Cat Tale
Catly smells like me, now. At about 8:30 a.m., as I started in on my second bagel, the phone rang. Who on earth? It turned out to be Dad calling from their trip, convinced that their house was in the path of Hurricane Alex. I wrote down directions about which windows leaked and where to find towels. I must have been concentrating on that task pretty hard because I didn’t hear any strange sounds.

I hung up the phone, and turned towards the kitchen in search of more coffee. Hunh, looks like I spilled coffee on the floor on the way out, before. Wait, no, there’s water splashed on the kitchen floor, too! Quick check: it didn’t come from the ceiling (i.e. bathroom) above; nor is it spurting out of the kitchen sink faucet. There is water by the open back door, too – it’s almost as if Catly dragged in something from the fish pond.

The previous owners of this house transferred a kidney-shaped pond with five koi to me. In the draught a couple of years back, a great blue heron discovered the free lunch, and so I became fishless. I tried again, but the little goldfish disappeared after a year or so, too. I knew Catly couldn’t have dragged a fish in – a slow, thirsty bird, perhaps?

I stuck my head out of the back door – one of the stones from the pond edge had fallen into the water, but I saw nothing else out of place. I returned to the dining room and surveyed the scene more closely. There’s Catly, under the table. And what do you know? The whole back half of her is wet, as if she fell into the pond. Of course, she was trying to lick herself dry. I fetched a towel and began to help the effort. Oh, no! Since there are no fish, I don’t keep the pond all that clean: she smelled like pond funk!

And that’s why, at a little before 9:00 this morning, I could be found trying to bathe the old house cat with a dab of my shampoo. Maybe she’ll stop drinking out of the pond, now.

Yet More Old Business
I have articles scattered about the house, websites bookmarked, and even e-mail saved that I think might be worth sharing. On an archivists' listserv, one participant recently wrote:

I was just going through some newspaper clippings from 1904 about the women's suffrage movement. One of the reasons given for denying women the right to vote was that doing so would destroy "the sanctity of marriage."

I recall this type of thing from the research I did on the suffrage movement. The husband's vote was to represent the beliefs of the whole household. Giving the wife a vote (and perhaps that of an unmarried daughter living at home!) would disrupt the power structure.

Old Business

Store Magazine's recent list of 100 "biggest retailers" is topped by: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Costco, Sears, Safeway, Albertsons, Walgreens, and Lowe's. The publisher of the trade magazine told the Washington Post reporter what I have been thinking was the case: the cheapest thing often wins. Publisher Rick Gallagher said,

Despite everything we might say about how much we value customer service, look at this list. . . . When push comes to shove, people are going to choose low prices over service.

(Washington Post 7/11/04)

Similarly, while we gripe vaguely about what a shame (or even, how unfair) it is that manufacturing and service work increasingly is done abroad, we tend choose the cheapest thing when we shop, not the Made in U.S.A. item.

A friend complained that the Atkins diet craze led restaurants and grocery stores to fill up with products labeled "low-carb." He found this wrong or offensive, somehow; possibly based on his skepticism about the soundness of the diet. It's just capitalism, I tried to say. People will buy it, so the manufacturers make claims, adjust ingredients. Of course, they have to keep these products cheap, and sell them at Wal-Mart, to really fit into my big picture, here.

Turning to the personal, I believe I spent money in each of those big-box stores that have stores near me this past year. Oh, except Costco; I don't have a membership at any of those places. I complain about them, but I do go. I choose local grocer Ukrop's for service, and Target for nicer products, but I did try to shop at Wal-Mart last summer for savings on non-food items. I have been to Kroger to buy beer, since the 'krops (famously) does not sell alcohol. It may be more than a year since I spent money at Lowe's: I remember storming out of a long, unmoving line (one of two actually open, understand) one Sunday when a clerk responded to a customer's query, Oh good, can you open a new register? with "No, I'm on break." I put down random things like light bulbs and plant food and went to Pleasants on Monday for the same items.

As for buying goods made abroad, that doesn't generally factor in to my decision. I want the thing that I think is best: fits best, will last longest, is best made, or looks best. Next, I look to see if it is within my budget.

