Web Librarian

You’ve heard that goals need to be “SMART,” right? It’s a fairly common model for making goals, you know, not pointless. And I have, over the past few years, improved at making goals “Specific,” “Measurable,” “Relevant,” and “Time-bound.” The first two, especially, I do well—I think it’s the engineering training that makes those so easy.

But, every once in a while, I realize that I have totally skipped the “A,” which stands for “Achievable.” One of my major weaknesses is perfectionism (and it is a weakness, more often than it’s a strength, especially within the intersection of libraries and web development), which is part of the problem. Also, although I have a little bit of project management training, I sometimes fail to think through the risks inherent to any given project. In the particular example I’m writing about, today, now that I am sitting down and acknowledging them, I believe the major risks are overcommitment/burnout (for me), others’ lack of time or interest (too small/busy a committee), insufficient groundwork having been laid, and a myriad of existing and potential technical hurdles.

I’m not here to declare failure on this project, but to acknowledge, to myself and to the world, that my vision of the project was unreasonable. I need to dial it down a bit, aim for something that can be achieved in a reasonable timeframe and that can be grown into the eventual vision I have for this project, or something equally good. I thought that a small group of committed volunteers and I would bring this whole thing from [essentially] zero to DONE in a matter of several months, and that’s just not realistic. One, my group of volunteers may be very small, indeed; only two people have expressed interest, and that was with reservations. There might be one or two others who would help, if I asked individually. So, not many. Two, “DONE”? Really?

Here’s the thing, though: we can totally get some good work done. We CAN get a blog going, to feature existing librarian volunteers; we can maybe survey our membership to see what volunteering people are already doing and share that data; and—admittedly, this is not as cool as an ongoing volunteer clearinghouse that our communities all know about and that is self-sustaining with minimal committee intervention, but it is more achievable: we can set up a Librarian Volunteer Day in the state. That will be a lot of work, true; it’s probably an aggressive goal, but it is an achievable goal.

I find my blood pressure is going down, a little, just having acknowledged all of this and dialed my goals back into some semblance of reasonableness. /sigh/

(Blogs: for making mistakes and learning in public, right?)

Google Plus

OK, I don’t know how long this will be available (and I don’t know a better way to capture it forever than to play-and-grab with screen capture—any Elluminate Live wizards out there with a better plan?), but my Google Plus talk is available here. You’ll need to fill in the email address and name boxes, for some reason I don’t understand, but nothing will happen because of it—you can put in gibberish with an @ sign, and it won’t know. :)

It isn’t the world’s best Elive session, but neither is it the worst. I wish I’d said “um” fewer times, and there were a few things I meant to get to but didn’t…. but it was interactive and pleasant, and I think everyone who attended learned something! I call it a success.

Emerging Leaders

Moving to future plans… I’m going to propose the formation of an ad-hoc Librarians Build Communities (LBC) committee to the Alaska Library Association E-Council. (The ad-hoc committee being a precursor to a full-blown LBC program in the state, which, by the way, is only one of the five items on Group G’s to-do list for this six-month period: “… extend and implement Librarians Build Communities in pilots within group members states” [sic].) For the text of my proposal, I borrowed heavily from the Wisconsin LBC proposal, which one of our mentors shared with us. Since I’m just asking to form an ad-hoc committee, I can’t imagine they will say no.

I still found the proposal intimidating to write, because there is so much undecided right now. Our committee hasn’t met, other than at conference, and both the mentor who was on the LBC project last year and our ALA staff liaison (who was last year’s liaison) were unable to attend that meeting. We could be way off in our thinking and not even know it, one month in, which I find very worrying. I mean, there could be more done than we think. (Or there could be LESS done than we think.) We’re meeting on the 28th and the 6th, and I hope that 5 months is enough time to get some quality work done. *fret fret fret*

Anyway, I built a website, just to have something to show (and also, yeah, to better understand what needs to be done, from a technical standpoint), and, if I seem a little, I don’t know, stressed, it’s because the process was a definite eye-opener. We’ll have to do a lot of work from scratch, to make this program work nationally, from both a programmatic and a technical standpoint. Technically, even just using Google forms and PBwiki, there are too many moving parts for most state-level committees to get it all right. And, even if they get it all right, it relies on too many external services to be full-proof. Scary. Programmatically, without a good technical solution for volunteer matching, this is going to be a nightmare for states to maintain. … On the bright side, having built this site, I now have some ideas about how to code up something that will work. I think.

