picked a handful of violets in my name

Notes

My parents have been here for the past two weeks, and then my internet connection spent a couple of days being pissy, and then I had other shit to do. But I'm back!

Parents

It was a good visit! We did many fun things, such as go to museums (Museum of Science with Ellie's kinda-sorta-girlfriend-I-think,* two three year olds, and the dad of the of the other three year old! MFA, wherein I learned exactly how intensely my dad does museums), elbow our way through the North End (I have been to concerts that were less crowded than those sidewalks, sheesh, also who the fuck drives in the North End are you fucking kidding me), etc.

* Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with that relationship thing, so I do not have a single-word term for it. It is very functional and they seem happy! It's also kind of hilarious (but possibly only to me, because of the sheer amount of TMI I have on Ellie's life and personal identity).

Thanks to a trip to Ikea and two carloads off to Goodwill, my room is in pretty good order! This is kind of miraculous. I still have too much stuff, but A) some kind of shift has occurred that unblocked my ability to get rid of things I don't need and B) I have improved my storage capabilities.

An important note: if you are planning to rearrange some furniture, and are drawing something out on paper, make sure your measurements are correct. We were off by two feet.

Grad School

I am not sure why advising needed to be an all-day process, but it was. There was assorted fuckery related to my being listed with the wrong concentration and assigned to the wrong advisor, but I did have the proper advising experience I was supposed to. Then there was the unrelated fuckery of not enough seats in classes, the end results of which are that I'm taking core library classes in a slightly different but still completely reasonable order than I'd originally thought, and I am still waiting to hear which history class I've been placed in (they needed volunteers to take Methods some time other than first semester, and one of the alternatives was a women's and gender history course, so I volunteered, but we're being manually registered and I haven't received an email about it yet).

There were two really bright spots in my day: I think I met a friend of a former schoolmate (one year ahead of me, so we weren't really friends), and one of the professors pinged my "you are from the internet" radar. Also there was ice cream and I got to go to work for a little while afterwards.

Work

Boss is departing; she'll still be available to advise us but today was her last real workday. This makes me the second most senior employee in the archives. I am deeply unsettled by that.

I am processing a new collection... three new collections... six collections? There are three organizations who donated their records, so there will be three collections. There are six accessions right now, because sometimes they gave us stuff in multiple batches. Some stuff will need to be moved between accessions because it belongs to one of the other organizations. Sorting that out will be the easy part.

The third organization was created by the merger of the other two, which helps to explain the cross-pollination of materials and also makes it a little harder to deal with it. Furthermore, each of those orgs is the result of mergers and renamings of even older organizations, such that the final conglomerate can say it dates back to the 1800s. (The bulk of the collections is more modern, but there are items from the predecessor orgs and these are the oldest papers I have processed.) I am going to need a nice detailed organizational chart to make sure everything is housed where is belongs, is referenced where relevant, and is laid out sensibly and accurately in the finding aid. Fortunately for me, someone wrote a history of one of the orgs and all those materials are in the collection; a thank-you card to that person may be in order when I'm finally done.

(JP)

(That's supposed to represent those oval bumper stickers that usually have two-letter country abbreviations. Someone makes such a sticker for Jamaica Plain. I keep threatening to buy one for Ellie, to upgrade her Subaru wagon [Level One JP Vehicle] that now has a carseat for a small child [Level 2 JP Vehicle; can also qualify with one of those fences to keep your dog in the back] to a Level 3 JP Vehicle.)

Boomerangs has been holding a massive sale to empty the store ahead of planned renovations. I've paid them a visit every day since Tuesday; retail therapy works for me and thrift stores reduce the financial burden and potential for guilt. (I mostly look for things with violets on them. It's kind of a theme.) I also finally made it to one of our local botanicas, which I have been meaning to do for over three years (ever since we were apartment-hunting and I saw it out of the realtor's car window); unfortunately I think I kind of interrupted the owner's lunch. The botanica has a shop cat, whom I briefly petted when I walked in; I spent the rest of my time there being insistently headbutted in the ankles. Secretly I was delighted, because I almost always love cats more than they love me.

I also keep returning to City Feed for lunch. It is very pleasant to eat a ham and cheese sandwich and watch people walking by.

Transcriptions Thursday night to see Cameryn do a staged reading of some new material.

