Over the Fence

Thank goodness it's the weekend! This has been a long week, with some very busy days. Yesterday, fortunately, was much easier -- I spent several hours in the library's poetry section, weeding old books and trying to make room on the shelves for fresh material.

Many people don't understand book weeding, or question why we do it. But even in areas like poetry, where the information contained within the pages of the books doesn't age, the books themselves do. Libraries eventually find themselves with a lot of old, yellowed, sagging, marked-up poetry books, and libraries that have a carefully edited collection are actually used more effectively than those with shelves and shelves packed full of aging material. As both of my bosses have often said, we are not an archive. Our books are meant to be used.

So, yeah, I weeded out a lot of books -- mostly huge, dense anthologies and literary criticism from the 1960s through the '80s, most of which hadn't been checked out for many, many years. Some were never checked out. Now there's room to breathe over there and the shelves look much fresher. As I've written before, I love weeding -- it plays to my desire for organization and simplifying.

I'm getting more used to my new glasses but I still don't love them. I find I only use the top part of the bifocal lens. The bottom part might be useful if I'm trying to read tiny print on a jar, for example, or maybe on a pharmaceutical package insert. But for my day-to-day work mostly on computers, the top part is fine.

This week I had the garden cam pointed backwards, at the junction of the wooden fence and the brick wall at the back of the garden. This is where animals come in and out of the garden, and I wanted to see how they do it. Here's a quick video that answers the question -- for both foxes and cats. There's a similar point on the other side, and in this way the animals can treat all our gardens as one big hunting and/or exploring ground.

The other day I talked to my quiet neighbor, who lives in the house physically connected to ours on one side. She is a model neighbor -- we never hear her and she keeps pretty much to herself. But as I was moving around the rubbish bins the other day she stopped and asked who was living upstairs. So I gave her the updates about the Russians moving out and this new family moving in, and how pleased I am because they're so quiet compared to the Russians. She agreed, and it never occurred to me that of course she'd been hearing them too through the common wall. Things are much more peaceful for both of us these days!

(Photo: A study in squares and rectangles, taken as I waited for the tube one morning this week.)