*fret fret fret* (This is a precursor to *panic*, but I am hoping not to get there.)

AkLA Conference

AkLA stuff is moving along. We had a meeting about the NMRT Social and Conference Orientation, this morning. I feel better about that. It will go awesome, or it won’t, but if we fall short of awesome, it definitely won’t be due to lack of preparation.

I submitted the reports I’m responsible for (with pictures!), and I have an agenda for the NMRT meeting. So, yay for that!

Snapshot Day is done enough for conference, with pretty awesome little “teaser” handouts. (I wasn’t involved in the handouts, other than saying “yes, that’s fantastic, great job!” but I’m really psyched about them.) That won’t be much work again until April.

My lightning talk is … well, I have a topic. And, like, at least two slides! (Out of 20.) That’s what I’m going to work on as soon as I post this, actually. And then again from home this evening. (I thought I’d work on it over the weekend. But I’m nearing burnout, I can tell. I spent Friday night and Saturday CLEANING MANY OF THE THINGS, at home, instead of doing work-work. Not a great sign.) … Don’t look at me like that! I’m not being irresponsible, exactly: all of this work I’ve done on LBC is relevant, since that’s my topic. I’m hoping my talk with inspire people to join my state-level committee. ;) … It will be a much happier talk than this blog post has been, I should say. It’s a great idea, a great advocacy tool, and generally really worth people’s time … I’m just fretting over a short timeframe and insufficient data. And I’m only fretting as hard as I am because I tried to implement the technical side of a state-level pilot all by myself and am [far] less than pleased about the results. Details, I guess. It’s still a cool project.

I’m excited about conference, though! I have been known to forget, over the course of a year, how much I like the people at AkLA. It’s a very nice community. And Fairbanks in the winter will be a new and different experience.

And now, after looking more into it and organizing my thoughts (as much as I ever do—see photo on left), I find that I actually have more than half an hour of content to cover, in my Google Plus for Education talk. Much more. But the online session is set to shut down right after 2:30, I believe, so I’ll have to restrain myself.

(The in-person session went OK. Not amazingly, but not badly.)

Here are the links I’ll share:

• Google Plus Cheat Sheet
• Michelle Stephens’s talk (57 minutes) on using Google Plus with students – covers the pros and cons and many of the nitty-gritty details I won’t have time to get to
• Michelle Stephens’s blog posts on Google Plus, which, again, go into really useful detail, both on the pro and con side
• Sarah Houghton-Jan’s post about teaching Google Plus – this is included to help you, if you want to turn around and teach it to others
• My G+ Profile, in case anyone wants to chat about any of this

Here’s a very, very condensed version of what I plan to say, with the basics of using G+ left out:

