Just got (and accepted) the offer of an on-campus interview at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, TX, on 15 August. Also, I have a phone interview with U Missouri-Rolla tomorrow.

Executive summary: Things did not go well.

So at the beginning of the journey on Wednesday, it looked like good luck was going to be flooding over me. I got to the Huntsville airport two hours early, as is generally recommended; for once, this turned out to have been a truly good idea.

After getting through security, where I would like to note that the cute young ID-and-boarding-pass guy asked entirely too many friendly personal questions for someone who genuinely was not flirting, I checked the Continental departure board to confirm my flight to Houston. Turns out that not only was my 3PM flight delayed and (as of 1:45PM) not yet rescheduled, the 12:45PM flight hadn’t even started boarding yet.

As I only had a 90-minute layover in Texas, I decided to ask the gate rep for advice. She was very nice and bumped me up to the yet-to-depart 12:45 flight, which started boarding shortly after 2PM. I took this as a good sign, an indication that Teh Universe would be watching my back during the trip. Turns out that Teh Universe had shot its entire wad right at the beginning.

Got to Houston, hung around a while, was delighted to find my flight to Seattle was leaving on time. Was further delighted to find it arrived in Seattle on time, right at 10PM local time.

I went down to the Hertz desk, where I’d reserved a car, and the troubles began.

Turns out that Hertz, at least, doesn’t actually hold cars for those with reservations; instead, they count on cars coming in around about the time that reservation-holders arrive, which seems a rather silly way to go about things. Because of this I didn’t actually get a vehicle until just before midnight, when I’d been planning on driving away around 10:30.

I then drove around, took a couple of wrong turns, and finally arrived at my motel at 1AM Wednesday morning (with, remember, a 10:30 interview looming ahead of me). My heart sank when I saw the place, as it looked like the sort of certain deathtrap that would give Norman Bates the willies. Still, it was a room with a bed, and I needed sleep.

I went up to the office, which at that time of night only communicated with guests through a drawer/slit in a thick bulletproof window. This was a further bad sign.

I gave the clerk my information, he rummaged around through papers and asked if I’d booked directly or through an agent. I told him I’d reserved the room through Travelocity and gave him the appropriate page of my itinerary. He shuffled and ruffled some more papers, made a call to somebody or other, and finally came back with a copy of the reservation cancellation form Travelocity had faxed in.

Now, I’m pretty sure I know what happened: When I booked the trip, the first package I chose fell through; apparently, the flight I’d initially chosen filled up before my reservation was complete. If Travelocity handles requests in parallel rather than sequentially, then, it’s likely that they had requested and received confirmation on the motel reservation while waiting for the flight reservation to go through. When the flight failed, Travelocity would have automatically sent out a motel-reservation cancellation. When they sent out a new motel-res request along with my second package request, the motel got confused.

The upshot is, I was stranded just outside of Seattle at one o’clock in the morning with no room, no rest, and a whole lotta anxiety. I drove from motel to hotel, looking for somewhere to stay, and found nothing until 3AM, when I found a room in another seedy motel that turned out to be the last place one of the Green River Killer’s victims was seen alive.

So! What with procuring the room and getting minimally settled in and all, I wasn’t asleep until 3:30, then I was up again at 7 to get ready for the interview. Needless to say, I was not in the best state to perform a book talk, and it showed.

I did kick ass on the reference interview role-play, though. On the other hand, my ass got kicked on the reader’s advisory role-play, which I hadn’t even been expecting. There was no kicking of anybody’s ass on the first interview component, an exercise I hadn’t even conceived of and which struck me as exceedingly odd: One of my handlers drove me out to the Issiquah branch library (which is very nice) and asked me to stand in front of the door and greet people as they entered. I felt, to put it bluntly, a fool.

So, yeah. Once everything was over, I was so beat from the flight, from the late-night stress, from the lack of sleep, and from the poor performance that I crawled into bed on returning to my motel. I napped, which turned into proper sleeping, which led to my waking up so late in the evening that there was no point in trying to go out and see some of the city. It was really rather a miserable trip, made worse by the fact I certainly don’t expect any job offers to come from it.

Have to admit, I’m really nervous about Seattle tomorrow. Part of it surely comes from my receipt yesterday of another lovely “we’ve decided to go with someone else” calls, part comes from my disastrous phone interview yesterday, and part comes from the fact that at this point I seem to have collected more rejections than is typical for a librarian seeking a first position. My confidence, in other words, is shot all to hell.

