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.  

Buried in Books

Embarrassing confession:  I realized when I uploaded this week's pictures, I don't have any shots of the girls to share.  

I feel like I'm learning a lot of new things with this library project.  This week, it was compu-surgery.  I bought a cue cat scanner and barcode labels.  

Only to get the cue cat to display the coded number instead of the coding, you have to disconnect a pin.  

Josiah assumed I'd need help with this, but I actually did it myself in the end.  

See the "big" square?  With the pins coming off the side?  I had to sever one of those pins--without destroying any of the others.  

Those suckers are tiny, and surprisingly durable.  But I managed in the end, and I've been applying and scanning barcodes amok.  

Right this minute, I have 1,642 books inventoried, and 325 of those are totally ready to shelve.  Which means I have piles and piles of books in various stages of processing.  Everywhere.  (The school, our school room, my bedroom.)  

In all my obsessing about running a library, I realized I'm going to have a bulletin board!  So I started thinking about various themes and I fired up Crikey to make one.  

You know that verse in the Bible that admonishes you not to start building a house without counting the cost?  I'm just sure there's a crafting corollary:  Don't start a project before checking to see if you have elephant gray cardstock.  

I'm grateful for next day prime delivery.  My letters spell out, "WILD ABOUT BOOKS."  

A friend of mine was road tripping up the coast and spent a night parked here.  She needed to make some modifications to the a/c setup in the camper, so Paul got to get the blowtorch out.  

It was fun to see her, as it's been several years.  

I picked up some "post garage sale" books from a homeschool family in town.  

A few of them will go to the homeschool sale next month, but most will go to the library.  

The girls haven't finished the current puzzle yet, and Grumman isn't helping.  We came down one morning and found pieces all over the floor.  

What I say:  "I need to do my lesson planning for tomorrow's tutoring session."  

What Grumman hears:  "Nap on tutoring books.  Look cute and immovable."

We spent 3 days at the school this week.  If you look close, you can see that 2 of the shelves are stickered, and the rest have a bookend in front of them.  

5 more stickered shelves.  We use the bookend in front to indicate a shelf that has been looked through and currently contains only unscannable books.  Our milestone this week is that all the shelves have now been gone through in a cursory check for barcodes on back covers.  Now all the books that can be scanned, have been scanned.  

There's a saying in the Air Force mom community, "Find a dime, your airman is fine."  I'm not superstitious, but in going through the new totes of books we picked up, I spotted a dime, and it made me smile.  

You know your cat is spoiled when you won't close a drawer because he's drinking, and you don't want to disturb him.  

Grumman has been "helping" with the library project quite a bit lately.  I'm pretty sure there's cat hair permanently adhered to at least a few books.  

Our collection of readers is growing!  I'm a little sad that I got rid of so many over the past few years.  I had 2 baskets and a plastic shoebox full of them at one point.  

Miss Quito, 

Miss Oslo, 

and Miss Cairo have all gone back to the shelter.  I'm sure they'll get scooped up as soon as they're altered.  It's not as hard to let go this year.  Either 3 kittens is more work than 2 kittens, or I'm really distracted by other things, or both, but I'm okay with them leaving.  Especially right before Annaliese comes for a visit, since she's allergic to cats.  

Our Memorial Day Week

We had out of town family visiting over the long weekend, which was wonderful.

They got to meet the foster kittens.

And my step mom and I took the girls to their first theater movie in a very long time.  

Some birthday shopping happened.  

I updated the Dad picture I keep in my phone.  (The old one was from 2019.)  

While the girls were at the movies, the guys went to the air museum.  

Jack came home full of "letter number number" stories.  F16, A10, P38, none of it means anything to me, so I tend to glaze over quickly.  

But he was happy, so I was happy for him.  

Grumman wasn't sure what to think of the extra feet in the house, so he stuck close to Sam's feet, because those are familiar.  Or the most odiferous.  Or something.  (Who knows what goes on in his little walnut sized brain?)  

The weather has warmed up here.  I can tell, because the cat is melting.  

Speaking of Grumman and Sam feet, omigosh, this was amusing.  Sam went camping with friends.  He came home with alllll the smells on his feet.  Grumman went nuts, rubbing, licking, biting, and finally laid down on a foot to just enjoy the sniffs.  

Library milestone this week.  Now that school is out, I can get into the classroom that currently has the school's books in it.  I took the girls with me, and we started scanning.  

The shelves with the index cards taped to them indicate books that are scanned.  At the end of the first day, we'd scanned 319 books.  

Many of the school's books are old and unscannable.  I'll be doing a lot of manual entering at some point.  

Quito purrito conquered the Sam.  The kittens have learned to climb, and are everywhere now.  3 kittens is double the work of 2 kittens.  

Jack went to a friend's house. and came home with a bag of cherries!  Win win!  

We've reached the playing with dirty laundry phase of kitten fun.  That's a mask.  

Day 2 in the library this week, I sent the girls out to play with friends (there were staff kids around, as the staff had one more week of school than the students did).  I spent my time stickering the books we scanned the day before, having typed up labels after dinner that night.  Many of the books had a crusty, yellowing, brittle label on them.  Some of those were easy to remove, so I took them off prior to sticking the new one on.  I had quite the pile of old labels and tape by the time I was done.  

A lovely shelf of stickers.  (Note the Nat Geo mags?  1974 is the oldest one I've noticed so far.)  

2 more stickered shelves.

I just love seeing this start to take shape!  It's still complete chaos and mess, but we're starting to group like things together.  I forgot to get a shot of the biography shelf.  I have a bucket of biographies at home, and the biography shelf at the school is growing as I find them in the piles, so we're going to have a nice bio section once we combine the two.  

No pictures from day 3, but we did more scanning, so now I need to sit down and churn out some more labels to apply next week.  Our total inventory is over 1,100 books entered so far, but we still have a long way to go.  I'm probably more than half done entering the books here at the house, but only about two ninths through the ones at the school.  

Part of Hannah's birthday shopping was a slingshot.  

And who better to teach her the finer points of sling shot-ing than Sam??  Who told a slingshot story I can't even repeat.  I face palm just thinking about it.  

The girls are working on another puzzle.  

This is a hard one.  It's an aerial city photo.  
 

These guys go in for a weight check on Monday.  Quito is 2# and the other two are close, so they may be staying at the shelter then.  It's always a little bittersweet to say goodbye, but Annaliese will be visiting soon, and she's allergic, so having fewer cats in the house seems like a good thing.