Friday morning, time to take my grandson home and get on with getting ready for winter.  We  have a pleasant drive, chatting of this and that while he plays on his laptop.  It is a hand-me-down from his other grandmother, that he must share with his little sister.  Because he kept it for the week he visited me, it will be hers for the coming week.  He is making the best of his time with it before he has to turn it over to his sib.

After dropping  him off, I drive on to work.  I find it  hard to settle to cataloging and entering new students in the database. The tech school is closed for the holiday weekend. 

 Once started for real, it goes smoothly.  After about three hours, I take a snack break.  I’m trying to economize and lose weight, so I shopped at the Dollar store across the way instead of McDonald’s.   My snack is a cup of unsweetened tea and two molasses cookies (I love molasses cookies–these are Clover Valley generics. A little too sweet, but not bad.) smeared with peanut butter, and sprinkled with raisins.

I’m listening to Live 365 –Folk Alley as I work.  The selections are good, but a bit mournful.  Still, the background sketches about various artists are interesting, and it keeps my mind from spinning in unproductive circles as I work.  (Cataloging isn’t the  most mentally challenging task in the world.)

Having completed all the new stuff, I head toward the last instructor office with uncataloged books.  I stack them in a box on a fat-tired dolly.  After three trips, I come to the amazing realization that after 2 years of working 20 hours a month (more or less) on cataloging, organizing and straightening our small library, I am looking at the last load of uncataloged books!  Be still my heart…there is a light at the end of the tunnel!

This isn’t the end of this task; the final part will be doing a complete electronic inventory of the volumes cataloged, chasing down errors, cleaning up mavericks…but the main part of this undertaking will be finished today!

I break out the bottle of sweet tea from the Dollar store in celebration, and dig in.

5:00 My program is glitching.  I break to update it.  1:50 secs.  It did fine, but it doesn’t help.

6:00 PM–Half the books are cataloged.  The big medical texts are beginning to feel really heavey.  Program still fussy.  I log out and in again.  Still glitchy.  I read some of my triond mail–and get all soppy over a poem by DA Cournean.

6:15–Time to try this again….Success!  Amazing what just leaving it alone will do.

6:35–The EMT instructor comes by to pick up a backboard.  I return to cataloging and Spanish flamenco on mountain dulcimers.

7:15–all books cataloged.  Time for an exercise break and a snack.  While stretching, I spot a stack of new books by the bookkeeper’s desk.  Do these need catalogued? EEK!  Oh, dear…and I missed six of them still in the box. *whimper* Definitely calls for a snack.

7:40–Refreshed by a stretch and peanut butter and jelly on crackers I am back at it.

8:45–Waiting for the printer to warm up so I can print labels.

10:00– Labels printed, affixed and books returned to their shelves.  Just enough time to run the routine maintenance program on the databases.  Of course it didn’t run quite smooth, and I had to tinker with it, but at last it was done.

11:20:  Time to tally up my hours, and call it a day.  With a long drive home still ahead of me, I am impatient to be gone.

12:00 Midnight.  I’ve often been asked if I’m not afraid to work late, alone.  Mostly, I’m not.  I reside in a small town, I work in a small town.  The crime rate is fairly low.  It does happen–the most skittish part of my evening is the time between exiting the building (which has been locked all the time I am working) and entering my vehicle.  I don’t linger between, although the night is still; not even the tele-marketers remain at this hour.

Once inside my little truck, I lock the doors, start her up and turn on the radio.  I find a station playing classic rock, and settle in to zen my way through a the 2 1/2 hour drive home.