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July

Photo of 12/31/07

Last Day of 2007

Hi Y'all,
Since this is the last day of 2007 I thought I'd tell everyone a happy new year! So HAPPY NEW YEAR! Not a whole lot happening around here. Katy and I just shared a cig on the porch and we talked about new years resolutions. I asked if she and Rick were going to quit smoking for the new year but she said there would be a little procrastination...they are waiting until the 11th of January because that date has been auspicious for them...it was the 11th of January last year that they went on their first date. So it would be pretty stupid of me to try to quit earlier than she does. She is notorious for letting me bum a smoke. There is another class for quitting starting up in Bardstown, we went to it the year before, or last year, I can't remember. Anyway, it worked great for Ron. He hasn't smoked since. I know I have fallen off the wagon at least twice since then. I guess it was two years because I got back on the wagon when we went on the cruise and that was November of 06. Time sure flies. Ron is working on his model airplane and it is keeping him out of trouble. I got him a balsa wood model of a Stearman for Christmas. This has been the year of the Stearman. He got to ride in a Stearman when we went to Galesburg, Ill. We bought a poster and put it up in the basement stairwell to go with all his other model planes and then I got him an old Navy training film (on DVD) on how to fly a Stearman for Christmas too. It is very interesting. I was following along nicely until the 4h chapter. At that point there was just too much to remember but Ron thinks he wants to fly one now. I took some photos this morning out in the backyard with all the frost on the yard art. No frost on the dog but I got some good photos of July too. If I can remember how to do it, I will post them to this blog so everyone can see them. That's all for now. Hope everyone has a great 08! Carol

a new day

OK folks, I got this apple laptop for my husband for our anniversary and I've got to figure out how to use it before he gets home from DC. Katy kids me because this is supposed to be his present and she says I got it for myself. She's partially right. I wanted us to have a laptop to be able to take it on trips with us and I had to decide whether to get one with Vista or XP. There are very few laptops left with XP on them so I figured that if I had to get a new operating system anyway, I might as well switch over to the MAC. Emily has a big influence on me...She loves Apple and I figure she knows better than me. The biggest issue is whether or not Ron's word processing will stay in the same format he is using on his pc. He has to have this book turned into the publisher on WORD. We just have to figure out how to do that on this mac and everything else will be a fun learning curve...I hope. I havent found freecell or solitaire on this computer and that annoys me. Sometimes you just want to hum instead of sing with your brain. Is that an apt analogy for playing freecell? Works for me. Anyway, yesterday in the library a young lady came in with her laptop and wanted to print off of it. I said we had no way of doing that, so she wanted to copy her stuff onto one our computers and print it off from there. OK, good, no problem. Then when she had it hooked up, computer to computer, no disc, no thumbdrive, she couldn;t get the new Vista word processor to jive with our word on our XP systems. That made me think I have made a good choice. She ended up saving the work to notepad and putting it on our computer's notepad and it worked out all right. I'm sorry to say that I didn't get the whole process of what she had done...you know how it is on the desk...but I would have liked to know all the gyrations she actually went through since I'm sure it will come up again with everyone switching over to Vista. I guess I'd better do something other than screw around with this. More later! Carol

Surprise!

OK. I'm going to do this because I enjoyed it during the 24 things. NOW it is not a chore, it is a luxury and you know how those things go on the list of things that actually get done. This coming from a person who can waste a ton of time on free cell. It is my day off, the cat is curled in front of the computer and the house is warming up from the overnight heat shutdown. I bought a Kitchen Aid stand mixer at Lowe's last week and as soon as the hour is decent for turning it on, I'm going up to start on making some yeast bread. I have made bread before on several occasions with enough time between them to forget how much physical work it is to knead that dough. Those pioneer women must have been tough to do that every time they needed a loaf of bread. Now the mixer will do the hard part. I'm also taking a KYVL class on library technical stuff. We got to cataloging this past week. I got the AACL2 book out to read the first two chapters. OMG. Fortunately the instructor has a paper to go along with it that actually makes it somewhat understandable. Understandable...whether I remember it long enough to do any good is still up in the air. I went to the library's valentine party last night. It was upstairs and I didn't get up there until it was almost over so I didn't get to see how crowded it was but what I saw was a lot more pleasant than the times I have seen in the basement. I think the setting makes a big difference. Can't wait for the new building. Stephanie and Anne seemed like they were happy with the results. Catherine's quilling was a surprise. There were a lot of cute things she had patterns for. It seemed like a sweet little thing to do and the mom and daughter I talked to were quite taken with it. Is there anything other than library stuff I can talk about...I have a bunch of music on my MP3 player. I keep finding new stuff I forgot about and go back and download more. My credit card bill is going to be a big surprise this month. It feels like a lot but when you think about it, how much can it be? Less than a dollar a song and maybe 2 or3 every other day or so...maybe average out to one a day. That's 30 bucks. Wow. Two teens at the library game night the other night had their laptops with them and had their music library's up. One would play a song for 30 seconds and the other one would bust in with "You gotta hear this" and start up another. They were very polite to each other about it and it was an education for me. I pretty much stay with music I know and love...which is what I listened to in my teens, twenties and thirties....some forties. I'm sure they will consider Marilyn Manson the same way I do Simon & Garfunkle or The Doors when they get to my age. The one boy teen was doing the head banging thing...I was thinking "you are going to give yourself a headache" while watching him. Times change. Guess I'm going to get off my fat behind and get something done. Somebody else write something.

