TGIF!

I swear, there's nothing longer than a 4-day work week. 6-day weeks fly by, but the ones that are FOUR days long just take forever!

So to celebrate TGIF, here are some other things I was thankful for today:

1) The sweater and scarf Patty gave me. Brrr, it was cold today!

2) My mom convincing me to bring the waterproof jacket to Philly, since it's been raining for two days.

3) Waterproof boots that let me truck right on through the puddles everyone else has to walk around.

4) Fingerless gloves that let you work your iPod, but still convert into mittens when you get too cold.

5) Sidewalks that are wide enough you can walk on the far side and not get splashed by the cars driving by.

6) Tea in the fellows' common room at the APS.

7) Driving rain which drives 99% of the smokers off the sidewalks - I swear, Philly has more smokers than all of the countries of Europe combined!

8) Not having to ride my bike in the rain, because I'm close enough to walk.

Research accomplished today:

1) Read two almanacs

2) Read through the W&M Quarterly.

3) The internet was down today at APS. Lacking internet (and thus the ability to order new books) I decided to read through the card catalogue. Don't worry - it was just the section with the 1500-1700 books!

The American Philosophical Society

So I got up bright and early yesterday morning for my first day at the APS... and got lost walking to the library. I turned north on 5th street instead of south. Oops.

Eventually I did make it in. Everyone at the APS is very nice. The building is right across from Independence Hall (now I will always be orientated!), which reminds me of being in good ol' Colonial Williamsburg. They recently remodeled the inside of the building and there's a brand spanking new fellows room which a chalkboard, whiteboard, fridge, microwave, and lockers - you know, all the comforts of home AKA what a gal needs to make tea.

It's fascinating being surrounded by people who mostly do American history. They've introduced me to some cool new resources I didn't know about before. Most of it's American-related, but you know America WAS a British colony for a little while!

Research accomplished yesterday:

1) Looked at a bunch of secondary sources.

2) Realized I probably need to just sit down and read the entire Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London pre-1700.

Welcome To The Folger

So I spent all yesterday reading my homework (ack! at my age... err, stage in my dissertation). Today I went into the Folger Shakespeare Library (which is conveniently located next to the Library of Congress, which I hadn't realized) for the first of my Dissertation Writing Seminar meetings.

The library's nice, though I'm mildly puzzled by a library which serves British historians Orange Pekoe tea. Not that I have anything against Orange Pekoe but....

Met some cool people from English departments all over the East Coast/Midwest and one other historian who together with me forms the History department contingent of our seminar. One of these days, we too will emerge from our cocoons of ignorance to flutter about in the light of Literary Analysis, but until then we must be content to worry about concrete facts like dates and historical causality (e.g. if A happens before B, then B cannot have caused A) because I don't think I was quite following everything else they talked about.... Must brush up on my lit jargon for next month.

Seriously though, this is going to be a lot of fun. And I've already read two of the books that have been assigned for our next meeting - sweet!

Research accomplished:

None for my dissertation, but I read more seventeenth-century poetry than I'd ever read before in my life (that I remember), so that was at least different...

It's Raining, It's Pouring, At Least There's No Snoring

So I have one of those tea pitchers where you can both brew your tea and then pour it using a little spigot at the bottom. Today, as I'm leaving the room, I pour myself a glass of tea.

The spigot gets stuck into the open position.

There is a half gallon of tea in my pitcher. Needless to say, my glass is not that big.

So I frantically try to unstick the spigot. Failing that, I pull the pitcher out of the fridge and stuff it in the sink so I'm not pouring tea all over the fridge and floor. Still can't get the spigot unstuck. I turn the pitcher on its side, so the liquid can't reach the spigot, and it starts leaking out the top.

I just can't win with this thing.

Finally I get the spigot unstuck and then thank my foresight in buying a LOT of paper towels as I mop up the mess.

Flash forward about five hours to a strange popping noise in the back of my car. I go to check on it and discover that one of the bottles in the six-pack of Coke I bought at the Meier's has popped its little seal and is now leaking all over my floor mats. At least it was only on the rubber one, not the cloth one, but c'mon, seriously? Both in one day?

