Ahhhhh...I didn't have to go to Akwesasne today to train member library directors. No one signed up for the training, possibly because the site is on the St. Lawrence River, on the border to Canada, possibly because the topics were really dorky. At any rate, since I was out of the library two days this week, it was fine with me to be at my desk today. Wednesday we went to Port Henry (on Lake Champlain and the home of Champy, the Lake Champlain monster that is like the Loch Ness Monster) to barcode their irrelevant collection. My hands were black with dirt and dust when I worked on the balcony collection. The balcony is one of those beautiful, wood floor places just wide enough for one person, with brass railings. The books, however, are horrible for a library, nice for someone who wants to impress people who are easily impressed by books in a den. We had a good day of barcoding. Ate lunch in a really funky tiny Mexican restaurant that seats about 12 people, new to the former mining town of Pt. Henry. The waiter was about 70 years old, wrote our orders out completely, no abbreviations, took forever to write them down, said each word as he wrote it ("twoooo soffffft tacccos, onnne Dietttt Cokkkke"). The food was incredibly mediocre and we decided that Taco Bell was better. But you have to try these things.

Yesterday I went to Canton to a regional committee meeting. I like these meetings, the people in this region are universally nice. I traveled with the Director of the Plattsburgh Pub. Library, who is nice and is also interesting, and with a woman I have known for 17 years, someone I really like. That made the traveling good, lots of stimulating (and anti-Bush) conversation. The meeting went well, we discussed automation projects, data bases, retrospective conversion of bibliographic data (anybody know what that means?), correctional facilities and their problems accessing the regional catalog, and something called federated searching. I love that term. What it means is that you search, say, your library's online catalog, and the you click on a tab for an online data base and through the magic of software your search will automatically be transferred to that data base or data bases. This is really cool--no need to repeat your search! Very expensive, say $30,000 if you have a proprietary system, as we do. But a girl can dream.

It has been hot here, nearly 80 for most of the week. Today it's only supposed to be in the 60's, with frost warnings for tonight. The season of sleeping in the boat house may have come to an end. I won't close it, though, until after Columbus Day. We have our cocktail party on the porch there. My cousin Jim left a voice mail message asking if I still wanted the water left on and for how long. There is still hardly any fall color yet, amazingly enough.

Dinner with Ken on Weds. was nice. He loved the idea of having me buy a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store on my way home so we had that, some cole slaw and his favorite: canned creamed corn. I loved creamed corn as a kid, probably because it has lots of sugar. We had a nice, companionable evening. He has finished stacking his firewood and is in fine shape. He found someone to cut down the dead pine tree that was threatening the power line and his garage so he was really happy.

Tomorrow it's supposed to be sunny and 65: just about the perfect day. I can sit on my new deck and read, read, read. I have been conscientious about stacking firewood, doing 6 wheelbarrow loads a day. This takes half an hour. I'm not sure when I will finish stacking the 4.75 cords I have to do (if ever!) but I can see some progress being made in the pile, plus of course there's the nice stack I'm creating. I have no other plans for the weekend, just watching hours of O.C., this really stupid TV show that I have a DVD of.

I bought 2 new fish this week, zebra danios, which are incredibly cute and are school fish so they swim around together. While I was cleaning my goldfish bowl, though, I broke it, so I had to buy something new to put them in. I bought a 5-gallon aquarium with a charcoal filter and a light in the hood (now I have "fish in the 'hood"). I have spent the last 3 nights watching these incredibly cute fish darting around the tank. Tonight I'm buying 2 more danios and 2 other fish, maybe barbs, maybe tetras. I want something really colorful. The danios, of course have stripes, horizontal ones. This is way cool. They only cost $1.29 apiece, pretty cheap entertainment.

We got our retrospective raises this week. Mine was $700 after taxes. It's committed, however: I owe at least that much to Steve for the deck. He's coming by tonight to give me the bill for the balance of what I owe him. Rats. I've been fantasizing about putting in a wall at the back of the downstairs and making a room out of what I call the library. I don't know why I want to do this but I'm really enthralled by this idea. Last night I stood there and stared at the incredible mess of stuff that's there now, envisioning a bed in the room, thinking about how much less my electric bill would be if I could close off that part of the downstairs. We'll see. This may just be a phase.

And now I move on to the work portion of the day. Cataloging cookbooks for Tupper Lake.