Tasks 21 & 22

Ok, I have attempted to download the videos on my computer and the computers at work and neither of them will let it happen. I did read the stuff I could and read about Li2.0. I am somewhere between Jack and Catherine. I know how Catherine feels about drowning and dying of boredom but I also am encouraged by Jack's enthusiasm. I think we need to think about just what it is we want the library to be. Maybe we will have to revise the definition of "library" Emily and I have had some of this conversation. I like game night, don't get me wrong, but I still feel like that should be the function of a "recreation department" I know that we have recreational books and that books are traditional media for libraries. Now we have electronic media and video games are electronic recreational media. Have patience with the elderly, Emily, it may take us a little longer to get our feeble old minds wrapped around these new functions of the library. And just saying that makes me think that this is going to be a process. We won't do this overnight and our patrons won't expect or even know how to use this overnight. I think it is important to keep an open mind and to keep learning and evolving. Thanks for getting us jump started, Emily. It has been a lot of fun.

Library Databases

OK. Explored the databases and I am impressed. I had always been impressed with Ebsco host. If any one remembers those reader's advisory things we had in high school...those tiny print, coded little paperbacks with magazine articles listed. First of all you had to find the subject you wanted and what magazine it was in and then hope that the library actually had the magazine, the issue and that the page hadn't been torn out. Just imagine all that work! I have always loved being able to tell people about Ebsco when they were looking for non-book and non-internet sources for their papers!
I got on the Heritage thing from home and at first thought it was full of it because I put in one of my ancestors in the census search and they didn't show up and I knew they were here during because they are in the census books they have here. But despite that I did find out that some of my family from the 1700's were Polks ala Polks Station here in Nelson Co. and that one of the women was captured by Indians and had a child born in Detroit while a captive.
I got on the Auto Repair thingie and saw that I really should have looked up the VW beetle for recalls and service bulletins before I bought the damn thing.
I explored Novelist and was really impressed. Who needs books when there is so much to read about books! And authors! I thought Ludlum and LeCarre would be read-alikes. Boy was I wrong. The YA book award lists are extensive too so if you are looking for a good YA book, try those lists too.
Thanks for making us do this Emily! It was an eye-opener!

Downloadable books

I explored the sites about downloadable books and I have the same feeling about them as Eileen. I get too bored just listening...I have to get up and start doing something else. The thing is that everything else is too noisy so I can't hear the reader when I do that. I think I would like them in the car but I would have to be alone...some folks have to talk you know. And I don't go anywhere by myself that I would have a chance to listen to a whole book. I'm thinking this earphone thing on the mp3 might solve those barriers though. There is no excuse for boredom. Ever.

Tech Blog for #18

This blog is for the assignment #18 where we blog about technology. Having already read Jack’s post, I’m going to start out by commenting on what he started and let it develop from there. I too used to take photos on a SLR with zoom lens and wait for the photos to be developed and then put them in albums, shoe boxes and plastic storage boxes and have to search through all those photos to find the one I was looking for. Now I have CDs with photos on them that I can’t find. But posting these things to flickr seems to be a good way to have the photos ready to be viewed with little or no storage space required. I would not trust the baby pictures to flickr alone though. I recently started trying to organize the storage room and came across yet another storage box of photos from 25 years ago. I also have a box of vhs-c tapes of Katy’s babyhood that I want to get transcribed onto DVD. Which brings me to the frustrating side of technology. I have gone from 45 rpm and LP vinyl disks, to 8 track (very briefly) to cassette tapes and then CDs. Now CDs are out and our music is going to come from a little bitty thing with earplugs. I won’t miss the clutter but just looking around at the rows of CDs on the shelves near me and then thinking back on all the money I have spent on all the different formats just keeping my music in the latest fashion. You young people will accuse me of whining but wait 20 years and you will be doing it too but I’m guessing with a lot less clutter since it all seems to be digital anyway. I can see it now, all the music, stories, photos, videos, everything on one little chip. They will probably implant it in your finger so all you have to do to review any of it is to poke your finger up....nah, that’s going in the wrong direction. Anyway, you get the idea. Add your id, your debt card, a gps and one of those those RFID chips and you won’t need to carry a purse anymore... Except for lipstick and a comb. No way those are going high tech.

Anyway, the thing that I’m really looking forward to is the MP3 player. Last summer Ron and I started making a list of our top 100 songs of all time. We had a hard time limiting the list to 100. We were thinking at the time of how neat it would be to have one of those old fashioned juke boxes like the ones that sat on restaurant tables with the little pages that turn, the chrome trim and the push buttons. The old Stephen Foster Hotel Coffee Shop had them if anybody remembers that. I know the MP3 is a far cry from that but the idea is that we can have our list of 100 songs (only now it doesn’t have to be limited to 100) and have it at the dinner table or in the car or where ever. I was telling him yesterday that one of the things I wanted to get started doing is going through my CDs with a pad of sticky notes and writing down which of the tracks I want to pull off to put on the MP3 player. He started talking about some of his favorites...Broadway Showtunes...and I think he may have to get his own.