Really Big Manuscripts

Probably not going to be a reality show at any point, but there are a lot of Really Big Manuscripts out there which one normally doesn’t get to see. One notorious breed of super huge manuscripts are what my coworker refers to as “Filzas,” or large books of Italian accounts and legal documents from the [...]

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Vernon, NJ

I took a vacation for about 10 days in northern New Jersey, in a small town called Vernon.
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I was charged with caring for: two rats, three cats, a small pond of fish, a deer and her two fauns, two squirrels, and two finches. Located in the middle of the mountains, it rained once [...]

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Macabre Manuscripts

One of my projects this summer was to examine some “hybrid books” (a printed book with some manuscript – handwritten – sections) and describe the manuscript portions. Most/all of these can’t even be found in any kind of online catalog, only in the card catalog in the Rare Book room, and even they will only [...]

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Snowstorm in N.E.

The big snowstorm has hit, and already in some areas of the yard we have 10 inches of wet, snowball snow. We lost power for a good three hours, during which time my mother and I had to resort to playing Scrabble (I won, 317 to 184), and she viciously berated me for being a [...]

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Back on the Cape

Yesterday I took the train from Philly to Cape Cod – the rain kind of destroyed any hope of nice scenery, but I got a couple of pictures of NYC through the mist, and also one of the feet of the little girl in the seat ahead of me.
The rain we had yesterday turned to [...]

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Christmas in Philadelphia

Well, not really Christmas. Yesterday the roommate and I went to Rittenhouse Square to see the tree-lighting. The promise of booths and fun was sort of ruined by the rain – there ended up being about two booths, 50-odd people, and a somewhat disappointing tree, although there were some good times had thanks to free [...]

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Philly Storage Solutions, pt. 1

The other day I got the chance to go see the library’s high density storage (HDS) warehouse. It sort of felt as if I were being inducted into some kind of secret society. We entered the ware house through an unlabelled lobby, signing in with a guard, going down a few levels in an elevator, [...]

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Fall Frolics

Despite having a bump the size of a small egg protruding from my achilles tendon (slammed it into a rocking chair), I’ve been tromping about Philly with the roommate and her friend-who-dissects-mouse-spleens, C. Went to the Mütter Museum for the first time, where we all turned into 8 year old boys (“Ewwww!! That’s so cool!!”) [...]

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First day of school

I felt a bit giddy yesterday morning as I waited for the crossing guard (there’s a charter school right near my apartment) to wave me across the street. The air has started to have that fall crisp in it, and it was my first day of school! With my backpack and packed lunch, I did [...]

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The Inevitable

Well, it’s finally happened. Real life has encroached upon our untouchable haven of an apartment. I emerged from the shower to see a MOUSE run into my closet. Growing up on a (non-working) farm, I’m not wholly new to this kind of thing. But there, I had two good mousing cats who’d take care of [...]

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