• Blackboard is awful. It lacks basic community-building options like avatars and “like” functionality, and discussions are super clunky, due to little-to-poor notification functionality (from the students’ perspective).
• Ideally, we would be able to find something that 1) maintains student privacy; 2) students are already using (or can be taught to use with minimal difficulty); 3) makes discussions easy, with threading, avatars, and text markup; and 4) has notification settings that can easily be toggled. G+ hits most of those, though its markup is a little tricky (*bold*, _italic_), and setting up circles for classes is a little tricky—rather, getting students to all add each other is tricky.
• Once everyone is all circled up, though, discussions would be very easy. Post a thing, ask people to +1 it when they’ve read it, encourage students to post to the circle, encourage discussion of what gets posted…
• Hangouts are great for (up to 10) people working together on group projects, committees, and virtual office hours. You can share Google Docs, watch YouTube videos together, and, if I’m not mistaken, screen share.
• Using it for a real-time backchannel, during class, would be pretty great. Goodbye clickers, I never liked you anyway.
• Two caveats: most universities will frown on discussing grades in G+, since Google’s privacy policies are a little vague. (I don’t know if we email our students their grades, but if we do, then it’s a non-issue, since they’re already in Gmail.) Also, Google’s not entirely 508 compliant. They’re working on it. But you may find yourself unable to require G+ interactions, since there may be students with disabilities who can’t use it—I assume the same policies as we have for Gmail would apply.

I keep being asked if I have free time at the Alaska Library Association conference, coming up on February 23-26 in sunny Fairbanks, and I keep having to look up my registration. So I thought I’d share my schedule (even though I’ve learned not to post ahead of time what I’m going to attend). This way, I’ll have it in an easy-to-view format, and I’ll be able to share it. Plus, I haven’t planned all my meals, so I’m hoping to make plans with folks (look for bold text). :) If I put a star (*) by it, I’m either organizing or presenting, so I have to attend; if I have already paid for it, I’m probably hard to talk out of it; most other things are optional.

Thursday:

• Morning & afternoon: fly in, check in, go to Registration (12-6:00 PM, Westmark Hotel Lobby, shouldn’t be a problem); if it isn’t bitter cold (heh), explore downtown Fairbanks; if it IS bitter cold, drink coffee, deal with work email, maybe hit up the fitness center, and generally do the pre-conference chilling out thing
• 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM: Exhibitor Reception / Silent Auction
• *7:00 PM – 9:00 PM: New Members Conference Orientation/Coach and Rookie Social

Friday:

• ~8am: Hotel breakfast
• 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Opening Keynote with the Fairbanks Mayor and the Anythink Libraries speaker
• 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM: Coffee Break near exhibits
• 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: President’s Program: Building Library Clout in a Tough Climate (well, either that or Patents – Help Your Users Locate Information)
• 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM: President’s Program: Marketing That Makes a Difference
• 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: State of the State Luncheon (I paid for this, so I’ll probably go :))
• 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: AkLA General Membership Meeting and Awards
• 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Coffee break near exhibits
• 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM: Beyond Focus Groups 101 (I have some doubts about the applicability of this one, because most UX-savvy folks seem to say “don’t do focus groups!” – but maybe this session will help me avoid the worst pitfalls of this method)
• 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM: Dinner – I would like to make plans with someone, for this!
• 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM: Dessert Reception at the University Alaska Museum of the North (so worth the $10, if you haven’t signed up for it yet!)

Saturday:

• ~8am: hotel breakfast
• 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM: Library Marketing Toolkit 101 (depending how late I stayed out on Friday :))
• 9:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Coffee Break near Exhibits
• 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM: Secrets of the Stressed Out Brain (I have some concerns about this one, because the same presenter is talking, in another session, about how boys’ and girls’ brains are really fundamentally different, a view which is not supported by the bulk of psychological research; but here’s hoping she sticks to stress and not gender, in this one)
• 11:30 AM – noon: Check out Poster Sessions?
• Noon – 2:30 PM: I need lunch plans!
• 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM: Net Neutrality
• *4:30 PM – 6:00 PM: Library Lightning Talks (Pecha Kucha-style. I still haven’t picked my topic. *blush*)
• 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM: Conference Dinner – Alaska Spirit of Reading with Ishmael Hope, Alaska Native (also paid for)

Sunday:

