Particularly in the light of how I was feeling about work last week, I really needed this comment which showed up in an Annual Review of Masters' course provision here which I've just been sent:

"The librarian... has been extremely helpful in making access to electronic resources available to our students, both on and off campus; and in suggesting solutions to lack of availability or access. Her input makes a significant difference to the experience of students."

Yessss! I knew there was a reason I keep on doing this b£&$dy job on days where I haven't got enough staff, enough time, or enough influence over the Uni processes and systems which are putting great big tank traps in the way of providing what I ideally want to provide for our students.

Making a difference (a significant difference, at that!) That's all I really need to know to keep going.

Having another insane day as an increasingly insane week rolls on... basically, both my team and the other team in the Library at work are currently short-staffed for various reasons, which leaves us with no slack as soon as anyone is sick, teaching off-campus, has to take a spouse to a hospital appointment, etc... I'm teaching 50 miles away this afternoon and only had time to start prepping it this morning, which is days later than I would normally be (fortunately, it's a repeat of last year so all I had to do was tweak some existing stuff and check I had enough handouts), I'm organising a conference next week so am still running around trying to sort things for that, though I think we're just about there now.

And our teaching students are all back from placement, so the Library is inundated, and right on cue various printers and other bits of equipment choose to pack up. Schnarrrrgh.

I made a big effort to go to bed early last night and then couldn't get to sleep, which was infuriating but is also a sign that I'm getting far too stressed, since work never normally keeps me awake at night. Hoping once I've got to the Midlands and back today I'll calm down, though it'll probably be after the conference next week before I really de-stress (just in time to start panicking about Christmas...)

What do you guys all do when the stress levels rise? Meditate, go swimming, shout at spouse, run round like headless chicken, hit the gin?...

... the Doctor goes dark, dangerous, and off the rails. I like this... I think DT was enjoying it, too.

After that stunning moment where the Doctor was an utterly still, grieving centre to the command room of the base with everyone else running about shouting and trying to save the world, which was a lovely piece of inversion, I did think he was going to walk out of the base and leave Adelaide to press the button, which would have been really fascinatingly different, but...

I loved the biodome scenes (great use of the Botanic Garden of Wales!). And I was worried that Lindsay Duncan was going to be irritating, but she was fabulous, I thought.

Not sure whether to let First Small Person watch that after all - not so much that I think the infected crew are that scary (though possibly more than scary enough for a six-year-old) - as that I think most of it will go entirely over his head...

Tension building for Waters of Mars... - there's quite an entertaining article in this week's Radio Times quoting DT, RTD and Moffat on writing Scary!Who.  Tennant comments,

"The Doctor is more fallible than we've ever seen him before... To challenge children with that is great - to show that their heroes can be conflicted. It's good to see the Doctor wobble." 

RTD disputes the idea that Waters of Mars is too scary for Who to continue to be seen as a children's programme, pointing out that  "The darkest scares come from children's stories. Our fear of the dark, of forests, strange noises and empty houses - that's all the stuff of childhood."  [Well, actually I would suggest those are primeval human fears, which start in childhood because children are human beings, but I take his point.]

And Moffat, awarded the prize for writing Scariest Who by RTD, responds that "The Girl in the Fireplace is a load of slush in frocks" ! (great quote, but rather ignores the monsters under the bed...) and acknowledges that adults are sometimes frightened of different things. "I think there were things about The Empty Child that scared adults more than children." Hell yeah - I freaked out for several nights running after that if one of my children woke up and called "Muuuuum-eeeee..."

Some interesting comments too on which episodes of classic Who sparked the most complaints - 1964's The Edge of Destruction because Susan attacked Ian with a pair of scissors (too easily replicated at home!) Terror of the Autons (1971) which got complaints from Scotland Yard! because policemen were Autons in disguise, and from parents because of the troll doll which came to life and children were terrified to go to bed in case their teddy bears strangled them; and The Deadly Assassin because of the later-cut Tom Baker drowning scene.

Personally, I remember hiding behind the sofa numerous times watching Who when I was a kid, and there have been plenty of occasions in new!Who when I've dived behind a cushion and whimpered, so I think they're probably about even...

Hope someone pampers you today :-)

This time twelve months ago, after wrestling our way out of town past particularly horrendous Friday night rush-hour traffic, ignoring ominous warning lights on the car dashboard, and eventually making it to Stratford by the scenic back route because there'd been an accident on the M40... I reckon altariel  and I had just about made it as far as the restaurant at the Courtyard Theatre and were grabbing a bite to eat, tickets duly spat out by the booking office computer and clutched in our sweaty fingers, before this/this.

