Yesterday was my first cataloging class meeting. While sitting in class, I started thinking about how you’d organize someone’s private library. Like, if you just had a room full of books, how would you keep track of all of them? Find one that you were looking for? Prevent buying duplicates?
And then I realized that my future probably holds some kind of crazy book cataloging scheme for my home.
I actually don’t have very many books right now. I two small/medium book cases worth. I know what I own and where exactly everything is. But, you know, 10 years from now that probably won’t be the case. I’m not even a book fetish type person, but you pick up a few every year. Plus if Les and I ever manage to move into a place where we both have all of our possessions, there will suddenly be a lot more books around.
Right now I have all my books from my undergrad years organized by broad subject. My hisotry books are all grouped depending on region and time period covered. So all my European history books are grouped from ancient history through modern Europe. Then there’s American history from the colonies to now. Fiction is grouped by how good it is. And cooking and craft things are all on the same shelf.
My fiction groupings make no goddamn sense, let me tell you. But everything else, at least, appears to have some kind of method.
Anyway, for those of you have a decent sized collection, how do you organize & keep track of everything? Do you sort of know what you have from memory? Do you use a website like Good Reads or Library Thing? How do you display them?
They all match! How could you not want to vote for that?
So yesterday I went to drop off film at PhotoLab in Berkeley. There were a couple of people in line ahead of me and when it got to be my turn the guy behind the counter was all ‘What can I do for you, young lady?’
Young Lady. I don’t know what to do with being called ‘young lady’ anymore. When I was 20, it was patronizing as hell, but it was at least somewhat accurate. Now that I’m nearly 30 it’s patronizing and confusing. 30 isn’t old by any means, but it’s not young either. Did this guy think I was 23? Or was this one of those things where you see a grandmother with her granddaughter and ask if they’re sisters? Like, did he think I was 40 and would be flattered by being called ‘young lady’ or something? Also, this guy had to be in his late 30s/early 40s. So it’s not even like he’s old enough to be calling anyone ‘young lady’ in the first place.
I should have called him ‘young man’ when I left. As in ‘Thank you, young man. You’ve been very helpful.’
So it’s the early evening and I’m sitting at my dining room table reading the “introduce yourself” thread for one of my classes. My semester started yesterday and I’ve only just realized how much reading I’m going to need to be doing for my classes.
I decided on taking all four of the classes I signed up for. None of the classes have an excessive amount of assignments and they’re staggered in a way that will allow me to get things done without going too crazy. That’s the hope at least. Three of my classes are mostly off-line, which I think will help a lot. My problems with keeping up with my classes last semester wasn’t the work load as far as assignments or readings, it was keeping up with the class discussions. They were often a little boring for me and the irregular updating made it hard to keep on top of everything.
Right now I’m trying to figure out a decent organization system to help me keep track of my classes. The book for my Information Secrecy class hasn’t been printed yet. So my professor, who edited the book, is posting chapters for us. Which means that I need to print out pages and pages of articles and keep track of each of them by week. I cannot really deal with in-depth reading on my computer of anything longer than about 5 pages.
So! Anyone have suggestions for keeping track of school stuff? Right now that best I can come up with are huge binder clips and great big document folders.
Les wrote an email to Jon Carroll (and SF Chronicle columnist for those of you not in the Bay Area) and it got printed in a recent column. The letter was about bicyclists and our tendency to blow through stop signs and the occasional red light. I admit that i am completely guilty of not bothering to stop at stop signs.
I have to say that I agree with both the bike-non-stoppers in this article.
Les is correct – it wouldn’t make any sense to bike on streets with a million stop signs unless you are going to blow through them. Otherwise it would be much easier to just bike along the major roads that have both the stop lights & the right of way, much like every single car in Berkeley. Duh.
Also, the momentum hierarchy described by the second letter writer is something that I have also used to justify running stop signs and the like. It takes a lot of effort on my part to get up to speed so I’m only going to stop if I absolutely must. This is also a perfectly good justification for pedestrians having the right of way at cross walks. The amount of time it is going to take a car to stop for me while I cross is much, much less than the amount of time it would take me to wait until there are no cars on the road.
I also have another theory about stop signs and bikes. Basically, cars don’t want me anywhere near them so they’re going to stop and let me get by regardless of my own personal behavior. Stopping at every stop sign just confuses and scares people. I cannot tell you the number of times I have been waved through stop signs out of turn by cars because, you know, I’m on a bike. So generally on small streets with limited traffic, it’s better just to blow through. It is a little like going 65 in the fast lane on the freeway. Why yes, that is the legal limit but no one goes that slowly in the fast lane. Obeying the law instead of following the normal flow of traffic cause more harm than good in this case. Likewise, stopping at every stop sign when cars expect you to cross out of turn just causes confusion and frustration for everyone involved.
Grinding whole wheat flour somewhat finer than normal does not make it appropriate for pastries, as the labeling on this bag of flour loudly proclaims.
This is the reason no one believes you when you say things taste good.
Love,
cola
Last Tuesday Sarah Doty came up to Berkeley to have dinner with Les and me. She brought with her a four day old sour dough starter as a gift for me. I was really pleased.
The starter was bubbly and smelled foul, which is perfect. I got it home the next day (via bike since we’d spent the night in Les’s loft) and fed it. And then it started acting funny. I blamed the Oakland tap water, which smells of chlorine. Chlorinated water can’t be a good base for growing bacteria, right? So I went an purchased a gallon of distilled water and hoped that wold fix it.
By Friday, I figured hope was lost. I’d followed the directions in The Bread Bible, but the starter was was too solid and didn’t look active at all. So I fed it again, adding a little more water and told myself that I’d just toss it on Saturday if it didn’t look more active.
Saturday came around and what do you know? I’ve got a ridiculously active starter on my hands! It smells foul, it bubbles like an almost flat soda, and it grows to twice its original size in a matter of hours! Truly it is a wonder of creation.
My starter’s name is Henry. I have no idea why, but that’s is its name. I’m eating some bread leavened entirely from a wild stater as I type this. It is the awesome.
Thanks Sarah!