terrain and wind farm south of Cheyenne

To get back to human affairs: downtown Cheyenne was rather quiet and half-shut-down on the Saturday afternoon preceding the President’s Day holiday.  But we wandered around window-shopping and reading historic marker signs, trying to decide where to get something to eat.  The historic train depot was mildly busy, with a visitor center/museum at one end, a restaurant at the other, and this in-between:Since the Korean restaurant was closed on Saturday (you may be thinking “???” and so did the locals whom we asked about the Korean restaurant…), we picked the brewpub at the depot for a late lunch of pulled pork and sweet potato fries.  Although the building is no longer used as a depot for passengers, the railyard is still active with hundreds of freight cars with the Burlington Northern logo, which we could see coming and going from our table near the window.

Meanwhile, another symbol of the West is strewn about the downtown area: giant cowboy boots decorated with appropriate subjects.  I’ve seen this kind of thing in other cities, usually with old carousel horses: local artists decorate them, they are auctioned off to raise money, and then the finished products are displayed around town.

Grumman parked at Cheyenne airport

We followed our late lunch with some errands, and then a walk in Lions Park, where noisy ducks and geese entertained us with their take-offs and landings on the partially frozen lake and we read the signs for some of the specialized gardens currently buried under a foot of snow.  Then, the sun just having dropped over the horizon, we said our goodbyes to the violent-orange fellow Grumman parked next to us at the airport (but not its pilot, whom we never saw) and got in the plane for our trip home.

As if in cosmic retribution for my haughty adolescent pronouncement, this semester I am taking CHGN 121, or General Chemistry 1, at the School of Mines where I work.  Perhaps “taking” is too strong a word: what I am actually doing is sitting in on the lectures and sort of reading along in the text book.  The goal is to become a better reference librarian to chemistry and chemical engineering students, for chemistry has a voluminous and confusing body of reference literature associated with it.  But part of me- an older, wiser, more mature me– wants to learn and come to love the subject I spurned in high school.

I’m still unsure how it will all turn out.  Until last week, the class covered material that I recognized fairly easily from my high school days.  Now we’re working on quantum mechanics, a new topic for me, but one so charged and freighted with cultural allusion that it’s difficult to tell if I will master it with true scientific knowledge, or merely appropriate it as a literary scholar. My metaphorically-oriented brain keeps thinking about The His Dark Materials books (The Golden Compass, etc.) and The Matrix as we learn about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, antimatter, and the generally weird behavior of electrons.

And then there are weirdnesses that are just funny.  The dumbbell in a donut, for example, describes the orbital path of an electron around the nucleus of an atom.  Since electrons behave like waves and not particles, the only way to describe the position of an electron is in terms of the shape that its wave form makes, and one of these is the dumbbell in a donut shape.  And that makes me laugh and think of Homer Simpson.  Mmm… donut… Hey!  who are you calling a dumbbell?!?

Joda, age 14

Oh, sniff.  Some professional photographer did a project on elderly animals, and I was just on her website looking at her photos and the short documentary about her work.

Joda isn’t quite as old as some of the animals in Leshko’s portfolio, but of course I was thinking about her as I looked at the images of sheep, horses, pigs, geese, and dogs.  They are beautiful photos, and I recommend having a look at them.  If you’ve ever lived with an elderly animal yourself, you might get a little misty-eyed, though.

We were excited to get into the new house!

The old house has to be cleaned.  Oh, and the new house has to be cleaned, too.

I had a snow day the day after we finished with the old house and got to spend the whole day watching the storm and enjoying the new house.

More cleaning… lots! Ugh.

The landlord hired professional carpet cleaners.  Yay!

The laundry room drain was clogged and the water from the washing machine flooded the room where we had all of our boxes of books stored.  Boo.

The Preservation class I took in library school, plus the extra 20-hour disaster management for librarians training workshop, came in handy.  I knew how to deal with the situation.  Plus, it’s not summer, we live in Colorado, and we heat the house with wood– all pluses when you’re trying to dry a couple dozen books.

And life goes on… hopefully the yo-yo is out of momentum now.

Welcome to the family, Kayli!  I can’t wait to meet you.

The new place is on a hillside, and the backyard looks rather different.We’ll grow flowers, herbs, and veggies along the terraced areas.  Yes, the playset comes with the house.  We were thinking of taking the swings down and using the frame to grow hops, but maybe we should just make friends with all the kids in the neighborhood?

Because of the cooing distraction and the size of the biscuit, traffic at the register got a bit jammed up behind us, and I had to pull firmly on the leash as I tried to reason with a dog who was now convinced that she wanted to live at Meyer Hardware for the rest of her life.

