Nerdy Thoughts

December has flown very quickly for me and I cannot believe next Saturday is Christmas eve. I honestly thought I'd post more this month but it feels like I always overestimate how much I'll post each month.

December rundown

Dec 4th - I went to a knitting night at our local cat cafe which was nice. The cats weren't too active because they were tired but the folks were nice and we had a few good laughs. I'm hoping they'll have more in 2023 since the only other knitting group I know of that regularly meets tends to get together at 2pm and is geared more toward seniors.

Dec 8th - Our fundraising committee at the library decided to have a small Christmas market fundraiser. I'm not on the committee anymore (I left back in 2018) but I offered to help out with one of the tables when a member was too sick to stay and man her table. It was okay, we made about $800 which is pretty good considering it seemed to be a bit of a last-minute fundraiser. For my troubles, I ended up catching the flu from the other person I filled in 🤒 I was so feverish and so annoyed because I had plans to see friends that weekend but I did the smart thing and stayed home.

Luckily it wasn't Covid, I tested negative and after my fever went away a couple of days later I was back to normal. I only had to take one sick day and stay home on the weekend. On the plus side, I did finally finish decorating our Christmas tree. I normally go for a lot of colour but this year decided to just stick with white, gold, and silver ornaments because I had that old song 'Silver and Gold' stuck in my head while I was decorating. I'm happy with how it turned out:



Dec 14th - Went out for our department Christmas lunch at Clancy's, a hotel restaurant. The food was okay, pretty much the usual fish & chips, burgers, and turkey dinners kind of place but they gave our group a private dining room which was really nice. It was also good to catch up with some of the retirees I hadn't seen in a few years thanks to Covid.

Dec 18th - Made up for missing plans with my friends the previous weekend by meeting up this weekend for sushi. It was good to see them but one of my friends was feeling crampy and I was in a blue mood so it was a bit more subdued.

I'm going to catch up on comments & posts this week but I hope everyone's December has been going well so far!

I’ve been feeling wiped out the last two weeks, hence the lack of posting. The big project has been organizing and hanging the annual staff & faculty art exhibit we have at the library. In the past I helped out the main organizer, Joanne but with her retirement last year, I’ve become the main organizer. A big adjustment and a lot more communication work than I was expecting, it was surprisingly time & energy consuming. Anyway, it is up and I’ve put some pictures behind a cut below.

( Just a couple of snapshots from the show )

The only thing I have left to do is post pictures on our Library gallery Facebook page but I have been weirdly anxious about it so I’ve been procrastinating. I will get it posted by Friday and I keep reminding myself it’s not a huge deal, I already have the show announcement up & the art is up, those are the most important things.

…yet still anxious and my brain feels like TV static.

So, I’ve decided to take some vacation time for Friday & Monday so I can have a long weekend because I need to recharge and not be at work for a few days. It helps that I have a bunch of vacation time I need to use up thanks to not taking much time off while we were working from home.

Objectives for my time off:
+ Pay my taxes
+ Find a spring/fall jacket that is good for changeable weather and isn’t a hoodie.
+ Read comics on my shelf I’ve been meaning to read
+ Get outside when I can and the weather isn’t crap.

There’s so much to catch up on my Reading Page and that’s exciting, so many new folks to get to know. I have a little catching up to do as I was away from my computer the weekend. I was engrossed in a couple of library eBooks I wanted to finish before my loans expired. It was a grey, wet, and windy weekend here, the perfect weather for curling up on a couch and reading which is pretty much all I did, aside from a bit of cleaning. I had been feeling wiped out last Friday, enough that I was a little worried I might be sick but luckily by the next day I was fine and there were no other symptoms.

I figure it must have just been the poor sleep I was getting and my anxiety being a bit high last week. A combination of too much twitter, tax season, and my coffee consumption increasing due to being back in the office. When I was working from home I was a tea drinker but at work we have a coffee shop on the main floor of the library so the temptation to walk up to stretch my legs has been too great.

Some of our staff still get their knickers in a knot over the coffee shop which I find funny. I mean, I get it as it is annoying that some students leave their coffee cups in the bookstacks but to be honest they were doing that before the shop opened. People will always sneak food into the library so we might as well have a dedicated eating space. Plus, it’s one of the better coffee spots on campus that also carries local brands & Fairtrade.

Aside from that, the rest of the week so far has been mostly consumed by working and trying to work on my daily habits for drawing & exercise. So far the former is going better though an injury to my right leg is hampering the latter.

We have a staff & faculty art show coming up in April so I’m trying to get a collage piece and maybe an acrylic painting done in time to add to the show.


