Onward to O

Yes! On Friday, I finished with the letter N. That's the fastest yet for completing a letter. I was so close to the end I really wanted to get there. I did not start O because I had a lot of requests from libraries that had arrived on Thursday and I needed to attend to that task. I pride myself on MassCat's (my) turnaround time.

Since I only work in the office 3 days/week, it's not a good idea to let the requests sit around. Forty-eight hours is a reasonable limit. Also, the MLS-Northampton delivery days are Monday and Thursday. Some of the requests were sent to me in "person" on Thursday. I always try to get them done and back into the bin for Monday's pickup.

I have something to look forward to when I arrive in the office at 11. That letter O.

This will be a busy week.

Monday: a lecture at the Sci-Tech cafe on Future Foods, including 3-D printed foods (?). This is a series of very technical topics presented for the general public. They're usually way over my head and the people I know who attend them say the same thing. But the talks are still interesting. The research that's going on in universities is truly amazing.

Tuesday: a documentary on Hedy Lamarr, the actress who was also an inventor. Amherst Cinema has
been showing films of women who have made significant contributions in scientific research. Of course, being women, they tend to be ignored or not taken seriously.

Thursday: a meeting of all the Healthy Bones and Balance (HBB) Leaders. We have these meetings 3 times/year. It's a chance to meet some of the other leaders, learn about new exercises, and ask questions. I still think about becoming a personal trainer and/or wellness coach.

Friday: LaRK Jazz Trio is playing at Bread Euphoria. The L of LaRK is a friend of mine whom I met when she started to attend the HBB class at the Hatfield Senior Center. Now M and I socialize with her and her husband and have also become LaRK groupies. It's a pleasant night out and we often invite friends. We sit around, chat, drink wine and munch on pizza or soup and sandwiches. Very nice.

Saturday: M and I are hosting a dinner party. We haven't had one in a long time and are looking forward to this. Of course, there is some stress: what will I serve 8 people? What's easy to make so that I can still spend time with my guests? And I want to impress them with my culinary skills.

As spring continues its envelopment of New England, more signs pop up. Yesterday, a mother black bear and her yearling came onto the deck. No doubt, she was trying to get to the bird feeder, which is too far from the deck for her to reach. It's taken us a lot of years to place that feeder in a way bears and squirrels cannot get to it. That doesn't stop them from trying, though. The bear climbed a tree (which was still too far away) and then settled for picking up the seeds that had fallen to the ground. As fascinating as they are to watch, I don't want to encourage bears to spend time in my yard. After a few minutes, I stuck my head out the sliding glass door and told her to "go away".

She did.

Signs of Spring

The absolute definitive sign is that the date is March 21; Spring arrived yesterday at 5:58 p.m.

A few hours earlier, my newest great-niece, E.C., was born -  a harbinger if there ever was one.

The snow is melting (though there are still piles on the side of the road); the frost heaves are subsiding; and the pot holes are increasing to sink-hole proportions. Heavy trucks are leaving deep tire tracks in the mud of our gravel road. Ah, you've got to love it.

My geraniums are starting to bloom as well as my hibiscus. Oh, yes, I've spotted several ants.

On the work front, I'm zipping along. I've finished working on titles that begin with No, Not, Note and I'm part way through Nothing. I'll be done with the letter N in only a few weeks despite the tiny font I accidentally used for my list.

If work continues to progress this smoothly and quickly, I won't bother to reprint the list with a larger font.

This evening, I'm heading to Black Birch Vineyard to pick up my quarterly share of wine. Despite the difficult driving conditions on their gravel road (Hatfield does have paved roads, but also lots of gravel ones), it's such a pleasure to visit this vineyard. The setting is absolutely enchanting. I've attended a couple of fundraisers there and also gone just to sit and enjoy a glass of wine.

It's a pleasure to support a local industry, to support a hard-working, industrious couple, and enjoy a sipping wine all at the same time.

Navigating the letter N

It's March 1, a mere 3 weeks till spring according to the calendar. There's snow on the ground and more predicted for this weekend.

I'm always conflicted at this time of year: I don't want time to pass so fast but I want winter to be OVER! I want to put out my pots of geraniums that have been in my living room since October. I want to begin new pots of geraniums and put them in hanging planters. I want to plant impatiens and begonias in the shadier spots around the house. I want to be surrounded by sunshine and flowers. I want to open the pond and spend time with my fish.

In the meantime, I'll plow through my alphabetical list of potential duplicates looking for bib records to merge, enhance, correct and otherwise clean up. I've finally reached the letter N; I'm now officially on the second half of the alphabet.

My supervisor created a list based on a report he ran. I printed the letters N-Z of the spreadsheet. Unfortunately, I'm not that adept at managing Excel and printed a list with very tiny letters. It's 66 pages. I've been using a magnifying glass to read it.

I've been trying to decide if I should just reprint it - a few pages at a time to avoid the same mistake. But, being the parsimonious person I am, I'm just coping. It may get to the point I can't stand that minute font any longer and just reprint. I can always use the pages as scrap, though I have plenty of that.

In the list, I'm beyond the words Narrate, Navigate and Nazi and have begun Need.

Too bad I didn't see the word Narcissus in there. I'd like to see a few of them blooming.

My Queen Phase

That's the band Queen. I watched the DVD of Bohemian Rhapsody last week and I can't stop thinking about Queen.

In the 70s and 80s I listened to Queen's music and liked it, but didn't pay a lot of attention to the band itself. That was the same for The Who; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young; Pink Floyd; Traffic and many others. I watched parts of the Live Aid concert. I remember when Freddie Mercury died. Was it really 1991? It doesn't seem that long ago.

