cancelled

For the first time in seven years I had to cancel a trip and a talk. I figure I’ll explain what happened because I think a lot of people may not even understand this “I give talks” aspect of my life. I was supposed to go to the PLA Conference in Portland Oregon. I was originally invited in August of last year and said yes. As you may know from the rest of my typings, a lot of other travel then filled in around it. I was scheduled to give a talk at 10:15 today [I had asked to speak in the afternoon, denied. I had asked to speak after 11 am, denied]. The deal I had worked out was that I’d get my airfare covered, two nights in a hotel [they had offered one night, I had said for a minimum eight hours of travelling, that wasn’t enough] and a modest honorarium. I don’t know why these places say honorarium instead of fee, but there it is.

On Friday I noticed I didn’t have a hotel reservation yet and sent some frantic emails asking about this. The woman in charge of reservations hadn’t gotten my two [2] housing forms I’d emailed in. Not sure what happened. They quickly handled it. Then they let me know they hadn’t gotten the contract that I’d faxed and mailed. I occasionally have these waking nightmares that somehow I’ve ceased to exist to everyone but myself, only it happens slowly, not quickly [i.e. I send emails but they just vanish once they leave my mail client] and this was seeming like that.

I had a flight out yesterday at 2:20 pm. I have three airports I choose among: Burlington, Manchester, and Logan in Boston. Burlington is closest, but has fewer flights, Manchester is next closest, but I have to drive there [about two hours] and Logan is furthest but I can take public transportation most of the way and it has the most flights. This flight was out of Manchester, connecting in DC. I got up and left the house at 11, got to the airport at 1, ate lunch, waited on my flight. At 2 it was clear that we weren’t boarding. At about this time they made an announcement that the incoming flight that was supposed to be my outgoing flight had been hit by lightning and was going to be delayed. I saw the flight crew outside taking photos of the plane with their phones. I was pretty sure “delayed” was inaccurate. So I got in line to be rebooked and called United at the same time. The nice man I spoke to said “Oh your plane is just delayed, just wait for it” which was basically the best information he had at the time. It took United almost an hour and a half to declare the flight cancelled.

I used my librarian skills to determine that there wasn’t another flight out of Manchester that day. I found that there was a flight out of Logan, in a few hours, getting me in in the middle of the night. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have much of a sense of what normal people would do in a situation like this. I was pretty sure I could get to Boston, brave rush hour traffic, park my car in a $22/day lot [not reimbursed] and be in Portland by midnight. Maybe. I called my Dad and my sister who I call my Reality Check Network. They both assured me that only crazy people would consider this, though I should ask the PLA people if they’d reschedule me. I asked, they said no. They were pretty nice about it. Occasionally librarians are very very crabby dealing with plan changes; I am a pleaser so I try to avoid pissing people off, but this was unavaoidable bad news. I waited in line some more. I got an email from United saying that my flight was officially cancelled. I called again to see if I could maybe be put on another airline’s flight. No.

At this point I have made my peace with not going. Once this happens a switch flips in my head and I absolutely do not want to go anymore. I emailed everyone in Portland telling them I am not coming [I have a ton of friends there, I was looking forward to seeing them] because with no talk there is no free plane trip so instead of making a little money on this, I would be spending my own money which I didn’t want to do. After two hours in line [seriously!] I talk to the guy at the head of the line who confirms that yes, I am going noplace. He “refunds” my money which means he gives me what looks like an airline ticket except it implies that I will get my ticket money back. He gives me a voucher for airport food because I asked for one [and told other people to ask for one, they say “they’ll give you food money?”] and I ask if I can spend it all on beer. I call the parking lot people who come fetch me and give me not some but all of my parking lot money back. I drive two hours home, eating my free sandwich. I get home at 7. I send the nice people from PLA the links to my talk and my slides. I lose at Scrabble against Jim and sleep for eleven hours.

When I went to bed last night the United website still showed me as booked on a flight to Portland today, a fact which multiple phone calls did not clear up. “Oh just wait five minutes” said the phone support person. “Oh just ignore it” said the next one. Eventually the trip vanished – poof! I emailed my friends in town to say I wasn’t gone, and they invited me over for dinner.