Friday was Slutcracker with Ellie. We left the house late, and then there was epic traffic, and then there was nowhere to park in Davis Square. I whined a lot about how it would've been faster to take the T. Not true, actually (epic train failure), and I calmed down quite a bit once we found a parking place and squeezed in some dinner before the show, even if it was just Chipotle.

Last night we went to the TNG munch at Diesel. Did not run out of social, hooray! And now I have some new friends on Fetlife. But we didn't get home until after 11, which was bad.

Joan gave a short lesson on processing in the context of our institution and what we collect, and our increasing tendency to scan everything. Then there was pizza and chatter and office party.

Recently

Work, mostly. solarcat and I are going to Garment District and maybe some other places this weekend, for Killjoys costuming purposes. (I also need to figure out a Ramona Flowers costume, since Cory has decided that's what we're doing for Halloween, since I'll be in Grand Forks and all.)

Ellie and I spent some time last night talking about our plans for revamping the apartment. The main thrust is to make our space better for our creative pursuits. So much of it depends on her having the time and spoons to build new furniture, so no idea when any of it will get done. I can post an outline of our plans, with crappy diagrams, if anyone is interested.

Links

• via saystheheart: Safeword, the s&m superhero


• Married to the Sea: new uniforms


• via cofax7: Gerald M. Weinberg: What’s Been the Effect of Banning My Stuff?

  Whatever it was intended to do, banning things increases interest. When one of the Pope’s Cardinals banned The DaVinci Code, lagging sales picked up and made a few more millions for Mr. Brown. Banning Harry Potter had a similar effect for Ms. J. K. Rowling, now richer than the Queen.

(Tangent: I once got to attend one of Jerry's workshops. He and my dad go pretty far back; we would usually pay him a visit when we took our road trips to New Mexico. Jerry knew I was working on a novel, he was running a writing workshop and it was going to be pretty fiction-oriented, and he hadn't seen Dad in a while. So Dad and I took a week off work/school and went. It was awesome.)

(And another tangent: Wow has my life been full of fantastic opportunities and experiences that resulted directly from grown-ups taking a chance on me. Including my current job.)

Plans

I am considering StrowlerCon, but would need roommates. I also need to run it past Ellie and see if she wants in.

Recently

Today's lulz: letter from Glamour magazine attempting to get Mr. [Sofia Blackthorne] to subscribe. My legal first name is technically unisex (I was named after my great-grandfather), though in English-speaking cultures, Dominique pretty much female (although I wonder, given the number of times people have attempted to call me Dominic to my very cis-female face - can they not pronounce -que endings or something?).

Also, Ellie is eating all my Green & Blacks milk chocolate. :\

Links

• scottpilgrimslash: comment-fic-athon


• via holyschist: [Activist Modus Operandi] Methods of Communication


• tim: How To Fail Out Of Grad School Without Really Trying

  There's a saying that you should never take advice from the survivors, and I felt that way reading this list of reasons Ph.D students fail. If I interpret this article as advice, it's good advice. But if I interpret it as a compendium of reasons why students fail, it doesn't really capture my experience or that of other people I know who left grad school. One reason why is that the author attributes failure only to individual students, ignoring the important role that unsupportive faculty members and indifferent institutions can play in encouraging failure. As Barbara Lovitts shows in her book _Leaving the Ivory Tower_, there are disciplinary and institutional patterns to grad student attrition, suggesting structural reasons for why Ph.D students fail that cannot be reduced to random individual variations in character.

• via #dreamwidth: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names


• via rydra_wong: I love the smell of dreamwidth in the morning.

  Every day that you're online, scout around dreamwidth. Find one person you don't normally comment to and comment on an entry. Pick a community that looks cool or that you're a member of and don't normally post to/comment on, and leave a post/comment. Post something of substance in your journal. Start a conversation. Engage. Enrich the community.

Plans

Need to redo the purple on my hair this weekend, or maybe sooner if I feel like it. It's starting to fade significantly near the roots. Also need to go to the post office, since those bastards have stopped leaving international parcels on the porch. Also should install software updates and restart my computer, especially since it might fix the problems that exist between Adium and Facebook chat. Also also should order some tights for extended skirt-wearing season.

And by that, I mean I Organized All The Books. Next step is to get them into LibraryThing.

Ellie suggests that the best place to hole up during the zombie apocalypse is a strip mall with a home improvement store and a Super WalMart that share an interior wall. Then you have materials for fortifications from the home improvement store, plus food and guns from WalMart. Just knock a hole through the interior wall and you're golden.

