Wow, so I meant to write a blog entry about the summer, but that was like on August 15 and now it is August 24. I went ahead an posted it just now, although it was not a complete posting. Gotta at least give me some kudos for trying!

The boys have two weeks left of summer vacation, although we made sure to fill their time with various classes. fun activities, and outings. We only took one trip, which was down to San Diego to Legoland and the Scripps Aquarium, which is part of UC San Diego. Brennan attended a one month Academic camp in July, took a one week Science camp, which he loved, and now the boys are in a two week, two day cooking class. Elden had pretty much been in his Tiny Tots class the entire summer, which was three days a week. This week they have the two days of cooking class left and then next Friday they go back to school. I am looking forward to Brennan staying in class until 2:30 and Elden will be attending preschool 5 days a week in the mornings. LA county has this great county funded preschool for 4-5 year olds for residents. You don’t have to be financially qualified either and it is free. The one that Brennan attended when he was in preschool was funded by cigarette tax money. I’m not sure Elden’s preschool is funded by, but I am so glad that he will be going everyday. Brennan is also still taking drawing and painting classes, which he thoroughly enjoys. I even bought him a nice sketch journal, you know the ones with the hard black covers, which he draws in quite often. I was thinking to enroll Elden in soccer, but I am not sure if I have already missed the deadline. Brennan pretty much does not express much interest in sports, and although he played basketball for two years, I am not sure we will be enrolling him again. Early on, I really was enthusiastic about getting him to play every sport, just so he can have the exposure, but it has really been a struggle, so I have sort of given up on trying to force it upon him. Elden does show some interest and has even been asking a few to hit baseball with him, so perhaps I will enroll him in T-ball, if we are already too late for soccer. Also, Elden learned how to swim within a month. Having a swimming pool does have it’s privileges. I was going to sign him for swimming classes over the summer, but the classed had filled up, so then we just decided to let him start swimming without his life jacket. I will have to start teaching him the actual swim strokes though, although he has been practicing kicking.

I do have to say that the summer has really passed by so quickly, but overall it has been a good one. Gonna wrap this one up.

So I am finally entering the last stages of my MLIS degree. It’s been 5 years since I started the program, but I am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. But who the hell knows if I will be able to find a job. I was going to an internship this coming Fall semester, but the university cut registration and I had not yet finalized my work site. My official last class will be in Metadata. I am almost frightened to take it, since I did not take Cataloguing, but my advisor insists that Metadata is the way to go. Other than that, I have my internship and my final culminating e-portfolio, which is an electronic presentation of a portfolio that will show evidence of everything that I have learned in the last 5 years. Let’s hope and pray that I don’t fuck that one up. LOL! I am saying that in a joking manner. I am not exactly looking forward to it, but it’s what I have to do in order to graduate, so let’s just say that I don’t have a choice, but to do it.

But the class that I will be taking in the fall, which I finally paid for is described as such:

Principles and applications of metadata for resource representation and retrieval using various schemes. Includes metadata creation, management, and dissemination, especially for digital libraries. This course provides students opportunities to learn, evaluate, and apply principles of metadata for a variety of digital resources. Topics covered include metadata terminology, content and encoding schemes, applications of metadata standards for different purposes and environments, especially for digital libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage and scholarly digital repositories, and various approaches to metadata creation, storage, management, and dissemination, including harvesting and aggregating. This course will allow students to deepen their knowledge of organization of information, digital libraries and museums, institutional repositories, content management, and information architecture.

Other than my excitement about graduating in Spring 2010, I am also the co-chair / web coordinator for the American Library Association student chapter at San Jose State University, SLIS. We have lots of activities planned and I am I really am thrilled to be part of this group. I still work as a research / teacher assistant, and will continue to do so until I graduate. There is no way that I will quit this, since the husband will be getting 10% furlough cut. Any money will definitely help, no matter how small.

So that is my update on my school stuff. I still need to write about the kids and what they have been up to. Soon, I promise…