• hotel breakfast
• I haven’t signed up for it, but I’m considering going to How to Make an Interactive Book Program for Small Groups at 9:45. Not super relevant to my current job, but the most relevant talk, during that time period, is by someone whose spiel I’ve already heard. :)
• *11:30 – 12:30 AM: New Members Roundtable Meeting (Please join us! We’re voting for officers and making plans for 2012. Everyone who has been a member of AkLA for 7 or fewer years is eligible for NMRT membership. There’s no fee. We put on one conference session [or social] per year, and we try to do some kind of mentoring [which, this year, is tied into our social—we may stick with that model, or not, depending how it goes], and … that’s pretty much all our roundtable has to get done. Anything else we do is up to whoever is interested in doing it!)
• 12:45 PM – 2:15 PM: Endnote Luncheon w/ Molly Raphael
• 2:30 PM – 3:15 PM: AkLA E-Council Meeting (assuming I’m still on E-Council)
• 3:30 PM – 7:00 PM: ???
• 7pm: Cab it to the airport

I sort of got volunteered to give a talk on Google Plus (seriously, I missed a meeting of UAA’s Elearning Working Group (“Elearn”) to go to my library’s holiday party in early December, and I found out in January that I would be giving a half-hour presentation via Elluminate Live on February 17). I see how they decided to volunteer me: I’m on Elearn’s Social Networking in Education subcommittee, and Google Plus was the social network I researched. I did the bulk of the work in putting together a pros & cons list, on using G+ in place of some of Blackboard’s (dis)functionality. It was logical enough. And I don’t mind, really.

Or, well, I kind of mind, because I’m currently really overwhelmed: between my role so far in getting Group G’s Emerging Leaders project off the ground, the preparations I need to do for the upcoming Alaska Library Association conference (our state NMRT is still finding its feet, so I’ve found myself doing a lot of duck-herding types of tasks, in addition to the standard Chair duties; also, I am supposed to do a Pecha Kucha-style talk during one of the conference sessions), the work I’ve been doing with Alaska Library Snapshot Day, and my post-conference ALA NMRT to-do list, plus, you know, my day-to-day job, I’m feeling quite overwhelmed. Adding to all of that the preparation of 1) a half-hour session on using a social network I like very much, but 2) don’t use daily, to supplement classroom instruction, which 3) I almost never do, to be presented via software that I use regularly enough, as a participant, but 4) have never had to use as a teacher, when 5) one of my known weaknesses is talking to someone I can’t see (seriously, you should hear the voicemails I leave)… well, I’m not at my best, right now. I’m sure I’ll be glad to have the experience, once it’s over.

And, anyway, that’s why The Powers That Be gave us things like quiet Wednesday night and (please oh please) quiet Saturday afternoon reference shifts, right? So we could do research on things we don’t know about and become the experts our peers seem to have decided we must be? :)

And, to my delight, some of the work has been done for me. For instance, check out this awesome list of 10 ways to use Google Plus in the classroom! I hadn’t thought of some of these! I’m going to read everything she has written about Google Plus in (and out of) the classroom, because she’s discussed it at length and seems to have a nuanced view of it, as opposed to some of the unabashed fandom (or anti-fandom) you normally see, which is so very weak on details and therefore not helpful at all.

The Mobile Professor’s list of potential improvements to the Hangout function makes it clear to me that I need to practice more with Hangouts before I try to teach anyone else about it—not that Hangouts are the only useful G+ function for faculty looking to connect better with students. I am great with Circles and sharing from Reader and so on, and those are also going to be important aspects of my talk. But holding office hours (or other meetings) in Hangouts is a great function and one I feel like I should be able to explain better than I currently can… (I’ve done Hangouts, but not many of them, and always just for fun.) Is anyone interested in experimenting with Hangouts, with me, on Sunday or Monday?

(Ironically, or perhaps just unfortunately, my Emerging Leaders group is going to be meeting via Hangouts… but our first meeting is not until February 28th, well after I’m supposed to give this talk. I will actually be an expert on G+ Hangouts, later this semester! Bummer!)

