Elena Colón-Marrero @elenarchivist@glammr.us

Things are becoming very real on the moving front. We’ve secured a realtor & have our own portal. There’s a house I ADORED with records in the Bentley but we couldn’t move fast enough. But there’s this other one that’s bright yellow, with a pool & grassy backyard but the taxes are a lot.

This means leaving California and heading back to Michigan without any jobs. But that’s where our support network is and our money will go so much farther. As much as I’ll miss the home we made here & my favorite places to be I just can’t do it anymore.

After speaking with my mom & my partner it’s been decided that will leave my current position at the end of the year. Till then I’m keeping it on the DL until I have my ducks in a row. My breaking point was seeing the curators argue for/against inclusivity about the term “counting frame” vs “abacus” but when I suggest ways we can surface Black, Indigenous, and other voices of color in our collection I’m met with “we need to talk it more” & of course we have the exact same convo we’ve had for yrs

Asking for me: How do you know it’s time to leave a job, even if that means you will be unemployed for the foreseeable future?

I went to encode this finding aid but it’s not even done! I had to be blunt with my coworker and say “this looks unfinished. You need these two sections to match. The A,B lists should be Sub-series 1 and Sub-Series 2 (after a very long discussion on if those sections were sub series because they can’t both be yes/no). Please remove all of the brackets and tell me where you are getting subject terms.”

Since our Senior Archivist left we’ve split up finding aid duties. The new Senior Archivist writes all the front matter and double checks all of the records in our cataloging system. I do the encoding, pdf compiling, and submission. I thought this would be fine, but there’s a lot lacking in the front matter & record checks that’s involved more work for me but is also keeping me from getting this darn grant done.

It’s all been pretty weird since I don’t think our leadership have taken it seriously considering we are a museum. But also we are in the middle of new laptop deployment & they want everyone to have the new laptops to wfh with.

Our FOH staff are being hit pretty hard with the closure. Our project archivist left the grant early so collections is trying to see if we can allocate that money to FOH

MPOW has finally announced that its closing to the public. The only WFH info we’ve gotten is to “talk to supervisors & department vps” which means different departments are getting different instructions. I’ve been told on the DL that I can work from home a “few days a week or as much as I feel comfortable”

There's something about February conferences where coworkers of mine announce that they are leaving while I'm gone. Thankfully I found out in real time this year.

My dog met my coworker's new dog in the parking lot today & coworker's dog was quite aggressive to mine. They eventually started to ignore each other & do their own old dog stuff alone.

Anyway a certain person in IT is trying to tell us what our best practices should be without even acknowledging the fact that no one has been responsible for our public search since the person who was left. I am very glad this person does not have overarching power anymore.

They (really just one person) blamed us for using double dates as a "horrible idea" to "bad practice" to fixing what was broken.I literally cannot roll my eyes any harder.

We were having trouble with some of our records showing up on our online search in one view but not the other. Turns out IT was using two different types of queries. Updated one from 1.4 to 7.1 without thinking to check for problems.

My candidate statement for SCA’s nominating committee is due tomorrow & the prompt is “how can nominating committee ensure diversity within the orgs elected positions” & given everything that is happening with SAA I’m not sure I can answer that question. I’m seriously considering pulling my name because I can’t think of a response that feels honest but also not defeatist.

How does one focus on work when you’re not sure your family is okay? Asking for me 🙃

I have to put together a candidate statement for an org. It only has to be 300 words, but I have no idea what to say or what I care about anymore. 🙃

He's not the first and far from the last researcher that has questioned if I know what I'm doing. I try to be explicit from the very beginning as to why I can't provide something, but they quickly go from understanding to patronizing to downright hostile. My other coworkers don't have to deal with it as regularly as I do. *sigh*

I've been avoiding working on a research request, because when the researcher added a part two to the request after I was unable to fulfill part one he started explaining to me how I should read these floppy disks. Of course he said "You probably know all of this, but have you tried...."

We FINALLY got a written roadmap & explanation of why things are where on the IT front at MPOW. But also we are getting brand new (not refurbished new) laptops in February. I’m trying to figure out how I can be on that first wave upgrade list.