I have, as always, mixed feelings. I really wanted to give this talk. I really wanted to go to Portland. I really want, in general, to do what I say I am going to do. However, I have a difficult time balancing exactly how much I should pull out all the stops to ensure that I can do what I say I will. I probably could have made it to Portland yesterday if I’d done something crazy. Or I maybe could have planned a Sunday flight and paid for my own hotel room or stayed with a friend. Or I could have gone for the weekend and been 100% sure I’d be there today [which meant leaving the day after I got back from Texas]. I say all this stuff because I want to reassure myself that what I did was okay. It’s difficult for me to say “I can’t” but I’ve been getting better at it this year. Seems like a strange goal to work towards, and it’s bad if it’ a habit, but I’m thinking it should be part of my vocabulary.

time has come today

I consider it a good trip if I can come home without being sick and thinking “I made some good decisions.”

I am home from SXSW which was more fun than I was expecting. Staying with friends instead of solo meant that I was more social and did more stuff than I might have if I had been left to my own devices [which, if history is any indicator, means that I walk around looking at things alone all day, nothing wrong with that but it’s good to change it up a little]. I also got less sleep and did a lot less narrating and more doing. A short list before I go back to the daybed and soak up the remaining sunlight hours.

I went to Austin and stayed with the Guys of MetaFilter in a nice house north of town. Here are my photos.
I was interviewed with Team MeFi for community radio. MC Frontalot was also there. Not sure where the audio wound up.
I was interviewed by Latoya Peterson from Racialicious about the digital divide. Not sure where the video wound up.
I went with librarians, MetaFilter people, old skool bloggers and others to see MC Frontalot perform with other nerdcore rappers. Here is his website. I stayed out late, really late, eating pancakes the night before my panel.
I presented a panel with NYPL libraran Jenny Engstrom which was, by all accounts, a smashing success. Here are my slides.
I went to dinner with 50 someodd people and was amazed at the confluence of old and new friends.
I got held up by technical plane problems at the airport and wound up flying into Boston instead of Burlington which meant a side trip to Denver and some special surprise time with Jim.
I ate an awful lot of tacos.

I got home three minutes before the post office closed [thanks Forrest!], which is auspicious. I still need to get the ASKMEMobile out of the Burlington airport parking lot, but I have a plan. Between the detour into Mountain Time and the time change and the 28 hour trip home [with some snoozing in-between] and my general bleariness, I’m not sure I’ve ever been more happy to come back to my little treehouse where time seems to mostly stand still. More reports as events warrant.

three fifths done

Bla bla bla the journey really is the destination. This was a photo I took at the Loussac Library in Anchorage Alaska. Often when I go places, I’m fidgety and sort of keeping an eye on the clock and my agenda and where else I have to be when. I’m good at getting places when I need to be, but sometimes less good at the Be Here Now aspect of the whole thing.

I finished up my Alaska trip and checked out of the hotel I was staying at around 1 pm and then had almost twelve hours to kill before my red-eye flight. I was pleasantly surprised that the library was open on a Sunday and got a ride over there and just hung out before taking the bus back to the hotel to use the free wifi for a few hours before eating and going to the airport for the long bumbada bumbada trip home. The library wasn’t too full, the heaters made a pleasant sound, the view was amazing, the wifi worked. It was one of the most peaceful parts of a long and interesting but rarely restful set of weeks.

I head to SXSW tomorrow. If you see me, please say hello.

winter beach fallow

van

I think I mentioned that I’m traveling. For the last week I’ve been staying at my Dad’s place in Westport MA while he’s in Mexico. I have the run of a house with five bathrooms, six TVs, four pets, a delightful kitchen, an SUV and a beach within almost-walking distance. And I’m on deadline to write a few talks, so I’ve mostly been hanging out inside doing some typa typa work, listening to bhangra music and making the cats purr.

At first this was all novel, now it’s just hunkering in a new hunkerplace. I’m a fan of hunkering. Vermont got several feet of snow. There has just been rain here. I’ll take the dog out to the beach in almost any weather, but he’s not raring to go in this sort of downpour. At first I was taking a lot of photos and making a lot of plans and busybodying myself around here [I washed the couch cushion covers, oh yes I did] and now I’ve adapted to a slower pace, a different rhythm, a little more Johanna Newsome and a little less bhangra.