In other news, it's Labor Day Weekend so I spent the day hiking in Meadowbrook Park. It has the awesomemest kids' play area (any Dogwood Elementary School alums out there may visualize the old Creative Playground) and acres of tallgrass praerie nature reserve. Way cool.

Is This Seat Taken?

So I went off for my normal tea break today, and came back to find this guy sitting in my chair.

Now, admittedly, I hadn't left any books at my spot. Or my computer. Those are the big things that even the absolutely clueless can't miss. But you still have to be pretty out of it to not see all my papers, my pencil, and my laptop cord.

I went and carefully extricated my stuff (he'd set his laptop on my papers, his books on my pencil, and was SITTING on my computer cord).

He never once acted embarrassed or apologized.

(Insert judgmental term of choice here.)

Research accomplished today:

1) Read some commonplace books.

2) Plowed my way through a bit of a latin arithmetic textbook. Definitely need to brush up on my latin.

It Must Be Monday. And The First Day of Classes.

You can always tell when it's Monday because EVERYTHING has to happen all at once. Three days worth of stuff (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) gets crammed down into one day, and it's bang-bang-bang like an action-adventure movie. Add to that the fact that UIUC classes start today and you get... a really long blog post.

Today's post-ant adventures started with the bike ride into work. I was biking along, happy as a clam (are clams really happy or did I just make that up?) when one of the traffic lights turned yellow. I decided there was no way I'd make the light so I stopped, thus enabling the bus driver across the street from me to complete his left turn before the light turned red. And awesomeness of awesomeness... I got The Wave.

Yes, The Wave. You know that wave - the one bus drivers reserve for their other bus driver friends, especially when said friend has done something incredibly helpful like stopped traffic to allow them to make a particularly difficult left-hand-turn. And I got one! Yippee!

Then I got to Campustown (yes, there's a sign, declaring that you've now entered "Campustown" as opposed to the rest of town) where there are these cool dedicated bike lanes - nice, wide, and up off of street level so you're definitely not in with the cars.

There are pedestrians crawling all over my bike lanes. Never mind the perfectly good sidewalks about two feet to their right (which, BTW, are also perfectly empty of pedestrians). Never mind that I was far from the only frustrated cyclist trying to get through in said bike lanes. Nope. Idiot pedestrians are walking all over the very clearly labelled bike lanes and then look surprised when they get crazy swerved around by cyclists trying to get by.

Despite the best attempts of said pedestrians, I made it to the library ten minutes early and cooled my heels waiting for the Rare Books & Manuscript room to open. Well, to be closer to open. Technically the door is unlocked and I can walk right in to the office area, but I hate to besiege the poor staff when I'm not really supposed to be in there yet. Especially when I am uber-caffeinated and hyped from my bike ride (this phase, alas, does not last me through the whole day.)

I started off with the same old, same old: finishing up the last of the library's copies of Robert Recorde's Grounde of Artes. While I was doing this, Alvan comes in with a book in his hands.

"I thought you'd like to look at this before I put it away," he says, handing me the book.

"What is it?" I ask, carefully taking the book from him and trying to open it without setting it down (for which I'd need a bunch of book rests and other stuff I didn't have.)

No reply. I continue to fumble through the flyleafs, ultra-conscious of the fact that this is a Very Old Book with a Very Old Cover and that the Curator of Rare Books is standing there looking over my shoulder.

"What is it?" I ask again.

"Look at it," he says.

So I keep flipping through blank pages until I find the title page.

Warning: For those of you who haven't studied the history of science, this might not seem like such a huge deal for you. But trust me. This is a Big Deal.

I am holding in my hands a first edition of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.

A moment of reverential (electronic) silence please.

Of course, then I had to give the book back to him. I didn't really need to read it - it's available on EEBO - and that's not the kind of artifact you play around with. But still. I held it in my hand for at least a minute. Beautiful.

In the interests of not going on forever and ever, I will endeavor to cut the rest of my adventures short. They include:

1) Getting to see a British guy using a light sheet (it's basically a clipboard-shaped object attached to a power cord that glows; very cool) to look at watermarks in his eighteenth-century musical scores.

