putting things away on shelves

New stuff!
For Christmas I got a hand-me-down Mac Mini and keyboard, and a monitor twice the width of my previous one. Through the successive efforts of my son, my husband, and even me, I have Snow Leopard loaded and have downloaded some necessary applications (Scrivener, Bean, Dropbox). This all took a while, because I'm dilatory and disorganised. But here I am now, posting from the new machine.

On the less technologically advanced side... As I bicycled to work one dim grey morning, I was distracted by a looming darkness on the sidewalk. Because I'm a natural scavenger, even of looming darkness, I stopped, and discovered it to be two wooden bookcases (about 7' tall and almost 4' wide, maybe 8" deep) leaning against a power pole. That is tall, actual wood not particle board, shallow bookcases meant to contain books rather than sculptures and curios. Exactly what I need to get the stacked books and papers off the floor of my study.
You'll have noticed that bookcases of that size and presumed weight are going to be awkward loads. I was on a bike. So bungy-cording them, even one at a time, onto my bike-basket was not going to be an option. I stood pensively for a bit, thinking of my sleeping husband, and whether I should bike to work and phone him to bring the van and fetch them, or go home and wake him up to help me fetch them home. And what if someone else came along in the interim? If I'd had a cell phone, I might have called right then, but... Or was I overestimating the eagerness of the visible traffic - people heading in to work in compact cars - to load themselves up with two large bookcases?
Since I'd been on my way to a morning weights session, it was still pretty early. Soon traffic would pick up. Seize the day, I thought, and turned around. I bicycled quickly home, got the van and drove back. The bookcases were still there, hurrah!
Unfortunately, I could only park about 4 car lengths away (see: early morning, people not left for work yet). A challenge. Next question being whether I had overestimated my personal carrying capacity? I tipped the first bookcase and walked it down to horizontal on its side.  Oh good! It wasn't taller than me or my shoulder-height, sideways. I put myself midways of its length, tucked my shoulder under the uppermost side, and lifted.
Good thing I've been working out with weights.
If you find yourself doing this, gentle reader, be cleverer than me and fold something up to protect the bony point of your shoulder. I collected a nice dark bruise to mark the spot. The other bruise I acquired was at the upper curve of my calf, where the lower side of the bookcases bumped with each step. I proceeded to the van with a sort of chicken-hop, unable to take long steps because my knee would bump the shelf (this was on my left, because that's the good knee and I was reasonably sure it wouldn't buckle unexpectedly). Anyway, I understand why chickens don't routinely carry awkward loads on their nonexistent shoulders.
I couldn't set the case down, for fear I couldn't hoist it back up again, so finally reaching the back of the van, where I could prop one end up, was much relief. Pushing it into the van was dead easy. Pant, pant.   Then trotting around to the side door to move Mark's swords & stuff over so they wouldn't be trapped, then climbing into the van to push and pull the bookcase over to where I could slide the next one in beside it. Minor adjustments.
Back out for case number two. With really no excuse now for not having something over my shoulder to cushion, except that I didn't think of it until I found the bruise the next day. Case number two was heavier, subjectively, and I was slowing down. But! I reached the van, rested the top of the case and slid it in horizontally to lean against its twin. Hurrah!
Except that due to the width of the cases, and the aerodynamic slope of the van's back door, I wasn't going to be able to close the door. Not so hurrah.
Okay, we can deal with this. So I climbed into the van, moved the bag of swords again, and started wrestling with the bookcases, trying to lean them over enough that the upper back corner (of their current alignment, not their functional, upright alignment) would be low enough to clear the doorway. If you've ever, in a confined space, tried to manoeuvre two objects larger than yourself, one of which is leaning on the other, you may guess my degree of success. Fortunately, partway into this, I realised that they were both pressed against the back of the passenger seat--which can be moved forward. Hurrah!
So, I drove home, parked the van, and grabbed my bike. It says something about the subjective nature of time that I was still able to fit in a slightly abbreviated workout.
I left both cases in the van, so that Mark and I could share the fun of getting them up the twisty stairs. This involves a sort of slow-motion bootlegger's turn on the landing, with one person backing into the bedroom, then the other towards the bathroom, so that the long object can be aimed towards the study. In, and stood against the wall, repeat with next object.