Brrrrr. I'm getting goosebumps remembering - what a night that was. Happy Hamlet Anniversary, A!

The Resident Geek's Mac laptop, Shadowfax (so called because it is silver-grey and when we got it it was incredibly fast, but is now, sadly, rather aged) is feeling somewhat poorly.

Among other things, it is currently absolutely convinced, whatever the RG does to attempt to persuade it otherwise, that the date is 1st January 1904.

I can't help feeling there is something of a temporal paradox here...

May it be filled with wondrous things. Elrohir is even now uncorking the champers...

... the books kind, not the plants kind:

Awful Library Books from Mary and Holly, public librarians in Michigan.

When it comes to stock management, librarians seem to fall into two instinctive types: the can't-bear-to-dispose-of-any-book and the let's-clear-out-all-the-outdated-junk-NOW.  Professionally I am definitely in the latter category, both by personality (I like order and space and find decluttering incredibly cathartic - not that you'd know that if you currently saw my house!) and for operational reasons (I've always worked in academic libraries with limited space, usually in fields where having up-to-date material is important, and for the last ten years with the luxury of having a national copyright deposit library down the road).  I hasten to add that we go through numerous disposal routes to avoid any book, however apparently ghastly, ending up in landfill - every book its reader, as Ranganathan said, though looking at some of the items on Mary and Holly's blog you rather hope not!

Nothing I like better than tackling an overcrowded, dusty, unattractive bay of shelving and coming out at the other end with a spruce, attractive section where all the stock is up-to-date or classic-and-useful and a trolley or two of superseded, dated, unused To Be Withdrawn.

Inspired by merrymaia 's enthusiasm for them, I got the Library to order the first of Jane Duncan's My Friends... Reachfar series, My Friends the Miss Boyds, for me. I'm so glad I did!

( Thoughts under the cut... )

Now, the Small Persons are in bed, the Resident Geek and I have not yet had dinner, it's the end of the week... what do we have in the ingredients line? Ahha - left-over roast chicken; onions, check; garlic, check; a bit of spinach that needs eating up, check; mushrooms, check;... oh good, half a packet of arborio rice, check. Home-made chicken stock, yup. Half a bottle of white wine, (mostly for me but partly for cooking), check.

I have seen my immediate future and it is Nigel Slater's left-overs chicken risotto recipe (with my usual tweaks).  Mmmmmmmm.

... as I cycled down the hill, there was this guy sitting on the wall by the bus stop, whose face looked so familiar that I was convinced I knew him. I shot by too quickly to wave or anything, which was just as well, because as I trundled on down I was trying to place him, and then I realised:

I'd never met him (I don't think; he's obviously from round here and I guess he might be one of our students), but he was exactly my mental Elladan/Elrohir.  (In my head they're identical twins).  Flawless features (he could have been anywhere between about 17 and 25), pale skin, big dark eyes, high cheekbones, and waist-length smooth dark hair (couldn't see the ears!)  And curled up on the wall in that completely lounge-on-a-rail physically relaxed graceful way I always assume Elves would have.

It was quite uncanny; I've had a face like that in my mind's eye for years every time I've read the Twins in LoTR or thought about them, and there it was, to the life.

Has anyone else ever done that?  Walked into a shop or got on a bus and had to suppress a cry of "OMG it's [character name]!" ?

I have been teaching literature searching/use of our Electronic Library for four-and-a-half of the last five-and-a-half hours, with the only break being the 50-mile round trip in the car to the first session which was at one of our partner colleges. Lovely students, and all the technology more or less held up, which is a minor miracle given that other people's networks (the partner college) are always hairy to negotiate, and that the Uni here got clobbered by a huge virus attack at the end of last week and our own network is off-the-danger-list-but-convalescent...

..but I'm not sure I could tell you my own name at this point and you wouldn't believe how many corrections I've had to make to type this post straight.

All done now, thank the Powers, going home to wrestle Small People into bed instead, which at least utilises low mother-cunning and, if necessary, brute force rather than any higher mental faculties and is therefore hopefully not beyond my capabilities.

Yet another study published today, in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, claiming to find an association between mothers' employment and their five-year-old children's quality of diet and levels of physical activity.

Why am I so annoyed about this?  Because as far as I can tell from the abstract (which is all I can currently access since my library isn't currently subscribing to J Epidemiol Comm Health), what they were actually looking at was families where the said five-year-olds did not have a parent at home during the day at all.  I.e, either both parents were working, or the mother was a single parent.  I quote:

"Conclusions: For many families the only parent or both parents are working. This may limit parents’ capacity to provide their children with healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity. Policies and programmes are needed to help support parents and create a health promoting environment."

