Blogger-Naught

I stumbled across my blog the other night by accident and was stunned to see that my last post was more than a year and a half ago. I guess that says something about how busy my life has been lately, since I thought it had just been a few months. I am trying to think of all that has happened in the intervening months and my head HURTS when I begin to think about all that has transpired.

The Past

- I finished my dissertation, and filed it in the late fall of 2009. (Yay!)

- In the fall of 2009 I searched for, found and tried to purchase a lovely old farm house in Michigan.

- In January of 2010 I began teaching for Wayne State University in their School of Library and Information Science. (Of course, since my life is never uncomplicated, I had to go through the court system in PA to get permission to leave the state. Meanwhile the house I mentioned just above -- and the $ that went into the good faith deposit and various and sundry pre-purchase tests for said home -- fell away like leaves falling off a tree in the late winter.)

- Traveling back and forth between PA and MI at least once a month from January until May 2010 was a real treat. This was especially interesting when through some weird twist of luck I wouldn't get the schedule for some WSU events until the day before. Hah!

- In the spring of 2010, after going through the court process, I received word that I would be allowed to leave the state.

- I searched for, found and purchased a home in Michigan. I closed on the house June 15th, 2010.

- I managed to finally get all pertinent services up and running by mid July of 2010. While this factoid would not seem to warrant any discussion, I have to say that in Michigan this is a major undertaking. I must have been on the phone for several hours with each of the service suppliers getting service started, fixed or etc. Truly bizarre -- Nothing like living in a Third World country in the good ole US of A!

- The summer of 2010 was spent trying to get services (hah), and setting up the house. It was a long summer! A number of things with the house had not been cared for and so the crazy work of home ownership began.

- I had to deal with contractors who took care of the yard for the season, others who fixed the garage roof and yet another that replaced several windows in the house.

- Once the academic year started things got truly crazy! I prepared video presentations for one online course, while I developed material for an on-campus course at the same time.

- Then there were the never-ending committee meetings, advising questions, emails from students, research project development, and etc. Without exaggeration I worked between 80-100 hours a week from August until May. I was utterly exhausted by the end, but was very happy to have many wonderful, engaged students this academic year. (Yay, students!)

- During the spring semester I began meeting with a writing partner and I got several articles out the door and published (in process at the moment - both will come out this fall in Art Doc and The Journal of Academic Librarianship. I have another paper that is under pre-submission revision since several items have been written since I originally wrote the paper. It has helped tremendously to be accountable to someone else.

- This spring I gave a paper at ACRL (April 1, 2011), developed one research project on visual literacy among LIS students, and did the data analysis for another research project on museum's use of Flickr that was folded in with a colleague's research and presented just a few days ago in Spain.

The Present

- Today I will finish the revisions on one paper and send it off.

- I have been developing a new version of one of the core courses at WSU. It is what I fondly call the "cataloging lite" course.

- Another course I will teach in the fall, a metadata course, is also being updated over the summer. I am feeling the pressure -- there are only 2 more months before the semester starts!

- Of course there are a gazillion things that are vying for my attention at home. The lawn, the gardens, the pool, the catz, the chickens and their coop. It never ends. I could spend my entire day doing nothing but yard and housework and still not get it all done! Eeeeep.

- I have brought the child unit back and forth between PA and MI multiple times so she can visit her dad. I won't comment on this, but suffice it to say that I have been the one who has schlepped and paid for these journeys.

Into the Future

- In early July I will travel to Vancouver and give a paper on the functional role of images, with the twist of what I found with the museum images on Flickr.

- I think I will work up some slides and a paper to go along with the Flickr study. What I found was FASCINATING! (at least to me). ;-)

- There are several folks I need to contact, too, since I certainly didn't have time for this during the academic year. :-P

So that about sums up the last year and a half. It has been a very stressful period in my life, but I love the house I am living in!!!! The gardens are growing like crazy and we are eating stuff out of the garden nearly every night now. Tonight I might have the mustard greens... the strawberries should be ripe soon. They look so lovely and there are oodles of berries. YUM!