Week's End

And what a week it's been. The weather has been incredible, 40's and due to be 50 today. Surprisingly, I'm ready for the January thaw to end. It makes it impossible for me to get to my house because the snow gets all granular and gooshey. Last night I got stuck at the end of my driveway and had a hard time getting unstuck. I had let the fire in the stove go out so I had to start a fire. Let it go out overnight so it was 55 in my living room this morning, got up too late to start one today but it's supposed to be sunny and I have good solar exposure so I'm not too worried. Just tired of not having winter: the sooner you get on with winter the sooner it will end. Pretending it's spring is just a waste of time.

Monday I went to Elizabethtown, the county seat of Essex County, to show off our new bookmobile. Glad-handing the county legislators, thanking them for their support. Didn't know who voted in favor of us and who didn't, so I felt sort of foolish thanking each one for his/her support, but did what I had to anyway. They were suitably impressed (or at least pretended to be) and I was charming when others on the staff were silent. What's with that? I'm not part of the bookmobile team, but I introduce strangers to our staff, etc.

After our stint there we went to lunch, then the director and another staff member and I stopped en route to the library to see the director's new home, a house she's renting in a "neighborhood" (you have to use the term loosely here--a neighborhood has at least a 10-mile radius) I used to live in, on a road I really wanted to live on, about .2 of a mile from the breeder I got my 2 dogs from. When we pulled into her driveway the dogs in the kennel exploded and barked for a really long time. I decided I sure wouldn't want to live next door to that.

Tuesday I spent the afternoon at the AuSable Forks library, weeding her adult non-fiction. From astronomy to cookbooks. Next week I go back to weed from craft books to history, then I'll be done. I actually found a book on space travel published before we landed on the moon--that's the example I always use when I do workshops or consulting on weeding criteria. I should have asked to save it for show & tell. After the weeding I spent half an hour talking to the director, who had a malignant melanoma removed in December and goes back in 2 weeks to have her lymph nodes removed. The melanoma was in a awful place--her gynecologist found it, if that's a clue.

Wednesday I went to Westport (on Lake Champlain) with 3 others to barcode that library's collection. They have a big (by our standards) collection, but she had lined up a bunch of old lady volunteers to help so we had quite a troupe. We got a whole lot done and they had a really good hit rate, meaning their stuff is in the data base. There's not that much left to do, mostly stuff in their juvenile collection (which is the ugliest part of the whole project) and all the fiction that's shelved in high places but she wants us back next week, so back we will go. I was surprised to see that the lake isn't frozen at all, completely open there. Lots of years by January there are fishing shanties on the ice in Westport. The weatherman on TV said we're below the average temperature for last year's January so far, so who knows.

Yesterday, mercifully I got to do some of my own work. I'm way behind with my cataloging and am supposed to be writing an ILL policy, a weeding policy I can give to member libraries when I weed their collections, buying books with the $3500 I have to spend right away, write staff evaluations due in December, finish my self-assessment due in December (didn't meet my goals for '05!), and of course write my Dept. report for December. But yet I blog. While listening to The Police.

Meanwhile at home I'm a combination of restless and mildly depressed. I saw Ken on Monday and Wednesday and will stop tonight after grocery shopping, liquor store and pet store. He's doing remarkably well this winter, not having the dark time he usually does. Of course, on Wednesday he reminded me that it was 63 years prior to that day that he buried his firstborn, who was burned to death by boiling water in the kitchen at the age of 3.

And my friend Martha had her baby! This was exciting and wonderful. Baby Eva Louise was born yesterday morning at 2 a.m. and Lin and I went to visit her at noon yesterday. She didn't look like a 10-hour old baby but rather like a one-week old, since she was a week late. She was beautiful and peaceful, and Martha looked great. Bill, Eva's father, looked very tired, however, since they had 48 hours of labor. Martha was really perky. Both grandmothers were there. I worked with Martha's mother in Providence and enjoy seeing her.

Three day weekend coming up. I have to take down my Christmas tree. It's time to set it free. It's still in great shape, not losing its needles, but I can get rid of it without missing it. I've looked at it and each of its ornaments enough times to satisfy my holiday needs and am ready to get the living room back to normal. I'd like to be able to look out of the two windows it's blocking, although I suppose it's blocking the cold air from coming in too. Maybe I'll plasticize one of the windows, who knows. What I'll really do this weekend is clean--living room, bathroom. I worked on the kitchen last weekend. Very productive Saturday: dump, got gas, made tons of molasses cookies for Ken, then went to dinner with Lin and Ralph. Saw The Life Aquatic (Bill Murray) and I really liked it. Take-off on Jacques Cousteau. Subtle humor but I thought it was clever.

And now it's back to cataloging John Tesh at Red Rocks. Finished Lake Placid's opera CD's (the first batch). That was a living hell. I'm sure there are plenty more to come but at least I can do books and normal CD's for a while (I hope). I'm listening to hits of the 80's right now. This seems to make my fingers fly over the keyboard. In college we used to listen to The Stones when we had to type term papers because we could type really fast to Mick. Jackson Browne really slowed us down.

My mental state seems to be pretty variable right now. Had some very sad moments the other day, but I was listening to Pink and she took me right back to Two Rivers and the time Molly, Kristen and I spent there without Henry. Then there was the news that Angelina Jolie is pregnant and I identify really strongly with Jennifer Aniston, queer as that may be. Martha's baby doesn't seem to bother me as much, but the idea that your husband leaves you, you want to have a baby and he immediately happily impregnates another woman seems devastating to me. That was my greatest fear with my divorce, that Jamie would have a baby with another woman. I just didn't know how I would handle that. I should have known he would never really want to have children, that would mean that someone else would be the center of attention. Not being mean, just saying what I think is really true. Now he's a mayor and is basking in the glory. He's always in the paper now--had a long letter to the editor thanking everyone for their help with a crisis in Lake Placid. Two huge grammatical errors, which I immediately noticed, thank you to my father. At least I can get along with him now and I know that he wants to be friendly to me. As if I care--the real problem was that I couldn't stand to speak to him. Past that now.

Ah, divorce.