Goldfish Revisited

I'm getting a bit of a slow start this morning because I slept a little later than usual. Last night Dave and I went to see our friends Gordon and Donna in Leyton, East London, and we were there until about 11 p.m. That is a positively insane hour for me these days, so now I need some recovery time!

Yesterday was pretty slow, consumed with reading and household errands. I did all the usual stuff -- laundry, gardening -- and read about 30 more pages of John Rechy's "City of Night," which I hadn't picked up all week. I like this book -- I keep thinking it must have created a heck of a scandal when it was published in the early '60s -- but I can see it's going to take me some time.

We didn't head out to Leyton until about 5 p.m., and neither of the most direct tube lines -- the Jubilee and the Central -- were running. I don't know if that was a prelude to the tube strike, which is supposed to start today, or an unrelated problem. We caught the overground instead, which got us to Stratford without too much trouble, and then we started to hoof it to Gordon's. We passed an idling taxi and grabbed that to save ourselves the walk, because Dave was carrying a banoffee pie and schlepping that around East London wasn't the easiest thing. The taxi let us out on Leyton High Road so I could photograph the buildings above, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Isn't that a crazy paint job?

Anyway, Gordon made dinner and we had a great time catching up. I asked if they'd recently seen the neighbor boy with the goldfish, and they weren't sure who I meant, so I read them the last few paragraphs of my post from January 2012. We had a good laugh. That kid is in his mid-20's now. How time flies. But I have never forgotten Alan John the goldfish!

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.)

Cat Napkin and Free Speech

Can you stand another bee photo? I took this one a few days ago of a bee trying valiantly to visit the long, trumpet-shaped flowers on Nicole the Nicotiana. It was quite windy and the bee was having trouble landing on them. I'm not sure those flowers are really made for bees as opposed to ants or something smaller, but somehow it managed and hopefully benefitted. I would think a Nicotiana would make some pungent honey, as aromatic as those plants are. Even just touching it leaves my hand strongly but not unpleasantly scented, and feeling a bit sticky.

As a follow-up to my previous post about covering books, I thought you'd like to see what I'm dealing with in terms of quantity. These are the books I covered yesterday, both hardbacks and paperbacks. This is how they usually come to me, in stacks with the spine labels printed on top. I covered all of these and it took me a couple of hours. Whew!

Covering can be a weirdly soothing process, a task that requires skill and attention but not a lot of brain power. I can daydream a bit while I do it. But as some of you suggested in the comments, it also becomes tedious when there are a lot of books to do -- and also kind of painful, because it requires a good grip and a firm hand to smooth down the plastic covering, especially on the paperbacks. My hands are always sore after I cover a stack of books.

Anyway, enough of that.

A student gave the head librarian a cupcake yesterday on this napkin. I thought it was pretty cute so I thought I'd share it. The librarian also gave me the cupcake, which wasn't bad!

This reminds me that The New York Times had an article the other day about "junk journaling," in which people -- all women, in the article -- create collages in notebooks with found items like stickers, labels, napkins, stamps, ticket stubs, whatever. I suppose I'm junk journaling here, in a virtual sense. I've always saved stickers and labels and other bits of trash and stuck them into my journals, way back to when I was a kid in the '70s. I had no idea what I was doing had a name. (Granted, my collages were not as dense as those produced by some of the junk journalers highlighted in the article!)

Dave was away last night for Back-to-School night, in which parents come to the school, see the facilities and teachers, blah blah blah. There was another one scheduled for next week but now that's been postponed because of a planned tube strike beginning Sunday.

As long as we're talking about current events, did you see that comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for some anti-trans tweets he made several months ago? This has caused quite a furor and a discussion about the limits of policing speech in the UK. Although Britain values free speech, there is no written constitutional guarantee like there is in the USA and there are limits to what can be said without legal repercussions. I can't walk up to a person on the street, for example, and use racist language against them -- that's an offense for which I can be arrested. Linehan was arrested, as I understand it, because his tweets recommended punching trans women if they're in female-only spaces -- that specific suggestion of violence is what got him into trouble, though he says he was "joking." (Ha. Ha.)