All that though was nowt, nowt, to the fun of the next bookcase, oak veneer (if anything is heavier than oak, oak veneer would be it) and more like 5' wide, bought on usedvictoria. Mark and I together could barely get it into the van, and the counsel of wisdom would probably have been to say 'Um, no, this isn't going to work for us, sorry'. But I am not wise and dammit I am going to have bookshelves.
This case was too wide to lie flat in the back of the van, and lay a few inches above the floor, propped by the wheel-wells and creaking gently with the motion of the vehicle. Where it could not stay, for the van was needed immediately for loading other things. We got it haltingly out of the van, along the walk, and up the porch steps, where it stood oakenly.
Fortunately the next night people were over for dinner, and there was enough enthusiasm and muscles to get the behemoth bookcase up the stairs and into my study. Where it effectively blocked access to my desk for another week. But now it is upright, and braced against the wall (all credit to Mark the Wonder Husband), and books are moving into it.

I've thus been able to clear away the boxes of books and papers that were waiting for shelves, and reveal more floorspace. I brought out the blue-and-white oval rug and put it under the blue chair to mark out the reading space as distinct from the writing space, and I can pin up the maps and posters that were waiting for confirmed wall space.

Pics to come.

shelved!

I shall be catalogued.
Apparently our library (the one where I work) collects the work of local authors, especially of on-campus authors. Well, I knew that. Usually professors would give us a copy of their work, and some books went to Special Collections as well as onto the open shelves.
But that's academic non-fiction, right? Considering that UVic's Creative Writing dep't is almost vehemently anti-genre, to the extent that they won't accept news or posters about sf/f writing workshops or classes, I've always figured that fiction, unless published by a university press, or possibly by a small and very worthy Canadian press (chapbooks, with woodcuts printed in ink made from salal berries) was not to be acquired without strong advocacy.
But no. When in the course of a discussion of ordering books from Lulu, I showed a co-worker my own book (previously mentioned in this blog) Threefold, she said that the library should order it.
It's self-published, I pointed out.
Doesn't matter, she said. We bought another staff member's self-published poetry.
Oh, I said, and ceased objecting.

So there's my little book, with its own entry in the online catalogue. How very odd.

work-related thought

My day job, the one with benefits and a pension plan and lunch break (thank you all my union brothers and sisters who went before!) involves finding and ordering out of print (OOP) books. Sometimes they are meant as new additions to our library, sometimes they are replacements for lost, damaged or stolen books from the shelves.
The used book market is irrational, and moving online has made it even less rational. I have a couple of potted speeches on the subject, which I'll spare you this time.

Anyway, one result of the ability to search online is that anyone who has a book for sale, and sees no other copies available, decides that his copy is thus immensely valuable. Books that in the snail-mail market might have been priced at $5 or $20 soar now to $400 or $600. Plus shipping. And this is often for ex-lib or student-owned copies, full of hi-liter and pen marks, which a reputable bookseller probably wouldn't even carry.

So I was mildly amused today when I was asked to discover the real replacement cost for a science text someone had lost (from my own student background I'm inclined to call that 'lost'). The standard replacement cost is something like $50, meant to encourage the student to actually look through the piles of laundry and pizza boxes for the book. What was the real replacement cost of this particular book? Well, if the two copies on offer were real and not megalister vapourware, not less than $500 before shipping.

Want to bet that the lost book will show up soonish?

Google street view

Makes my bum look big.
The street view cars went through Victoria this past summer, and I saw them while biking home. The other night I got around to looking for myself (the views went up in December), by slowly panning along Henderson.
There's a front view, with face blurred, and a back view, which sadly needs some bum-blurring technology.

Every now and then I try to educate myself about the Google book settlement, but it never works. Today's article in the Times Colonist (yes, the Victoria newspaper really is called The Colonist) once again rebuffed me. I was sent reeling off, muttering "Agh, bad bad metaphors, agh, you are writers dammit, an analogy is not an argument, agh...."
I wasn't able to read past the second column, where making a book available digitally is likened to stealing a book from a bookshop.
Except not.
There's a difference, okay, between the content of a book (text) and the physical object of a book (paper & glue), which makes this even more complicated. A book-object, unlike jewelry or old coins, has no intrinsic value.
It can have heaps and heaps of extrinsic / assigned value. I see this on the Booksleuth forum, where someone desperately wants the edition of something that they read as a child, as close as possible to that copy they handled, with their jammy thumb-prints on it, ideally. Other readers just want the text, and would be happy to read it on Project Gutenberg.