Anyway, after watching the movie, all I want to do is listen to Queen and read about Queen. I can't stop thinking about Queen. Their music keeps running through my head.

Here's what I've done during the last week:
Watched Queen's performance at Live Aid on YouTube.
Borrowed 2 CDs via my local public library; I'll likely buy some CDs if the used CD store has any.
Ordered books on Queen via my local public library.

I'm not certain when this will end, but I'm enjoying learning all about the band and listening to the music again.

After all, sometimes I need a break from classical music and mystery books.

My, My, My

There are lots of titles that begin with the word "My" and I've reached that section in my alphabetical list of possible duplicates. That means very soon I'll be half way through the alphabet (M being the 13th of 26 letters). I began the letter M in mid-July - seven months ago. I began working on the letter L a full two years ago. I'm speeding up :-)

Rest assured I've done much more than merge titles beginning with the letter M. There are the typos and those weird characters that are supposed to be accent marks that I've corrected, the skimpy bib records that I've upgraded. Plus the files of records sent to me from MassCat libraries I've imported. And I've searched for many, many records that MassCat library staff haven't been able to locate. Sometimes I've had to create records from scratch. Well, that's my job.

One major transition I've made is to stop teaching continuing education workshops for librarians. Yes, after a couple of years of ambivalence, I told my contact at the Connecticut State Library that I just didn't want to do any more. Since I've been teaching so few, it gets harder and harder to rev up.

I haven't been attending any workshops or training or conferences myself, so I feel as if it's getting harder and harder to keep up. I can handle the MassCat cataloging because it's pretty simple and it's mostly copy cataloging. The original cataloging is usually straight forward.

I continue to subscribe to the various cataloging e-mail discussion lists, but I find I'm deleting more and more of the posts without reading them thoroughly. Very few of them address issues that I face.

I'm still enjoying my work at MassCat. It's enough of a challenge to keep me interested but not so challenging that I get frustrated. It's only 18 hours/week, 5 miles from my home and I get free coffee. What more could I ask?

Reading about the South

When I read books by Miranda James I can't help thinking about the movie Victor/Victoria. In an early scene, Julie Andrew's character exclaims to Robert Preston's character "A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?"

Male librarian Dean James writes the Cat in the Stacks mysteries as female author Miranda James whose main character is male librarian Charlie Harris. These books fit into the "cozy" genre as they take place in a little town in Mississippi called Athena. They're fun, easy reading with no graphic sex and violence - a nice break from some of the grittier mysteries I read. I recently finished Arsenic and  Old Books, the sixth book of the series.

And I just started reading Rita Mae Brown's Crazy Like a Fox. This is part of the Sister Jane Arnold series about foxhunting. This is another fun, light read.

I really like reading Rita Mae Brown's books. While I found her Mrs. Murphy series sort of silly, I don't mind the animals talking to each other in the foxhunting series. To me, it feels as if their conversations add depth and insight to the story and also adds to the information about the history and ecology of foxhunting that is woven into the plot.

Best of all, I like Rita Mae Brown's stand-alone titles. While Rubyfruit Jungle feels a little dated now, it was a real shocker when it was first published. Other favorite titles are High Hopes (about the Civil War) and Alma Mater.

What ties these two author (Miranda James and Rita Mae Brown) together is their detailed descriptions of life in the South, especially manners. Both authors are perpetually referring to "proper" behavior.

As much of a rebel as Rita Mae Brown is, Sister Jane Arnold, Master of the Jefferson Foxhunt, is always properly attired on the hunts and expects others to be too. There is a lot of description of the traditions of foxhunting and of the refined and cultivated south.

Charlie Harris sometimes gets angry or upset and would like to do or say something but doesn't because of his Southern upbringing. He also dislikes it when others ignore traditions.

Having lived in Massachusetts all of my life, and despite the state's Puritan history, Southern traditions and manners seem a little extreme to me. After all, I became an adult during the 60's when we "let it all hang out".  Since then I've found a comfortable behavior pattern for myself somewhere between being a Hippie and a Southern Belle.

Ultimately it all boils down to the Golden Rule.

Two New (to me) Authors

Mary Roberts Rinehart is a name I've seen in other mystery books. Wanting to expand my repertoire, I checked Fantastic Fiction and learned that The Man in Lower Ten was her first mystery novel published in 1906.

Checking through C/W MARS, that title was only available as one of a set of 3, so I requested it.

I'm afraid my first impression was disappointment. The book, while newer than 1906, was still old and had been rebound in a less-than-appealing plain red cover. Because it had been rebound, the inner margins were minimal, making the book hard to keep open and I had to work to read the ends of the lines on the left-hand page and the beginnings of the lines on the right. And the print was small. I considered returning the book and forgetting about this excursion.

It is a testament to Mary Roberts Rinehart that I finished all three stories.

Her writing style reminds me of Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle. The stories are somewhat convoluted and not always easy to follow. But I found myself enjoying them.

Typical of her times, she tends to make sweeping generalizations such as this sentence from The Case of Jennie Brice written in 1913. "There was something big about her, something which is often found in large women, a lack of spite." While that's a nice thing to say about someone (in this case Jennie Brice), I'm not sure that all "large women" can be described that way. Another comment about another character was that if he left his light on at night he must be a murderer.

My preference, however, is to read contemporary mysteries and I recently read my first book by Louise Penny Kingdom of the Blind. It had just arrived at my local public library and was listed in the
Wednesday morning email Wowbrary.

This series takes place in the Canadian province of Quebec and features Chief Inspector Gamache. Like Donna Leon and Faye Kellerman, there is a lot of character development and description of family life. It makes the characters more real and gives me a real appreciation of a different culture.

Since this series started in 2005, I'm adding Louis Penny to my list of authors to read from the beginning.