It's July but it's cold as Christmas
That's what Elton John sings, but the reverse is true right now. It's raining today and is incredibly warm. Truly lovely but temporary, the specialists warn. Temps due to drop dramatically during the day and rain to turn to snow. Not "significant amounts" but "measurable amounts." Well, you can measure half an inch so who knows what that means. I still have no one to plow my driveway but have snow tires so can handle snow up to a point. Then there's always what I did for most of last year: park at the end of the driveway and make a cowpath to the house. Who knows what winter will bring this year. I was predicting (to myself, not aloud) the other night that it would be a cold one. Let's see if I'm right. Last year the lake froze over on December 11th. THAT certainly won't happen this year! I'm stunned that it's already December 1st

I verified that the rank of wood I thought was dry is indeed dry so hooray! More dry wood! And I think I've burned less wood than I thought, so maybe, just maybe this will work out after all. Last year by early December the temp had dropped to -11 and we're far from that. It certainly would be a surprise if that happened any time soon. I still don't keep the fire going all night, which is hard on my kindling pile but saves my wood. More work to start a fire every night when I get home. But isn't life full of tasks anyway?

Wednesday we took our laptops to Peru to work in their basement children's room to barcode their collection. The hell with any sensible classification scheme, they use this: Nature, Sports, Guidance, Winter, Spring (etc.), Jungle, Desert, Mice, Rabbits, Dogs (you get the drift of that), Tall Tales, Poetry, Easy Readers (some of which are non-fiction) plus lots of other creative categories, and some have no classification at all so we just made something up to put in the data base. And she's very proud of the way she's got her collection organized. We suggested that it might be hard to find something when they go online and start getting requests for some of these books. "Oh no one will request children's books." NOT SO!!! Plenty of libraries use the collections of other libraries to substitute for their own crummy collections. Well, it's really not our problem and we did our best.

Today I'm off to Rouses Point for day 2 of weeding her non-fiction. Apparently she discarded everything I recommended from my last visit, which is a huge surprise to me. Today I move from the 300's (social sciences--doesn't get much more boring) through the languages and sciences, maybe to the cookbooks). She has a pretty big collection so this will take a while. I only go once a week, and she's only open from 1-5--I leave at 3:45 to get back here at 4 (no overtime allowed). You can't really weed for more than 2 1/2 hours at a time anyway, especially when the collection is as depressing as this one is. I shouldn't say that, hers is one of the better ones I've done. I actually kept quite a bit of her stuff, she does a pretty good job of selection. She just never throws anything out. Most of these directors are afraid of their non-fiction.

Now I must pay my bills online and scrape together whatever's left to order fireplace gloves for Ken for Christmas, as promised. He gave me a pair last year and they are one of the best presents anyone has ever given me. You can pick up a burning log and move it to just the right position to get the fire ablaze.

Onward and upward.