I'm so cold I'm so goddamn cold

My friend Mary Frances used to walk to work in Providence every day, and when it was really cold in the winter she used to sing that Stones song "She's so cold," only of course she'd substitute "I'm so cold." I think of her on days like today when it's -20. I'm pretty used to this weather, though and can be outside long enough to get my chores done. If I have to stay outside for any length of time I get chilled, but it's sort of nifty to feel what that temperature is like. -30 and colder is really amazing.

Friday the 29th of Feb. All I feel is that I wish it were the 1st of March because I'm ready to change my calendars. I guess I can change this work one before I go home, but see--I won't remember it then.

I'm way behind on my book orders so am sifting through the huge pile of requests from bookmobile patrons. They don't request much that's unusual or special and mostly I buy what they request. Except for the god ones. I even get the Harlequin and Silhouettes (sometimes), but I didn't order the fake CIA novel that (supposedly) was sent to the CIA, who blacked out a bunch of it. It didn't get very good reviews so I felt justified. I should order a book with a bunch of sentences blacked out?

Every year we have to come up with Service Priorities for the System, which must tie into our 5-year Plan of Service. From those Priorities we come up with Department Goals, and from those we come up with Personal Goals. We're assessed annually on the progress or non-progress we made on completing work on those goals. One of my goals for 2007 was to set up a blog for CEF. Well--I set one up in August, but never did anything with it. Woe is me. The director is now taken up with Facebook and has lost interest in a blog, and so, I guess have I. Once I get the blog going I will have to update it twice a week or so and first I have to figure out what to add to it. Anyway, one of my clerks' 2008 goals is to help me (read: get me to) weed the adult fiction collection. This is just about my favorite project, and it'll be great to have her do all the grunt work of checking how many times each book has circulated, how many copies we have, separating them according to status, etc. Then having a book truck shoved into my face. She's excellent at getting me to actually do things. That won't start until we've officially worked through dept. goals. We were supposed to have this done in Nov.--this place is not known for meeting deadlines. My goals? Deal with continuing work on a systemwide coordinated cooperative collection plan (above clerk to analyze data I generated in 2007) and continue cataloging local history collections (I think). Not supposed to have "continue" as a goal.

Work stuff. never ends, but that's why they call it work.

Friends are here this weekend at the camp below my house. They were here earlier this winter but it wasn't cold enough then so now they're here for VeryXtreme. And boy are they getting it. No heat, just a big fireplace. I'm sure their food is all frozen. They have an outhouse, but who wants to use one at -20? They're planning to climb a mountain today but it would be really dangerous in this weather so I hope they don't. They're hoping to climb Giant, which my father called Liza's Giant, and I never knew why. I think because it was her favorite mountain.

Now I have to move on to another project: director wants overall average fill rate for interlibrary loans we did for year 2007. Lots of totals to count, not everyone totaled their categories (correctional facilities, bookmobile patrons, member libraries, etc.). Have to count different statistics for different reports, each one just a little different from the other. And I am sooo bad with numbers. Like, percentages? I must have been sick the day they covered that.