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20 FebWow, Been a Long Time

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Since I wrote. I seem to be writing less and less frequently. Not for lack of things going on in my life that need processing though for sure. Perhaps just not as public processing though…

I decided to do gyrokinesis teacher training, but it looks like it might have to be another year or another trainer. And there’s enough going on in my life that it has to take the back seat for now. It’ll be good. Next year I should have earned an additional week of vacation (I think), which would allow me to actually pull off a training if the timing was right. Thinking about yoga teacher training too. But then, I’m thinking of a lot of things. Winning the lottery, selling the house, getting gyrotonic tower (they’re beautiful), etc, etc. Maybe some day some of this will all happen. In the meantime, continuing to arch, curl, breathe, & the like.

I’m now not only the manager of the bibliographic control/cataloging team, but I’m also managing the data team as well, unexpectedly. I think it’ll be a bit of a crazy next couple months, but once we get into a flow, it should be alright. I think both my teams are strong enough that we’ll all do fine, and it’ll give me a chance to get a more holistic view of the metadata my teams deal with, which is always a good thing.

Category(s): Other>Miscellaneous>Other, Stuff
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28 SepGyro Teacher Training Update

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Yeah. I know. I’m not a teacher. But I got invited anyway to learn all the fancy new directions that gyrokinesis is taking while it was all still fresh in M’s head. And stuff that wouldn’t necessarily make it down to me at a student in class level. All about the psoas. Funny how things come full circle. When I was at Evergreen, I took an extracurricular modern dance class and the woman teaching the class was all about the ilio-psoas. That was the only paper she ever handed out in the two years I took that class, the one on the psoas.

Ok. It wasn’t *all* about the psoas, but that was a good part of it. I can’t wait to take a full class incorporating all of this. Due to the volume of material, we kind of skipped around and messed around a bit more in length with some of the new stuff. My psoas is telling me about it still. Probably because afterwards we went back to M’s and played on the leg extension unit & tower & the last thing I did was some stuff where I made them burn. Which they are still doing. OMG. I’ll be able to walk tomorrow, but that’s a part of my body I don’t think I’ve felt so distinctly… well… ever, really. Except I have, because it’s been aching with the funky back stuff lately.

I think I need the yoga anatomy book — I want to see the groupings of muscles and how they all fit together. So much connects in the pelvis. You know how they say that the human body would be structured entirely differently if we had wings? I mean, duh, right? But we just really wouldn’t look so much like angels if we had wings because of the musculature that would be required to hold everything in place (much less to fly). Stay with me for just a moment longer here… ok, so right, it’s kind of like that with how much is anchoring in the pelvis — sometimes I just get lost and can’t keep track of all the movement that’s happening that’s anchored in the pelvis and it kind of blows my mind. Maybe at however old it is that I am now I’m finally acceding, conceding to Balanchine’s exhortation, that I always fought, to do, not think. And much like I can hear Balanchine in my mind’s ear, I think I can hear Juliu in my mind’s ear saying feel, not think. These dudes — they’re like Yoda. “There is no try, there is only do or not do.” Oy. I have been breathing too much this evening!

So there. I am being contradictory. I want the anatomy book so I can break it all down and analyze the heck out of it and then integrate it all to the point where I just feel the holistic movement. It is hard to just let go and do/feel — moving in so many directions at once!

In yoga, one of the lines of thought is that the mat is like a portable laboratory. A portable sanctuary. A portable space of peace. It’s always my laboratory. My body is a laboratory like *whoa*. There’s always something going on to pay attention to that is interesting . Stretch here, contract there, arch here, curl there, bend here, straighten there, twist and twist and twist and twist…

I’m going to have to take a hot water bottle to bed with me for my belly tonight! And tomorrow M1 has an orthodontist appt bright and painfully early so time to start wrapping this evening’s written processing up! I’m not sleepy. Want to move more and play with some of this new stuff! Carting children around bright and early, PLAY!, carting children around, PLAY! Sigh. Being a grown up is annoying sometimes.

Category(s): Movement
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26 SepPaying Attention

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Ah, this!

…yoga isn’t about doing 3 hours of asana a day or remaining perfectly calm when you get lost. It’s about paying attention, and having awareness, which gives you choices about how you want to live your life: in a way that is constructive, or a way that is destructive.

