Welcome to Tessa's blog

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Nice lunch

Work is basically the same, some people are absent for various reasons and the returns are piling up. I'm involved in several committees at the library, and there have been lots of meetings these past few weeks. One day I attended three meetings and felt pretty braindead afterwards. I have now handed in the 2013 statistics from my department, so that is over for this year.

One nice thing was the lunch I was treated to one day. I had done research for a former colleague, and payment was this lunch at a golf club. Very good food. It turned out that I got more research tasks though, because he wanted to know about the other emigrants as well. I have already done it, it was fairly easy as they ended up in the same place as the others (Massachusetts).

I got to talking to one of my neighbors when I was in the laundry room last week. He was apparently very interested in libraries and reading, because he asked for a tour of my library. He was very impressed by our old books and the picture database that we are hosting. His origin was an area in the Middle East where access to libraries was not a common feature, so he is catching up on his library visits here (he has six different library cards).

The weather here is strange. Meteorologically, the spring has arrived in the south. It has been above freezing for seven days and nights, so winter is supposed to be over. The snowdrops are blooming in the park outside the library and the migrating birds are returning. It's really early.

The Olympic Games is turning out to be a very successful competition for us. We have many medals, but only two gold. The last chance is today, when Sweden meets Canada in the hockey game final.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Noise and long hours

It's pretty tough at work. These past two weeks have been hard to get through. I'm working about ten hours a day again, and this is not what I expected. Half of the staff in the stacks are either sick or injured, so we have done only the absolutely necessary tasks. There is a mountain of returned books that we don't have time to shelve. We are running out of space for all the books and have to put them on the floor. It was like this early fall last year and I really didn't want to see that happening again.

It's very noisy at the library right now. They started refurbishing one floor and also installing a sprinkler system. The drilling is so loud that they have given us covers for our ears to muffle the sound. It's going to be even louder next week when they will remove the concrete floor on the highest level. We are not looking forward to this, because we can't escape. We have to retrieve books no matter what.

I was told that we have to send in the statistics to the national library no later than February. This meant that I had to measure the entire book collection. It's about 100 000 meters. I had some old figures, but since we have moved more than half of the collection, I had to measure it again. It took three days.

By the way, the first half of my long vacation was approved. And God, do I need it..... It starts around April 20 and lasts almost three months.

The Olympic Games started yesterday and Sweden already has two silver medals, both in cross country skiing. I watch some of it on TV.