Welcome back to BlogJune for another year!
Hello fellow Librarians and library people. BlogJune is back on and somehow I've managed to actually have an interesting day to start the month with.
For those that don't know me already my name is Andrew I've almost graduated in Library and Information Sciences at QUT and am currently looking for work in a library anywhere in Brisbane. I'm a keen cyclist and avid reader.
I currently work full time looking after my disabled brother at his house and spend my spare time cycling, reading or writing.
This will be the third year I've done BlogJune.
The first year I didn't really have much of a format, just a vague idea of what I did every day and how I went about it.
Last year I tried to write something about Libraries every day and I quite liked it although by the end of the month I was really pushing it for fresh ideas(seriously "Why I should Bungee Jump more often" was a legit topic I wrote about and posted on the internet), I'm going to try that again this year. I had some trouble coming up with a fresh topic every day so I would come up with topics during the week and then post a list of them all on Saturday and after that I'd tackle them one per day the following week. This month I'm going to shift that over to Sundays because I have more time on Sundays than I should and it means I don't have to do anything big today(as I haven't really planned out very much). I also used to post a short story on Saturdays, I'm shifting that over to Sundays because, again, I haven't written anything recently so I need to get my writing gears in place and actually write something tomorrow afternoon.
So, anyway, I hope you are all having a good year so far and look forward to reading everyones blogs going forward this month.
The Last Eleven Months.
The last entry I posted for last years BlogJune was about a bicycle I told my friend I would look at, I ended up buying it and I haven't regretted the decision to buy the expensive bike over the cheaper ones available at the time. It has, so far, pretty much been a dream to ride. The one exception was the day I decided to ride from my brothers house to the city and my front ring had a spoke bend on it at the Moggill Road/Western Freeway Crossing which resulted in me only being able to get into the lowest gear humanly possible for the rest of the trip(10kms) which was slow and agonising and ended up costing me about $90 to replace the part(the guys at a bike-shop in the city bent the spoke back into shape for free but didn't have the replacement part so I had to ride home in fear of it breaking again). Everything else about it has been great. I've lost some weight, feel better about myself and have probably narrowly avoided death a few times whilst obliviously riding through traffic at what my city council cycling map defines as medium speeds.
My dad has been out of hospital for over a year now, he's going pretty well. Almost no long term side effects from his accident last year. We're still planning on going to Spain to to the El Camino de Santiago later this year which will be a blast. I've managed to somehow snag myself a week in Paris after we're done, by myself, which will be fantastic. I'm planning on cycling around the city a bit and checking out some of the libraries archives, and universities they have over there. Just to see them, they look like very classy buildings and I love old classic buildings like that.
My soccer team didn't win the premiership, we placed third in the end. We did pretty damn well but sadly lost just one game at the end of a very very long season. I also became a godfather again at one point, which is always a blast.
I've still not graduated although I am very close now. Thank god. I finished my Minor Project last year, on the topic of Work Exchanges in the GLAM Professions and found that overall they provided a general benefit to the participants and organisations involved with some slight risks related to poor planning and not having set goals before starting. I worked so hard and long on that paper that in the last day, when I was going over it all several times over and rewriting huge chunks of stuff, my fingers were actually burnt a little bit by the keys on my Laptop which had heated up from being on for so long.
I was very glad for that project to be over. I really want to print it up one day, it was 65 pages long in the end and it was so good to just be finished with it.
After I finished up with that I did my last work placement for university at the Queensland State Archives, which was an interesting two week stint in which I helped a few people with their family research and found out a lot about the long term storage of information as well as the efforts undertaken to preserve the knowledge and legacy of the past. The idea of having to think in terms of centuries instead of years for storage was weird at first but I got into it after a bit. Finding really really old stuff out in the back shelves was just crazy. And the staff were really nice and put up with my rambling questions and general lack of knowledge about their organisation(I hadn't had time to really do much research as I should have because I spent the preceding weeks going over interview transcripts about work exchanges looking for ways to correlate data that was sometimes very rough in nature and simultaneously reading every article on the topic going back fifteen years). My cousins from Sydney also came up to stay for a week while I was doing this and I took them around the CBD on one of my free days and showed them through GOMA which was a lot of fun. It was also good to catch up with them and just kind of have a touristy day, we went up in the Brisbane eye which was interesting.