Without yoga at work, I really think I’d be much worse off. Or rather, the situation would be the same, but the lack of balance would cause the context to be much worse. I joke a lot about needing to go breathe now, but truth is, I desperately need to carve that space out in both my personal life and my work life. It gives me just a little it of time to back off, step back, center myself, reorient, and if not approach from a better perspective, at least I’ve had a chance to do the other stuff…

Gyrokinesis does the same thing for me. The movement modality shares some similarities and has its differences as well, but my approach tends to be the same.

Today in class, I went into it with goal of practicing with intention and thinking about where each movement was originating from, and where it should be originating from. I would have moved slower and gone deeper, but it’s nice to not be too far off everyone else. I can go slow and deep at home. Or when it turns up in class. :)

Weirdly doing ‘halo pulses,’ my hip cramped up. Here I am thinking about movement originating from my rib cage, and my hip went all grar! on me! Silly hip. So many muscles connecting in the pelvic structure, it’s kind of crazy, really.

Now I think I’m going to knit for a bit. I’m slowly, maybe, making progress on the sweater. Or: At least I’m on to the sleeves…

Category(s): Movement
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25 SepThinkin’

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Been thinking about yoga and gyrokinesis a lot. They ground me and keep me sane and breathing through my days. The only thing that saves me from running away and getting certified in both (besides cost) is that building clientèle is a slow and painful process. I’m not, and I never have been, very good at doing things half way. For the last six to nine months I’ve been telling myself that I was going to take the year between starting gyrokinesis and yoga to just “be” with them. Not a fan of the ‘be here now’ thing, but I’m really not good at not taking things out to their furthest logical progression so am relenting and attempting to ‘be in the moment’.

It’s hard.

And increasingly I find that the people I practice with don’t do full time either, they do something here, something there. Lots of people do it and keep “the day job” or get the training just for themselves, knowing it will never ‘pay back’ except in personal satisfaction and depth of practice. Knowing this makes it… well, it makes it a little harder not to push forward and just do it.

I think back on all the ballet I did and the most valuable part of the practice besides the never ending classes, was the teacher’s assisting that I did, and teaching when the teacher was out. I learned what to look for, what needed correcting, what simply needed learning, and what had physical limitations that required care to work with. I admit to watching people in the various classes I take all week. Not with a judgmental eye, just out of curiosity — what does this pose/movement look like on them? Where are their limitations? Where is the impetus of their movement coming from? Where is their alignment giving away a physical limitation? Where is their alignment giving away proprioception limitations? And then frequently I’ll close my eyes and go back to what I’m doing and how it all feels in my own body, what my limitations are, where the impetus of my movement is initiating, where my alignment is physical v. proprioception… I watch my teachers with the same eye. We are all blessed and cursed with different abilities, different strengths, different weaknesses. I am slowly learning not to mirror my instructors movements but to move to the full extent of my ability to express the movement. Forever I thought a teacher had to have a perfect expression to teach a movement, but I look back on Ms. Jan and realize by the time I was taking classes from her, she must have been in her late sixties, if not into her seventies. She would mark through the movements she wanted us to perform, and if she really wanted an example, she’d have either an assistant teacher or a student show the exercise. She would sit in the middle of the mirror and watch us, or walk around and make subtle corrections, drop a hip here, lengthen a leg there… adjust a gesture over there. So it helps to have someone who can do a full expression, but it is not necessary. As one of my teachers says at the end of class, “Thank the real teacher, yourself…”

For the first time in a long time, I tweaked my back hard over the Labor Day weekend. Tears. Ice & heat packs. Hot baths & showers. Standing, sitting, lying, whimpering… Worked from home one day, and was ginger when I went back the following day. It’s been increasingly better, but now and again since then, it’s been achy. Today was one of those days. My alignment was off, I needed to move more slowly through things, and think through the alignment very carefully. There are a lot of muscles, ligaments, bones, and various viscera and being aware of all of it can sometimes be hard to keep track of! I do think if I’m still getting the achy stuff going on I’m going to check in with a doctor then likely a physical therapist who can tell me what’s going on & just make sure there isn’t something bad, but first my insurance stuff has to get straightened out. In the meantime, paying attention and moving with a lot of care in alignment!

Weirdly, my least favorite pose right now is child’s pose. It is very hard for me. My calves are big, and push my sit bones away from my heels when I lean forward, unless I am very actively using my arms to push myself back into position. It’s tiring. Even when I push my knees to the side, to let my belly nestle down, it’s still a very active and not particularly restful pose for me. I’d rather do down dog as a rest or repose, it’s that active for me. If I’m thinking about it. I can relax, but I lose “the correct alignment” and my butt goes up as my knees attempt to stay connected to my femurs. Something has to give somewhere for relaxation… always such a relief when the instructor comes around and puts pressure on my sacrum and pushes down gently. The same spot that tweaks out on me…

Paul is home from metal kommand and the kittens are hungry so this is as good a point to pause as any…

Category(s): Movement
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31 JulRandom Processing

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Last weekend was great. Did the gyrokinesis teacher training/update (even though I’m neither a teacher, nor apprentice). So much fun. So much lucky for me, it’s terribly decadent to be a student, and to be able to wallow in one’s own body without having to worry about what’s going on with others’ bodies.