( Book talk )

Last March I signed up for an extra work project from our Archives department and I was assigned a side project of transcribing a diary from 1890 set in rural Newfoundland with an unknown author. It was just something to work on whenever there was nothing from my regular acquisition workload to do. Unfortunately, it got pushed to the back of my project list because my acquisitions work actually became busier since the pandemic began because my individual work focuses on electronic books. As you can imagine, in the remote learning world we live in now, EBooks have gotten to be very, very popular with faculty and students.

However yesterday I finally got to get back at the transcribing project and remembered just how intriguing the journal is. The unknown author is a woman who seems to be somewhat young, it sounds like she's not married yet, and she's originally from St. John's (our capital). So it's not clear why she's living in the rural area of Three Arms when she's not married, I'm thinking perhaps her family sent her to live with relatives to help them out in this rural area.

She writes a lot about her uncles and aunts as well as the visitors they receive, a man named Jack that she kissed and who is a fisherman she's only seen six times the year so far. She writes often about the weather, recording the winds nearly every entry which reminds me so much of my Dad who knew the wind direction every day. It makes sense, the weather & the wind impact fishing and travelling by water that's a huge part of their day-to-day lives.

It's said locally that one thing Newfoundlanders love to talk about is the weather and I think that is very true. Weather talk is not simply small talk here, it can be a full-on conversation. Though I think that this is true for any place that has large fishing or farming or any industries reliant on the weather.

Anyway, getting away from the point. My point is that it's been really enjoyable working on this slice of life journal and I wanted to share it. I hope in transcribing I can help the library find some clues to her identity, I'm interested in knowing what happened to her and how this journal ended up surviving the years.

Work stuff
Folks keep saying to me "So you're back to work this month?" and I'm like "...by's, we never stopped working since last March and we've been back in the office half time since June so..." 😒🤷‍♀️

I know what they mean but it gets annoying when folks keep implying you're not really working because you're working from home, especially when my work is 80% doable remotely by computer. Anyway, that annoyance aside I'm actually a little happy to be back physically in the library and in the Acquisitions office. It was nice to have a change of routine from the home office and seeing my coworkers and actually talking to people instead of talking to myself.

While I've been able to keep on top of my work at home and have been really grateful that I could work from home, I'll admit I struggled a lot with staying focused. When I'm working from home I find sometimes I get distracted by household chores, estate responsibilities, or get into my own head and have a thought spiral. At least the times in the office there's only work so there are fewer attempts multitasking and my attention isn't as divided.


Home stuff
Last week was the week of repairs and maintenance, I got the hot water tank & pressure tank replaced and some electrical work has been done. Not terribly exciting, still a relief to have it done. It feels good to finally tackle some of the work I've been putting off but still weird doing work in my parent's house. I don't know, living in my family home does make me feel closer to my parents and I know it was what they both wanted (they said it repeatedly. Repeatedly.) so I don't regret my decision to move in but there are moments when it feels weird to be here or do things without them.


Fun stuff
• I'm steadily working on my first crochet sweater with the goal to get that and the crochet blanket I've been working on finished by the summer. Ideally sooner but I know what a procrastinator I can be. Though I did pick up some Tunisian crochet hooks and have been itching to try them out so maybe that will motivate me to be faster. I'm determined to avoid starting any more projects until the sweater and the blanket are done.

• Reading a lot, mostly non-fiction. The most enjoyable book was The Jane Austen Handbook by Margaret C. Sullivan which was a fun, entertaining guide to the regency era. Since watching & reading the Bridgerton series I've been entertaining some AU ideas for fanfiction.

• Playing a Sims 4 Rags to Riches family, doing lots of building in-game when I'm not playing my Matchstick family. Watching some videos about the new paranormal stuff pack which looks interesting and I might pick it up on the next sale...but maybe not. This past year I splurged on Sims packs because I figured 'hey if I can't travel I can have my sim self travel'....not really my thought process but yeah...I definitely indulged thanks to all the sales they had this year.

On one hand, it feels silly to get into a simulation game but what can I say, I've been really enjoying it. The first Sims was the first computer game I ever bought myself and I was really into the Sims 2 but dropped out of playing when Sims 3 came out.

Over Christmas John and I watched Masters of None on Netflix and have now moved on to watch Aziz Ansari’s stand up specials and now I want to read his book...so yeah, guess I found yet another person to be a fan of. At some point I’ll probably try to watch Parks and Recreation now although it probably will be a while before that happens. I’ve been re-watching Once Upon a Time because I wanted to get myself psyched up/interested enough to watch season 4.

( Cut for further OUAT talk )

We also watched The Hateful Eight and the latest Sherlock episode. Overall, I liked both. I mean, there were flaws in both but they both kept me interested the whole time through. I don’t want to say too much about either since I know some folks might not have seen one or the other yet.

