virtually a librarian

Continuing with the theme of moving the personal / professional line, I thought I’d do a photo post today, to describe what/who I am – what I like to do – outside of library-land (apt for a Friday night, right?). I’ve mentioned before that I have a serious case of work-bleeding-into-personal-space-and-time, so it follows that I do spend a lot of my time thinking / reading / talking / writing about libraries and technology. But I *am* more than a librarian / educator / gadget girl (though I sometimes forget that) and I *do* spend time on things that have nothing to do with libraries or technology (though sometimes not as much as I should).

tiniest, tiny, huge

The thing I love to do most in the world is hang out with my niece and nephew, Issy-B and Seba. I took this picture this afternoon, when we got home from a walk. We all wore our new sneakers – Nikes for me and Dunlop Volleys for the twins. I think Issy-B is jealous that mine are hot pink, while hers are pastel. We might have to rectify the imbalance with another pair of sneakers. Luckily, we’re going shopping tomorrow.

christmas chicken cooking on the webber

I really like to cook, although unfortunately I don’t have much time for it. I try hard to stick to a menu during the week, preparing as much in advance for the coming week over the weekend. I also try to keep some curry and some pasta sauce in the freezer for emergencies. But if I had my way, I’d cook something gourmet every night.

a few of my favourite shoes
(bummer about the blur)

I like to shop. A lot. In particular, I like to buy things for my niece and nephew (clothes! books! toys!), things for the house, and shoes. Unfortunately, I have super skinny feet, and it’s really hard to get AA fitting shoes in Australia. Oh, and I also love buying presents. In the past I have also been a big buyer of handbags and perfume (though my recently acquired mortgage has cured me of these two vices – handbags just cost too much [plus I'm a backpack girl these days] and I have enough perfume to last me about, oooh, 7 years [seriously]).

mushroom girl feltie
(on the front of issy-b’s first birthday card)

home made earrings (box one of too many)

From time to time, I make stuff. Recently, I’ve made a few felties, which has been rather a challenge, seeing that I passed my sewing class in grade eight by the skin of my teeth, and I do not even attempt to sew buttons back into their original positions. I also really like making jewelry, particularly earrings, but haven’t had much time for it lately. (Must confess there are two pairs in this box that I didn’t make – bottom left and second from the right in the top row, although the latter broke so I’ve done a repair job on them.)

I was going to add that I’m a fairly prolific reader, but that kinda goes with the territory, right? Oh, and I also like to sleep. A lot. But not really sure how to illustrate that one!

Photo courtesy herlitz-monster-talent under a CC attribution license.
Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/monstertalent/3463025654/.

A colleague introduced me to a new term, recently, which perfectly describes my state of being today: “task monster”. To be a task monster is to put blinkers on, put one’s head down, and frantically power through your to-do list.

Huzzah for a productive Thursday, spent at my local public library. Notably the productivity was aided by being away from my laptop, with all its fun – and not so fun – distractions. Time now to deal with everything I missed while I was ‘checked out’ today.

I’ve never had a clear line between my personal and professional lives. It’s not possible to be a workaholic and stop the professional from bleeding across into the personal, at least in terms of time and space – I work outside of work hours, and I work in non-work environments (I always have, but it happens even more now that I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home).

I’ve also always had a very blurry line between personal and professional in online forums, too. Take Twitter, for example: my private Twitter account is very much my life stream – it’s full of anecdotes about my personal life, as well as my professional life – but I’m largely connected there with people I have a professional link to. My friends and family don’t do Twitter, but this hasn’t stopped my private account from being the domain of non-work talk. I have a clear line in my mind about what gets posted to my private Twitter account, and what gets posted to my public one, but that line is not necessarily a marker between personal and professional – it’s more about degrees of personal (and, I have to say, what I’m willing to have my students read!). I am, essentially, a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of girl. It’s my approach to life. I share stuff. It makes me who I am, both as a person, and as a professional. I share through my private Twitter account the stuff I’d be likely to share with people in person, both personal stuff and professional stuff.

As I posted a few days ago, until recently, Facebook has been a fairly open forum for me, but I decided to cut back my friends on Facebook to include only those people I actually know and hang out with IRL. That means I’m no longer connected with many library types on there, and I’m no longer connected to people from school that I don’t hang out with IRL. Again, though, the line in the sand with Facebook is not about personal and professional – it’s about the ‘realness’ of my connection with the people I’m linked to there.