I think what Linehan said was odious and offensive, but I do think the police went too far in arresting him. His threat, such as it was, was non-specific and not directed toward any individual. I tend to have a rather maximalist view of free speech, that people should be allowed to be assholes if they want -- and perhaps this is my American perspective since free speech in the USA is more legally absolute than here.

But I question why people say the things they do. I don't know why we all can't be more considerate of each other, live and let live, and stop trying to game the Twitter algorithm by being the most offensive person in the digital room and thereby getting more views and retweets. As the saying goes, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

A Harvest, and Covering Books

We got these tomatoes from our tomato plant (or, as the British say, "tomahto plahnt") last weekend. Unlike our first harvest these weren't at all mealy and in fact we found them really good. I only wish we had more! I think the plant still has some green ones on it but who knows how well they'll ripen as the weather cools. Dave's co-worker gave him this plant last spring, so frankly anything we get is a bonus.

OK. Some of you asked for details about covering books. I'm going to do my best to make this interesting.

When we add a book to our library -- whether purchased or donated -- it goes first to the cataloging clerk. That person, my co-worker, enters the book into the online library catalog using international library references that guide its placement, within a certain Dewey decimal category, for example. Her cataloging ensures that someone searching for a book about a certain topic or by a certain author will be able to find it. The clerk prints a spine label bearing the book's call number -- usually a sheet of them at a time, for a stack of books -- and then hands everything to me.

If the book is a paperback, I start here. First I attach the spine label, which you see I've already done. Then I use scissors and a plastic smoothing tool to wrap the book in special library-quality book covering. It's an adhesive plastic a bit like contact paper, but made specially for books.

If I do a good job (which I always do!) the book winds up looking like this. It takes a little more than seven minutes (I timed myself) to wrap the adhesive plastic around the entire book, smoothing out any air bubbles with the tool, and to trim the corners and edges. Sometimes books need more than one spine label, if they're for a certain age group or fall into a certain category like a graphic novel.

I also stamp the book with the name of our library, inside the front and back covers, as well as the date it was acquired. I attach a "date due" slip inside the back cover, and that's where I stamp the due date when the book is checked out. (Most libraries don't stamp due dates anymore but we still do. We're old-fashioned like that. It helps kids know when the book is due and helps us see at a glance how often it gets read.)

Hardcover books are a whole 'nother thing. I take the dust jacket off the book, affix the spine label to it, and cut a different kind of book cover to fit it.

This cover is a sort of clear plastic envelope with a paper backing, and an adhesive strip at the top. The dust jacket goes inside it, facing the plastic, then the adhesive strip is uncovered and the clear plastic is folded down and secured to the paper backing to create a pocket around the dust jacket. Can you envision that? Sometimes part of the paper needs to be trimmed away to better fit the dust jacket, in which case the plastic folds down farther. It's basically one-size-fits-all.

Then the corners of the covered jacket are taped to the book using special book tape, which secures the cover to the book itself.

And voila! The book is covered, and after stamping it's ready to be checked out.

I'm sure this process still isn't entirely clear, but I couldn't take a photo of every single step because a) phones are prohibited at our school starting this year, so I had to be furtive about using mine at my desk, and b) I need two hands for most of the steps so I had no way to hold the camera.

If you want more information about the products used during this process, you can see them at library supply sites like this one.

Covering a single book is no big deal, but often the cataloger hands me a stack of 20 books at a time, and covering those can take a few hours -- especially since I'm also dealing with kids and re-shelving and doing all the other things that are part of my job.

Fun, right? Aren't you glad you asked?

Psychic Weight

Yesterday started leisurely enough. I picked one last handful of blackberries for my cereal, being careful to wade into the bushes only after I'd put on my long pants and long-sleeved shirt to thwart any insidious flower bugs. (My itchy arms, by the way, are slowly getting better, but it's been, what, three weeks?)

By the time I got out the door I was running a bit late for work, so I decided to take the tube instead of walking. Problem was, the tube wasn't running. Or it was, but with "severe delays." I got to West Hampstead station and there were about 200 people on the platform and no train in sight. So I texted my boss and said I was walking and I'd be a bit late. She didn't take me to task. After all, I can't control the tube.