2) Feeling all intelligent because I took my lunch break at 11:30 and hence was just finishing eating when all the students mobbed the Subway at noon.

3) Laughing my head off at three idiotic squirrel hunters during my afternoon tea break.

Um, okay, that last one might need some explanation. These two squirrels had fallen down into a courtyard in the middle of the library building, and couldn't get back out. So these three guys with gloves on were trying to get the squirrels into a squirrel trap. Poor little squirrels were freaked out and kept running into the walls (literally - they bounced off the glass walls that lead inside, scared the crap out of m

Meanwhile, we're all sitting in the cafe saying, "Um, dude, haven't you ever trapped a squirrel before?" The key is not scaring the little critters half to death. It's food. I'll say it again F-O-O-D, food. Nevertheless, they did eventually succeed in rescuing and releasing the squirrels outside where presumably they ran off to have little panic attacks. Or give interviews to Oprah about their harrowing experience. One or the other.

Back to the list:

4) Coming up with a short version of my 401 (or whatever UVA's renumbered them to) seminar title. I finally decided that if I shortened "Popular Science" to "PopSci" I could get all the important parts in. But the sight of "PopSci" still makes me cringe.

5) And lastly, ruining my eyesight trying to read mid-sixteenth-century manuscript annotations in an almanack. But my eyesight is so worth ruining, when I come up with little gems like the following comment one frustrated almanack-reader made in 1554:

Iff any man dedist dilegently take hede to the Contents in this boke, he myght safely haue perceyued that neuer any Astronomyer before tyme dyde wryte & sett forth thynges soe ferre frome the Trowth (As the man haith done) concernyng the nature and dyspocicione of the yere.

Translation: this almanack sucks. Hehehehe.

Welcome to Urbana-Champaign

So I'm playing catch-up a bit here, because I actually arrived in Champaign on Wednesday afternoon after a 5-hour car drive from Dayton, Ohio. (That drive was preceeded by a 9-hour car drive from Virginia.)

I'm staying in an Extended Stay Hotel about 2 miles north of the University. It's a typical motel-style hotel, complete with funky smell from the ventilation system that doesn't keep the smoking and non-smoking rooms hermetically sealed. My asthma loves it already. But the price is right and the people there are uber-friendly and helpful, so I'm not complaining (too much).

The biggest problem I foresee right now is my location. My motel is in the middle of EVERYTHING. Seriously. From Radio Shack to David's Bridal. And don't forget the bizillion places to eat (all within walking distance) - Lonestar Grill, Outback Steakhouse, Taco Bell, Subway, Burger King... To get to campus I have to bike past: Panera, McDonald's, Olive Garden, Barnes & Noble, and ToysRUs. And that's just the first quarter mile.

On to the work stuff. UIUC's rare books & manuscripts library is fantastic, and so are the people in it. Alvan took my down into the sacred vault - the stacks where all the books are stored - shelf after shelf of ancient folios, quartos, and octavos! It was like heaven in an air-conditioned warehouse.

A massive storm rolled in when I first arrived on Wednesday, which would have made the perfect setting for a murder mystery. I can see it now:

It was a dark and rainy afternoon at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). The staff of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library huddled around a battery-operated radio, listening to the weather report: hail, tornados, and severe thunderstorms. One of the interns had just gone down to the stacks and brought a flashlight, just in case the power failed. Because of course, on a day like this, the power inevitably would fail at some point...

Other random items of note:

1) The coffee shop (located in the underground tunnel with connects the various libraries, because we wouldn't want to overshadow the cool agricultural experiments going on next-door) only serves loose-leaf tea and calls Earl Grey "China Grey." Must be a copyright thing. I decided to bring my own Twinings tea bags from now own because, well, it's Twinings!

2) I asked Valerie about a staining pattern on one of my books today... and she sniffed it. Oh yeah.

Research accomplished so far:

I've read a bunch of copies of Recorde's Grounde of Artes. So far nothing too exciting, but I'm going to shift over to almanacs next week and then am expecting to find gold! This is based on what Alvan's told me about his own research - but more on that later. I think this is enough blogging for a Friday night!