Enjoying our visitors

Life has been very busy lately, but in a good way. On Friday night through Monday morning, I hosted two young Korean women for a weekend home stay. Our college just hosted eighteen visiting university students and their chaperone, and they were among those visitors.

We frequently have visitors from other countries in our department, but I haven't been involved with them before. In fact, usually I'm unaware or only vaguely aware of their presence. This time, though, I taught an ESL class for them, accompanied them on one of their field trips, and hosted the two young women. They also invited me to help judge a "food festival," a team cooking contest they had at their residential-style hotel.

It was so much fun for me that even though I've been very busy with my job, classes, and homework and holding down the fort while my husband is away (more about that in a future post) I feel like I've been on kind of a vacation. (Not one of the restful kinds, like lying on a Mexican beach--rather, one of the busy and stimulating kinds, like going to Washington D.C. or Disney World.)

They are flying home as I write this, and I will miss them. I hope they will send me some photos, since I didn't take any, and if they do, I will post them here. I'll also write about some of the things I did both with the young women and with the class, whether or not I get some photographs.

Hipper librarians

This New York Times article has been circulated on several listservs I’m on, as well as e-mailed to me by my son. It discusses the "hipper" new librarians, and I guess that’s a good thing. I still find it concerning in terms of this being a mid-life career change for me. I couldn’t really pull off "hip" when I was young, so I doubt that’s going to get easier now.

I guess the age discrimination thing goes both ways, though. Here is a letter from a woman who feel she is experiencing age discrimination in the job market, and another from someone who feels she is having trouble because of her youthful appearance. I guess the thing to do would be to take the "do" advice from one of them, and interchange them in order to have "don’t" advice.

If all else fails, I guess I’ll have to get a tattoo, or at least get something besides my ears pierced. I always thought that eyebrow thing looked kind of cute.