The LITA Forum wrapped up on Sunday with a virtual presentation from Sarah Houghton, the librarian in black, titled Library Future: Star Trek or Starbucks? Sarah was really good when she stuck to the Starbucks analogy – what could libraries do better if we did it more like Starbucks? – but towards the end, she started kitchen-sinking it (as Mark said); kind of throwing everything in – make hard choices, stick to our core values, benefit the many rather than the few ….
We had Starbucks cookies for lunch again, how apropos, in the Starbucks right outside the Nationwide Arena, where the Blue Jackets (hockey team) plays – where they were playing the Grateful Dead when we walked in. Twice, once Touch of Grey – the only Dead song that got much radio play, and the other time Scarlet Begonias – much more obscure. And funny another connection – the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics is by David Dodd, who was city librarian at the San Rafael PL, where Sarah is the now director – she must’ve replaced him. Yup.
Then we cabbed (because of Mark’s bum knee) over to the downtown Columbus Metropolitan Library, for Innovation in Libraries, a post-conference sponsored by OCLC. Got to see the opening keynote, Phil Simon, and a bunch of short presentations – all good stuff, although I was cynical about the project to catalog TED talks – with MARC.
Retired to the brew pub with a bunch of librarians and ended up having dinner at Ted Turner’s burger joint. Pretty good – I scraped the raw meat out of the center of my “medium to the well side” burger with my fork, and liked the skin-on fries, and cheap ($4.25) Rolling Rock. Got back to the hotel in time to watch Boardwalk Empire and Treme.
Throughout the conference I kept having that feeling that there was something on my glasses – something blurry. At the brew pub on Sunday, I started seeing flashes in my peripheral vision, and then on Monday, when I took my first turn to drive, somewhere in Indiana, I had lots of floaters in my right eye. It was like my own little oil and water show. Naturally I read up on MedLine, and the floaters and flashes are symptoms of a detached retina, which could be cause by head trauma, old age, near-sighedness, and of course tumours.
I decided to call the eye doc Tuesday morning, and when I said I couldn’t make the first appointment time they offered me, at 10:30, the receptionist said, “these are not symptoms that you should ignore” eeech. So I went in at 1:00 and turns out I have this –
Vitreous detachment. The doc said my retina is beautiful, but the goo inside of my eye is collapsing and coming off the back. Normal, caused by old age & near sightedness, nothing to be done about it. She said to avoid contact sports. She made the diagnosis by dilating my eyes; she even added extra drops. So Tuesday, my first day back at work, I was there from like 8:30 to noon, and then off to the eye doc, came home all blurry at 2:00, did as much work as I could until 4:00. Then I had a haircut, co-op grocery shopping, and yoga class – all while blurry. At yoga I take off my glasses, so I didn’t notice so much. Besides groceries, I went and splurged at the cake store – $20 on rubber scrapers and fancy muffin papers. When I got home from yoga, Al was here to watch Sons of Anarchy, and trying to make up his mind about jobs. I ate the sweet potato that I’d left in the oven for myself for dinner, in between talking to him, and trying to write up a discussion summary for my online course. At least the blurries were pretty much worn off by then. I still flet like I deserved ice cream, so I had some with chopped up crystallized ginger – left the ice cream out to soften while I was writing the summary, and it took so long I kept thinking I should put the ice cream back – I scooped out of the middle, instead of the edges.
Today, even though it’s only Wednesday, feels like Thursday already.
