Home from BC and lots of catching up to do in terms of e-mail as well as other domestic chores. Back to work next Tuesday and the two weeks I had off for Pace's birth have passed way too fast, especially with a three-day detour in the middle of it.
It was fitting that I ended up sitting beside two mothers on the flight home – one with an 11-month old and a 2 year old from Kelowna to Edmonton then a first-time-flying-with-kids mother with a 5-month old from Edmonton to Regina. You should've seen me swapping parenting tips and tricks like an old pro!
If you compare it to the original version, you'll see how far it came through the revision process of the Partnership Journal.
I've said it before but it's worth submitting an article to this journal, especially if you have ambitions to become an academic librarian someday. Some people probably don't see an online publication as being as legitimate as a print one but if anything, I'd say that the editors are aware of this perception and are more stringent!
Quinn did a brief post with a link to a longer article recently exploring the subject of why publishing with open access journals is better than publishing via traditional methods.
(Oh, and the quote that gives this post its title is from an unsolicited e-mail a librarian I just met a couple weeks ago sent me after seeing my article. I'm expecting the hate mail from Alberta librarians to come flooding in any day soon so it was nice that my first feedback on the article was so positive. )
I'm sitting at the Kelowna Public Library using a temporary barcode and password (do all public libraries have this option for visitors? They should!) to check e-mail after a very long day. (I start to shake if I don't check e-mail at least every second day.)
The funeral was good – the Royal Canadian Legion did a very moving tribute (my grandfather was a WWII veteran who drove a tank in Holland) and to finish, three couples who used to dance with my grandfather and his wife regularly danced everyone out of the auditorium to the sounds of Anne Murray's “Can I Have This Dance.”
The eulogy went over amazingly well – I got a big round of applause (which I don't think I've ever heard at a funeral before!) and the Funeral Director came up to me after and said “I would say that was the best eulogy I've ever heard here.” (I thought about quipping “Well, you mustn't have been open very long then” but didn't.)
I'll likely post the eulogy when I get home (though after a build-up like that, it might also disappoint!) But yeah, this is the third eulogy I've done for a grandparent (my other grandfather died when I was 7 or I might've been able to do that one too!) so I've got some practice. Plus, as much as I hate to admit it, all of those presentations at library school probably helped me improve my public speaking quite a bit.
Anyhow, I fly out early tomorrow and will write more when I get home…
Mike T. sent this along and I'm reprinting it with his permission (though technically, I only asked if I could reprint the list – I hope he doesn't mind me reprinting the whole e-mail.)
Enjoy.
I know that you probably won't believe me, but the first month is
actually really easy compared to months 2-18. They sleep an awful lot
in that month and are darn cute while doing so. I know that you are
enraptured by his eyes and smile right now, but take the opportunity to
take lots of pictures of his hands and feet. You won't believe they
were that small in even a few months.
I
don't know if I gave you my fool-proof checklist for dealing with an
upset new-born/infant, but I'll give it to you again just in case.
If the baby is fussy or crying check:
1. Is he hungry?
2. Is his diaper dry?
3.
Is there something physically bugging him? (a tag on his sleeper, a
bunched up blanket under him, a toy looking at him funny, etc.)
4. Does he have a fever?
If
taking care of those four things doesn't work, then you are probably
dealing with colic, teething, or some other unusual circumstance.
Those four things will take care of it 99% of the time, though.
And always remember that worse people than you have raised wonderful kids, so don't worry too much.
Cheers
Mike
There's that old saying that when it rains, it pours and that's the situation for us right now. In addition to the birth of our son, Shea's had a few (minor) complications from her c-section so that needs to be dealt with on a daily basis.
Then, a week to the day after Pace was born, I got a call that my last living grandparent, Grandpa Peet, had passed away. So I'm flying out to Kelowna tomorrow, the funeral's on Wednesday and I'm back Thursday morning.
I've been asked to do the eulogy (the third of my four grandparents I've had the honour of doing this for) so I might post that eventually.
No need to post condolences or anything – Grandpa was 88, he'd been in ill-health for the last month so, as much as these things can be, it wasn't a huge surprise. He went the way I want to go someday – he was still living at home, still driving, still playing cards nearly every day (but had to cut back on the dancing a bit!), both mentally and physically sharp.
It's my own selfishness but I'm telling myself that part of the reason he held on as long as he did was to hear if we had a boy or a girl and to see pictures of the baby (which he did.) Whatever gets you through the night, eh?