Christmas came and went, then I got nearly stuck in Noosa during the minor flooding of Australia day. My mate had a birthday party up there and we decided to try and wait it out instead of driving home, I got home eventually and found out that my parents house was without power for three days. To put this in perspective during the actually dangerous floods of 2011 my parents lost power for a grand total of three hours. So this was unexpected. We had a few generators floating around the neighbourhood and managed to make do until the power came back on.
I did go to the ALIA Online 2013 conference in Brisbane in February and had an amazing time there. I caught up with a bunch of people, made some new connections and listened to a lot of very interested people talk on topics I was very passionate about. I also got to use an iPad for the first time. I was not very impressed by it. I tried to ride my bike to the Wednesday Session and ended up spilling a lot of Gatorade over my conference shirt(which I kept in my backpack while cycling) and it looked like I had a massive blood stain on my shirt for a little while until I managed to clean it up a bit. I ended up catching a cold on the bike ride home in the dark of midnight. But still it was a great week overall and I hope to be able to go to the one after the next one(because I don't think I'll have money to go to the next one, I had to scrape together some serious coin to go to this one and I had to decide between this or buying a Lego Death Star for the same amount of money. I have regrets sometimes about my decision).
That was followed by a boring as hell couple of months. I'm sure I did stuff during them, but for the most part all I can remember is cycling around a lot more and then waiting for the rain to stop so I could cycle a bit more. I also had my 30th birthday party which was a great day and I stupidly didn't take any photos at all.
I've been working on my cooking the last eleven months and have been having regular dinner guests over to my brothers house which has so far been pretty good for him, he seems to be enjoying them and that's been a huge relief for myself and for my mum.
So pretty much the last eleven months hasn't been all that exciting. But it hasn't been overly dull either, I'd say on the balance its been pretty good but it could have been better.
My Day.
Okay, my day today started at about 815am. I had set my alarm for 7am but the battery on my phone died sometime in the night and I slept through. This meant that I woke up after my brother did and I had to rush around to get him breakfast(Cocktail Frankfurts and a mix of fried Onion, Tomato and Mushrooms with this powdery stuff my mum gets from a health store and has to be kept in the fridge all the time), then dressed for the day. I ended up catching up to most of the time lost from sleeping in when he and his day carer Patrick took him off to some Church event or something(if I'm not looking after him I don't really care where my brother is, I assume my mum knows and approves of it). I took the opportunity to drive home and then picked up an Axe and a crowbar from my dads tools and drove off again to Carindale where a friend of mine was moving house and needed to destroy a table because it was rotten but she didn't have an axe or any tools to do the job. It took about ten minutes of gentle axing to destroy the table and the chairs(which was a bit of a waste because one of them was perfectly fine but I was told they didn't want them so who am I to judge?). After that I helped move a Bookshelf, two fridges and a washing machine.
The weird thing about it was that the house they were moving out of was right across the road from the house they were moving into so we were literally just moving everything 13.32 meters across the road. I would have hated to have moved everything further because the people living there were total pack-rats. I like to think I have a lot of stuff but I'm a rank amateur in this field. The only area where I might have more stuff might be books, because I have several bookshelves spread out over the city(which I could have sworn I'd written an entry on but can't seem to find here right now). I was impressed that most of the stuff we were moving was actually useful stuff, if it was just junk or rubbish I would have been a bit pissed, but it was all good useful stuff that three people living in a house just accumulated over the years.
I live a pretty light life, I have only a few changes of clothes, a laptop and a bed. I could conceivably move houses in an afternoon with my brothers van. But I'd probably have to go and buy a fridge and a couch and a washing machine at some point. The clutter of daily life is amazing.
I also finally got the top of my desk from the house! I bought a second hand office style desk for my computer from my friend and she'd forgotten to give me the top of the desk(the bookshelf stuff they stick on desktops to store things) which they were using as a liquor shelf storage unit downstairs. I managed to squeeze it into my car before leaving. I'm hoping they have a housewarming party sooner or later because they're all a great bunch of people and a lot of fun to hang around. Even if Carindale is a bit out of my way.
