Day 2 in the life

That’s it. I’m dropping out.

Today’s day was interrupted by a wholly pointless meeting with our department chair. Working backwards through the story, I wish he had just returned my email suggesting the meeting with a “yep, you’re screwed, no need to meet.”

Or that he had returned my first email with a “yep, you’re screwed, sorry, nothing I can do.”

Here’s the problem: I have three classes left. One core class, one class for the law librarianship specialization, and one pure elective. The class for the law library specialization is only offered one time per year, in the spring. It is on Saturday morning. I can’t take classes on Saturdays.  The core class is offered twice this spring: on Saturdays (ugh) and on Thursday afternoons. Afternoons. Not evenings. 3:40. Technically? I could take that section. I could take three hours of vacation every week and piss off my clients and annoy my coworkers and use all of my vacation time. (Note: I am incredibly lucky to accrue 6 hours of vacation time every pay period.)

I wanted to know if there would be any options to address this dilemma.

I left my meeting with the department chair with two next steps: talk to my advisor (who teaches the law librarianship class) to see if she would be open to teaching it on a weeknight. Next spring. Because why should I finish in the summer like I’d hoped to? And pray. I kid you not. I said to the chair, “so I guess my next step is to pray that [the core class] is offered at a time I can take it over the summer?” and he didn’t counter that.

But my day wasn’t all bad, and my trip to that side of the city wasn’t completely wasted, as the meeting was followed by an event where I met my Urban Alliance intern. I’m looking forward to working with her this year (she starts in our office on Monday)–my first impressions were very positive. She’s very well spoken and quite mature for a high school senior! I’ve got to say: if you work in a city with Urban Alliance, you should strongly consider becoming a job site. They do an amazing job of preparing and working with their students for a successful year. (Private job sites are required to make a substantial contribution to Urban Alliance to be a job site, but they also do “unpaid” sites–the student is still paid but the site doesn’t have to pay–for non-profit and government job sites. Not guaranteed, but a possibility.)

That was all just this afternoon; earlier I had a meeting with a colleague about lawyer stuff (read: privileged conversation) and spent an inappropriate amount of time on the phone with banks. How did THIS week become the week during which I need to do all of the prep work for buying a condo? (And OMG I AM GOING TO OWN MY HOME BEFORE THANKSGIVING. –depending on contingencies)

Stay tuned for day 3, which includes a field trip for school and some last minute legal work for one of my clients.

HLSDITL! (Day 1)

It’s round two of Hack Library School Day in the Life. And what a week it promises to be.

But first, my crazy fish:

Dagger nose-down That’s Dagger. Nose-down in his plant.

Now, back to relevant stuff. Today is Monday, which means class after work. Which means a very long day. Today I managed to get up more-or-less with my alarm clock, giving me time to toss the ingredients for mushroom barley soup in my slow cooker. The only problem with this is that I’ll spend all of class eager to get home. There are worse things in life!

Big stuff today. I spent a chunk of time watching an old D.C. Council meeting in search of the rationale given for an amendment to a bill related to a project I’m working on. Prescient moment: a currently incarcerated then-Councilmember speaking about legislation relating to ex-offenders (or “returning citizens,” as we call them here). One information access problem here (okay, a bunch of them): 1. I couldn’t find amendments on our office network drive. Seems to me that we ought to have them somewhere accessible. 2. We don’t have meeting agendas saved on our office network drive either.* I had to go ask one of our Amazing Admins (I think this is going to be their new title from now on; they could have their own act in a show!) to look in her files. 3. Videos don’t have bookmarks so I had no way of knowing where in the video was the part I was looking for.** The meeting was over five hours long. Ultimately I found it and all was well with the world.

Other big things today: finalizing my decisions on mortgage and settlement companies. Because with everything else going on in my life, I decided it was time to buy a condo. If not now, when?*** Right?

And class, of course. Didn’t do all the reading because I’ve decided (apparently, subconsciously) that this is my semester to be a bad student.

 

* IDEA! There’s no reason why I can’t create such a folder. Initiative, I haz it.

** Let me explain why I didn’t know where on the video I was looking, even though I had an agenda from the meeting. Legislative meetings have two parts: a consent agenda, and a non-consent agenda. The consent agenda is voted on in a block with a unanimous vote. The non-consent agenda is voted on item-by-item. The non-consent agenda is addressed in the order that it’s printed on the agenda, BUT sometimes items get removed from the consent agenda and then who knows when they’ll be talked about. That was the case here.

*** Pirkei Avot 1:14.

Department of Redundancy Agency, Repetition Administration

As I noted earlier, it really isn’t necessary for the District’s laws to refer repeatedly to the “Mayor of the District of Columbia.” Really, “Mayor” is just fine. And if you weren’t sure, we even have a law that says so.

But if you insist on using the full title in every freaking paragraph of the law, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to encounter the following:

“The Mayor may…delegate…to an agency of the government of the District of Columbia, designated or established by the Mayor of the District of Columbia.” (Of course, a delegation provision is pretty unnecessary, too, as the Home Rule Act specifies that the Mayor may delegate anything he darn well feels like delegating other than approving or vetoing legislation.)

The biography game

I’m still reading Wolf Hall, but my library is now open on Sundays!  and with concern that the federal government shutdown will continue beyond the point at which the District can remain open, I took a break from working on my independent study on Sunday as I figured I should get to the library, pronto.

With nothing on my immediate to-read list, I decided to play the biography game. I read this idea somewhere, and like most ideas, I remembered it without remembering its source. The biography game works as follows: go to the biography section of the library. Go to where your biography would be (if you had one), and read the biographies on either side of your name. That’s it. When I got to the correct shelf, it turned out that on either side of my name were memoirs. (Girl, Interrupted, and The Liars’ Club.) I didn’t want to read memoirs, so I kept going. In one direction I had success: a biography of Elia Kazan. In the other direction? Memoir, memoir, memoir, memoir, essays about Franz Kafka. So I broke my rule, and I checked out a memoir. I expect to learn a good deal from it, though. It’s “a true spy thriller” by Reza Kahlili.

Who knew I was so bad at following simple rules?

What games have you played to find books in the library?

 

You-Lee-Muh

This semester I am doing an independent study, tentatively entitled “The dual challenges of online legal publication: hackability vs. authenticability.” I’ve committed to submitting the literature review section of my paper to my advisor by Tuesday. (Or ON Tuesday?) Consequently, I’m beginning the literature review section today. (Kidding. I’ve been working on research since the beginning of the semester.)

I came across a video from a presentation given at Rutgers Law School last summer about developing a UELMA-compliant platform for New Jersey statutes. The subject of the presentation was described as “how the N.J. Statutes could be made available cheaply, and in an UELMA compliant manner.” Exactly what I’m looking at.

Only the presenter pronounces the name of the law as “You-Lee-Muh.” I’m a very picky person, and things like that annoy me. It’s unfair, I realize.

Ultimately, I gave up on the video halfway through. The presenter shared some important ideas: make sure to have permanent versioning, links to session laws, ways to deal with repealed sections, etc (see approximately minute 25:30), but didn’t–at least in the part of the video that I watched–address the question of authenticability. I have other sources for research on hackability; if the program is advertised as being about UELMA, I expect it to address authenticability.

And please, people, pronounce it right.

 

Close reading, episode 2

“not less than 48 hours or 2 business days, whichever is greater”*

Let’s see here. 48 hours is two days. There’s no getting around that one. Two business days might be longer if there’s a weekend or a holiday (or a government shutdown?). 48 hours will never be longer than two days. So why not just say “2 business days”??

 

*Open Meetings Amendment Act of 2010, D.C. Law 18-350.