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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Desk duty again

It's Thursday and I have desk duty in the manuscript reading room again. There is only one visitor, and she manages by herself. The number of visitors varies greatly, sometimes there are very few and some days large groups of students sit here and study old books and manuscripts. The Library Science Faculty sends a lot of students over to our library, both for library science studies and book history studies. We have a fairly large collection of books printed before the year 1800, and many of those items are rare.

Tomorrow I will go to Kristianstad city library to put up an exhibit on the life and music of Leroy Anderson. I have been working on that for quite some time now. I have asked my more technically gifted colleagues for help on several things and the media department made a large poster. I even got the book binder to make a transport casing especially for the oversize printed material. It's very useful to know people like that.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Boring weekend again

The weekend was rather boring. The most exciting event occurred when my mother called me to ask for a clue to a crossword puzzle. She lacked the proper name for fishing line. Fascinating, isn't it? Apart from that, I watched sports on TV. Swedes are pretty good at skiing, both cross country and downhill. There were competitions in Canmore, Canada this weekend and it was shown on TV here. A Swede won the cross country sprint. The European championship in figure skating was also held this weekend, and I saw some of it too.

I started the thing I really was supposed to do - write texts for the Leroy Anderson exhibit - far too late on Sunday night. But it went better than I thought, so I stayed up late to finish that part of it. I used most of the afternoon at work today printing and editing the texts and images. There are a few more things to do (I keep finding new interesting items to include), but the main structure is done.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Speech

Today I had to give a speech in front of about 80 of my colleagues. Not my kind of thing, generally speaking. I didn't look forward to it, but it turned out great, actually. Mainly I think this was because it was in co-operation with a colleague. I didn't have to stand up there by myself. We received a lot of praise for the presentation. The topic was a project we are involved in regarding technical solutions in the stacks. The flow of book requests is complicated, the orders come from several different database systems and there are also handwritten requests. The goal is to get these different systems to "talk" to each other and produce requests looking basically the same (it varies a lot now). We are also working with a digital "message board", which is a system for communicating with he patron. Now, if anyone thought I have the knowledge to get databases to talk to each other, think again. About two years ago there was a computer nerd employed in the stacks, and he has come up with several technical improvements. We are all very happy about this, because it has made our work easier.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Lots of work

It has been a working weekend. I have spent most of the past two days in front of the computer, trying to write texts for the exhibit at the library. It's not the easiest thing. It's difficult to know how much information to include. We just found out that Leroy Anderson visited Sweden in 1929 with a jazzband on tour, and that means he was in Sweden at least four times (1929, 1959, 1962 and 1966).

It has been a lot to do at work also. Most days this week I was at the library 10-12 hours. No wonder I didn't wake up until noon on Saturday.

Thank you for the comment, Nancy. We certainly would never have found each other if it hadn't been for the Internet.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

End of holiday season

The previous weekend is traditionally the time when you take down the Christmas ornaments, and I followed the tradition this year. It's supposed to be 20 days after Christmas. It was a lot of work to exchange the curtains, get all the decorations off the tree, and drag the tree up to the attic again, not to mention the cleaning afterwards. Even though I didn't have a real tree, it still got pretty dusty in the room.

Over the weekend I also managed to purchase four Leroy Anderson LP:s from the 1960s. I found them for sale on Swedish ebay, and I bought them right away. They arrived by mail yesterday, and they are in very good condition. I wanted them primarily for the covers (to have at the exhibits), but I might also try to find an old record player so that I can listen to them.

The news of the Leroy Anderson jubilee year is spreading. People call me from all over Sweden to ask about the centennial. I do my best to enlighten people, and I have to say that I'm glad the technical aids are so advanced these days that I can send lots of information material via e-mail. Sometimes I think of the world before the internet, and wonder how we really managed.....

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Interesting movie

Last weekend was once again spent with family members. My sister and her family visited my mother last week, and when I arrived there Friday, I was met by my nephew John. He was jumping up and down with excitement when he saw me. I have somehow got a reputation of being an expert on building playing-huts (by taking some mattresses and blankets and build a small "house"). We started immediately by pretending that a bunk-bed was a boat and added a wall to it by hanging a blanket over the side. Very easy to do, and with great results. John sat in the "boat" and collected his toys and other items from the furniture nearby.

Saturday my sister, her husband and I went to Kristianstad to see a Swedish movie called Arn. It's one of the most expensive movies ever made here. It's set in 12th century Sweden, and tells the story of a man named Arn Magnusson, who grows up at a monastery, where he is trained in the arts of fencing and archery. He gets involved in the assassination of the king, and later, after being unlucky in love, he is forced to leave. He is sent to Jerusalem as a templar, and tries, quite successfully, to defend the city. It was an interesting movie, both for historical and entertainment reasons.

Sunday we walked down to the beach in the morning. It was around zero centigrades and very windy. But John is crazy about water and probably didn't notice the cold weather. He was busy trying to "catch" the waves with a stick. After a while, we returned home and then we went for lunch at Furuboda. In the afternoon, my sister and her family returned to Borås.

Monday I was once again scheduled for a dentist appointment, but for the second time they called and cancelled. The dentist was sick. Instead my mother and I went to town. Rather surprisingly, none of us bought anything. We had lunch at a cafe, and then I had a meeting with the city librarian to hand over some exhibit material and talk about the display we are going to do there on February 2. Later, there was another Leroy Anderson meeting also, and then I returned to Kävlinge by train.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

New Year's

The New Year's Eve-celebration was held at my uncle's place in Övarp, Norra Strö - the hometown. It was a very nice visit, especially since all of my mother's siblings were there. She has three brothers and one sister. It's not often they all get to see each other at the same time. We were treated to great food (salmon) and the neighbours provided the fireworks display. My uncle has cattle and they were very afraid of the fireworks, but I think they survived it.

The next day we got out of bed pretty late. For obvious reasons. I stayed at my mother's place until the evening, because my sister and her family were driving down from Borås that day. We just had time to eat dinner together and then both my aunt and I had to leave. It was Sunday-traffic so the trains were not that frequent. It actually took three hours for me to get back home again. One hour longer than usual.

I forgot to mention that my mother's boyfriend gave me an extra Christmas present. He has helped me a lot with the electrical problems in my apartment and he had complained a little about my small selection of tools. So now he got me a large set of screwdrivers.....

And finally I would like to wish the readers of this blog a Happy New Year!