And now it's been a week and I've been busy and distracted at work, which is the only time I do this, since my connection at home is painfully slow. We had training at work all week, our new automated system. It's as different from our old, current system, as an automatic transmission is from a standard transmission. Windows -click- vs. text-based. Should be interesting when we go live on 3/25. We have to cease all cataloging functions from 3/15-3/25, which means my department has to find different, more entertaining things to do. We're going to shift the collection in the stacks. This is vastly entertaining. Plus we'll do OCLC deletes, taking things out of another database, which you can only do for an hour before you REALLY don't care if it's the right record you're deleting or not.
Weather: -3 when I got up. Sunny these days, semi-warm but warming up over the weekend, nearly 40. Hooray! The snow is turning granular and settling incredibly. Do I feel all right about this? It's not time for the snow to melt, I don't trust this at all. Too early for spring, yet we've had this snow since December. Hopefully when Jen and Drew come tomorrow we can walk down to the lake but I don't know how it will be walking in the woods. Ken says the snow is still almost 3' deep and the top 1' or so won't support you. We'll just have to try it.
Birds: Sure sign of change in season, I had grosbeaks in my trees yesterday! I love their chirps. I used to have at least a hundred of them each year so when I heard the tentative chirp! chirp! when I went out, at first it seemed so natural I almost wasn't stunned, then I realized what it was and I said out loud "Grosbeaks!" Ken has about 80 redpolls hanging around his feeder. These are good signs that something is happening. He started tuning up his chainsaw this week. I said, "You've got spring fever, don't you." He agreed he probably did. I cooked him catfish for dinner this week, turned out quite well.
Dogs: all is well. Jackson assimilated well into the group, I actually really like this dog. He's big and lunky but comes running to me when I turn around to head home on our walks. When he first arrived he would keep on walking, rudely, and disappear for half an hour or so. I guess that's to be expected, but now he knows he can do that any time he wants to and he'd rather be with me. I like that. Typically, he likes to be way ahead of me when we walk, the Pathfinder of the group. The girls bounce and jump. Poor Jack, when he comes near me Tess grabs a huge hunk of his neck and tries to drag him. He hates it.
Back to work.

So now it's Thursday and we're taking our lunch break from our training session. This is the funniest group of people to be trained with. Not a question asked, not a comment made. And, as usual, the director gets none of it, learns nothing, disconnects from the system, can't figure it out. Even the clerks act like librarians. Before they're library employees they're civil servants, most of them, although some of that's changed and these people do have a committment to library service these days. In my department I've got the one who challenges everything: the one who asks the trainer the questions that have been answered by me and by the system administrator on staff--she just didn't get the answer she wanted from us, so she's going one step further, hoping for a better answer. And me, I've already played with the system so it's not too exciting for me. We're coming from a last-generation, text-based, more primitive automated system that can still do some things that the new system can't do. Such is life. I can't believe it's Thursday and I only have to work one more day. What happened to this week? I was supposed to make an appointment with the bank this week to talk about refinancing so I can pay my income tax and some other bills. But since I haven't been able to pay my Feb. mortgage I'm too embarrassed to do that, won't do it until next week. What a wuss. How did I get to be 50 and have the same poor financial habits I had when I was 30, just multiplied exponentially? Did I learn nothing in the last 20 years?

So let's see if I really want to do this. Sometimes during the day I just feel like saying something, taking a break, talking about things that are on my mind.