Anyway, if you’ve done anything awesome with G+ in the classroom, or to supplement classroom meetings, and you’re willing to share, please let me know! I’d love to chat with you!

Finally, I feel like myself again. Being sick mid-week is no fun. … OK, being sick is no fun, period.

An edit from yesterday: I remembered what I was doing at the end of the day, or at least part of it. I was setting up a Doodle and sending out an email to my Emerging Leaders group. Weird that I didn’t remember that, 10 minutes later…

8:30-9:30 – hung out in Starbucks, downstairs from my office, for a change of pace; replied to an email asking for information about Alaska (yay, people are interested in our open position!), replied to an email about Alaska Snapshot Day–it’s going to be awesome, this year, folks!; tried to reply to two other emails (but Mail is set up wrong on my computer… so my replies are written, but have yet to send); posted to my library’s Facebook page, to promote Anchorage Reads
9:30-10 – started this post; worked on fixing Mail (no luck yet… no, wait, there they go! … our Exchange server is so fiddly!); dealt with Facebook; wished for more coffee
10-10:30 – we have these things called “Individual Health Planning sessions,” at UAA, and I had one scheduled for 10am; they took my blood and told me my cholesterol and stuff (my numbers aren’t as good as they were last year, but they aren’t bad, either :))
10:30-10:45 – talked with a colleague about a LibGuides Mystery (neat!)
10:45-11:45 – grabbed some tools of destruction (see photo) for our Subjects A-Z project, maybe we’ll do card sorting!; ran into several colleagues, talked about moose and First Fridays and Etsy; bought coffee
11:45-1:25 – lunch; some email, including a long philosophical question to a colleague about our faculty evaluation criteria; a long status update meeting with my department head (we work 3 offices down from each other, how do we have so much news?)
1:30-2 – Remember that paperwork from earlier this week? Finished that, got it turned in.

It gets shaky after this, because the snow shut Anchorage School District and part of the university down. I spent some time talking to a coworker and some time on email. At some point, Dale came and got me, and I worked the rest of the day from home. I chased down most of the LibGuides Mystery. I added some stuff to TeuxDeux. I’ll probably write post-its for the Subjects A-Z sorting task before giving up on work for the day–week!–while watching “Warehouse 13.”

Back at work after two sick days. Still headachy and tired, but functional enough. (Plus, I have two meetings scheduled today, which it would be better not to miss.)

8:45-9:30am – catch up on phone messages and email, print Staff Development Fund applications, check Facebook (while printing, which took FOREVER), admire the large amounts of very wet snow falling outside
9:30am – noon – read and score Staff Dev applications (which might seem irresponsible, doing it the day of, but they weren’t sent out to the committee until I was already at home, sick) … this was slow going, I admit; I couldn’t concentrate and ended up taking several breaks, wherein I checked Facebook and ate some yogurt and signed up for a bunch of trainings on Springshare products we want to evaluate, later this semester; I also read some emails and checked in several times on the [ALA] NMRT Special E-Board Meeting, held to approve our budget
12-12:30pm – make coffee in preparation for afternoon full of meetings, eat a bagel, and try to find that one research study I wanted to talk about in our later meeting, refresh my memory on what it says
12:30-1:50 – meeting to go over Staff Development Fund applications
2- 3:15 – meeting to put together Subjects A – Z (choosing what those subjects would be, that is); this wasn’t the world’s easiest meeting, but neither was it the worst
3:15-3:30 – telling most of my libraryland contacts about our job opening: http://www.uakjobs.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=76357 (Instructional Design Librarian, gotta love it!)
3:30-3:45 – got some fruit juice and chocolate :)
3:45-4:00 – got a very sweet phone call from a coworker, who was at the stressful meeting and on the committee and wanted to assure me I wasn’t crazy :)
4:00-4:40 – … no idea. Maybe I just stared at my computer? “other duties as assigned”? Going to go check on the contractors, now, and then pick up Dale and then go to the Anchorage Reads party … then sleep, because I’m still not up to 100%