Anyhow, posts might not happen for the next couple days but we'll see. I definitely want to get down to Kelowna Public Library (actually Okanagan Regional I think) and ironically, that's where I sat to write my Grandma Peet's eulogy way back in 1999.
I don't do a lot of link dump posts but I've had a few things sitting open in tabs for the past couple weeks that had the potential to be full-fledged posts…except now, the baby has all but wrecked my ability to write anything for an extended length of time so this is what you get…
Facebook Facelift – in addition to Facebook's recent re-design which is getting mixed reviews (I tend to like how it streamlined things for the most part but it didn't address some of the core problems with the site that I've blogged about elsewhere – search my blog for “Facebook” and you'll find a couple entries on the topic), Facebook is beginning to enter into partnerships with third-party sites to allow widgets of various types to be integrated into the site. The article I link to mentions that MySpace is way bigger than Facebook but that Facebook is growing more rapidly so I suspect this will only accelerate that.
reCaptcha – here's a cool idea. You know how you have to type a few random letters when you leave a comment on this (and many other) sites as a spam guard? Somebody's come up with a way to have those characters represent parts of public domain books so that everytime one of these “captcha”'s is entered, it helps digitize these books.
“[We]
estimated that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. Assuming
that each CAPTCHA takes 10 seconds to solve, this is over 160,000 human
hours per day (that's about 19 years). Harnessing even a fraction of this time for reading books will greatly help efforts in digitalizing books.”
Google Introduces Universal Search Between the Google toolbar, Firefox's Google Search Extension and various other options and plug-ins to give me direct access to it, I rarely go to the Google home page anymore (even if I try to, I get redirected to the Google Canada home page.) So I had to hear about their biggest redesign in their history via the media before I saw it with my own eyes. Universal search is an attempt to combine all their various search options (Internet, news, photos, blogs, books. etc.) into one interface. I still don't like how it won't “pass” a search string if it's not in the main menu at the top (you can switch to a search for “Jason Hammond” in Images but not in Books if that makes sense.) But it's a good start and puts Google that much farther ahead of everybody else in the search wars.
The Beatles Useless Pop Culture Trivia 21st Century American Politics Nonfiction Potent Potables Opera (because there's always that one category where you go, “ah, crap”…even when picking for yourself, I guess!)
Three posts in a row? Wow – I must be catching up on my e-mail backlog a bit! (Don't worry, the baby is right here, sleeping on my chest helping me type the entries. )
A friend passed this along. I know we're going to get all kinds of tips and advice in the coming days but this seems to make sense on first glance.
Cool…congrats to you and Shea. Good lungs ehh…sounds like you two
need a copy of the happiest baby on the block DVD…the 5 steps to
stop a crying baby. I believe the guy's name is Harvey Karp…our
doula and her collective swear by it. The premise is that a new born
baby is in a fourth trimester and as a result he suggest five tips
(the five Ss) that kind of recreate the prebirth experience…. That is why he
enoucrages the use of a snug swaddle, sshhhushing (white noise from a
radio will do but babies are used to a lot of noise being in the
womb), a gentle rocking he calls swinging, holding a baby on its side
and the last is using a soother.
When you watch the video, swaddling the baby (ensuring the hands are
bound) and turning them on their side seems to calm most of the
babies down. If not, incorporate the other 3 Ss.
And from the Amazon description…
When you bring your soft, dimpled newborn home from the hospital, you
may think your nursery is a peaceful sanctuary…. To him, it's a
disorienting world part Las Vegas casino, part dark closet! Karp
recommends a series of five steps designed to imitate the uterus. These
steps include swaddling, side/stomach position, shhh sounds, swinging
and sucking.
With the CLA conference coming up (already on? What day is it again???), the New Librarians Interest Group is doing a survey of students and recent grads to explore why (or why not) they attend the annual conference.
I think this one is well-worth filling out as this is a pretty important topic and depending on the results, could lead to a resolution being introduced at the CLA conference to make the conference more accessible for students.
The grandparents bumped into somebody in the elevator at the hospital this weekend who mentioned that Pace also means “peace and harmony” in Italian (if you follow this link, click on the volume icon to hear it pronounced) as well as Middle English. We didn't know that but that's cool too.
As with the nickname “Peso”, I thought we might've ended up with another unexpected but fitting Mexican/Spanish connection since Italian and Spanish are such similar languages.
No such luck (although the Spanish meaning of Pace is very appropriate these days too! )
) 
