Wow. Two Posts in Two Days?

One of the many awesome things about having a laptop is that I can pretty much post anywhere at any time. It's not like I can open up the laptop and take a snapshot in the middle of the street yet, but hopefully once I get my new and improved cell phone, that will go far. So here I am, with everyone else in bed, blogging. Just like old times.

Thankfully, I seem to finally be getting over the bug that rocked me for about a week. Naturally, Mike's sick now; I hope he gets over it quicker than I did. We're supposed to be taking the kids to see the Radio City Music Christmas Spectacular tomorrow night, so I hope we can still go. The boys have been so excited.

I'm still recovering from this semester - it only ended on Sunday evening, and writing a final paper while feverish and sick really, really sucks. I would say it's not my best work, but I know I say that about almost everything I hand in. I hope my teacher thinks otherwise.

While I enjoyed the class and the material this semester, I did make a big discovery: I can like archives, but I just don't connect with it. I had initially been toying with splitting my specialization between archives and youth literacy, even weighing more heavily in archives, until this semester. I can talk books. I can talk kids' books. I connect on so many levels with books. But archives? This semester was a struggle all the way through, whether it was catching up with the reading or getting the simplest assignment committed to paper. I wasn't on fire and I had to fight to create every sentence. Which is helpful in that it showed me what NOT to do.

I decided to go to library school because I love books. Because helping develop my kids' love of reading made me love kids' books in a whole new way. I took a career detour of sorts years ago when I somehow got away from my original career plan - from the time I was 4 or 5 until I was about 12, I wanted to be a teacher or a librarian - so why am I going to do this to myself a second time? I'm not. Taking this archives class showed me more than ever that yes, I want to be involved in children's literacy. Next semester, I take a collection development class, which any librarian needs to have. I also have an historical research class down, which I thought of dropping; I do, however, need a research class and the class itself sounds interesting. So I'm going to stick with it. After these classes, I'm pretty sure that the rest of my electives will be in children's literacy, perhaps with one or two Web classes to round me out.

Having that direction in place has given me a tremendous sense of relief and peace. Something in my crazy life is settled.

I've been knitting away, but naturally, being sick and knitting equals huge mistakes. Luckily it's a stockinette piece so aside from having to negotiate the ripping back of a few armhole decreases, I should be fine. Grr, regardless.

More tomorrow on books. I should probably get a good night's sleep since I'll be back at work after three missed days. Zoinks.