It wound up being another incredibly busy day, mostly with re-shelving and numerous classes having library orientation. Some of you asked about covering books and what that entails. You know when you get a library book it often has a clear plastic film over the dust jacket, to protect it? Well, that's a book cover, and that's what I put on. Paperbacks get a different type of clear plastic that adheres to the cover. I'll take some photos the next time I cover books so you can see what I mean.

Anyway, the day sped by, and I walked home in the afternoon just in time to get rained on. We do need rain, so I am not complaining -- well, not too much -- but I got rained on Monday too. Why does it have to rain right at 4:45 p.m. when I'm walking home?

I got home damp, again, and Dave said, "Why didn't you take your umbrella?"

"Because if I had it would have been like the Mojave Desert out there and I'd have been carrying around a 40-pound umbrella for nothing," I said.

"Your umbrella weighs 40 pounds?" Dave said.

(I hate carrying anything as a rule. I will always opt to endure minor discomfort if it means I can leave things at home.)

"It's psychic weight," I said.

(Photo: A newsagent in Soho, on Saturday.)

A Bee Indoors

Yes, I know -- another bee on another purple flower. I'm not winning points for originality here! But what's unusual about this bee and flower is that they're inside the house. That purple heart plant grows by the back door, and the other day the bee leisurely flew inside to check out the blossoms.

The bee seemed to struggle a bit with the long, floppy stamens of the flower, holding on to them like a drowning man holds on to a life preserver. But I imagine the flower might have enjoyed it, if a flower is capable of enjoyment. Whatever chemicals and hormones run in its vessels might have sped up a bit, in reaction to finally being touched by a pollinator!

Or not. Who knows.

Once finished with its exploring, the bee bounced futilely off the glass windows for a few minutes before I helped it back outside. When it went back to its hive covered with this exotic tropical pollen, did the other bees say, "Where have you been?!"

Yesterday was wildly busy once again. I covered new books, shelved three or four cartloads of returns -- they're still pouring in -- and we had sixth graders coming in for library orientation. The librarian had them rotate among various "stations" where they learn about the library and how it's organized, and at one of them, they were supposed to write on a poster the place where they most like to read. Most of them said things like "on the couch" or "in my room," but one kid wrote, "on a boat in Croatia." Very specific.

It began raining (yay!) as I walked home from work, so I got a little wet and rode a bus part of the way. I picked up my new glasses at the optician. I'm still not thrilled with them. They're much better than the varifocals, but they still seem a bit over-magnified. I find that I constantly use the top part of the lens and never the bottom, which is supposed to be for close-up reading, and they seem a bit blurry toward the edges. I'm going to wear them a few more days and try to get used to them, but honestly, I wish I'd never started all this and just had my old reading glasses back. (I do have an older pair of readers, and they're much easier to wear!)

Buzzing Bluebeard

Although the weather is getting cooler and there's a noticeable touch of fall in the air, the bees are still out and about. They like our bluebeard (Caryopteris)...

...as do the hoverflies.

I spent all of yesterday tidying up around the house. I did laundry, watered all the houseplants, and mowed the lawn.

The grass is still looking scraggly in areas that we didn't mow over the summer, to preserve the teasels and encourage insect life. But it should bounce back in coming weeks with adequate rain and sunshine.

I sat out on the back bench and read the first 60 pages of "City of Night," that paperback by John Rechy that I picked up at a charity shop a couple of months ago. It's good so far. Very "Midnight Cowboy" in theme. It was published in 1963, a couple of years before "Midnight Cowboy," so it's ironic that the latter would go on to be the more famous novel about urban male hustlers.

I managed to break yet another slat out of the bench. I suppose we'll have to buy a new one. It's almost nine years old and we've refinished it once, so I think it's served its purpose. Now the wood is rotting at the joints and while it will probably get us through winter (when we rarely use it) we may replace it come spring.

Otherwise, there's not much news from this corner of the world. I was glad for a quiet day to let me get my life organized. Today I need to check in with the optometrist on the status of my new glasses. I handed them in more than two weeks ago to get new lenses and haven't heard a peep.