Jim was up last weekend and we did a lot of food eating and Olympic watching and Valentine’s Day catchup. Kate and Ned are coming down this weekend along with a friend who is having a birthday and we’ll have some sort of cupcakes. It surprises me sometimes how staying in one place for a while seems to settle me down to an almost non-vibratory state, but that I also don’t have as much to talk about. And I say I’m surprised by things more as I get older and shouldn’t I be getting surprised less?

A friend from library school [hi Anne!] had the words STAY and ROAM tattooed on her knuckles. When I travel to tiny libraries to tell them about how we do things in rural Vermont, it’s unusual because the people in these small towns rarely leave them. When I go home I’m unusual in that I’m rarely in one place too long. I tell people that I travel because they can’t, that I talk about the people in my town because others don’t. But at some level I just have the fidgets and there’s something to the appeal of elsewhere.

valentine’s day bookshelves

There was a small amount of “Are you doing something special with Jim today?” questioning on Sunday, which seems normal. The short answer was “no, we decided not to” and the longer answer has more to do with the nature of long-distance relationships and the fact that we’d been together both the weekend previously and will see each other this coming weekend. We did more of a five-day virtual thing. I sent him some bamboo to his office on Friday [who knew you could use frequent flyer miles on bamboo?], we played Scrabble on Saturday, sent some schmoopy photos back and forth on Sunday and talked yesterday. Today I’m heading to the post office to pick up my valentine [received: 1210 songs with love in the title, wowie!]. And tomorrow I’m leaving town for three weeks.

The three weeks thing was sort of a gaffe. I made plans to go give a talk on a day I wasn’t actually free. I’ve never done this in six years of speaking, so I apologized like crazy and said “Pick a new date and I’ll go down there!” The date they picked — this is the NorthEast Florida Library Information Network — was wedged firmly between two existing trips, one to house- and pet-sit for my Dad while he goes to Mexico and one trip to Alaska. So as much as 2010 is going to be the Year of Sensible Travel, March is going to be a little insensible.

So I did the be-your-own-valentine thing and assembled some bookshelves that I’ve been sort of slow-motion working on for a few months. I made a valentine for my facebook friends and added a different photo to Flickr. I sent some email and had some fried cheese for dinner [on sale at the supermarket!] and had a bangup hilarious phone call with my favorite [and only] sister and called it a day. Moderate expectations, amply exceeded, and a five day Valentine’s Day. Hope you had, have, or are having a happy whatever-you-have.

stuck in the past

I was discussing with friends lately how the 1890s is my favorite decade. Back when this blog was just a teeny “what I did today” ramble, I’d take machine shop photos and colorize them so that I could have images to use next to some of my posts. This usually involved, in the late 1990s, taking a photograph of a book. Well now I can go go Google and read an entire book from 1895 full of fun machine pictures and even add it to my so-called bookshelf.

Nothing has been going on this week other than the normal stuff. I have had a cold and have been doing the lay low thing in addition to my usual work. I got very “rah rah” about blogging stuff when I was doing it for BoingBoing, but coming back to my little “hey here’s what’s been up” box that I type into does not make me want to go off and research 19th century dictionary advertisements [though I have a great old advertisement for one]. Here are the photos of my trip to Florida. I had a nice time.

that was the week that was – where I got my ideas

dismevowel me?

So hey, I was over at BoingBoing this week. This was also the week my friend Dawn came to visit and I was in Florida for three days. I also worked at the school like normal. It was sort of a hectic week. I don’t read BoingBoing usually. I like it but can’t keep up with it. This past week, I enjoyed getting to see the other side of it. I’m more used to the world of MetaFilter where posts are for other people, not about yourself, don’t have photos, etc. I had a hard time adjusting.

So, in case anyone’s curious, here’s an annotated list of what I blogged about there, with some extra “where do you get your ideas?” notes tossed in for good measure. I’m typing this on a plane [with wifi! expensive! too expensive for me!] on leg three of my six leg [car-plane-plane-subway-bus-car] trip home from Florida. Update: I am now home. My last post appeared on BoingBoing flanked by McDonald’s ads.

