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- kate (
kayselkiemoon) wrote,
I wandered lonely as a cloud
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
-- William Wordsworth, "Daffodils", 1804
I am looking forward to the coming of spring. I love check for changes each day in the garden, and watch bulbs send green shoots poking up amid the mulch and old leaves. Sadly we have some weeks yet before daffodil time, but at least February is almost over. Thank goodness February is so short, because I always want to go straight from January to March. This year especially, I'd like to leave snow season firmly behind. The one blessing is that it turns out the class I signed up for this spring is a 'blended class,' which means that the class meets 14 times, and every odd class meets online instead of in South Hadley. So instead of having to drive up every Saturday, I just need to do so every other! ^_^
I have had four weeks of class so far, in this my first semester at Simmons GSLIS (graduate school of library & information science). The class I'm taking is a core class, "Principles of Management", and going into it I wasn't sure how interesting it would be. But I like the professor, and I'm learning all kinds of interesting things, as well as new insights into current and previous experiences. As my professor said, even if you have no desire to be in a position of authority over someone else, the knowledge and skills you learn by studying the principles of management are useful in whatever situation you're in (both jobwise & lifewise). This helps explain why so many of the books in the Business: Management & Leadership section of the bookstore resemble self-help books! Right now we're looking at how it's important for organizations to have communication plans, and for managers to understand the paths by which communication flows through an organization. yummy. *g*
I have been rather reclusive these past months (months? heh, years?), in terms of remembering to reach out to friends and socialize. Last April I went down and visited Lisa in D.C., and at the end of August I went out to Michigan to visit Amber. That was my first time in Ann Arbor and a lovely city it is. They've a spectacular used bookstore, The Dawn Treader Book Shop. It's funny how I always come back from a trip with more books than I brought with me. ^_^ But a happy Kate cannot subsist on books alone. I need sociability to whack me over the head. *sheesh*
My brother has moved into an apartment he shares with his best friend Jeff, but he comes back to visit several nights a week, to join us for dinner & watch things with us. Right now we're watching an episode of a show he'd been recommended, Father Ted. Very silly. But funny!
I will close by pointing out a neat article from 2/20's New York Times, "Book Lovers Fear Dim Future For Notes in the Margin". It talks about "marginalia, [the practice of] writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world." I think that part of the trouble modern-day readers/book experiencers face, regarding how much value to place on the practice of marginalia, lies in the fact that the value of marginalia frequently comes into being only after a certain amount of time has passed. While it may be amusing to learn that last semester's owner of Paradise Lost thought the Virgil sucked, or to ponder the significance of only one word's being highlighted in the whole of book ten, the value is fleeting. But when looking at the doodles a reader drew into a book over 150 years ago, the degree of time past elevates our interest. How will this practice translate over to electronic texts? I don't know, but it makes for interesting thinking.