Mounties.

I was reading the CBC news website this morning (it's a slightly less league-biased source of news on the state of the NHL labor dispute than, say, nhl.com) and noticed a story that mentioned an RCMP volunteer being killed in a car accident. In reading the article, I discovered something I hadn't been aware of: the RCMP has an unpaid volunteer auxiliary, members of which work side-by-side with regular officers.

Of course, I immediately thought, "Ooh! Ray!" and headed over to the RCMP website to learn more about auxiliary officers. It turns out that they're only active in the provinces, not the territories (so all you gotta do is get Fraser assigned to northern BC or Alberta and you're golden...) but, of course, you can't just look up one thing on the RCMP website and then leave...

Which is how I wound up clicking around until I found the recruit FAQ. Particularly, this question:

Q: I wrote the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire (SFPQ) before June 28th, 2004. Will my results be re-calculated to include my Conscientiousness score?

Which just made me giggle. It's always fun when stereotypes turn out to be a little bit true...

(no subject)

I have apparently just applied for grad school. The College of Library and Information S-something-that-starts-with-S at University of Maryland, College Park, specifically (so yes, everybody I told at ConneX that I was planning to be migrating to the East Coast in ~16 months, yes, I'm right on schedule). It was weirdly easy, once I got UM (er, that is, the University of Michigan...) to give me access to my damn grades online, which mostly required me to a) show up during the website's "hours of operation" and b) click on the link a couple of different times. The grad school application is online, and the paper application to the actual master's program is all of two pages. I don't have to write an essay, because I did that the last time I applied, two years ago, and thinking back, I really don't think I can top that 250 word pinnacle of late-night charming bluntness to the effect of "I want to work in a library. Your school trains librarians. I think we all know where this is going." which, oddly enough, led them to accept me the last time I tried this.

So, yeah. I'm all applied. I'm going to ask my boss's boss for a letter of recommendation on Monday, but if she can't write me one for some reason (possibly having to do with not actually knowing what I do all day, which would be fair) it's not a big deal, because they have my last set of letters, too. Hopefully the field hasn't gotten too much more competitive in two years, and hopefully they'll understand that when I said I could finance my education in the absence of a graduate assistantship I meant "I understand how to take out massive crippling student loans and will not let the absence of an assistantship prevent me from enrolling" and not "Yeah, I have stacks of cash, it's no big deal either way."

So, knock wood, cross fingers, all that jazz. The papers are in the mail, and now we wait, and write a yuletide story.