December 1st, 2003

Ok, so I survived. It’s December 1 and NaNoWriMo is over and I am done with it. I did not do so well this year. I did not make it to 50,000 words. I am not a winner. However,
I do have 40,399 words that I would not have written had I not taken up the challenge, so despite being a loser, all is not lost. This book is a lot harder than the last one. Even had I gotten to the fabled 50,000 I’d only be about halfway through it. I can’t really promise that when I get to the end anyone not me will be interested in it. Since my forward momentum with this project was not as intense as my momentum last year, maybe it won’t come to a grinding halt now that the thing is over. One can hope, we’ll see. Better luck next year.

The good news is that my dear friend Legomancer also participated this year and he DID cross the finish line, make it to 50,000 and then on to the end of his project. He’s now in re-write land, and I’m thrilled that after years of not writing very much he’s back on track with the writing bug because he’s really super talented. You don’t have to take my word for it, though, you can check out some of his older stuff yourself.

Now that the franticness of November is over and done with, though, I will have to get back to all the things I neglected during the month I was trying to write but not able to make myself do so. I’m behind on a lot of things, this blog being only one of them. In fact, I was told in
no uncertain terms by my sister-in-law that I was not to write in my blog until I had updated Sophia’s
Webpage which is sadly out of date. I don’t think anything has been done on it since we got back from Europe in August, which is an eternity when you’re only two years old, as she is. So, you can clearly see how well I listen to direction as I’m over here type-type-typing away on my
blog. However, she should be pleased anyways, because the next two entries I compose are going to be about Sophia and her impending sibling, so there’ll be news on that front, even if it’s not on Sophia’s page proper. I have lots and lots of things to tell you about Sophia.

Work has been crazy. I have had an everchanging schedule with way more reference desk and lobby registration desk hours than I really expected to have. The schedules are kind of out of whack, the division director is making them on a day-to-day basis and almost never before to 2:30 the day before. It’s impossible to plan anything at all. I might be working 15 minutes at a desk giving someone a break or might be scheduled 8 hours with no lunch somewhere. Whatever software he’s using to design the schedule he needs something new, because he’s constantly scheduling people in two places at once, neglecting to give people lunch hours and other oddball arrangements. Presumably this is short term, but we’ll see. At any rate, I’ll be really happy when I get to work at my desk because I have three pretty exciting projects to work on. First of all there’s a revisit to the Sovereignty
Commission database. Then, there’s the Eudora Welty stuff. She died, you see, and her house somehow became part of the Archives now (I’m not sure on the fine print or how all that works). It’s a very cool house filled to the brim with books and stuff. Inventory is proceeding, both of the books and the furniture and her letters. There’s thousands of letters, see, from all kinds of authors like Willa
Cather and all kinds of publications like the New Yorker and all kinds of famous and important Jacksonites and all kinds of fans. So there’s inventory going on that I will have to magic into a database of some kind for when this stuff is made publicly available. That’s going to be exciting work. I have to say that I’ve liked the stuff I’ve read that was written by Eudora Welty (all by obligation, in some class or another). I found that short story “The Misfit” to be especially striking for some reason. However, I could hardly be called a fan, and I would not name her among my favorite authors and I’m not the sort of person to swoon at the mere mention of her name (as many around this area are). Still, her house is indescribably cool. She was a true bibliophile and the place has, quite literally, bookshelves in every room including the hallways. There’s loads and loads of books and when we were there last I asked if she had annotated any of them. This is something I’m always curious about, as it seems to me to reveal something very integral to the nature of a person (though I can’t elucidate exactly what). There are those people who love books and write in them extensively. Then there are those people who love books and would never dream of so much as writing their name in it to signify it was theirs. At any rate, the woman (Welty’s niece) pulled a book off the shelf to show me how it had been annotated. At the back, in the last few blank pages, Eudora’d made comments about various scenes and characters, indicating the page numbers she was referring to just before each comment. Her handwriting was sure, but it was a penciled annotation. She wrote in those books, true, but very carefully and respectfully. I found this more interesting and human than I can describe. Lastly, we have
an outgoing governor. Tomorrow I will go and talk to their IT guy, to try and assess whether they have any electronic records that need to be transferred to us along with all the paper records we will be taking when they leave office in a few weeks. I imagine there will be some, because I think this governor is less computer phobic and has a more computer intensive staff than the prior one. At the very least, they’ve already mentioned that all their promo pictures were taken digitally, so there’ll be those. So exciting and interesting stuff, if I can ever get a chance to actually do any of it.

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