Librarian seeks new employment

I’m trying to leave my job. I know that this may seem like a silly thing to do in these recessionary times, but I feel that my job is turning me into a person I don’t want to be, so it’s time to put more effort into trying to leave. Actually, I have thought this for a while and have been looking avidly at the vacancies pages in the CILIP Gazette and scouring jobs.ac.uk for any jobs I think I might have a chance of getting and that I would realistically be able to do.

I almost sent off a job application the other day -I’d done my CV and written the letter but in the end I decided not to send it. I had a bit of a crisis of confidence (so, what’s new?)  and thought that perhaps I wouldn’t be able to do the job if I got it and therefore I should not apply and leave space for someone else who really could do the job.

I think working in my current job, although it’s given me lots of experience, has actually reduced my confidence in my own abilities. I now know, only too well, that I’m not good at dealing with difficult people.  No matter how many courses I go on this is not going to change. I actually think that the more difficult (read rude, ungrateful, nasty) people I deal with the less equipped I feel to deal with them.

So, I know that I don’t really want to get a new job in the same sort of role that I’m doing now. The problem then is how to I get a job in a different area of librarianship or even in an entirely different field of work when I don’t have experience of anything other than reader services librarianing and opening envelopes. Well, that’s not quite true, I did a smidgen of pretend cataloguing in my previous job. People have been telling me that I have ‘transferable skills’, so I suppose I just have to work out how I can transfer them and to what purpose.

Vivaldi’s Gloria

I’m listening to Vivaldi’s Gloria at this present time (on Spotify), because we might be doing it with choir after Christmas, unless anyone (of the choir) protests. I’m very sure I’ve sung it before, but I just can’t remember when. I’m sure it was fairly recently, but I’ve tried to look up when I think it was on the interweb and no luck. Maybe I’m misremembering, but it sounds so familiar and the feeling of knowing specific bits very well because they’re difficult and we had to practise them a lot is very strong. Weird. I’ve even looked on this and my old blog to see if I wrote about it and I didn’t. The only thing to do now is to ask my mum, as I’m pretty sure she would have been singing it too, if I was.

Anyway, I hope we do start rehearsing it after Christmas – it will be a good challenge. Despite our early fears, everyone who stuck with it really enjoyed doing Carmen in the end. Apparently (according to the choir master) the Gloria is easier than Carmen. Despite the fact that Carmen was quite difficult I’m not sure I believe him!

Hawaii magnet

This is the first of my objects. It’s a magnet and is usually holding up bits of paper on our fridge door, but I took it down to take its picture. I would like to go to Hawaii, but I haven’t been there. The magnet was brought from there from my friend S, who was on a round-the-world trip at the time. Lucky her! She is very good at maths.

The photo isn’t very good, but hopefully you can make out the little turtles on the right (your right) hand side.

Choir practice

We had choir practice tonight and this is what we sang:

• Good King Wenceslas
• Don’t Cry For Me Argentina
• Old King Cole
• Angels’ Carol

Good King Wenceslas went quite well – it would have been a bit worrying if it had gone badly, as we’re only singing the tune. Don’t Cry For Me Argentina also went fairly well, although we forgot the harmony and when we should have been mmm-ing and when we should have been ooo-ing, although it turned out that we never actually had to ooo at all. Old King Cole was fine for us, but not for the poor sopranos, who have a really difficult part and had forgotten it all again. We spent quite a lot of time on trying to get that right. The Angel Carol was also rather challenging, for us as well as for the sopranos. We had practised it a couple of times before, but it seemed a lot more difficult than before – how did that happen?! I think all will be OK in the end – I’ll just have to bash the notes out on the piano a few times and hopefully they will go into my brain and stay there eventually. Hopefully before the 3rd of December, when we have our first concert.

When a [wo]man is tired of London [s]he is tired of life (?)

I think I agree with Oscar Wilde to a certain extent, although I’m not sure how I would actually like to live in London and to be in such a busy place all the time. It might be a bit much.  However, I like going to London and being in London. I like the busyness and energy of the place – the sense that it is alive.