At the edges of libraries – a few links I liked and a small “thanks for having me”
Phil Agre located, search not quite over – I had been paying attention to this story since I heard about it. Phil is brilliant, haunted, and vanished in 2008 sometime. I saw this update on rc3.org and made a quick note.
What’s really on bittorrent anyway? – found when reading the Freedom to Tinker blog which I read regularly.
“The only perfect reference work” Nelson’s Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia – a friend emailed me about a friend of his who was coming out with a fascinating book about… something. He also mentioned this encyclopedia which I think I may have a few volumes of. I did some digging.
Airplane bird strikes are now public information – my friend Mike twittered about public FAA databases and I lost myself clicking around this one.
Slime as Engineer – brainless mold mimics Tokyo subway – I found this by accident [or serendipity] as I was looking up something else but it had a “bb would like this” vibe to it.
The peculiar challenges of Chinese Braille – judith twittered about someone reading Braille on the bus and I went off reading about Braille.
Read Houdini’s books via Google Books and Library of Congress – a pal emailed me a link to the original blog post about it. I’ve always been a fan of Houdini and full-text books available online.
Catch a cold for the holidays: a history of The Common Cold Unit – I answered a question for Ask MetaFilter about how communicable the common cold was and what we knew about it and everything I looked up pointed to the work done at the CCU. May be one of those things fascinating to me and only sort of interesting to other people.
Skin contact between performers creates a positive social environment – Melissa and Hiram posted a link to this on facebook. I enjoyed the video and the goofy musician’s take on things.
“If we’re there, where aren’t we?” — PBS looks at life online – Doug Rushkoff emailed me about this and it seemed like something the BB crowd would enjoy. I was hoping to use the tawdry photo of the girl in her underwear that graces the Frontline page [stay classy!] but opted instead of Patrick Stewart.
Copyright disputes in the 1840s – my friend Hugh thought I might like his Mom’s blog where she wrote about Dickens and some other terrific stuff.
Lessig on Copyright and Culture: “Things could have been different” – found this somewhere on Twitter. I suspect there’s some sort of Lessig history on BB because I was surprised that this got zero comments.
Funny kayak.com easter egg – David Weinberger’s twitter pointed me to this one. Surprised it was so popular.
A concise history of the [Judas] Priest logo – Modcult is one of my favorite blogs and it was all I could do to not just point to every single post they made.
Book Sharing Bankrupting Publishing Industry! – not sure where I originally found this, but anyone who is making amusing satire about ALA deserves more exposure.
Build privacy into national broadband policy says CDT – I read the CDT’s blog in my RSS reader and this sort of thing is 1) important 2) woefully under-reported
Pietenpol’s DIY airplane:”a common man’s airplane” – an email correspondent/library buddy of mine posted about this documentary on his blog. It had a DIY aesthetic that I enjoyed.
Valentine: serialized multilingual device-independent comics – a friend of mine is working with the artist/writer of this comic and pointed it out. I’m impressed with multi-lingual efforts and though tthey did a great job with this one. Plus hey, comix!
Puppets are fun – the last puppet theater in LA. I like the idea, was sorry I couldn’t find more catchy media for this post.
The longest-running open source project: US Federal Depository libraries – I have very good friends who are the authors of FreeGovInfo and they suggested this post.
Make your own mossarium! – the post I was born to make.
Librarians for Fair Access resists exclusive content contracts – interesting issue in the library world this week, maybe a little inside baseball for BB, but I thought people would understand it and appreciate it.
The unbearable awfulness of pine mouth – my friend Dawn mentioned this to me and I looked up some stuff about it.
Robots + Monsters reopens today, donations to aid Haitan relief – I have loved these illustrations since R&M first opened and it was timely that they had something to announce this week.
310 class photos from 80 years of PS 99 in Queens NY – one of my favorite posts but maybe not as punchy as it could be. Watching this neighborhood change via the school photos was, I thought, fascinating.
Illuminated 15th c. Manuscript – full of hidden demons – a friend made a post about this on MetaFilter and I repurposed it a little for BB.
Superman – The 1948 Serial – not sure how I found this, I think randomly by looking at free stuff in the Internet Archive.
music for/by the birds – a favorite recent post on MeFi by a friend who just became a dad! Seemed like a safe starting post.