Came home to the week from hell. I hate that this week overshadows what was truly a desperately needed few days of vacation. Bitch slapped by the universe. Living in my body means I tend to not frame what I need to say for other people’s parsing requirements as well, so I didn’t frame something in a way that it needed to be framed and kinda blew some stuff up that I didn’t mean to blow up. Oops. We worked through it all and came to an understanding so all’s well that ends well, but… my bad, gotta be careful.

Also, our beloved TimTheCat died. We came home Monday & they’re usually annoyed at having to go back on the regular food, but… it was clear by Tuesday that there was something profoundly, dreadfully wrong. He’s a feral rescue dude, we got him at about 4 months, and while he’d been fostered and socialized before we got him, he never got over his instinctual people=big predator instincts except for M1, who was His Person. If I came within five feet of him and made eye contact, you could see the gears turning in his head calculating what he was going to do. He’d freeze, look up, and you could practically hear him thinking ‘she feeds me, pets me, loves me… but she’s a person and she might be bad news *this* time… Better safe than sorry, I’m bailing.’ And off he’d go. In the last two or so years as long as I didn’t make eye contact, I could walk past him within about two feet, but eye contact? Outta here. Except for M1. She could walk up to him, pick him up, carry him around, make him do silly dances. If we’d had doll clothes that would have fit him (he was 15 lbs of muscle-y feline), he’d have let her dress him up. That Tuesday night I picked him up & carried him around for a bit was a horrid, bad sign. So at 9:30pm, I loaded him into the carrier (a first — we’ve never been able to get him into it before), and went to the vet ER.

Diagnosis there came back not great. Diabetes & DKA with ultrasound and additional blood work to follow next day. Wednesday brought pancreatitis, fatty liver disease, and some degree of kidney involvement. Thursday morning brought fluid in the lungs, increasing kidney issues, & the possibility of cardiac arrest. Any one of the things TimTheCat was fighting would have been an uphill battle. I asked the obvious question, and got back what was rightly the obvious answer. The final consultation the vet had with the critical care vet said that we were making definitely the right decision.

We broke the news to the girls. M1 got it, it took a while and a little further explanation later on for M2. Both of them cried hard for about 45 minutes when they grasped the situation unfolding. M1 was asked if she wanted to be there at the end. She said, ” I can’t stand it! I don’t think I can bear it!” amidst sobs. I stayed home with the girls, P went & took with him something that smelled of M1 & Tim’s favorite catnip toy filled with fresh catnip. He said it was very peaceful and the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. When the reality finally dawned on M2, I was surprised (and yet not) by her questions — she wanted to know how the vet did it, if it hurt, why he couldn’t get better, if we were going to have any more kitties, all asked through sobs.

TimTheCat “comes home” in a little cremation jar sometime in the next week. But it won’t be the same. There’s a place on the mantle for him by Siobhan, he has friends waiting to show him the great people-free catnip patch in the sky.

For now we’re down to the cranky old lady ‘Spew. As soon as the vet is back from vaca, I will make an appointment for her to go in and scream at him about the indignity of a physical… Eventually maybe we’ll have a space in our heart for a couple of new kitties, but the holes are too raw yet, and the ghosts too vivid to go there just yet. RIP, big Tim dude.

Category(s): Critters, The World At Large
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16 JulReflections on Bicycling

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Love love love it! But it took me 1h 20m to get into work this morning. Weirdly, it only took me 1h 5m to get home. Then again, I started out without quite a full battery & it hit the half way power point only 3 miles in on the way in so I rolled in about 75% on my own power. And while I didn’t particularly make much better time mph-wise on the way home (9 on the way in, 10 on the way home), I did take it easy with a full battery, but mostly used for the last hills between the trail and home.

So my final thoughts are these.

  • It’s absolutely decadent.
  • It was a lovely ride in and a lovely ride home.
  • If I do it somewhat regularly, I will likely get faster.
  • Realistically, this is something that will have to be a treat — it leaves too much of the dropping off & picking up of kids to P. At least until I get faster.