I like the names of the roads, the names of the Underground stations and the names of the parks and wondering how those names came to be. In fact, I have a little book called What’s in a name?, by Cyril M. Harris, which is all about “the origins of the names of all stations in current use on the London Underground and Docklands Light Rail…” It’s very interesting, but in way I think it’s more fun to look at the names and imagine what their origins were.

Walking from the CILIP headquarters back to Charing Cross station when everyone is leaving work at 5pm certainly makes me feel more alive. It’s a question of looking lively and paying attention to one’s surroundings or getting squished by a car/bus/bike/mown down by speeding pedestrians. I think the pedestrians may actually be the more frightening hazard.

I took the photos on my last walk from Ridgemount Street to Charing Cross station. I know they’re a bit blurred and therefore not very good, but I thought I could perhaps pass off the blurryness as an attempt to capture the bustle of Trafalgar Square and surrounding area in an artistic manner. I suspect I may be wrong about this.

Sausage casserole

Another food-related entry today. I thought I would follow on from yesterday’s post by posting the recipe for sausage casserole. As I said, I made it up as I went along, so it’s not rocket science, but it’s something to write! The quantities should make enough for four fairly large portions, but you can obviously halve/quarter/double amounts as required. I suppose I should really have taken a photo of it, but we’ve eaten it now! Anyway…

Ingredients:

• 8 sausages
• 1 courgette
• 1 medium onion
• 4 large carrots
• 2 medium potatoes
• 2 tins of tomatoes
• 1 tin of baked beans
• 2 cloves of garlic
• large pinch of mixed herbs

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C /356°F
2. Chop the carrots, onion, potatoes and courgettes
3. Fry the sausages in a pan until cooked
4. Chop the sausages into bits
5. Put the sausages and the chopped vegetables into a large casserole dish
6. Mix the two tins of tomatoes and the tin of beans together
7. Add the beans and tomatoes to the sausages and vegetables
8. Add the garlic and herbs to the rest of the ingredients and stir well
9. Put the casserole in the oven for approximately 1 hour
10. Take casserole out of oven and serve

Two pieces of cake and a slice of pizza

Another ploy I thought up to help me think of things to write about for NaBloPoMo was just to write about the best bits of my day. It was going to be the best and worst bits, but I thought I would try and be more positive. They will be listed in no particular order.

Today’s best bits:

• Being given a free piece of chocolate brownie. The cafe thing at work makes really good, moist, chocolate brownies. The nice administrator lady was wandering round the building giving away free bits of brownie – possibly because they were leftover from the reception (see below). I was quite glad I was in the foyer at the moment she passed the help desk.
• Eating half of the cupcake one of my colleagues gave me on Friday. It had kept quite well in the fridge. Possibly the best carrot cake I’ve ever tasted. I must ask my colleague where she bought it from.
• Eating my lunch, part of which was cold pizza. Yum. Oh dear, I sense a theme developing.
• [Quick, think of something to say that isn't to do with food] Finding some books I thought were lost.
• Seeing my colleague (a different one) after she finished doing a tour with some people who’d come in for a reception (not sure what the reception was for – just to show off the new building, I think). Although she’d had to show more people round than she expected to, she looked happy and I know she will have done a good job and been a good ambassador for the library. I felt proud of her, although I’m not sure I had any particular right to.
• Finding out that the sausage casserole I made for dinner tasted good. Nice-tasting food is never a foregone conclusion when I’ve been cooking, especially when I make the recipe up as I go along. Sorry, I know it’s to to with food again.  I like food.

On days when I write about the best bits of the day there will also be a random photo of the day. Here is today’s:

I made this cheescake earlier this year. Sorry, it’s food-related again – that was a coincidence. It’s the first baked pudding-type-thing I’ve ever made that was actually edible. I made another one a few weeks later, which included white chocolate. It was nice, but I think I should have melted the chocolate before putting it into the cheese mix instead of just putting it in in chunks, because it didn’t spread throughout the mixture when it was cooked, like I thought it would. The original recipe was Delia Smith’s, from her Frugal Food book.

