Suggestions?) and choose images for the promotional material and get the damn thing promoted.
In tandem with that exhibit, I hope to submit a poster session proposal about it and about digitizing our collections for the Music Library Association. If it gets accepted, I have to present about a week before the damn exhibit opens. I have also arranged a concert to be performed by local musicians for the first Saturday after the exhibit is opened.
Meanwhile, the church gig is back in regular swing, which takes Thursday nights and Sunday mornings out of my schedule for the next nine months. In addition to that, I am taking on another challenge and singing in a separate choir that meets on Tuesday nights and has lots of concerts. Oh, and I’m working 15 Sunday afternoons at the library and have to work dinners, too, for the Rare Book Dept.
Yikes. And to top it all off, I am supposed to be planning things for the Smith Alumnae Club and also be a supportive sister for my brother and sister-in-law who are expecting their first child on my birthday. That kid better not be born on my birthday. I don’t share well. 
No, I’m sure I’ll figure something out! After all, December 1 is big enough to accommodate Richard Pryor, Bette Midler, Woody Allen, and Mary Martin.
two views on Sarah Palin
September 12, 2008 at 9:44 pm (politics)
industriousness
September 9, 2008 at 4:55 pm (history, medieval stuff, music, musicals, rare_books, work)
Wow, I haven’t posted anything in over a month! Amazing.
I am sitting here petting my Very Needy Cat. She’s a twerp. She has a new pink bed and it’s very exciting: she immediately seemed to know it was hers when I brought it home, and she attacked it. And then she went right to sleep in it.
My mother was here for a week and a half, so I gave her my bed and slept on the couch. The cat decided to sleep on my head when that was happening. So I still have a sore neck.
I am doing remarkably well. I actually noticed yesterday that I hadn’t thought about Paul hardly at all that day, and that is quite an improvement. I’m focused almost entirely on my career and my future in special collections right now and that is taking up quite a bit of time.
I’m attending my SECOND Rare Book School course this year in October, when I will go to New York and study illuminated manuscripts with Roger Wieck at the Morgan, right across the street from where I worked for three years, Oxford University Press! Amazingly the neighborhood hasn’t changed that much since I moved out of NYC (quite unusual, actually), so I will probably know most of the restaurants, etc., in the vicinity. I will stay in a hotel and not impose on my poor cousin or friends as long as the library pays for it. The course is going to be extremely useful for my medieval music manuscript exhibit, as I have to read all these books about medieval liturgy and time. I’ve been spending hours transcribing the scripts in all the manuscripts I plan to put on display and trying to ascertain the liturgical background of each. The earliest manuscript I am exhibiting is a 9th-century manuscript with notation (St. Gall, for those of you who are interested, and I have an 11th-century one with Beneventan notation). The latest will be from around 1500.
In the middle of the week at RBS in October, I will go and see South Pacific with Kemper. I am very excited about this, as this production is the first Broadway revival since its debut in the 1940s with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza. I love South Pacific.
At the beginning of October, I have been asked to participate in some kind of panel discussion at my alma mater about library work, so I will get to go visit friends and professors in Northampton. I think maybe I will need to buy a suit before that, too, so Loehmann’s, here I come!
I have been going back and forth with several professors in the music department at Temple about my application. Turns out they all wanted to accept me but the administration wouldn’t allow it. It’s quite a nightmare. So I am now thinking of getting a master’s in medieval history at Villanova, which happens to be my brother’s alma mater. He also happened to major in history there, so once the little beast returns my phone calls, hopefully I’ll know who to talk to over there. It appears that Villanova actually costs the *same* per credit hour as Temple, and all their courses are in the evening. Oh, and they actually have a huge course catalog, unlike Temple, which only offers history courses on the American Civil War and Stalinist Russia. ugh. So I am going to have to take the effing GRRRRREs for the first time in 12 years. I am terrible at standardized tests.
I am also going to try to put together a poster session of my exhibit for the MLA conference in February. I need to do poster sessions and publications, if possible, as much as possible. Overwhelming.
