"This is the Year that Was: 2009"; Doug Bolden's Dickens of a Blog: Sunday, 27 December 2009

Sunday, 27 December 2009

This is the Year that Was: 2009

I could wait a week to write this post, but overall there does not seem to be too much point. This year has already been so full of things that I could probably write a dozen posts about it and still have pages to go. As it is, I will have to be concise, pithy, witty, restrainedly eloquent, tersely articulate, and the pecunia of my verbiage must suffer a necessary paucity. I am off to a good start!

Speaking of being off to a good start, this year was off to one. I got accepted, and started, a Masters of Library and Information Science program at the University of Alabama! I was on my way to receiving ALA accredidation and being able to refer to myself as Librarian Doug. Still am on my way. About half way done. I am doing well in school, have amassed more A+'s than anything else (not that it matters on the 4.0 scale) and have learned many new tricks and hopefully have come across well to my professors and classmates. Either well or a smartass know-it-all busybody. Either way, well, there you are. That sums me up nicely.

I also started working as a part-time night reference librarian at UAH (aka UAHuntsville) this past February. Still there, still enjoying it. It does not take a whole lot of my time, but it gives me a lot of oppurtunities to interface with students, to see some theory and information in action. While there, my first full duty was getting our new Database portal underway. Not a hard project, per se, but time consuming and required me using a handful of disciplines. Basically, I made a parser that took the old version of the database page, chewed it up, and spit it out in blocks that I could take, a chunk at a time, and put into the new form. I am very proud of that baby. It possibly needs a tad bit of work (the kind of work that might drive a sane man insane, because it involves shoving a bit here to a bit there and adjusting, over and over again); but it works well and has been found useful by many. Yay, me.

This is actually the second job that I worked this year. The first was a brief (two or three weeks at the most) stint at Waldenbooks, working the Day by Day Calendar store. It was going to be a run up through the end of January, maybe February, to begin with, but the store got the ax in the middle of all of it and so I spent the last couple of weeks of the story (and the first couple weeks of the year) beating shelves up and packing things up. It was nice. Looking back at my blog, I found this entry which will work as my goodbye to my time at Waldenbooks:

Yesterday, went and said goodbye to Waldenbooks. That store has meant a varying amount to me over the years. For whatever reason, when I first came up here, it was one of the first bookstores that I visited. A friend of mine bought a skin mag, there. First time that I can remember someone buying a skin mag. Inspired me to do the same, a little bit later (I recommend it to all teenage boys, the shaking of the hands cannot be beat). My roommate (the ineffable Jimmy) seemed to be a B&N sort of guy. I can't remember, but I remember only going to Waldenbooks occasionally. Later, after graduation, when I realized that I didn't really care about philosophy or astrophysics all that much, at least not enough to look for them as career paths, I started working in the calendar stand...Working there this season was both awesome and the suck. Parts of it were great, getting to hang out with certain folk again, people watching on the slower days when a wide assortment of people would come in and never really be in a rush, and so forth. The weird panicked rush as Christmas loomed sucked, and there were some random "much ados" combined with the "long week" (where I worked something like six days in a row leading up to Christmas). However, I am glad I went back.

Outside of work and school, there hasn't been too much going on. Or well, I should say, there has been plenty going on but it is the kind of quiet, pleasant stuff that never makes for titilating escape from this humdrum world. I like humdrum, so I've liked it a lot. Take that, you thrill seekers! At any rate:.

I celebrated my five year anniversary which was nice.
I only made up to about ninety-five books on my weighted reading tally.
I hung out with friends, but probably less than any other year of the decade previous.
I reconnected with some old classmates through Facebook and Myspace. That was nice.
I started listening to a lot of BBC Radioplays.
My mom visited Hunstville for the first time since something like 2001.
I enjoy that. I reconnected with my childhood hero: Doctor Who.

Also, in the last month or so, I have done some serioius chopping and rebuilding on my website. It has been a lot of fun, but I am ready to get done with the technical side and look to some other things (like reading, again).

Well, that is a year summed up in just a handful of paragraphs. It feels weird, because it was such a good year, to leave it like this. But just about anything I could add would just be rambling at the mouth. I am looking forward to the new year and the new decade.

Si Vales, Valeo

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This is the Year that Was: 2009

Sunday, 27 December 2009