Lose 10 to 17 pounds in a week!

A co-worker just handed me a gem of a diet plan, found in an accession from the late 1980s. It's printed on medical office stationery and was supposedly used by the secret service and military. It must be good, right?

Some of the highlights:

The first day: All the fruits except bananas. "Should you eat the melon, your chances of losing 3 pounds in the first day are great."

Second date [assuming the first date went well, of course]: Vegetables! Lots of 'em! "Stay away from dry beans, peas and corn. These vegetables are good for you but not as you are trying to reduce your caloric intake. You may have a large baked potato with butter."

Fourth day: "Eat as many as 8 bananas and drink as much as 8 glass of skim milk." That's all, though you can supplement with a vegetable soup made of onion soup mix, cabbage, onions and tomatoes if you want.

Fifth day: "You can have 10 to 20 ounces [up to 1.25 pounds!] of beef and six tomatoes."

Seventh day: "Brown rice, fruit juice (unsweetened) and vegetables. Again, stuff, stuff, stuff!!!"

Should you desire a salad dressing, a recipe is provided. Simply combine a pint of imitation mayonnaise with a pint of lo-cal cottage cheese and 2 packages of dry salad dressing mix.

I think I'll stick with regular exercise and a turkey and hummus sandwich. And maybe I'll do some strength training in the guise of moving a map case. Maybe.

Sigh of relief

Well, the test is taken. Now all I have to do is wait for the results. All those people who say the exam is tricky? They're absolutely correct. Very few questions were obvious, regardless of how much reading you did or how long you've been working as an archivist. The part of me that admires good work has to admit that this is a well-crafted, if slightly diabolical, exam. I wanted to explain so badly why I chose certain answers over others, knowing that I wasn't choosing incorrectly but that I may not have discovered the best answer according to the ACA.

Reading the Archival Fundamentals II series proved to be a very good move on my part and I'm seriously considering buying my own copy of Ritzenthaler's Preserving Archives and Manuscripts. All of the AFS books were well-written and informative, but I consumed that one like I would a novel. And I've just requested the Photographs: Archival Care and Management book through ILL because I really don't know enough about photographs yet. 

Meanwhile, I now go back to my pre-exam life of full-time work and part-time grad school with a little bit of fun thrown in to keep things interesting. I think I'll move a map case next week. Why we have one set stacked two high and one set stacked four high is beyond me, but two stacks of three seems like a good goal if I can get enough hands together to safely shift the beastie.

Domain 7

I completed Benedict's Ethics and the Archival Profession yesterday. Even though it's framed around the 1992 Code of Ethics, the substance of the updated 2005 Code of Ethics is essentially the same so the book was definitely beneficial. The case studies were probably the most helpful to me. I recognized my own institution in several of them, which wasn't exactly heartening, but at least our shortcomings do not encompass any of the illegal or even questionable activities covered in the case studies. To the best of my knowledge we're above board but should probably work on closing some loopholes in our donor agreements and a clear collection development policy wouldn't hurt us either.

19 days to go. Planning to finish Selecting and Appraising this weekend and starting Managing Archival & Manuscript Repositories if I have time. My new lunchtime reading is Cook's What is Past is Prologue.

I'm also training for an 8k run. Only 22 days until that one. Fortunately, the regular training runs are helping with my energy and attention levels.