Welcome to Tessa's blog

Monday, March 25, 2013

Illness

I should never have written here that I seemed to have avoided the illness my sister's family had. Only a few hours later I got sick with stomach flu. Terrible. It was an awful week. I did very little. I tried to write some emails and tidy up around the apartment, but it was not very productive. I'm much better now and I have worked today. The movers have managed without me, luckily. There weren't too many items for me to attend to here. This is Easter week and many people are away on holiday. My mother has invited me to the summer house, where she is staying right now. I'm going there on Wednesday.

Still pretty cold here, although quite sunny. Someone said it hasn't been this cold in March since 1978.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Musical in Göteborg

Tuesday last week I made the tallest mover (he is close to two meters) help me rearrange the misplaced journal collection. We didn't need the ladder because he could reach the top shelf anyway. It took the entire afternoon to shuffle all the boxes into a correct order. They aren't so heavy (the journals are printed on newspaper paper), but there are a lot of them. In late afternoon, when the workday was really over, we had about 30 meters left. To get it finished, all the others helped out. We were seven people standing in a row, passing the boxes from hand to hand. I'm amazed about their commitment to help out. I didn't even ask.

I took last Monday off and went to my favorite mall outside Helsingborg. It was a nice visit, but I got to pay for it the next day. The tasks had mysteriously piled up and I had to stay at work for longer than I thought. Some researchers had complicated questions that took a while to answer.

Friday I went by train to Göteborg in the afternoon. I met my mother there, and we went out to explore the city. There were some nice stores and we had dinner at a cozy restaurant. In the evening we saw the musical Chess at the Opera House. We had given each other tickets for it at Christmas. It was a fairly impressive musical with strong voices. My mother was more excited about it than I (probably because I have seen quite a few and can compare). But it was worth seeing it. We took the bus to Borås late evening.

Saturday we were very tired. Still, we visited the charity shop where my mother volunteers some days a week. They have moved to a new location, where there is more space for the fabric and sewing materials. Then we went on to the large shopping area, but didn't get much. Sunday we just did a short trip to a village outside Borås, to a second hand store. I had taken Monday off also, so I spent some time at my mother's place. Most of the others got an unpleasant illness overnight, so I left in the morning (it seems like I didn't catch it). I arrived back home by train Monday evening.

The weather is bitterly cold. High winds and below zero. Not nice at all. Where is spring?

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Rearranging

We still haven't rearranged those 300 meters of journals. There have been so many other things to do this past week. I have been at the storages a large part of my working time. Even last Saturday, sadly enough. I don't work on weekends normally, but it was necessary to get the books already placed on carts into a correct order, otherwise the move would have been delayed. The move is at its last stage now. There aren't many collections left at the old storages. At the largest storage we are now clearing out most things belonging to us; we have disconnected the phone, thrown out the computer, moved the boxes and office supplies to the new storage and the guys are removing the book-ends from the shelves. I think the move will be done by May, probably. That's way ahead of schedule. Before we started, I thought it would take a year and a half. There is the ephemera collection to be moved also, but that's not my department. There will be a lot to do also after the guys have moved everything. We have to rearrange several misplaced parts of the collection and put up new signs. I have to write a new instruction manual and there are lots of items in the database that have to be changed. Two of my colleagues are already working on the last thing. It's a big project, one of them recently got a print-out with 4000 items to be changed and that was just one callnumber (out of 20). It's going to take a while.

There have been parties at work this week, one birthday and one retirement. Both yielded cakes and cookies. Nice!

It's still a pretty cold climate here, but much lighter. The sun is really blinding us. The spring flowers have already turned up in the park in front of the library.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Many mistakes

Another busy week gone by. I have spent a lot of time at the new storage to go through some of the material placed there. I have noticed several mistakes in shelving, so I have rearranged some collections. I have discovered some books to be in the wrong place altogether, and moved them. A very large mapbook was placed among the oversize journals, which is completely wrong. Most of these mistakes were made years ago. This material has been moved a few times already, so every move has added to the mess. I have also caused some pretty amazing mistakes this week. They moved 300 meters of large journals according to my instructions. When the journals were in place at the new storage, I noticed that it was all in the wrong order. The movers had done exactly as I told them, so the fault is mine. I didn't look at the collection closely enough, before pointing out the moving order. That storage has very bad lighting, and I think many of the (current and previous) mistakes have been made because of that.

The movers started on a large collection of dissertations yesterday, and that was not fun at all. It's dark, damp and lots of spiders in that area of the storage. The collection turned out to be a very difficult one to move, because almost nothing was placed in correct order. Also, the shelves fell down when they started loading the books.

Next week will be busy, because we have to rearrange those 300 meters of journals. Getting the dissertations in the right order will also be a challenge.