There might be more to say, but I’m watching The Pink Panther with the girls & am distracted by Inspector Clouseau.

Category(s): Fun, Movement
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15 JulBicycles and Stuff

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Tomorrow, barring extenuating circumstances, I’m going to be a tourist to the world of bicycle commuting to work. It’s about a 13 mile ride one direction, which is, by most standards not undoable, but a little further than the folks who do it usually consider it an option. It’s an experiment. It’s also something I’ve wanted to do since I got this job. And this bike. I love my bike. It’s an electric-assist, so I have the option of having some help, but it won’t make me go super fast, just help me get to where I’m going without arriving there totally exhausted & fried. Well, except that last time I took it out for an 11 mile ride I came home and took a two hour nap. Not so much a luxury I’ll have if I bicycle into work! But maybe when I get home…

I’m simultaneously looking forward to it and somewhat apprehensive about the whole thing. The distance is one thing. Eight miles? I could do eight miles and not really be phased. In my mind’s eye, I can picture eight miles from here & it’s a ways, but it’s not too bad. I think after about eight miles, I get into more urban and more bicyclists, and the roads I’ll be crossing are more major crossings, and more people, etc, etc. After eight miles, I don’t really have a sense of the trail I’ll be bicycling on either. Not that I haven’t done it before, I just haven’t done it for something like 16 years and I’m kinda foggy about how it all goes. I think I can just keep following the yellow brick road (and all the regular bike commuters), but still. I like to be able to visualize this stuff.

I’m also not a super confident rider. I’m ok. I’m not particularly fast, even with an electric-assist, I average out at about 10mph unless I’m going downhill. You know, gravity helps everyone out there. Being slow like that means the silly lycra/spandex people zoom past me. As does pretty much everyone else, but… whatever. I like bicycling. I just don’t like going up hills & I have help with that now. Also, my bike is real purdy.

I think my best bet tomorrow is just to let myself be a tourist. That’s more fun anyway. That means instead of being all boring and serious and focused, I get to look around and stop and smell the wild roses and take pictures of the lakes and generally dawdle & annoy the boring, serious, focused spandex people. And if I’m late to work, eh, I’m late to work. It’s an experiment, after all…

In other news, got the article draft out to the people who need to contribute to it. A little (a lot) later than I wanted it going out, but… it’s out & hopefully they get it back to me in time to revise & send on to the editor so we can go through the whole process again. Also did a walk through of a webinar presentation. I’m the host… which of course brings to mind, “I am your host und sagen wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret!” I fear the presentation will be nowhere near so interesting as Cabaret, certainly not choreographed as well (I mean, really — who can compete with Bob Fosse?), but it’ll be interesting.

And if I’m going to be coherent enough to be peddling a bicycle, electric-assist or no, I need to be going to bed in the very near future. So that’s that for now.

Category(s): Movement, Other>Miscellaneous>Other, Professional Development, Stuff
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06 JunBread & Roses

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As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

–James Oppenheim

Category(s): Stuff, The World At Large
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13 MarTime: Cost: Quality

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Mass production of everything inspires fear and worry (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) of quality. Until the middle ages spinning was done on a spindle. People said the quality of wool spun on the wheels was lower, though it increased production. Later the more industrialized machines increased volume further. Again people said quality decreased as quantity increased.

That’s something else I’ve been thinking about lately. The volume of information both accessible “online” & unaccessible except through gatekept systems (in libraries or in books/print materials only) has skyrocketed. Part of my job is to help libraries scale up to the volume of information available to them electronically. We don’t deal with nearly as many titles as OCLC, but we track around 4000 databases (and have more that we don’t track), and have around 1.3M journals & …3M? ebooks? Everyone knows that LoC doesn’t have all titles cataloged. And OCLC considers us a competitor so though we’ve tried to work something out with them, we’ve thus far not come to a workable agreement (and OCLC doesn’t have everything cataloged either, not by a long shot!). I have two catalogers and there’s no way we have time to catalog all of it, much less the $$$ to pay outsourced catalogers to catalog all of the remaining & ever increasing content we have libraries that are subscribed to. We have a autocreate program that uses publisher info to make brief MARC records based on publisher info to cover the things for which we don’t have full records. At least there’s *some* record that way otherwise no record means no way to search for it for our client libraries. We also buy Bowker records (created from publisher info sent to Bowker as part of establishing the ISBN), which also informs LoC’s CIP program, and we’re increasingly reaching out directly to publishers for MARC records for their content with decidedly mixed results.

