entering the 21st century

I actually figured out hot to send picture files from my phone to my e-mail.

I know. I'm a genius.

While I was working in the choral library in at my school, I realized that the only way to show what all I was doing was to photo-document. But, like many of my projects, it didn't dawn on me until about a week in.

When I first walked into the 10x20 room, you couldn't see the floor or the tops of the 14 file cabinets or the tops of two tables. The floor was covered with scattered choir uniforms, tons of octavos (that choir music that looks like a little booklet but without staples so the inside pages easily fall out) and random photo copied hand-outs, worksheets, tests, calendars, text books and student papers. The tables were covered with electric keyboards, all their accessories, random parts of the risers (the steps that choirs stand on) and boxes full of more unsorted music. And the file cabinets and uniform cabinets were blocked in by the 12 large, black aluminum guard rails that go on the back of the risers.

The room looked like the bedroom of a hoarder. The kind of room where you'd open the door, throw things in, then shut the door and forget about it.

First off, it really is a just a storage room. In fact, the choir room and band room are really an old gym that's been wonderfully renovated. The band instrument storage room is the old boys' locker room. The orchestra storage is the old boys' shower room. And my storage room is the old girl's shower room. And as wonderful a job as they did in the actual room, the only complaint I have is that they didn't level out the floor in the shower room. It still slopes toward the center of the room where I imagine there is still a drain under the tile floor. So none of the cabinets sit upright and you feel drunk walking around the room because you're constantly adjusting your center of balance.

But I renamed it the Choral Library (and made a little sign saying thusly) so folks would hopefully not treat it like the room at aunt Millie's that you don't go into.

A couple directors ago sorta filed. She at least threw them into evelopes and then into a WWII era file cabinet that required two people to open. (seriously, it was stamped "U.S. Army Air Force" on the back. It's been 50+ years since the Air Force separated from the Army.)

They weren't in any kind of order and none of them had been stamped with the school stamp or their file number so they all had to come out.

Next they go into piles to be stamped and have a lavender file card with a label indicating the pieces name, composer and arranger made.

This library is on a number system. As new pieces are added to the library, they are not sorted alphabetically. If it were alphabetical, you would have to shift drawers to make room every time you added a new piece. Numerically, you just put it at the back of the last file cabinet and assign the next number.

BUT this only works if you have an updated catalogue that allows you to sort the library by title and composer so you can find what you're looking for.

The file numbers go to 976. The catologue stopped at 781. And the director had only left me a hard copy and no disc.

Thank my lucky stars I ran into the director who made the original catalogue, and was apparently the last one to actually keep the library organized, over the summer. She had a disc copy that stopped at... you guessed it: 781. Which meant I had nearly 200 titles, with an average of 50 copies per title, (1000 pieces of music) to sort, file stamp, school stamp, index, record and file.

THEN I realized that someone over the last few years has been shifting files and reassigning file numbers without updating the hard copy. So I had to go through all 14 file cabinets and basically rewrite the whole damn thing. And in doing so, discovered that the files were all backwards. The highest numbers were on the left, the lowest on the right. So all 14 cabinets were pulled out and reversed.

Finally, I started filing so I would end up with something more OCD compliant like this.

But then I started going through the stacks and stacks of music that weren't even in envelopes and the whole process starts again.

I filled and emptied that table more times than I remember.

But it's so pretty now. I'll take more pictures now that I know how techno savvy I am.

Note on the choral library: Remember that this used to be a shower room. There are windows on two walls. And the third and fourth floors can see into the room. I'm really really hopeful that the old windows were frosted.

whew

I was almost worried that I would have to take down this blog if Google didn't get off it's kiester and update their search engine, um, stuff. I don't know the technical term, but I know that I followed all the rules that Google itself laid out in it's "help" section if you don't want your pages to be located in a search. It was actually a pretty simple fix. Just a single line of code had to be changed in the html for this blog.

But I kept doing searches for things that sitemeter had told me were guiding folks to my page. The most popular was the crown moulding stuff from last fall. And my page kept popping up in the results. Like, on the very first page.

Plus an image search for "Kevin Hart gay" gave my picture on the very first image page. (am I really THAT gay??)

So, wanting to be safe from the savvy search skills and peering eyes of junior high kids, I was more than ready to say adieu to the blog. Thus, I haven't been blogging all month.

