Done!

I just emailed my finding aid to my internship supervisor and to my professor. I finished up at the Archives yesterday and spend all day putting the thing together. I’ve been at the computer for over 12 hours. I’m ready for a long winter’s nap, that’s for damn sure.

I was supposed to be done Thursday, but because I was quarantined with “The Whoop” (as people are calling it) I had to extend my semester a few days. Oh, well. I’m done now.

Woo! I mean Whoop!

Ok, sleepytime…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Wrapping up

I’ve turned in all of my assignments from home. Well, all but one, that is. The internship project actually requires me to be physically in the archives to complete. Since I’m not supposed to have contact with people until Saturday, I haven’t been able to get to the archives to finish up.
Being quarantined for a few days has actually been quite nice. I mean, besides the coughing. That part rather sucks, but I’ve been resting and doing homework and what not. I been in my pajamas all week, too. I get up, change out of my pajamas, shower, then put on different pajamas. It’s great!

For my internship, all I have to do is type my notes, do a little rearranging, make a task list for Saturday, and put together the prose of the finding aid. I can totally do all that in two days. Oh, and I still have Sunday to edit and smooth out the kinks. I’ll be emailing the assignment to my professor Sunday night. Grades aren’t due until 9:00 Monday morning, so I don’t even have to take an “Incomplete” for that class. Yay!

Our school has been particularly “buggy” this semester. There’s some sort of gastro-intestinal thing going ’round, too. I think I’d rather have whooping cough. Still, who gets whooping cough? I’ve been accused of making out with the 15th Century. You know us librarians, always making out with the 15th Century.

I’ve had to cancel most of my birthday fun, but I’ll be un-contagious by my actual birthday-day (which is Tuesday), so I can still have fun then. I’ll be going to Salem for the afternoon, which should be great! Then it’s off to Maryland for a week to spend Christmas with my family. I haven’t seen most of them in ages, so that will be really nice.

I’ll have to reschedule my birthday festivities for January. I wouldn’t want to miss out on bowling and boozing completely!

General Notice, part deux

I went to see the doctor today, and am now being treated for pertussis, aka whooping cough. I had a chest x-ray and had blood drawn, but I won’t get the blood test results for a little while. Regardless of the results, I am on antibiotics and am quarantined for five days.

If any of you develop cold-like symptoms, and especially if you get a cough, please go have it checked out. What I thought was just a cold that wouldn’t go away is probably going to turn out to be pertussis.

I am also hereby canceling my birthday plans for this weekend. We’ll have to make up for it over winter break.

Just so’s you know.

General notice:

It seems that whooping cough (pertussis) is going around school. I have had a cough for a while. I was under the impression that I just had a cold that wasn’t going away because of the stress from school and what not. However, recent events have led me to believe that I might have whooping cough, i.e. my symptoms combined with the notice of a professor and student’s diagnosis.

I’m getting a culture taken tomorrow to know for sure. I’ll keep you all abreast of the situation. However, if you’ve been around me in the last several weeks, and develop a cough, you should probably get it looked at, as pertussis is supposed to be highly contagious. More than likely, even if I do have it, I’m way passed the critical contagiousness threshold. But still, better safe than sorry.

Just so’s you know.

Home stretch

Thanks for the encouraging comments regarding my last post. It was whiney, yes, but had to be done. Sometimes you just have to put things in to words to make them more managable. I feel much better, and am now looking at my situation much more realistically. Just had to indulge in a pity party for a few minutes. Ok, moving on!

This is the last week of school. Here’s a list of what I need to finish, and the order in which I need to finish them:

1. Archives paper, Topic: Archives and Postmodernism. Title: “Postmodernists to Archivists: ‘No more passive guardians!'” It’s getting there, but I still have to put it all together coherently. It’s now three days late.
2. “Interview with a library director” paper. Still in the notes stage, but it’s not due until tomorrow, so there’s still time.
3. Archival description project. Will include a MARC record and an EAD version of a finding aid (from a project last semester) that I remade according to the DACS standard. Those bits are done (except for minor editing in the DACS finding aid). Now I just need to write the short paper on digitizing that has to go with it. Due Thursday.
4. Internship project. Getting there. I think I’ll finish on time. I have one day left at the internship, then the project gets turned in on Thursday. Every folder has been described, and all of the materials are now intellectually combined with like materials. The physical arrangement just needs to fit with the intellectual arrangement. I’ll finalize my notes, then put it all together on Tuesday, along with looking up some stuff for the finding aid, like full names, dates, etc. And there are some things that still need to be pulled out in to an oversize folder, and some that still need mylar protection because they’re falling apart. I’ve made notes of these things, and on Tuesday, I’ll have a list ready of all the tasks that I need to do before I finish the finding aid. Some things aren’t going to be described as well as I’d like them to be because there wasn’t enough time to read all of the letters. It was difficult enough trying to make sense of the whole series. There were pieces of like materials strewn all through it. One guys letters were in several places, and photocopies of those letters were all over the place as well. I had to bring those together, weed through it to make sure I could throw out the copies.
5. Evaluation plan. Due Thursday. Because we’ve been working on it all semester, it’s mostly done. I just have to put it all together, edit it for cohesion, and add a couple of short bits at the end. I’ll be doing this on the due date, but I think it will work out fine, since the bulk of it is already done.

So, there you have it. The only project that’s causing me serious anxiety is the Internship. I just ran out of time to do it as well as I would have wanted to. But that’s how it is, eh? We only get 24 hours each day. Speaking of time, I’ll get back to my paper now.