After that I drove to Lawnton(thirty minutes away) and went to my god-daughters birthday party which was a lot of fun. I'm not usually a fan of childrens birthday parties because usually they involve me standing around while parents have conversations about their children and I'm seriously out of my element in those types of talks. But most of the people there were the parents of two-three year olds so they'd actually recovered from having babies and resumed something of a social life and had other topics to go on about. I had planned to take my niece, who stayed the night over with my parents last night, but she and my mum were out visiting my grandfather this morning so I couldn't organise or co-ordinate with them to do it. The BBQ was going hard and we all ate entirely too many sausages.
Overall the party was fun, nothing really exciting except for the face-painter lady who's sun made balloon animals and gave me a ladybug which I gave to my niece when I got back. I also showed my friend James some maps of the city I got from the library(cycling maps) and said we should think about some weekend in the future riding around some of the bikepaths they have around Lawnton. He seemed keen but he has two kids right now with a third on the way so it might be hard to find time. I hope we can pull it off. Cycling by myself is okay, but it isn't fun.
After I got back I ended up at the Pine Rivers Westfield looking for a birthday present for my younger brother and ended up getting him two Super Mario Brothers t-shirts before a very stressful drive home on low fuel. I filled up when I got closer to home and now have a tank full of premium petrol. Because it was $4 extra for the full tank and I'd wasted that much money on stupider things in the last few days.
Once I was home my mum made dinner and it was okay but I'd eaten a ton of food at Lunch so I didn't eat much. After that we had some cake for my brothers birthday(he and his wife are in town because she's running some fun run tomorrow called The Coloured Run that was delayed because of the rain last month) and I sat down to write all of this out.
Tomorrow I'm thinking of driving half-way to my soccer game and then cycling the rest of the way. I'll decide if I'm stupid enough to do such a thing in the next couple of hours.
Until tomorrow people!
YouTube Clip of the Day.
I want to get pumped up for the new Superman Movie. This is probably one of the best Superman moments of all time(the end fight between Superman and The Elite in Superman Vs The Elite was better, but is entirely too long).
For those that don't know me already my name is Andrew I've almost graduated in Library and Information Sciences at QUT and am currently looking for work in a library anywhere in Brisbane. I'm a keen cyclist and avid reader.
I currently work full time looking after my disabled brother at his house and spend my spare time cycling, reading or writing.
This will be the third year I've done BlogJune.
The first year I didn't really have much of a format, just a vague idea of what I did every day and how I went about it.
Last year I tried to write something about Libraries every day and I quite liked it although by the end of the month I was really pushing it for fresh ideas(seriously "Why I should Bungee Jump more often" was a legit topic I wrote about and posted on the internet), I'm going to try that again this year. I had some trouble coming up with a fresh topic every day so I would come up with topics during the week and then post a list of them all on Saturday and after that I'd tackle them one per day the following week. This month I'm going to shift that over to Sundays because I have more time on Sundays than I should and it means I don't have to do anything big today(as I haven't really planned out very much). I also used to post a short story on Saturdays, I'm shifting that over to Sundays because, again, I haven't written anything recently so I need to get my writing gears in place and actually write something tomorrow afternoon.
So, anyway, I hope you are all having a good year so far and look forward to reading everyones blogs going forward this month.
The Last Eleven Months.
The last entry I posted for last years BlogJune was about a bicycle I told my friend I would look at, I ended up buying it and I haven't regretted the decision to buy the expensive bike over the cheaper ones available at the time. It has, so far, pretty much been a dream to ride. The one exception was the day I decided to ride from my brothers house to the city and my front ring had a spoke bend on it at the Moggill Road/Western Freeway Crossing which resulted in me only being able to get into the lowest gear humanly possible for the rest of the trip(10kms) which was slow and agonising and ended up costing me about $90 to replace the part(the guys at a bike-shop in the city bent the spoke back into shape for free but didn't have the replacement part so I had to ride home in fear of it breaking again). Everything else about it has been great. I've lost some weight, feel better about myself and have probably narrowly avoided death a few times whilst obliviously riding through traffic at what my city council cycling map defines as medium speeds.