But if you have to choose, pick the WalMart and use random merchandise to block the doors. Ellie suggests filling shopping carts with slashed-open diapers and watering them to create a kind of sandbag thing.

( links on art, accessibility, fandom secrets, site culture, and podfic )

New layout on sofiaviolet. I took the Light on Dark theme for Funky Circles and made it really fucking purple.

Today's Groupon for Boston applies to classes at Bead + Fiber in the South End. Since there's totally stuff I haven't been able to figure out on my own at all.

As Ellie and I are leaving for Northampton in less than an hour (we hope), I will catch up on the interwebs later. I may or may not spend the day spamming the crap out of Twitter, and there may or may not be pictures when I get home.

Yesterday's concert was great (even though I had the nagging remains of a headache), and Thursday played some of my favorite songs, including the one I uploaded yesterday.

My train back from Worcester got in a little past two in the morning, and Ellie still came and picked me up.

I slept really really really late, and then Ellie and I went to Fourburgers (as Cambridge seems to be the only nearby place not getting its water from the "no srsly boil this" backup reservoirs). We attempted to figure out what Ellie should do for a cheap vacation, since she has this week off before summer term. Finally decided that maybe a day trip to Northampton was in order.

Then we tried to go to a grocery store in Cambridge but got lost, considered going to the one in Dedham we usually go to and rejected that idea except in case of emergency, tried to get on Memorial Drive but wound up on Storrow instead, decided to try the grocery at Jackson Square, and then actually went to one near Fenway because we wound up driving right past it.

So we have a case of bottled water now, and Ellie wants to go out to some lumber yard out in the middle of nowhere tomorrow, so she can get more if we need it.

Daily Song (right-click): My Chemical Romance - The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You
Since that's what Ellie asked to listen to in the car today. (She only seems to request MCR when we're going to be driving for a while, so I just start with Bullets and keep going until we get home. This is as far as we got today.)

If you want to vote for ideas I've already had or make topic suggestions, I'm going to begin work on those entries ASAP, probably later this evening.

via yvi: truelove: it isn't a zero sum game, why shooting down efforts other than your pet projects is really fucking counterproductive

Related to Dreamwidth swag, damned_colonial explains how to get different colors and styles of t-shirt on Zazzle. Can be generalized to the rest of Zazzle, including other, non-clothing products.

rydra_wong: LJ is again tampering with your links to insert its own affiliate codes. This is the opt-out from the last round of affiliate-link shenanigans, and it seems to still work.

On today's agenda: roller derby! Ellie and I are stopping at some woodworking store on the way. Her tools already equal or exceed the value of her car, but she still doesn't have everything she needs. (In addition to set-building/theater tech and fine furniture, she plans to move into the woods one day and build her own house, and take a whole bunch of her friends who want lots of big dogs/unrestricted nudity/etc. with her.)

At some point, Ellie is going to build me a new garment rack. I had a mass-produced plastic/metal one, but it broke under the weight of my clothes. The new one will be made of two-by-fours and an oak dowel.

Tomorrow I have to accompany Ellie to the FedEx depot to sign for her package. Because apparently woodworking tools require the signature of a 21+ person. *sigh*

( links )

And now I go off and write my essay on corruption in post-colonial African governments.

I have 10 invite codes! (They were distributed to lissa_and_kitty, who is fictional and has little use for them.) You can comment here or email sofiaviolet@sofiaviolet.com if you would like to use one. ETA: Here are two of them: C9J7QA7JAEHN6AAAFW36 and 9Q33X8JR3DZJBAAAFW37, for those who would rather not comment or send an email!

Follow Friday: "Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die". Just introduce us to some new things to read."

fucking_meds for your various medications and how much they can suck, con_txt for CON.TXT, getting_started for Dreamwidth 101 questions, magpie for jewelry-makers, macapps, pretty_pixels for icons, queerlygen, fandomcalendar
followfriday | Latest Posts

***

Any Boston-area folks want to see Thursday with me at the Palladium? May 1st. Would be helpful if you have a car, since I won't be able to drive by then.*

* Yeah, I know. Ellie has convinced me. I get my learner's permit, she teaches me, I get an actual license, I sign up for Zipcar, I drive her around when she needs to buy GIANT pieces of wood.**

** We have a pretty nice woodworking shop in the basement now. Also some apparently very laid-back landlords.