An Honest Day's Labour

I started two new jobs within the last week, neither involving unearthing rocks from gardens in Langley. Yes, that's a rock, not a shovelful of dirt. Win and I offered to help Winnifred's step-mother plant her cedars, because they were getting root-bound in their pots. She had already called three handy-guys there in Langley, "no job too big or too small", but this job must have been too in-between because they all ended up begging off. Thus a rare shot of me doing some real work.

But back to my actual gainful employment. Thursday I began teaching "Public Libraries" at UBC. So it turned out I like teaching, and I'm totally enthralled by the students. Check out our class blog, to which they are posting news stories of interest to public librarians.

UBC itself, unfortunately, is sort of a French farce. Nobody seems to be able to figure out why I can't get a campus-wide login, without which you really can't do much of anything including use a computer, but I've decided to simply barrel along as if it's all going to work out. Below, my favourite sign at UBC, in the bathroom of the upscale cafe (used to be the Faculty Club, now democratically open to everyone, but of course students can't afford it. We managed to be invited to a reception there after Renata's husband's talk last week. Thanks for the invitation, Renata!)



Then today, I started my other new job. Working in digital initiatives at SFU, and boy are there a lot of new things to remember. They do theses, newspapers, audio cassettes, on-the-fly public requests, and this interesting thing where they convert textbooks to accessible PDFs so visually-impaired students can get the computer to read them out loud. All very cool. Don't have too much staff yet as they're students and get hired fresh every semester. Found myself (in t-shirt, linen slacks and loafers) hopelessly overdressed. Note to self: buy jeans this weekend.