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.