This blog has always had a clearer purpose in my mind. Although I’ve been an incredibly sporadic blogger, I’ve always blogged about professional-related topics here, and I’ve rarely injected the personal. I didn’t start this blog to talk about personal stuff – I started it to talk about professional stuff, and that’s how it’s always been. This #blogeverydayofjune challenge has changed that for me, sort of out of necessity – 30 posts in 30 days is a whole lot of professional topics.

So I’ve read with interest as Sue and Con have grappled with the idea of blogging about professional topics on personal blogs, because for me, the situation is reversed. I’m bolshy (read: loud and obnoxious) enough to say whatever I think about whatever is on my mind when it comes to professional topics (as long as they don’t set off the appropriateness radar, of course), but I’ve actually found it really uncomfortable to interject the personal here. Weird, huh? I kind of have the reverse issue that Sue and Con are talking about. That’s really strange for someone who is a compulsive sharer!

I’ve decided, though, that it’s okay to let my purpose here change, or rather, to let it diversify to match the way I am in the other forums I’m in, both online and real world, especially right now while I’m trying to figure out if I’m gonna keep blogging. In a post on online identity, Jenica Rogers wrote:

But once you’ve found your voice, and anchored it in who you are, be prepared for it to change. Your boundaries, too…

And you may discover that you yourself change as you write and talk.  You may become a different person. You may join new communities.  You may find a different purpose.  You might want to be a different kind of speaker and writer.  Honor that.  Stay true to yourself and your voice, whatever that means for you.  Because you always need to know why you’re doing it, and if that why changes, then let the how change, too.

I’m still not sure that I’m going to continue blogging here, and so the ‘why’ is a little unclear. In the past, the ‘why’ has been about having a space to have a voice on professional issues, other than through formal publications. So while I figure out if I want to continue with this blog, I’m going I’m going to mess around a bit with my modus operandi here. The ‘how’ is going to change up a bit, and I think that’s okay.

A day of Bs.

bleary-eyes

I had a slow and painful start to Saturday, after a late night reading #blogeverdayofjune posts and more than my evening quota of the latest Sookie installment. I have an obscenely pink Hello Kitty alarm clock, which was bought for me as a joke, and which lives on the bottom shelf of my bedside table. I persist in using this really rather ugly alarm clock because the snooze button is Kitty herself: she’s about seven centimeters tall, and as a result, it’s really easy to lean over in the dark and smack the snooze button without looking. Snooze lasts for nine minutes (and as an aside, I am convinced that nine minutes is the optimum length of time for snoozing: five isn’t enough; ten seems to make me greedy for another hour; nine is just enough to make me feel like I’ve indulged myself, without making me late [correction: without making me any later than I was going to be anyway - the fact that I frequently mistype my name as Late is really rather Freudian]). So, although I should have been up at 6am to get ready to drive to Brisbane, instead, I dragged myself out of bed, bleary-eyed, at 7am, and promptly commenced whirlwind-ing round the house.

barcamp

I spent today at #barcampbne (aka BarCamp Brisbane). Plans (or unplans) have been in the pipelines for a couple of months and it all paid off today, with what I think was possibly the biggest BarCamp Brisbane has seen to date. It was a great day, with talks on topics as diverse as bell ringing and adult Aspergers, and a fish bowl on Agile. I didn’t actually get to see any presentations this time round (I was the meeter and greeter responsible for pointing all likely candidates towards the breakout rooms), but judging from the conversations in the hallways and the chatting at break times, I’m pretty sure everyone had a great day.

It made me think that it would great to do another PodCamp with a focus on getting the general public involved, similar to the one I facilitated for Gold Coast Libraries earlier in the year. (It was really great to see at least one person who was introduced to the unconference/Camp concept via PodCamp Gold Coast in attendance today at BarCamp. Public libraries FTW!) I’d love to do something in Brisbane later in the year… Anyone interested in helping out?

bebes

A pretty great day was topped off by making it home in time to hang out with my delicious niece and nephew for a bit before bedtime. Kids have a way of giving your perspective like nothing else.

blogging

It’s day five of #blogeverydayofjune, and I hoped today’s post would be in the form of live blogging from BarCamp. Alas, I got distracted by unorganising (and by the lovely company of a good friend), so I got to the end of the day without coming up with anything witty, or intelligent, or even remotely relevant, to say here. The reality is I’ve got nothing left in the tank tonight, so I decided that profundity could wait til a week day, and you’ve got this here post on all things B.

bed

And so it comes back to bed. Perhaps this post would have been more coherent, and perhaps it would have had more point, if I had not authored it from the comfort of my very yummy bed…

On that note…

buonanotte!