9:15am – emailed work to let them know I’m sick and not coming in
the rest of the day – presumably alternated between napping and drinking juice and playing on the internet … and maybe watching Bones

8:30 – get to work, make oatmeal and coffee, start replying to emails from people I met at conference (yay!) and coworkers
8:45 – phone call, dealing with some misunderstandings about the upcoming AkLA NMRT social (it was pre-coffee, and someone was angry at me; not a good start to the day, but we did work it out by the end of the call)
9:00 – chat with my coworkers about weekends, moose, retirement, how to staff the reference desk
9:15 – boot up my laptop (I already had my desktop on) and start the blog post, while I eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee; schedule a meeting about the AkLA NMRT Social (send the meeting announcement to the wrong NMRT–that’s right, the big one, boo; also, spilled oatmeal on my shirt)
9:30 – reminded by Twitter to put in a help ticket with Serials Solutions; I want to see if we can use their 59 “disciplines” (yes, scoped search boxes are coming!) to inform our own list of Subjects, for LibGuides, but the meeting is this week!; then read/write some Twitter, some Facebook, quite a bit more email (catching up on listservs)
10:15 – order ribbons for AkLA NMRT
10:30 – more email; IM with husband about contractor, who claims to need our heat off for 3 days(!!) to replace our furnace and water heater
10:45 – went on walk, trying to clear my head and improve my mood; found a fun colleague willing to walk with me
11:30 – feeling much better, started paperwork to get reimbursed for part of Midwinter (we do reimbursals on kind of a “travel grant” model, where you put in an application, are approved [or not], and can have up to $1300 toward conferences and continuing ed per year, but then you need to write a report and submit financial paperwork afterward); took a quick break to buy an item I’d commissioned on Etsy; kept plugging away at paperwork
noon – realized my computer only freezes when I have MS Office open, hmmm
12:30 – impromptu planning meeting with colleague; discussed committee work and work-work
2:00 – late lunch and Google Reader
2:30 – wrote a long and (I hope) persuasive email to a committee of my colleagues, trying to convince them to choose a subject list that will make it easier (or, perhaps, possible?) for me to build cool things with APIs
3:00 – tried to read Library Faculty Evaluation Criteria, but kept getting distracted
3:30 – correcting earlier paperwork
3:45 – realizing I’ve been eating headache medicine like candy all day, and my husband is also suffering; relatedly, email discussion of canceling tonight’s book club, while trying some more with Evaluation Criteria
4:00 – meeting to plan NMRT social
4:45 – some more emailing (sending out NMRT social info and trying to answer one of the tickets in my queue), some more trying to read the Criteria, remembering belatedly to warn my colleagues about a local geocache that uses our library (for which they seemed grateful :))
6:00 – goin’ home!

So I was that person whose luggage went missing, before conference. Awful timing, too: they took a bunch of pictures at the Emerging Leaders meeting, where I was wearing a t-shirt (only mostly covered by a cardigan) and dirty jeans. I even made it on Librarian Wardrobe, I think as a cautionary tale. ;)

But let’s go back a bit. (And if you don’t want to read about airlines and how they’re frustrating, it’s probably fine to skip this whole post. There are no nuggets of wisdom, besides perhaps “Always bring a change of clothes in carry-on.”)

I left Anchorage at 12:30am on Thursday morning, to catch a connection in Seattle, as most Alaskans are wont to do. (We do sometimes have non-red-eyes, or connections in Portland or elsewhere, but it seems to me as though 4/5 of flights leave in the middle of the night and go through Seattle. Great news for next Midwinter, though, right?) As we approached, Air Traffic Control started suggesting that maybe nobody should land right away. We circled for a bit, and then our pilot decided we didn’t have enough fuel to do that indefinitely and (wisely) flew us to Portland.

Which was a disaster.

