w00t!

I think I the practicum is more or less in place. The staff have actively tried to discourage me, saying that it will be "repetitive" work, and they are afraid it doesn't meet the standards described in the handout about setting up a practicum. For heaven's sake, surely they can't think I expect to be building fancy containers or repairing old books every day? Or more to the point, at all? I wrote back and said that in my experience, written descriptions of things like this tend to be pretty idealistic, and I can't imagine any workplace that would have someone free to hand-train what is essentially a volunteer for 10 hours a week for an entire semester.

They did say that if I still want to do it, given the description of the work that they sent, they will be happy to have me. Whew. I sent back an email within less than half an hour of receiving *their* email. I did say that I hoped I would be able to at least observe some of the "good stuff" when I'm in the office.

I've also written to a couple of places to ask if they can point me in the direction of information about iron gall ink and parchment, as opposed to paper. I hope I get something back in time to use it. I have been kinda down and haven't been good about doing things I should be doing, like writing for that information.

I had been beating myself up with guilt over Not Being More Productive! All The Time! until Tuesday when I realized what all has happened in the last year. I've been really effective the last couple of days, though, like making a half-dozen different calls I've been dreading. Every one of the calls ended with the best possible reslution, too, so maybe things are picking back up again. I hope.

grr

I long for the good old days of Word Perfect. By which you may properly deduce that I am, once again, engaged in a struggle with W0rd. The thing that makes WP so incredibly much easier to use is that in WP when you show the formatting, it is in a separate are at the bottom of the window, and it shows *everything.* Like where page breaks are, and where font style changes, and it's all right there, spread out so you can see it and even (gasp) go into that window and change things! Take out the exact code that is causing the problem! In W0rd you have to click on a word, and it will show you some of the formatting of that single word. Then you click on the next word, and so on, one word at a time. This program is, for some reason unknown to intelligent life, inserting a page break in the middle of one of my pages. When I try to delete, it takes out the formatting for the next word instead of the page break. It won't show me anything in the "formatting" about where the page break is, or how I can delete it. W0rd SUCKS. Green monkey dicks.