Haven’t done one of those free-association thingies in a while, but when I saw the preeminent biology’n'atheism blogger PZ Meyer had one up I knew my time had come. And so:

# Video :: game (wish my first response had been something cool like “drome”, but no)
# Fantasy :: bath (huh?)
# Homework :: backpack
# Crush :: orange
# Late :: pregnancy
# Husband :: wife
# Soccer :: mom
# Wine :: red
# Before :: sunset
# Romantic :: bath

How terribly, disappointingly prosaic, but it does suggest I need to find a place with a nice big tub.

Monday, phone interview with Youngstown State University.

Tuesday, phone interview with Sam Houston State University.

Thursday, interview-like substance[1] in Seattle. Which trip has totally busted my savings, the King County Library System not paying for or reimbursing candidate travel expenses, but it’s kinda my dream destination and so (I hope) worth the financial imperilment.

[1] Instead of final interviews like most public and academic libraries have, this system follows up the prelim interview with a skills test. As near as I can tell the skills test is functionally indistinguishable from a final interview, but it probably is worth some sort of distinction because of the unique nature of hiring in that system. Instead of interviewing and hiring for specific librarian positions, see, they interview and skills-test for slots in an employment pool; when a position opens up, they offer it to the highest-rated pool member, then the next, then the next, until an offer is accepted. A friend who used to live in the Pacific NW says this is pretty typical organizational behavior for The People’s Republic of Seattle.

People here, almost unanimously, consider a 15-minute cross-town drive to be an onerous journey to be undertaken only when life itself is on the line.

She just got a staff job at Auburn that pays considerably more than most entry-level faculty librarian positions and carries no onerous publication requirement.

Let’s have a big ol’ Kermit the Frog style “Yayyyyyyy!”, shall we?

Have been in a weird state of not-depression ever since graduation, which has exacerbated the too-fidgety-to-write-down-whatever-I-have-to-say mode I’ve been in for most of this year. Hoping it will pass once I get a job offer somewhere, anywhere

More than my poor abandoned blog, I feel bad about my poor, abandoned friends. Connie, Lyda, Michael and Pam, all the many wonderful people I’ve disappeared away from while floating around in a no-responsibilities haze. Mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.

Huntsville has been very good to me so far. Here’s hoping it wasn’t just a fluke.

An up-side to my temporary move-in with my brother[1] is that, for the first time in years, I have a bed instead of a futon. And it’s a lovely bed, too, the one I was using during my previous 5-year stint in Huntsville.

It’s small, only a full-size, but it’s got history. It was my Granny’s bed, the one she pulled out into her living room before I was born, when she decided she wanted to deal with as few rooms in her house as possible. She babysat me for most of my first ten years, so this bed was a daily fixture and remains a strong reminder of her.

(I know, you’ve never seen me this sentimental, right?)

And it’s lovely in its own right, an early-C20 construction of steel tubing that is more than a little reminiscent of an old-fashioned hospital bed. It used to have the most fabulous golden patina, but for some reason my father decided I would like it better if he gave it an all-over coating of goopy black paint. Grr. Still, it has good lines.

Anyway, I decided this time I would take my bedding seriously, so once I got unpacked last night I headed down to Target for bed dressings. The most cost-effective purchase turned out to be one of those bed-in-a-bag sets (nifty pattern, decent quality 220 thread count all cotton sheets, no complaints).

I got the sham onto the box spring with no problems, it being fairly intuitive. I of course new how to do fitted and flat sheets, the comforter, and the pillowcases.

But now I have these two leftover pieces of fabric that I think are called pillow shams, and I haven’t a clue what to do with them. Do you buy special pillow-sham pillows to stuff into them, or do you slip them over your regular, already pillowcased pillows during the day and remove them before sleepy time? That seems like a ridiculous amount of unnecessary work, but the notion of buying pillows just to cover up your real pillows seems plain silly to me. (I’ve mentioned before that, outside of the whole man-sex thing, I’m not very good at being gay.)

So. Pillow shams. I got ‘em, what am I supposed to do with ‘em?

[1] Here’s the deal: My stepfather’s mother grew increasingly unable to take care of herself but refused to voluntarily move in with my mom and stepdad. Eventually the situation, and the state of her house, got so bad that my parents had to basically kidnap her and install her, against her protests, in the very nice trailer they moved out of after finishing their new house. Stepgrandma still owns this house and refuses to let it go, so my brother moved in as sort of a long-term house-sitting, repair-and-improvement gig. And so now I’m in what I think was my stepfather’s childhood bedroom.