They weren’t ready for all of Seattle’s incoming flights, which they basically got. None of the desk agents were really willing to talk to us, certainly not about rescheduling flights. They just kept repeating “Call Reservations.” (Heartbreakingly, several people got hung up on after 45 minute waits. I did make it through, after an hour on hold. And once my flight was scheduled, I gave my phone to someone else, so she could schedule hers. We travelers all bonded in an anti-Alaska Airlines kind of way.) My new flight put me in Dallas at 7:15pm, after a connection in San Francisco; this was much too close to the 8:30pm social I had set up, meaning I’d probably miss it, which made me very sad. (Spoiler: I did end up missing it. But I hear it went well! And I doubt there will be snow in June, so we’ll try again in Anaheim.)

But that didn’t make me nearly as sad as the word from the gate agent: “No, we will not be transferring any luggage from this plane. We are sending it all back to Seattle.” I couldn’t believe them! Really? It turns out, they were understaffed and unwilling to call in extra people to deal with the issue. (An issue they had 24 hours’ warning about, I feel like I should point out: I was warned the morning of my flight that Seattle was a mess.) Why they thought it was a good plan to send the plane to Seattle, of all places, is a mystery to me—I have a complaint lodged with Alaska Airlines, and sometime in the next 30 days (no joke! they say there’s a 30 day delay in answering comments!) they will presumably explain. And maybe apologize?

Anyway, I got to Dallas, so that’s great! It only took one extra flight (ANC->PDX->SFO->DFW, instead of ANC->SEA->DFW), and I was only 6 hours late, which, in the scheme of things, is pretty awesome. I shouldn’t downplay that. (And I made it clear, in my complaint, that there were really good aspects to the whole experience. As awful as the luggage part was, the reservation agent was great. I remembered her name and gave her props, even as I complained about the poor decision-making and general unfriendliness displayed by the PDX staff.)

But I wasn’t allowed to put in my luggage claim until I was standing in Dallas; they were unwilling to even think about my luggage until I reached my destination, which I found frustrating. They basically decided that everyone whose flight was supposed to go through Seattle would have to wait a day, minimum, for their luggage. It’s like they were punishing us for having the poor sense to run into bad weather! (I doubt that was really the logic, but it felt that way, in how we were treated and the decisions that were made.)

When I did reach Dallas, I put in the claim, and I took SuperShuttle, and it was 10pm before I got checked into my hotel. I don’t know where nearly 3 hours went, but they did. So no tasty Mexican food for me. (I did hit up Iron Cactus later. It was great! Coconut margarita: total win!)

Anyway, long story … still rather long, I suppose… the phone system called to tell me that they couldn’t locate my luggage. I checked every few hours and received the same message, “Your luggage has not yet been located. We apologize for the inconvenience.” So I went shopping for clothes in Dallas (kind of expensive, especially including cabs), and an hour after I had those clothes—which I skipped a reception especially for Emerging Leaders to meet the ALA leadership to do, heartbreakingly enough—they called to say my luggage would be delivered by 10pm. It was not delivered that night, but rather early the next morning. But I was pretty ticked off. “We cannot locate your luggage” is very different from “Your luggage is on its way to Dallas.” Grr.

Like I said, the lesson is “bring a change of clothes in carry-on.” (The lesson is NOT “bring a giant roller bag in carry-on.” Too many people do that, with too big of bags. It slows down the whole air travel system. I hate that. Don’t be that guy.) The other lesson is “avoid Portland airport,” maybe? Or “Alaska Airlines is great for 8 out of 10 flights, but when they mess up they REALLY mess up.” … I suppose there could be multiple lessons, here.

Anyway, despite the wasted time and money and the embarrassment of wearing dirty clothes to the Emerging Leaders meeting, I still had a great conference. So I try to look back and laugh about it. (Though I guess you can tell from the tone of my post that, if I think too hard about it, the laughter doesn’t come quite as easily…)

(Next post? I think I may take on a copyright issue.)