The long and the short of it is — no record means no access. A “poor” record may not provide all the various access points that one might wish to exploit, but it catches the major ones of title, author, publisher, and a few other data points (barring diacritics issues in various programs along the way which is something we definitely struggle with).

Libraries are backlogged in cataloging some several years behind. There’s just a lot of material out there requiring metadata and no one in the library world, libraries, vendors, or anyone else, can keep up with it. No one in the internet world can keep up with it either, but the expectation is much lower there. Library, catalog thyself! If we use “lower quality records” to provide some degree of access while we painfully slowly bring up quality (millions of records with two catalogers is not something one does over night), at least we are trying to provide some access for everything instead of waiting for everything to be fully & perfectly cataloged… Quality vs. Quantity, you can have two of anything: Time – Cost – Quality… We’re trying so hard to provide as much quality as we can, but… damn, the quantity & pace at which that quantity is growing is Freaking Insane.

Category(s): Library Stuff
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13 MarGatekeepers

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while and it’s been gnawing at me. The concept of libraries/librarians of gatekeepers of information. Libraries and the internet battling it out for who is going to be the great bastion of knowledge… Initially I thought these were two kind of separate issues but they keep getting intertwined in my brain.

Ok, first the gatekeepers issue, or… we’ll start there because that’s what struck me first. I can’t remember what I was reading or overhearing or … what. I think the context was how it was great that libraries/librarians are the gatekeepers of information and knowledge and how librarians vet and serve out The Best™ Information, that pep talk we give ourselves about the service we provide to our various communities.

I think I might be in a minority in that I mostly use my library card for searching for articles that come up in Google behind paywalls. Now and again I’ll get a book, but like an increasing amount of people, one of my earlier stops in the information gathering process is to check out what’s online in the great unwashed, dirty masses of Google. Maybe I’ll ask Google to take me to the Wikipedia article – it’s still somewhat unwashed, but it usually gives some pointers to some relevant and somewhat better sources. Or maybe I’ll just see if something fits in the top ten to twenty results (unless I’m really obsessed – I’ve been known to go hundreds of pages deep poking at what’s out there, less so more recently though).

The majority of the time, for my personal purposes, I find what I’m looking for without busting out the library card. For professional purposes, I… well, I follow largely the same pattern. Don’t need a library card because I’m in the library/publishing industry & I have access to certainly not all of what I need, but a fair amount of it & if the price is right, I can buy what I need, if I don’t have access through work or a library or Google. But most of the time I can find what I need online.

I get it when people say “I can find what I need online – why do we need libraries?” I can find what I need online to my authority qualified standards. I may disagree with someone else’s assessment of what’s an authority but that’s going to be true still if I’m standing behind a ref desk helping them try to find something too. Librarians may be gatekeepers of information, but with the internet seems to be a low barrier to information & an easy fence to jump. Might not get into the ivory tower, but there’s plenty of goodies in the king’s woods.

What I worry about with the gatekeeper metaphor is that “normal people” will start seeing the ‘gatekeeper’ mentality is less one of Information For The People! than truly a gatekeeper mentality of Information For Our People. There’s a tension between The library is free! Information wants to be free! and the reality of the cost of that information and who, in reality, pays for and gets to use that information. Libraries have their audiences. Public libraries are funded and supported (or not as the case sadly seems to be increasing) by their local tax base and it’s hard, if possible at all, to get a library card for the next town over. Libraries do provide interlibrary loan, for which I’m thankful. I’ve gotten good books that way (and interlibrary doc delivery supports my brother, for which I’m also thankful, he does some awesome stuff).

I think libraries are really important. I have to believe that libraries have a place in our future. Maybe not because “that’s where we keep our books, our trusty knowledge repositories” but we do keep our knowledge repositories there with professionals who can help us find and retrieve them when we can’t find them. If we know they can do that. Yeah, and here is where my thinking breaks down because nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

I do wonder about the assumption that “everything is online” and think it would be really awesome if libraries could get localized matches in search engines. Somehow. I know. And then there’s WorldCat. Still never seen that show up in an internet search result despite that being kind of the point of it. Weirdly, I do see LibraryThing fairly frequently. What is LibraryThing doing right that WorldCat isn’t?

I don’t know – it’s rambling; there are holes in my logic big enough to drive a parade of MACK trucks through. But I think there’s something there at the core, that might be true, and that little piece of truth nags at me. And there was a small bit of illumination that just came to me & left again. It’s been a long week of thinking about things.

Category(s): Library Stuff
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