But, alas, I've been checking for a couple weeks now and my blog seems to have become invisible to Google.

Yea!

I'm still a bit cautious and if you, one day, are eager to find out the latest and most fascinating news on me and discover the blog to be gone, you'll know that I have been infiltrated by nosy kids.

The quick and dirty:

I'm more than surprised to find that I love my new job. Before school began I was at school for 12 hours a day for a few weeks trying to clean up a huge mess of music left by my predecessor. I knew I'd have a challenge in front of me. The choir last year only had 32 kids out of a nearly 500 student school. And they stunk. When I got to the school this summer I realized that the choir was just the scum on top of a very dirty pond. The choir library at the school has nearly 1000 titles of music which add up to about 30,000 individual octavos (pieces of choir music.)

No one has been updating or organizing the library for almost 6 years. And no one had filed any music for most of that time. So I was dealing with hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music that were in piles...and not in piles according to anything. Just piles.

Sort + Make new piles + School stamp + File stamp + File card + Add to Catalogue + Put in cabinet x 3400 = Organized music library.

BUT, it got done. I knew my OCD tendencies and knew I wouldn't be able to do anything else until the library was organized. The choir is meeting already and I've got almost 70 singers this year.

It rocks. And the other classes I teach are very cool. I didn't realize how much I *wouldn't* miss singing "Six little ducks that I once knew."

Sidenote: I've been in the library maybe 3 times since I finished organizing before school started. Tons of work for what seems like nothing. But that's how OCD works.

short update

I was back in New Baden the week after my last post.

Everything was going swimmingly. Then mom tried to bend over in her wheelchair to get one of the dogs and her right hip dislocated (i.e. popped out of socket). Apparently it's pain that I could never imagine. She was nearly immobile.

Made my first ever 911 call, took her to a hospital in Belleville 20 miles away.

4 hours and two tries of yanking it back in later, they took her to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis where she's had most of her surgeries.

5 more hours later they get the hip back in.

3 more hours and they admit her to the hospital.

Stays in the hospital over the weekend then they admit her to a local nursing home.

After she gets settled in the nursing home the next week, I clean and close up her house, pawn her dog off on my brother, my sister takes back a small dog mom had been watching for her and trades me her other dog, Sebastian. I pack up all my stuff and two dogs and head back to Topeka.

Mom's basically wheelchair bound. She has a cast on her left leg and a huge brace on her right leg. Plus that nerve disease in her legs that means she has no muscle mass. She might be able to use a walker but she's had both shoulders worked on and arthritis in her wrists.

And insurance saw no need for her to stay in the nursing home. So a week later they sent her home to New Baden.

Fucking insurance.

In other news...

I came home to discover that deer apparently love impatiens (pretty annual flowers for you non-gardeners). I had planted over 200 of them along the border of my newly relandscaped front yard. I got a phone call while I was in New Baden saying, "Don't be mad."

I took this to mean that they'd died because he hadn't watered them. I'm the gardener in the house and I only plant things I plan on taking care of. He prefers plants he doesn't have to worry about after they've been planted. But he promised to water the finicky flowers everyday. Because one day without water and they wilt and a day later they're dying.

So of course I thought he'd killed them. But he said "They're all gone. They were there last night and today they're just gone."

"Did you mow them down so you wouldn't have to water them?"

He laughs and says he hadn't thought of that.

It turns out that deer have been raiding our front yard and ate every last one of my flowers down to the ground.

Augh.

But he kept his end of the bargain. Everything else was alive and well. 

Sebastian, my sister's dog, is living with us for a while. I like to imagine he's like a kid away at camp. Or visiting his uncle's house for the summer playing with his cousins. Sebastian and Oliver are about the same age so they have the same kind of constant, "Wanna play? Wanna play? Wanna play?" energy. Which is awesome for me because, besides the walks and the feeding, they pretty much take care of themselves. Whereas before it fell on me to keep Oliver constantly entertained.

Sebastian's an awesome dog. He's a shelter dog. About three times bigger than Oliver. But when it's time to play, Sebastian just lays on the floor and rolls around will Ollie. And he hasn't peed or pooped in the house even once! Yea!

While poop jokes are always funny, poop on the carpet is never, ever funny.