My for-real job that pays the bills is finding and ordering out-of-print books online. Out of print means that they're often used books, and in no case is the author getting a penny for that sale. Booksellers get something, and that's good, because bookselling is good just as libraries are good, and more people having access to more books is good...
Which seems to lead me to Google books being good. Although it is clearly vastly more complex than that. Possibly more complex than I can understand. Though at least I've heard of the used book market and of interlibrary loan, which puts me ahead of Sergey Brin, who doesn't know about ILLO, as noted by the Avocado back in October.
Brin's on-record cluelessness about real-world availability of OOP books doesn't make me trust that Google knows what it's doing, and the argument-by-bad-metaphor and similar ignoring of the used book market by writers doesn't make me trust that they have a better grasp of what the realistic problems may be.
A writer 'and former lawyer' is quoted at the end of the TC article with what I in my ignorance would call a classic slippery-slope argument:

If they're allowed to get away with this, what else is any huge multinational corporation going to be allowed to get away with?

From Bhopal to books online, what will corporations descend to next?< / sarcasm >
Okay, I'm sorry, that was unfair of me, but the suggestion that corporations haven't been getting away with abuses until now (ie, when they touch on that speaker's rights) kinda reeks of privilege.

Maybe I'll try again to understand the issues, in six months or so. I can make it a regular checkup. But I'm doubting that there will be any real coming to terms. It's sort of like the fanfiction issue, only with the possibility of someone making money.

A new year full of outrage, already

Tell me again why I should support the Olympics?

Besides the city of Whistler being made over into a venue rather than a community, it appears that Whistler's one public library will be closed to the public for the duration of the Games.
Why?
So that politicians, bureaucrats and Olympic committee members (and hey, maybe even a few elite athletes?) can have a private bar.

I keep trying to comment on that, and there's just nothing sarcastic enough to match the bare facts.
What else? Oh, Whistler library staff won't be out of work--they'll be seconded to VANOC and given vital Olympic duties like greeting tourist busses.

Reportedly the Olympic committee tried this in Vancouver--some of us see a library and think of reading, but VANOC members think of drinking behind locked doors--but was told no.
I wonder who told them no? I can bet it wasn't Jean Kavanagh, Vancouver Public Library's manager of marketing and communications.
She's such an enthusiastic booster (or do I mean enforcer?) of the Olympics that in October she sent a memo around warning staff that only the logos of official Olympic sponsors may be seen during public events. If a branch's AV equipment isn't made by sponsor Panasonic, then, well,
"I would get some tape and put it over the 'Sony,'" Kavanagh said. "Just a little piece of tape."
This doesn't just extend to inanimate objects, but to people:
“If you have a speaker/guest who happens to work for Telus, ensure he/she is not wearing their Telus jacket, as Bell is the official sponsor.”
No word on whether this will be extended to patrons who happen to be wearing brand-name shirts or hats.
I am somewhat comforted by the union stance (yay CUPE! my union!) as quoted on Quill & Quire:
"Our job as library staff is to not ever censor any information.”

To be fair, VANOC didn't ask Kavanagh to establish this policy. She did it on her own go, perhaps taking her cue from previous VANOC excesses like demanding that the Olympia restaurant (named after the mountain range) change its name before the Games.

Law Library of Unintended Consequences

Hey kids! If you live in the US, get those library visits in before Feb 10, when you may be banned from public libraries if you are under 12.
Why? Because books will kill you. Worse even than cigarettes, which only have to carry warning labels. The legal opinion at present is that the American Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act will require libraries to either get rid of children's books or bar children from contact with books. For their health.

Here's the quote: "Under the current opinion issued by the General Counsel of the CPSC, the law would apply to books for children under the age of 12; therefore, public, school, academic and museum libraries would be required to either remove all their children’s books or ban all children under 12 from visiting the facilities as of February 10."

And here's the link.
I'd really love to say Oh, this is nonsense, it can't possibly come to that.

ETA: As should not surprise anyone, other provisions of the CPSIA will end up shutting down small local businesses with handmade toys, because of the expense of testing. This article for more information.
I don't know. I'm Canadian. I can't even write to a congressperson, even though this is bound to affect Canada as well.