2010-08-18

altivo: Commission line art colored by myself (cs-tivo-color)
2010-08-18 09:32 pm
Entry tags:

Sunset

Summer is over. The sun went down before I got out of work today.

I find myself in an unusually bad mood due to stupid stuff. They are starting (STARTING?) road construction on my route to and from work next week. Why so late in the year, I can't imagine. Nor, for that matter, what they expect to be doing, except ripping everything up so that it stays unusable all winter. Undoubtedly it's "stimulus" money that has to be spent, so we've got a pointless porkbarrel now.

The alternate route past the construction site is already closed. It's been closed since June, though I have no idea what they are doing there either. Totally closed, no traffic allowed.

Along the road to Harvard I noticed last week that a huge oak tree was being removed. Now that tree had an overhanging branch that extended over the entire roof of an old farmhouse, and after so many old trees blew down in that odd "bow wave" thing we had a couple of months back, I figured someone was being fearfully cautious. Wrong. They went on to remove every single tree around the house. This week I noticed that they were bulldozing the former yard behind it. Now they've put up an ugly steel tower there. And I do mean ugly. I thought it might be a cell phone tower (though there are half a dozen already visible from that location) but it's too short, only about 50 feet. It has a little platform like a crow's nest atop it, and climbing staples with a protective cage around them all the way up from the ground. Now today I noticed that they seem to be gutting the house as well. Ripping out the insides. This all looks very suspicious. It doesn't help that the tower resembles a photo I once saw of a tower that was built for an atomic weapons test out in New Mexico. The house never had a for sale sign, I'm sure of that. But it may well have been auctioned for non-payment of taxes or as a result of a mortgage foreclosure. Those have become so frequent around here in the last five years that the bulk of the weekly newspaper is often made up of the legal announcements. Whatever they're doing there, I suspect it's some monumental piece of commercial greed which, as usual, takes no interest in what it does to the land, the air, or anything but someone's bottom line.

Library systems were completely down today as the primary database server was upgraded to new hardware. They came back on about 2:30 this afternoon, which was nice since they'd predicted an all day outage. We had been warning folks for a week that they should try to avoid returning or borrowing books today, and it appears that most took us seriously. Door traffic was normal, but circulation was very low.

New director is writing new job descriptions for everyone and recreating "titles." Looks like I'm going from "General Service Librarian" to "Technical Services Librarian" which is probably more accurate up to a point. The description has to be modeled on something she got from the ALA or whatever, as it pretty much describes a department head in a moderate size library. Although it makes me the chief liaison with OCLC and the consortium technical staff, it omits my responsibility for web sites, internal network, and PC software and maintenance. I may just let it stand that way because I'd just as soon dump all that anyway. Somehow I don't think it will make much difference though. Saying "It isn't my job" when you've been doing it for nearly eight years just doesn't carry much weight.

Obviously, I'm grumpy. It's getting hot again, which doesn't help. And it's Wednesday. Better go to bed.