My dad has been out of hospital for over a year now, he's going pretty well. Almost no long term side effects from his accident last year. We're still planning on going to Spain to to the El Camino de Santiago later this year which will be a blast. I've managed to somehow snag myself a week in Paris after we're done, by myself, which will be fantastic. I'm planning on cycling around the city a bit and checking out some of the libraries archives, and universities they have over there. Just to see them, they look like very classy buildings and I love old classic buildings like that.
My soccer team didn't win the premiership, we placed third in the end. We did pretty damn well but sadly lost just one game at the end of a very very long season. I also became a godfather again at one point, which is always a blast.
I've still not graduated although I am very close now. Thank god. I finished my Minor Project last year, on the topic of Work Exchanges in the GLAM Professions and found that overall they provided a general benefit to the participants and organisations involved with some slight risks related to poor planning and not having set goals before starting. I worked so hard and long on that paper that in the last day, when I was going over it all several times over and rewriting huge chunks of stuff, my fingers were actually burnt a little bit by the keys on my Laptop which had heated up from being on for so long.
I was very glad for that project to be over. I really want to print it up one day, it was 65 pages long in the end and it was so good to just be finished with it.
After I finished up with that I did my last work placement for university at the Queensland State Archives, which was an interesting two week stint in which I helped a few people with their family research and found out a lot about the long term storage of information as well as the efforts undertaken to preserve the knowledge and legacy of the past. The idea of having to think in terms of centuries instead of years for storage was weird at first but I got into it after a bit. Finding really really old stuff out in the back shelves was just crazy. And the staff were really nice and put up with my rambling questions and general lack of knowledge about their organisation(I hadn't had time to really do much research as I should have because I spent the preceding weeks going over interview transcripts about work exchanges looking for ways to correlate data that was sometimes very rough in nature and simultaneously reading every article on the topic going back fifteen years). My cousins from Sydney also came up to stay for a week while I was doing this and I took them around the CBD on one of my free days and showed them through GOMA which was a lot of fun. It was also good to catch up with them and just kind of have a touristy day, we went up in the Brisbane eye which was interesting.
Christmas came and went, then I got nearly stuck in Noosa during the minor flooding of Australia day. My mate had a birthday party up there and we decided to try and wait it out instead of driving home, I got home eventually and found out that my parents house was without power for three days. To put this in perspective during the actually dangerous floods of 2011 my parents lost power for a grand total of three hours. So this was unexpected. We had a few generators floating around the neighbourhood and managed to make do until the power came back on.
I did go to the ALIA Online 2013 conference in Brisbane in February and had an amazing time there. I caught up with a bunch of people, made some new connections and listened to a lot of very interested people talk on topics I was very passionate about. I also got to use an iPad for the first time. I was not very impressed by it. I tried to ride my bike to the Wednesday Session and ended up spilling a lot of Gatorade over my conference shirt(which I kept in my backpack while cycling) and it looked like I had a massive blood stain on my shirt for a little while until I managed to clean it up a bit. I ended up catching a cold on the bike ride home in the dark of midnight. But still it was a great week overall and I hope to be able to go to the one after the next one(because I don't think I'll have money to go to the next one, I had to scrape together some serious coin to go to this one and I had to decide between this or buying a Lego Death Star for the same amount of money. I have regrets sometimes about my decision).
That was followed by a boring as hell couple of months. I'm sure I did stuff during them, but for the most part all I can remember is cycling around a lot more and then waiting for the rain to stop so I could cycle a bit more. I also had my 30th birthday party which was a great day and I stupidly didn't take any photos at all.
I've been working on my cooking the last eleven months and have been having regular dinner guests over to my brothers house which has so far been pretty good for him, he seems to be enjoying them and that's been a huge relief for myself and for my mum.
So pretty much the last eleven months hasn't been all that exciting. But it hasn't been overly dull either, I'd say on the balance its been pretty good but it could have been better.
My Day.
