Mini-Van Mom: Odds and Ends

This has been an exhausting week. Everyone keeps telling me "it'll be okay, I know you miss the kids." It's not emotional exhaustion that's hitting me. It's physical exhaustion. I really, really need a week to do nothing but sleep and catch up on chores around the house! We moved middle child in on Monday. I don't know how he's settling in, because I haven't been back since Monday, but I have a textbook to deliver tomorrow, so I should get a fantastic opportunity to see how things are going for him then. His classes started on Weds.

The geese at work have gotten very aggressive over this past week. Do you see the sidewalk, just to the left of them? That is the door I take to get into the building. When I started to walk around them, they came after me with wings and beaks open, and they were hissing at me. I decided that I needed to go the other way - as in around the parking lot and into the OTHER side of the building to get in.

The entire flock of them had a stand off with the trash truck this week. This is the back end of the lot here in the picture, and the dumpster is off to the right, by about 500 feet. The geese were all sitting on the road in front of the dumpster, and refused to move when the trash truck came in. He honked at them, and the most aggressive goose of them all got up and charged the trash truck, wings wide open and hissing. At a trash truck. The driver sat in the cab and laughed and shook his head. Slowly, he inched his way forward, and kept honking the horn, and eventually the geese got up and moved out of the way of the truck, but not before several more geese decided to charge at the truck. (It's a weird summer for wild animals, have you noticed?)

I've also spent much of the week processing 25 pounds of tomatoes. I've been posting about it on and off this week. I'm working on another batch of oven roasted tomatoes right now. That post should be up later today! I still have 5 more pounds of tomatoes to contend with. I'm thinking I might try to make some ketchup from scratch. I've never done that before. How hard could it be? (I know, famous last words, right?)

Lest you think the life of a librarian is all the glamour of working with books, here is the ugly truth. We don't actually get to read all of those books! I work in an academic library, and our semester break ends Sunday. Classes start up again on Monday morning. We spent this week shelf reading. (Yuck) If you're never shelf read before, you don't know what you're missing. You start at the first shelf, and work your way down, reading every single call number to make certain that they are in order. You start going cross-eyed as you get to the right of the decimal place. Our library is a Library of Congress system, which is great because it contains letters of the alphabet at the beginning of the call number which in some ways makes it easier to read. It's bad, because the decimal places can extend several digits, which can give you a headache. We read every shelf this week.

We also replaced signage. You can see the flotsam above. We wanted a fresh look, and several of the signs were backed with pages of colored copy paper that had been taped together. They looked messy. They are all lovely and cohesive now, with black foam core board backing on them all.

I even got to remake the bulletin board in the hallway outside of the library. I replaced the paper backing and the letters. The paper was a couple of years old, and was looking faded. I keep saying "I", but every librarian contributed to the shelf reading, and while I was working on signage, someone else got the fun job of cleaning off all of the shelves behind the information desk, dusting everything, wiping down the shelves, and putting everything back. She also pulled everything off of the information desk and wiped everything down.