Newer Business
Thanks to Mom sticking with me for a long day of shopping on Thursday, I have an interview suit. We went to Hecht's, Nordstrom, Talbots, Ann Taylor, more than one Dillard's location, and . . . Casual Corner. I know, the latter is a bit down-market compared to the rest, but they have that whole petite-size division. Curiously, of all those very reputable shops, it was the only one in which a clerk offered to put the things I had in hand in a dressing room. (I will point out that I did not take anything off the rack in Nordstrom.) Then, another saleswoman who was using a steamer near the dressing room eyed me in the slightly-too-short petite skirt and said lightly, "Did you try a skirt from the other side [i.e., not a petite]? Let me get you one." She was exactly right. I will think of that store sooner next time I need work clothes.

Now, to find work.

At the Byrd: saw the midnight movie, "Office Space." Right.
In Style: The Street Talk item on Teresa
At the Diamond: Braves lost to Scranton, 9-0

What's going on here? According to a Statement from ALA President-Elect Michael Gorman on the destruction of Department of Justice documents, the Department of Justice wants the Government Printing Office to reclaim a number of items sent to government document repositiry libraries. "The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA)."

This Walter Benjamin article is the first thing in a long time that I am going to need to read twice. Is it his prose or his politics that keep tripping me up?

I didn't even get a chance to post, over there on the right, that I sent a resume to the local ITT-Tech -- and I just set up an interview. Wheee!

Change

This morning, I had my last cup of coffee at the Robinson Street WorldCup, my preferred coffee shop for ten years. As of August 1, they will be on North Morris St., about a mile from here. I bought this house because I needed to be in easy walking distance (5 or 6 blocks) of WorldCup, the art museum, and the Byrd. What's the point of living in a city if you have to get in the car all the damn time? There is still walking-distance coffee in Carytown, but I like WorldCup best. I don't like change; I don't wanna figure out which brews, which sizes to order all over again. When a classmate recently gushed -- seriously, gushed -- about thriving on change I was dumbstruck. I know that all of us are different, blah, blah, blah: but, wow. I just didn't know what to say.

After 15 years' service, Friday was Teresa's last day running the reading room (and other Herculean tasks) at the Valentine Museum. As she may well be reported as saying in Style, she left for a part-time data entry job. Shall we have a creative writing contest to fill in between the lines?

The other, minor, change coming on August 1 is that the downtown Y wants us to provide our own locks for the lockers. I have a combination lock somewhere, I think. I wonder if I have the combination though?

Alas, I have yet to have so much as a call for an interview, so I won't be starting a new job August 1 -- something that seemed very possible just a month ago.

Deserted by my coffee shop and self-locking lockers; bereft of work. I'm working on a mild case of the blues.

Thirty-five years ago dept.:Apollo 11 Mission First man on the Moon - Full Screen QTVR photo from panoramas.dk

The Spanish are working on robotic library pages. This we need? I can see using them for inventory, but it's hard to picture a machine taking enough care to ensure that the book will not be damaged -- that it will remain accessible for years to come.

Today's class trip was to the DC City Museum.

All Done
 
Comps are now part of my past. Thanks again to all who offered words of encouragement, notes, and links to articles. I got to CUA on Friday a touch later than I wanted, but still early enough to bounce around the halls of Marist checking on friends and wonder who the 20-some people I had never seen before were. That day, I wrote about the impact of technology on two areas of library service, filling most of a blue book and running one pen out of ink. Next I wrote what, looking back, may be my weakest essay, on outreach. About 1/3 of the way into that one, my hand cramped so badly I said "ouch" out loud, drawing at least C's attention and/or sympathy.
 
I seem to have lost Saturday's list of questions, and as of this writing, no one had posted them on the SLIS website. I know I wrote about points to consider when choosing electronic journals; we had a final exam question for collection development on that topic. The other one was a topic I liked . . . I remember that much. I used about 2/3 of a blue book on each of those. In comparing notes with the others, afterwards, I fretted most about quantity: it seemed like they had used  many more examples and made many points that slipped my mind. Alas, it will be September before we learn if we passed or not.
 
In other weekend diversions: dinner at Vera's. A trip downtown to see Fala and FDR, a bit of a cricket match, and an odd sculpture by the Potomac. Cheers to BL for fab meals on Saturday. I left Brookland a little after ten on Saturday night. It started raining the moment I crossed into Virginia and didn't let up the whole 100 more miles.

The whole expedition wore me out. I am just beginning to feel myself again.

R. Cockerham on spam research. Check out how easily he deployed readers to check the addresses of spam senders across the country. A little address research on their end, a trip with a digital camera in hand, and a then attach it to an e-mail.