Monthly Archives: May 2008

the survey says…

Right now the Library Research Ser­vice is con­duct­ing a sur­vey on the worth of an MLIS. (I got in mine 1996.)

For the final com­ment I had to sum up my thoughts about my exper­ince in the lit­tle box at the bot­tom of the sur­vey. I said:

As a pro­fes­sion­al degree an MLIS is ter­ri­bly per­ish­able. The only things poten­tial (library) employ­ers are ask­ing me about are what data­bas­es can I search and what soft­ware do I know. They don’t see that there is any last­ing ben­e­fit to the edu­ca­tion I got and how I have used it — out­side of libraries — for the last 10 years. Non-library employ­ers are the same — dif­fer­ent soft­ware — but the same ques­tions.

That and the per­ceived lia­bil­i­ty of hav­ing a mas­ters degree and no “paid job expe­ri­ence” for the last 10 years pret­ty much makes me unem­ploy­able. Damn what am I going to do with all this free time?

the value of free speech

Most­ly I find the com­ments on the larg­er blogs to be so much me-to-ism but this after­noon I came across this com­ment on a post about a sil­ly anti-non-Chris­t­ian (yes i made that word up) adver­tise­ment used by a Cal­i­for­nia car deal­er­ship that was in boing-boing.

One of the great­est gifts of tru­ly under­stand­ing the notion of free speech is being nei­ther offend­ed nor par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed when some­one exer­cis­es their right to say some­thing inflam­ma­to­ry. Their speech is, after all, free. And you like­ly under­stand by this point that, except in rare cas­es, you get what you pay for.

I think I got much more than the usu­al val­ue for this one.

cred­it goes to one air­pool (com­ment #23)

Garden Report

We’re build­ing a lot of stone walls this year. When we first had the lawns and beds installed we didn’t have the time and mon­ey to build the bed walls that we want­ed so we used the black plas­tic edg­ing to keep the grass out of the beds (sort of) This year we’re replac­ing the plas­tic edg­ing with stone walls. We’re using cast stones (con­crete) in three col­ors. We’ve done a hand­ful of walls so far.

We did the wall around the bed behind the per­go­la last fall as a test. Then we bought 10 pal­lets of stones.

lillies and sea-pinks

The sea pinks are get­ting ready to bloom (mad­ly) and the lilies are com­ing up. I just have to remem­ber to put down slug bait on a reg­u­lar basis.

I’ve put a bunch of herbs in this bed as well. It’s con­ve­nient to the kitchen. There’s a space in the mid­dle for basil. Which I’ll put in when I get the toma­toes lat­er in June.

herb bed

We did the wall around the bird bath bed last week­end. Once up on a time there were some 40 or 50 tulips in this bed. Five years lat­er we got a poor show­ing of three blooms. Tulips just don’t last.

birdbath bed

The only thing that stayed in this bed are the peonies. Most­ly it’s peren­ni­als, cro­cisi­ma, ox-eye daisies, geums, and the like. The lit­tle tri­an­gle in the front has a few annu­als. Cal­en­du­la for col­or and stocks for fra­grance. Usu­al­ly I put nico­tiana in the front of the house but this year I’m try­ing stocks.

bird bath bed

BTW the word­press dic­tio­nary is woe­ful­ly igno­rant of plant names.