Okay, my day today started at about 815am. I had set my alarm for 7am but the battery on my phone died sometime in the night and I slept through. This meant that I woke up after my brother did and I had to rush around to get him breakfast(Cocktail Frankfurts and a mix of fried Onion, Tomato and Mushrooms with this powdery stuff my mum gets from a health store and has to be kept in the fridge all the time), then dressed for the day. I ended up catching up to most of the time lost from sleeping in when he and his day carer Patrick took him off to some Church event or something(if I'm not looking after him I don't really care where my brother is, I assume my mum knows and approves of it). I took the opportunity to drive home and then picked up an Axe and a crowbar from my dads tools and drove off again to Carindale where a friend of mine was moving house and needed to destroy a table because it was rotten but she didn't have an axe or any tools to do the job. It took about ten minutes of gentle axing to destroy the table and the chairs(which was a bit of a waste because one of them was perfectly fine but I was told they didn't want them so who am I to judge?). After that I helped move a Bookshelf, two fridges and a washing machine.
The weird thing about it was that the house they were moving out of was right across the road from the house they were moving into so we were literally just moving everything 13.32 meters across the road. I would have hated to have moved everything further because the people living there were total pack-rats. I like to think I have a lot of stuff but I'm a rank amateur in this field. The only area where I might have more stuff might be books, because I have several bookshelves spread out over the city(which I could have sworn I'd written an entry on but can't seem to find here right now). I was impressed that most of the stuff we were moving was actually useful stuff, if it was just junk or rubbish I would have been a bit pissed, but it was all good useful stuff that three people living in a house just accumulated over the years.
I live a pretty light life, I have only a few changes of clothes, a laptop and a bed. I could conceivably move houses in an afternoon with my brothers van. But I'd probably have to go and buy a fridge and a couch and a washing machine at some point. The clutter of daily life is amazing.
I also finally got the top of my desk from the house! I bought a second hand office style desk for my computer from my friend and she'd forgotten to give me the top of the desk(the bookshelf stuff they stick on desktops to store things) which they were using as a liquor shelf storage unit downstairs. I managed to squeeze it into my car before leaving. I'm hoping they have a housewarming party sooner or later because they're all a great bunch of people and a lot of fun to hang around. Even if Carindale is a bit out of my way.
After that I drove to Lawnton(thirty minutes away) and went to my god-daughters birthday party which was a lot of fun. I'm not usually a fan of childrens birthday parties because usually they involve me standing around while parents have conversations about their children and I'm seriously out of my element in those types of talks. But most of the people there were the parents of two-three year olds so they'd actually recovered from having babies and resumed something of a social life and had other topics to go on about. I had planned to take my niece, who stayed the night over with my parents last night, but she and my mum were out visiting my grandfather this morning so I couldn't organise or co-ordinate with them to do it. The BBQ was going hard and we all ate entirely too many sausages.
Overall the party was fun, nothing really exciting except for the face-painter lady who's sun made balloon animals and gave me a ladybug which I gave to my niece when I got back. I also showed my friend James some maps of the city I got from the library(cycling maps) and said we should think about some weekend in the future riding around some of the bikepaths they have around Lawnton. He seemed keen but he has two kids right now with a third on the way so it might be hard to find time. I hope we can pull it off. Cycling by myself is okay, but it isn't fun.
After I got back I ended up at the Pine Rivers Westfield looking for a birthday present for my younger brother and ended up getting him two Super Mario Brothers t-shirts before a very stressful drive home on low fuel. I filled up when I got closer to home and now have a tank full of premium petrol. Because it was $4 extra for the full tank and I'd wasted that much money on stupider things in the last few days.
Once I was home my mum made dinner and it was okay but I'd eaten a ton of food at Lunch so I didn't eat much. After that we had some cake for my brothers birthday(he and his wife are in town because she's running some fun run tomorrow called The Coloured Run that was delayed because of the rain last month) and I sat down to write all of this out.
Tomorrow I'm thinking of driving half-way to my soccer game and then cycling the rest of the way. I'll decide if I'm stupid enough to do such a thing in the next couple of hours.
Until tomorrow people!
YouTube Clip of the Day.
I want to get pumped up for the new Superman Movie. This is probably one of the best Superman moments of all time(the end fight between Superman and The Elite in Superman Vs The Elite was better, but is entirely too long).
Click to view