I’m back at work today and the majority of my office discovered mouse droppings on their desks which was a *lovely* surprise. I was lucky and didn’t have any but cleaned off my desk anyway just in case. Yep, our library has mice. In fact, the whole campus does and I’ve even seen the odd rat around outside the buildings. I want to stress that because if rats were inside the building I'd be freaking the fuck out. This is just one more reason for the library to invest a staff cat/cats in my opinion. We already bring in therapy animals during exam period so.....sadly, no one’s taken up on my suggestion.

I give you my feelings in gif form:


I've been pretty stressed at work lately (about work and other stuff) and people have noticed more than I thought. Or at least my department head noticed. She commented on it and gave me the same advice she gave her girlfriend about taking a decadent shower to relax. Showing after the gym will have to do but I'm thinking that will help with the stress. I also put in for a few vacation days in November. So far I'm feeling better already...but then getting off work generally makes me feel that way lol.

There's no major plans for this weekend, aside from checking out Crimson Peak with a group of friends on Saturday. Ultimately I'm just aiming for cleaning and relaxing and maybe making soup. Oh, and watching Halloween/horror themed stuff naturally. Lately we've been watching Scream Queens which I have to say I am enjoying. It's got issues but it does remind me of a gorier, sillier Heathers which is one of my favourite 80s films ever.Scream Queens is sadly lacking a decent JD or Veronica type character but Chanel 1 makes a great alternative Heather 1.

So I updated last Monday and then sort of was wrapped up in work and other social sites throughout the week and didn’t get any posting in. Which isn’t too bad because everything interesting happened between Friday to Sunday anyway. Here it all is in glorious list format, because I like lists:

Friday: I got surprise holiday from work after higher concentrations of lead were found in the water at various buildings at MUN, the university campus I work on. In order to test the water in all the buildings and assure everyone it was safe the campus shut down and gave everyone a long weekend. Aside from the fear of having lead poisoning, it was a nice surprise. So far no one actually had lead poisoning; the higher concentrations were just discovered in a few buildings during routine tests. Most buildings had new filters put on the taps during the weekend so the campus is re-opened again and I’m back at work this morning. I spent most the Friday holiday reading in bed before hauling myself up to clean the apartment a bit.

Friday night: Headed to strangegoddess’s place for a Sharknado 3 party and to answer your question, yes my friends and I are dorks XD. We had previous parties for Sharknado 1 & 2. It was a good time and hilarious but I would have liked to have been able to hear more of the movie. I know, it’s not a movie one needs to hear but I’m sure we missed a lot of hilarious dialog.

Saturday: Slept in and went out for a late lunch/ early dinner at The Club, which is a good place to check out if you’re in St. John’s and you want higher end pub food that’s different from the usual stuff. We split the onion rings, I had a leek soup and John had chili before we split desert, caramel bread pudding with homemade ice cream. They also brought us out buns with molasses butter which is so freaking good I want to make it at home.

Saturday night: Went up to visit/stay the night lady_green_bat who is cat sitting for a woman who turned out to be my 3rd cousin I found out on Sunday from my parents. That’s what you get for living on an island, btw. Relations are everywhere. Anyway, we watched Wolf Cop because why the hell not and it’s as bad as you’d imagine from the title but still somewhat hilarious. Naturally it was filmed in Canada and it even had an actor from Ginger Snaps, my favourite Canadian werewolf movie, in it. So lady_green_bat and I spent most of time trying to figure out what kind of a parody crossover could happen between Ginger Snaps and Wolf Cop. Then we watch The Lost Boys for the 76th millionth time because that’s how we roll.

Sunday: Summer actually came to the island and a small crew of us went out on my dad’s boat for a trip to take part in the food fishery. The ride out was fun but then I stupidly got really sea sick because I took ginger gravol instead of hardcore actual gravol. Lesson fucking learned. I’m just glad I was the only one and that it was only a small crew who got to witness that. Everyone else had a good time though. Once again my dad kicked ass by catching the most fish. I’m hoping we’ll get a chance to go out again and that I’ll be properly drugged for it. Anyway, here’s a picture of Signal Hill that I took before I got sick.


( More pictures )

First highlight of the day so far? New work mug!


A surprisingly cheap find at Pipers, a small Newfoundland chain store. Now I just have to try to avoid breaking it like the last few mugs. The second highlight? Chocolate croissants brought in my department head at the library. As much as working at the library may make me feel loopy sometimes (especially as we integrate with our new operating system Alma) I do have to say I have an awesome department head. Even when she's up to her eyeballs in stress she's always super nice, friendly and funny. I honestly have no idea how she does it.