My spring break is supposed to be next week. Originally, in early January, we had planned to go to Costa Rica…
… and then we got a puppy, who needed shots, and socialization, and puppy kindergarten, before we could even think about boarding her. So those plans went by the wayside.
Lucy (now almost 5 months old) is very cute, and smart, and delightful.
They’re proving to be good for training “drop it,” in addition to being wildly amusing, and we can (carefully!) kick the ball around outside. Perfect!
(We like Chuckit! ultra balls a lot, too — for all the same reasons —
though they’re not great for playing “soccer.”)
In light of postponed travel plans (which became apparent almost immediately after Lucy arrived), I was going to use the time to catch up on some of the “suggested” reading for my information retrieval class, and watch some video reviews for previous weeks to reinforce some of the more complicated concepts.
And learn some stuff about HTML5 semantic tags. (I was not kidding about learning Javascript, but I’m going through the front end to do it.) Y’all, it looks like we’ve come full circle from the bad old days of HTML3 when we were appropriating table tags to make web pages legible. These newfangled (kidding, they’ve been standard for ~10 years) tags have no bearing on appearance; they exist to delineate different parts of a document outline: header, footer, article, section, aside. (My graphic designer self is champing at the bit to get back to CSS already… I understand and appreciate the utility of semantic tags, but the semantic tags alone… in terms of appearance, which is not the purpose or goal of these tags… it’s like “1994 called, they want their home pages back.”)
Oh, and getting a better handle on Git and GitHub. (Confession: I haven’t used the command line in a L-O-N-G time.)
Anyway. You get the idea. I had plans! My plans had plans!
But no. It looks like, in addition to those things, I’ll be doing a bunch of reading to prepare (with my group) to put together a very small controlled vocabulary… a completely new concept to me/us. Right now it seems extremely complex — a “wicked problem,” if you will, in the sense that it does not have a single solution, because the decisions we make will depend on the needs of a specific user base. (A controlled vocabulary for an information specialist working in web design will be a bit different from a one working as a youth services librarian — there will be some overlap, for sure, but their information needs are likely going to be a bit different.) We’re meeting about it on Friday morning, preparing so we can hit the ground running after “spring break.”
In the meantime, I’ll be getting a haircut on Friday (right after the meeting), doing a Women in Stem open house at the OLC on Saturday morning (might use the time, while chatting with folks, to make some new jesses for the birds), finishing up our last puppy kindergarten class (!) on Saturday afternoon, and hopefully (fingers crossed), attending a webinar on creativity on Friday the 31st.
What’s that saying, life is what happens… ?
Carmen Yount 