Still sick

I stayed home today other than going in to pick up our fair entries. I took the chance to do some work on our home library catalog, using Collectorz.com's Book Collector software. I had started cataloging our books a couple of years or so ago, never finished, and then the books got all mixed up anyway and we got new ones but didn't keep up with the catalog and gave some away but didn't update the catalog... what a mess. So what I did was begin using the Location field to specify which room or box the books are in. We have several big plastic tubs of books in storage on the back porch and I started going tub by tub, checking to make sure that all the books in each tub were in the catalog (many of them weren't), and adding a location (something clever like "big blue tub #1"). Then I printed out lists of the contents of each tub and taped it to the outside. Now, if all goes well (ha!), we will no longer rummage through the tubs, rather will check the catalog to find a specific book, walk directly to the tub, easily find the book we need, read it, then replace it neatly in the tub where it belongs.

Hey, I can dream.

The shelves will be trickier. I may just put "living room" as the location, or something. Our living room bookshelves are always crammed to bursting, and I need to pare down the books there to just the ones we know we'll want to visit with frequently.

And the success of this venture depends on my finding more time to work on this some more rather than getting bogged down and failing to follow through, like happened last time. At least the parts I have done so far are sort of contained, in the tubs.

Now my sinuses are hurting so I have moved into the next stage of this sickness (which everybody in the area has, or has just had, or is coming down with, by the way -- nothing serious or exotic, just a summer cold, although every time I say that I think about Stephen King's The Stand -- you know what happened when everybody in that book thought they were just coming down with a summer cold). I think this is a good thing. The end is in sight. Right? Right!