And I am sick and tired, to the back teeth, of the assumption that if small children develop better with as much parental contact as possible (which I can entirely believe), it has to be the mother who stays at home, without that assumption apparently ever being tested.

Now, I love my profession and my career, but I would like to think that if there were really overwhelming evidence that my children would develop much better and more happily as human beings with me being at home full-time, and that only I, as opposed to their father, would do for that, I would reconsider what I was doing very seriously. But nobody ever asks that question.  Everyone from the media to child psychologists glibly refers to the "need for mothers to stay at home" and never ask, and as far as I can see never test, whether what they actually mean is "the need for a parent to stay at home."  And it matters which it is, dammit.  It matters enormously, not only because of the immense guilt being conveniently deposited on working mothers (and let's face it, most mothers have first class degrees in guilt-self-infliction as it is), but also because if it turned out that it was just as beneficial for children's development for their father to stay at home with them, and more women felt able to dig their heels in to their husbands and insist that fine, if they were so keen on having a family they could stay at home - then more women would be sole breadwinners and maybe, just maybe, women's pay would have to improve?...

Who knows, maybe that wouldn't turn out to be the case at all. But what drives me up the wall with frustration, as someone who trained in academia and then information management and spent a number of years working in an evidence-based-practice field, is that we're NOT EVEN ASKING THE RIGHT BLOODY QUESTION, and until we do we haven't a hope of finding out. Arrrrrgh.

... you decide about 4 pm in between bouts of mad running about that you can snatch enough time to make a cuppa in the staffroom, and on grabbing your mug from your desk find it contains half an inch of very cold tea with fur growing on it.  That must have been in there since some time last week.  Lovely.

And I've been telling people that things are calming down this week. Not so's my tea mug would notice, apparently.

Just had this from the RSC on my Twitter feed - the Hamlet DVD can now be ordered!  Excuse me while I hyperventilate... greylin , are you receiving me?...

Ok, so the fantastic discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard has rekindled my long-held-but-never-got-round-to determination to read Beowulf properly - ie read the Anglo-Saxon, but with a parallel  (preferably verse) translation because my A-S is practically non-existent.

So, there must be people on my flist who can recommend - whose translation is any good?  I've got the Seamus Heaney 2000 verse translation on order from the public library: (to my shock and horror we don't have it in the Library at work! - I know our English department doesn't teach A-S but I refuse to believe they don't teach Heaney!);   here at the Uni we have a Michael Alexander and a Kevin Crossley-Holland verse translation, both weirdly from 1973, which I'm ordering over from the main campus.

Any others anyone would recommend?...

One for Anglo-Saxon fans: the Staffordshire Hoard, found by a local metal detectorist in July 2009 and excavated by Birmingham University Archaeology Unit and Staffordshire County Council - described by the British Museum as rivalling and possibly exceeding the importance of Sutton Hoo - has a Flickr slideshow here (my thanks to the Resident Geek for the heads-up!)

It's absolutely beautiful. I'm coming over all Rohirric just looking at it. Reading the descriptions on the Staffordshire Hoard official website is making the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

(Bother, I don't have a suitably Rohirric icon, this needs remedying...)

Have just discovered that I am a question on the new BA Education students'  induction quiz!  ("Who is....?")

The Library Manager, with much chortling, is directing any hopeful students who get as far as the Library to our staff photoboard.  She promises to deflect any legions of screaming fans, with the exception of tall dark geeky Scottish David Tennant lookalikes...

Reposted  from telperion1 , the following brilliant idea which I thoroughly endorse and am definitely going to do myself!

In honor of tomorrow being September 22nd, I have a suggestion for everyone who is or was part of the Tolkien fandom.

Close your eyes. (Okay, maybe not if you're still on your first cup of coffee... clear your mind at any rate.) Think back to when you first came to fandom. Whenever that is.

Think of the first few stories that absolutely wowed you. Preferably by writers who are somehow still active in fandom, or that you otherwise have a hope of writing. Think about why you loved this story so much.

Now open up your email program, or dash over to an archive where their stuff is hosted, and leave them a note. Doesn't have to be long. You don't have to share with anyone else that you've done this. Just take two minutes and let someone know that you still remember their work fondly.

Go on. I double-dog dare you. Not because it's a dare and you get swept up in the adrenaline... but because people deserve to know how much their fic touches people. And today is as good a day as any to find the time to do that.

I can already think of at least three of my starters-for-ten...