Let the awesomeness continue!

The first three days of the week have turned out to be pretty cool. I spent much of last week debating a final project topic. Everyone else in class seemed well on their way to finding their topics, gathering research, doing primary source research via a survey in one case, and just generally moseying on down the task list. I, however, was sort of stuck in limbo. Nothing on the list of topics the teacher provided was interesting at all, and when I'd suggest a topic it was either nixed or completely taken the wrong way and I would have to stop her and say, 'No, that's not what I meant.' Anyway, it was kind of frustrating and a big ole headache because I figured I'd have to just pick something dull and boring and I don't do well with those sorts of topics for big papers. I wasn't that worried about it, but it was just kind of in the back of my mind. Especially since fellow classmates had been discussing their topics for weeks. Enter last Friday morning. I am woken up by the cats and a thought comes to me that I should design a library space for the museum I work for. Boom! Lightning! Thunder! Light bulb! The research paper was due Sunday at noon, and you needed a certain number of sources, etc. Then you had to create a presentation to go along with the paper and I was due to present that on Monday.

I will share a tidbit with you now: I don't religiously check my horoscope, but when dawdling around, sometimes I do check it. I think they're fun. And sometimes, it blows me away! I checked it on Friday and this gem was what it said (get ready to *gasp*):

"There will be a moment today when you suddenly realize that while you've been taking things at a nice, leisurely pace, everyone else has zoomed ahead of you! Do not panic -- you are doing things in a way that is right for you, and that is the most important thing. Your steady pace will pay off in the end. Be careful of comparing yourself with other people right now. They have different forces working in their lives, and you have your own strengths to focus on."

How 'bout that for cosmic influences? So, all weekend was spent on this paper and presentation. I stopped to eat, and sleep, but mostly it was the focus of my thoughts and actions all weekend long. So, Monday comes and my presentation ROCKED. I did really well, the presentation technology worked out, people were interested, the teacher was impressed. Teacher even said that my paper was really good. Insert mental image of me beaming.

So, that was Monday. Also, this week has been good in that I've been getting lots of work done at both jobs. I passed the 6,000 items cataloged mark at the museum and the state historical society grant work that I'm doing is at the point of finally uploading it to the website. And I had thought that the website and content viewer was going to have to be seen in a webspace that I loathe because it's unsearchable, the viewer is terrible, we don't have control of the features or IT services, etc. But, I came to find out that this was not true. To my utter happiness and amazement, my boss told me that we would be hosting the civil war manuscripts on our OWN site with our OWN content viewer! And, after uploading two collections already this week and seeing them on the web: they look wonderful. The website and collection documents look fantastic; they're easily zoomable; you can see the transcript of the letter in the same screen as the images. Sigh. It's just fantastic. That has been probably the biggest boon of the week for me. I've been working with these letters for six months now through scanning and metadata and reading them and I get kind of connected to the people's lives a little bit. I actually care about these people's lives in this short time span that I'm working with, and I really wanted their words and letters to be shown in the best way possible. And I think they will be! My bosses were pretty psyched about my metadata organization too, so they're having me re-do some of the work done previously on the first phase of this project. I've had some computer problems, but nothing too terrible except that I have so many applications open at a time that I fully expect a message like this from my computer:But mostly, it's just been a great week school and work-wise!