National Blog Posting Month

It’s here again. Every year I tell myself I’m not going to do it again and the next year I do. When I say every year, I’ve only been doing it for two years, so that was a bit hyperbolic of me…or was it? I really shouldn’t use words if I’m not sure that they can really be used in the context I’m using them in. Anyway, I’m participating in NaBloPoMo again this year. Silly me. I thought I’d make things a bit easier for myself by thinking about what I want to write every day beforehand (in October) (whoever would have thought that would be a good idea?!) and I’ve chosen my own theme – ‘Objects In My House’. I can hear the sound of breath being bated with excitement from here.

To explain: I’ve decided to write about objects in my house that have tales or people metaphorically attached to them. I don’t know whether this is enough to sustain my own or other people’s interest in my blog for a whole month, but I’ll give it a go.

Update:

I’ve thought of a couple more things I can write about, so I’ll be adding those in as well as using the theme. We’ll see how it goes.

Two short reviews

In September, I saw productions of two ‘films-made-into-musicals’.

The first was Sister Act , which some ex-librarians and I went to see at the beginning of September. It’s a bit bonkers, but a lot of fun. The only slightly negative thing people had to say about it was that it doesn’t include the well-known songs from the film of the same name, which we thought was a shame. You do get to see Sheila Hancock looking like she’s thoroughly enjoying herself as the Mother Superior though, which might just about make up for it, depending on your point of view.

Some people-who-are-still-librarians and I went to see Fame – The Musical, performed by the very talented young cast of students from Pheonix Performing Arts, plus a few (only slightly) older and equally talented cast members who played the teachers. The show was great, full of energy, enthusiasm and extremely impressive singing and dancing. You may be glad to know that this show does include the well-known song, ‘Fame’!

Told you the reviews would be short!

Things I’ve been doing

I’ve mainly been at work, or at least that’s what it feels like! Not only has it been the beginning of the new academic year, but we have also moved into the Shiny New Learning Centre. The SNLC (or SNeLC  (sorry)), is lovely, but comes with its own problems, like an over-sensitive self-returns machine that goes into a sulk and stops working if anyone should dare to return books through it at anything other than exactly the right frequency. I don’t even know what the right frequency is, and I work in the library, so I don’t how the students will get the hang of it. Practice, I suppose. We’re currently posting people to take turns at standing beside the machine to help people put their books through correctly, although, as I said, I don’t even know what the machine’s idea of ‘correctly’ is.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m not supposed to be thinking about work when I’m not there.

I’ve been home to visit my family on a couple of occasions – once for my uncle and aunt’s 40th wedding anniversary party and once to sing Handel’s Messiah. I enjoyed both of these occasions, but I’m afraid I probably enjoyed the singing more than the party, much as I love my aunt and uncle! We performed the Messiah in the church I grew up and got married in, with people I’ve known all my life, a historically accurate orchestra (if that makes sense) and a church full of an enthusiastic audience. Plus, of course, the music is great. I like Handel’s music, because it makes sense – you can sort of tell where he’s going with it and he repeats ideas quite a lot. This is quite helpful when you’re sight-reading a part you’ve never sung before! We had a practice on the day, but that was it for me, so I had to muddle through as best I could and listen carefully to the people around me. I don’t think I made any mistakes anyone could hear, so that was OK. When I was singing, I felt the happiest I have felt for a long time.

What else has happened? I passed my CILIP chartership, which was a nice surprise. I can now put letters after my name – MCLIP, which stand for Member: Chartered Library and Information Professional. I don’t know why it’s not MCILIP – Member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. This has long been a mystery to me, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

The pacemaker seems to be working. I was still experiencing some strange rhythms, but I went to the pacing clinic in September and had the pacemaker’s settings adjusted and I’ve felt better since then. I’m feeling quite tired at the moment (hence having the day off today) but I think this is due to too much work, rather than anything directly heart-related. I’ve got another appointment at the pacing clinic in November.