Michelle's blog

We're doing "To the Library and Beyond" this summer and the librarian and page made this one day.

I bought a new digital camera yesterday. It's pretty sweet. It has a lot more functions to it than I originally thought too!

 

This past Friday I took my boys to the Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute and we were lucky enough to meet Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor and one of the Mengele twins. She has a book out, Echoes in Auschwitz, which I read a long time ago. While I was at the museum, I was able to buy a copy and get her autograph. It was awesome to be able to meet her and have my boys listen to her experiences during the Holocaust. It's amazing to me that there are people who want to deny the holocaust even happened. The pictures I got of her are not very good. All I had with me was my cell phone, so that was all I could do. I hadn't planned on seeing her there. Her normal day for working/lecturing is on Saturday, and it just so happened a school group came Friday and really wanted her to speak, so they paid double, and she was there. We lucked out, truly. The speaker who normally works on Friday showed up also and spoke for a few minutes (Walter Sommers). He lived through and experienced the Kristallnacht (night of broken glass). He was one of the lucky ones and was able to escape the U.S. before anything "bad" happened to him.  

Classes are, of course, over by now. I got A's in both of my courses. I'm still in the process of trying to get my transcripts over to the University so I can transfer. It's been frustrating, to say the least.

My OSD graduated from high school a couple of weeks ago in Nebraska. We traveled there to watch it happen. It went well.

Work is going good. We are 39% automated now, as far as books go. Once the books are all done, then we have to do patron records. 

I'm still reading a lot. Just finished up Joy Fielding's new book. It was pretty good. I read SEVERAL books when we traveled to Nebraska for graduation and I plan on reading a lot when we travel to North Carolina in June. There are just too many books to read and so little time!

I am working on a project for school and need an idea of the tech services aspect of processing journals/periodicals/magazines in an academic library. The project is basically a public library combining with an academic library and converting from a dewey decimal system to library of congress system. Most public libraries that I have worked in do not even catalog their magazines at all. They just mark them off on a card and stick them out there for public enjoyment. However, I am pretty sure academic libraries do it differently and there is more of a process involved. Can anyone enlighten me? Right now, for the project, I have all the public library materials being sent out to an outside service to convert them. I only need a page and half more on my paper and thought maybe I could expand it by going in this direction. Any help would be welcome. Also, any ideas on things like the vertical file (pamphlets) that the public library might want to keep but would not already be cataloged? Thanks!

It's like nearly the middle of April. And it snowed today. Crazy.

ok, so I am really liking these Next novels, so I joined some club over at eharlequin where they send them to me every month. At least, I assume that is how it works. Anyway, not sure I needed FOUR books but that is what I got. I will say one thing, I have plenty of summer reading material once my classes are over this semester!

It's Monday, again. I will soon be headed in to work.

I've tried, on several occasions, to start a food related blog. Something to store recipes and share recipes and write up information I discover that I find to be interesting or helpful. It always falls to the wayside, mostly because no site does everything I want it to do. Plus, life gets in the way and I get busy with other things and well, it just becomes less important. I used to have a recipe website with over 600 recipes on it. Recently I gave up my domain and no longer have that site, but I do have the recipes sitting on my server still. At some point I want to start a notebook and just start organizing my personal recipes into some sort of mess that will make sense. I used to print off every recipe that sounded good. I ended up with hundreds of printed recipes that I never tried and couldn't find what I wanted in them anyway, so I dumped them all. I'm thinking more along the lines of a tried and true binder of just recipes I have made and we like. I have a small photo album that holds 4 x 6 pictures that I am actually using for that very reason. I just put 4 x 6 recipe cards in it instead of photos. It works well. Not sure if I should continue doing something like that, or if I should go larger and do something more like a binder size. With a binder I can add tabs and try to group things together: chicken, make ahead, desserts, etc. With the little photo album, it would not be like that. And I don't want to have to spend forever looking for a recipe. So that is what is on my mind this morning. What's on yours?

Book: Show us a book that made you laugh out loud.
Submitted by Red Pen.

These are pics that Olan Mills took for the church directory. The one with all of us is going in it. This is right in the middle of all the sickness that was going on in our home. In fact, OS had stayed home that day from school, sick. He is on the far left.

So last night I stayed up way too late, reading this book. It was cute. And it is part of a series. For some reason I tend to enjoy series more, I guess because I can enjoy the characters longer with a series. Anyway, it was total fluff reading, but that is what I need right now. I have two of the other books from this series to read, and then there is one the library doesn't have I will have to search out. I am not convinced it is published yet. Anyway, the premise of this story is that the main character is a bubblehead blonde that has earned a reputation as Calamity Jayne. Now, as an adult, she finds a body and it's like the boy who cried wolf. No one believes her because the body mysteriously disapears. The rest of the book is about her trying to figure out what happened to this body. If you are looking for a light read for purely entertainment purposes, this isn't a bad little book. Since I am doing so much reading for school, I tend to go really light and fluffy on my personal reading.

ok, so I have been shopping around at eharlequin.com and they have manga now. It's kind of strange, and I am wondering if it is something that might be worth collecting (at least the first couple of books) like you would collect comic books. I mean, is manga something that is "collectible" and worth money someday? Or is it too new to be able to tell? I'm wondering how "popular" this harlequin pink will be. I ordered the first two and then got a chance to see them at the bookstore. They seem kind of cheesy. Then again, I guess most manga is? The first one is by Debbie Macomber, which is a pretty popular author. I don't recognize the author of the second one (Day Leclaire)... oh! and the pages are done with pink ink, not black... which is why they call it "Pink" I guess. ok, no way, I just did a search on amazon, in hopes of finding some customer reviews, and I see harlequin violet too. I wonder why the violet is not on eharlequin but the pink is? Anyway, I thought it was interesting.