Our Week With A New Furry Friend

It's a little calico cutie, Fiona!  

Jack Jack had some friends over after church Sunday, and I surreptitiously snapped this as they were walking to the park to play ball.  It's good to connect with humans again.  

We received a 3rd shipment from Library & Educational Services.  I like to shop their sales and pay under $3 bucks per book.  Full boxes are running about $80 something/box.  

Hannah's latest weapon drawings.

I'm not a crazy cat lady.  Really, I'm not.  But I did make a bonsai drive to another state & back to pick up a cat in need of a home.

Took a picture of this monument at a rest stop to show the girls and forgot all about it when I got home.  

And there she is.  Miss Fiona enjoyed having a sniff while we lunched outdoors before the drive home.  

It was a long ride home, as a fire slowed traffic to a trickle.  

Fiona is currently set up in the guest room while she acclimates to us and our house.  This may change abruptly as Eli is trying to get leave to come home next month.  

I thought her peek a mew face was too cute.

She's very tiny, but she's curious and she's vocal and friendly if you take it slow.  

So far, she and Grumman haven't gotten close to each other.  When they see one another, she growls and he hisses.  When I let him sniff my hands after I've been petting her, he hisses at them.  

But we're taking things slow and giving them both time to adjust.  

She is a cutie.  

 I picked up a box of donated books, and Grumman had to have a sniff.  

Speaking of books, this week was library move in day!  So, here's the library from inside, facing the door out.  I'm hoping to put my circulation desk by the door.  

You may recognize the blue biography bookcase we worked on before the official move.  Piles of books on the tables and underneath in buckets.  Those all need at least barcodes before they can be shelved, and some of them haven't even been entered yet.  

From near the door, looking toward the back wall.  The filing cabinets may disappear.  The large bookcase on the back wall has our "number books" (Dewey decimal numbers)  The smaller bookcase on the back wall is currently picture books:  biography on the top shelf, number books on the second shelf, and fiction on the bottom shelf.  As I want to display most of our picture books forward facing, I'm thinking they'll probably expand into the bookcase on the right, too.  

That's Jack's knee.  I brought him with me one day to schlep the totes from the house.  We filled Matilda and used the wagon to get them from the parking lot to the room.  Table and desk filled with more books that need processing.  

This is going to be our fiction wall.  All the books in the right bookcase need to be removed, processed, and dispersed to correct locations.  

Panoramic wildly distorted shot.  Pictures are from Thursday.

On Thursday, we took the lions share of the fully processed books from the house in and got them onto the shelves.  On Friday, we made a second load of processed books in and got those on the shelves, and I took a roll of barcodes and a scanner in and started adding barcodes to school books.  

This made a huge jump in the proportion of finished to unfinished books in the system.  This makes me very happy.  Of the entered books, I now have more books totally done and shelved than ones that still need work.  --This doesn't count all the books that haven't been entered at all yet, but one bite at a time (how you eat an elephant).  

Our school secretary comes back from vacation next week, so I hope to get class lists and start setting up my command binder.  My plan is to have each class be a 2 page spread with student name, photo, and barcode, so that I can open to whatever class is in the library and have the whole class' barcodes at my fingertips for easy checkout.