Across the parking lot, there was a crowd at a little auto auction place because some guy named Barry Fey was signing copies of his book.  I had never heard of him before, and based on the row of classic cars, I assumed he must be in that line of business, but a web search quickly educated me to the bio of “the Rockfather,” the rock concert promoter.  We strolled by and Bo inspected the paint jobs on some of the cars (apparently, painting an airplane bestows one with great appreciation for classic cars, which tend to have the most expensive paint jobs per square inch than any other kind of vehicle).I begged off from visiting the liquor store with Bo; I could only imagine the prolonged fawning, begging scene that would occur there, since Joda already has a history with the nice older lady who is usually at the counter.  So, Joda and I turned toward the main street to walk the three blocks to the path along the creek.  We quickly ran into a family walking two cow dogs and the adults made sweet noises at Joda while the kids petted her and the dogs all sniffed each other.

As we walked on, I was struck by a feeling of great fondness for this town– a relief, since I’ve felt ambivalent about living here so far and I’ve been hoping that I would get to like the place better.  Now I started thinking about how great it is to live in a town where the shopkeepers give treats to your dog and you can walk to stores or trails from your house, and where you can even be out in your shirtsleeves on a Saturday in January.

Then it happened.  The moment of shame.  Joda did the most impolite, uncivilized thing a dog can do in public.  Right on the sidewalk!  Luckily I had a bag, and I got it scooped up and out of sight within seconds.  But the moment began to turn into an eternity of shame as I saw that this was going to be one of those “difficult” older-dog episodes, not just a feature film, but a whole series, with sequels of ever-diminishing quality.  Oh, the horror!  I managed to get most of it into the bag, and then I pushed her off the sidewalk to continue her efforts in the street between two parked cars.

Finally, the incident seemed to be over, and I got her safely across the street, where we could duck behind some businesses into a deserted parking lot and then skulk our way over to the creek path.  And, you know what?  No one said a single thing.  No irate shopkeepers ran out to scold us, no passersby made rude comments.  Golden is feeling better and better to me.

Library science students also spend at least a few months, if not a whole semester, learning about copyright law and the rationale behind it.  So, even though some of us might come across as having an attitude that “information wants to be free,” in general, librarians are quite knowledgeable and respectful of the law.

But golly, we want information to be free.  We want that information to be in the hands of the people who are going to make good use of it, to create more really good information and make the world a better place.  Not to mention that we really dislike having to represent a profession in which you have to click multiple times or go through lots of contortions or non-intuitive steps to get where you need to be (ironically, our profession is one that is most successful when the people we serve don’t even realize we are going through those contortions behind the scenes so that they don’t have to, which is a whole other blog post in itself).

At my library, we just installed a “discovery system”, which allows users to enter search terms into one box and simultaneously look for materials from our library catalog and electronic article databases.  Except that the vendor who sold us the new system doesn’t play nice with (or vice versa) some of the vendors who sell us database subscriptions, so those databases aren’t included in the one-box search.  Or, they can be included, but you have to log in to the system (think: contortion).  Still, it’s better than our old system with all the separate silos people had to navigate.

Now, just to make things possibly a bit more challenging, the Research Works Act has been introduced in the House of Representatives.  It would make it illegal for publicly funded researchers to be required to make the results of their work publically available.  One of the main targets is the National Institutes of Health: four years ago,the Consolidated Appropriations Act directed that this agency would make all federally funded research articles available to the public through the PubMed portal.  The RWA would negate this act, and pre-empt any other government agency from making similar requirements of their federally funded researchers.  In other words, citizens who don’t have access to an academic or research library would lose the ability to read the results of research that they paid for with tax dollars.

The RWA came about due to the lobbying efforts of the Association of American Publishers, who argue that they add value to the end-products of the research: the articles.  But, as Michael Eisen points out in the NY Times, the peer reviewer process costs publishers very little, as it is carried out by academics and government researchers who volunteer their time (or are required to do it as part of their job).

Perhaps our business-friendly Congress and executive branch will see fit to pass this bill, but I hope not.  There’s enough bad, biased, and flat-out crazy medical information on the internet, and the balance doesn’t need to be made that much worse by the removal of the meat of PubMed material.  It does seem like the SOPA and PIPA bills are losing traction as representatives realize that the constituents are against them, or that they just don’t understand information technology well enough to be ruling on these matters.  In the public outcry over these bills, I hope we don’t lose sight of the Research Works Act and let it slip through.