Danish relative

My birthday last week was not really celebrated. The only amusement was a chocolate cupcake I bought myself. That same day I went with a colleague to the storage to do some minor projects and to shelve. We got some things done but both of us injured our right hands in this process. She got more problems than I, my hand is better now but she still has hers bandaged. I also have back problems. It's the same as usual and I have made an appointment for Monday at the chiropractor's place.

Wednesday was the funeral for my mother's eldest brother in the home parish church. I did not attend it. I hadn't met him in many years.

Thursday evening I got a very surprising phone call - from Denmark. I have never met the woman who called but it didn't take many seconds before I understood who she was. She was not so interested in family history 20 years ago when I visited her brother and sister in Copenhagen but now she had started on it. We are related, however it's distant. We have common relatives in Australia and that's what she was mostly asking about. It was possible to understand her, even though she spoke Danish. She had actually found a clue for a lost emigrant in that family. Her call got me started on this research again and I spent time at work today to search for more information.

At work we got one more employee who started last week in the stacks. It was not necessary to teach her anything because she is the one who replaced me during my illness last year. She was already familiar with the job. We are very happy to have her back. We were really struggling to cope with our tasks. Many people have also been ill (all sorts of flus and colds) and some days we had to ask our boss and other staff members for help. The piles with returned books were gigantic and we lagged behind with everything. This past week we also got two students to help out by shelving both in the stacks and the open collection. The situation is better now, thankfully.

Yesterday I gave a short speech at a review regarding our new database system, which will be implemented in June. We have open meetings for all librarians once every two weeks so that they can come and ask questions and get news on the progress. It is a very big project. I discovered a bug in the new system (this was not really what the technicians hoped for but rather now than afterwards). They took it seriously and discussed it at length, before deciding to fix it during the migration in June. My speech was about this bug and how and why we need to fix it.