Category Archives: Stories

A story from the weekend

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This weekend, we had a taste of good weather.  The sky was perfectly blue with barely a cloud in sight.  It was warm.  As I am once again sleeping in sweaters, and wrapped in a fleece blanket on the couch, writing this, that was a welcome change.

I was at my parents’, and their flowering pear tree is blooming.

It sits right outside my old bedroom window, and on Saturday I went out to take a closer look at the flowers, only to discover that the tree was positively swarming in bees.

I’m petrified of bees.  My sister got married outside last summer, and my parents practically invested in citronella candles and wasp traps for fear that I, the maid of honor, would embarrass everyone at the altar-slash-paper dove garland strung between two trees.  In the end, it was too cold and windy for bugs to really be a problem.  (Sorry, Mom and Dad!)

There were so many bees on the pear tree that you could hear them buzzing.  Did I mention that this tree is right outside my old bedroom window?  Let’s hope there aren’t any holes in that window screen.  For everyone’s sake.

Later in the afternoon I saw this lone, little cloud in the otherwise perfectly blue sky.  I went out to snag a photo, because I love little clouds drifting slowly and alone in the blue sky.

That little non-cloud object obscuring the beautiful blue?  A bee.

My principle on principal.

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In my free time, I go to library school.  Since I have a full-time job, this means that my evenings and weekends (and whatever paltry social life these might have included before) are generally consumed with doing schoolwork.  But I’m not complaining.  I all-too-frequently find myself shirking responsibility with various distractions — the array of the internet (my new blog, for instance), and (of late, most popularly) sleeping.

However, I find that my patience for lectures, and schoolwork in general, is increasingly diminished by the presence of grammatical or spelling errors in professors’ lectures, or other class materials.

For example.  In one of my classes this quarter, we have been discussing the foundational principles of cataloging.  One of these principles is the Principle of Principal Responsibility.  In the lecture materials, this has been alternately referred to as:  the principal of principal responsibility, the principal of principle responsibility, and the principle of principal responsibility.

Really.

In the interest of venting my intolerance in a medium more appropriate than class discussion, a primer:

principal: 1) noun, person who has controlling authority or is in a leading position; 2) adjective, most important, consequential, or influential

principle: 1) noun, a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption

Definitions from http://www.merriam-webster.com

In other words, principal, which can be either a noun or an adjective, and thus modifies responsibility, indicating chief responsibility; and principle, referring to a fundamental assumption, in this context a fundamental assumption of cataloging related to chief responsibility.