January thaw
Drip, drip, drip. Dropping below freezing now. Fortunately the warm up was only a couple of degrees above freezing, so we didn't get the catastrophic meltdown that flooded the boys' barn last year. The main consequence was that the snow around the "ice tracks" our wheelbarrow follows got spongy, making navigation of a full wheelbarrow difficult. It slips off the track now and bogs down in the soft snow alongside, making for much heavy work.
I spent the morning cleaning up Booth Tarkington (no not literally, he's been dead for half a century.) I rescued a 1914 edition of Penrod that was about to be discarded from the children's department because it hadn't been checked out in some time. Now that's no surprise, given a plain binding and the fact that it's a fairly thick book. As is often the case with such classics, Tarkington's Penrod books were really written for adults but later came to be considered children's books. They aren't. I was going to move it to adult fiction, and found that we have a number of more obscure Tarkington novels in that section. The cataloging was bad, which doesn't help circulate books or even with finding them. In fact, Monsieur Beaucaire was entered in the catalog as a second copy of The Magnificent Ambersons. Sigh. I don't know how these things happen or why. I can only say that it was all long before I was here, and it's all corrected now.
Received a second shipment of two books I had ordered for myself before the holidays. The original order came just a few days after I ordered, and I was surprised to receive a duplicate shipment yesterday. The packing slip says it's a "replacement shipment - original never received" which is certainly not true. Nor did I report non-receipt. I e-mailed the seller's customer service asking if perhaps someone had transposed digits in an order or customer number, and how to return the duplicates. The response just arrived: "Please keep the extra copies, on us." So they aren't going to tell me how it happened. Guess I'll donate them to the library.
Gary's in Chicago. I'm bored and sleepy. Lots I should be doing, but don't feel like it, so I'm probably going to read until I can't stay awake any more and then go to bed.
I spent the morning cleaning up Booth Tarkington (no not literally, he's been dead for half a century.) I rescued a 1914 edition of Penrod that was about to be discarded from the children's department because it hadn't been checked out in some time. Now that's no surprise, given a plain binding and the fact that it's a fairly thick book. As is often the case with such classics, Tarkington's Penrod books were really written for adults but later came to be considered children's books. They aren't. I was going to move it to adult fiction, and found that we have a number of more obscure Tarkington novels in that section. The cataloging was bad, which doesn't help circulate books or even with finding them. In fact, Monsieur Beaucaire was entered in the catalog as a second copy of The Magnificent Ambersons. Sigh. I don't know how these things happen or why. I can only say that it was all long before I was here, and it's all corrected now.
Received a second shipment of two books I had ordered for myself before the holidays. The original order came just a few days after I ordered, and I was surprised to receive a duplicate shipment yesterday. The packing slip says it's a "replacement shipment - original never received" which is certainly not true. Nor did I report non-receipt. I e-mailed the seller's customer service asking if perhaps someone had transposed digits in an order or customer number, and how to return the duplicates. The response just arrived: "Please keep the extra copies, on us." So they aren't going to tell me how it happened. Guess I'll donate them to the library.
Gary's in Chicago. I'm bored and sleepy. Lots I should be doing, but don't feel like it, so I'm probably going to read until I can't stay awake any more and then go to bed.