It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to sit down and blog. It’s that time of the year when the garden takes over and as well as doing some mass weeding, I’ve spent the weekend making spicy rhubarb pickle and summer fruit mixture for the freezer with the excitement of spending my evenings this week freezing cabbage and broad beans. I could also do with some ideas of what to do with red currants. One site that I have discovered recently that looks pretty handy for garden produce is http://www.allotment.org.uk/recipes.
I’ve also had to concentrate on my revalidation portfolio as my 3 year cycle is now complete. I’m slightly worried that my development seems very lacking with my limited role and lack of opportunities in projects and attending courses. I’ve decided to put a paragraph in my statement about my intention to do a management course to acknowledge a gap in that area. It’s been quite hard trying to decide what to include in my appendices, so far I’ve seem to have a pattern - new skills ie social networking and cataloguing, an example of a project I was involved in, development of my core skills needed for my current job and my committee work with CDEG and participation in EMBOC events. I’m also finding that I’m all right writing about what I’ve learnt from an activity but it’s the bit where you have to talk about how you’ve used this knowledge for your job which is proving to be more difficult. I’m also going to have to start filling in my audit sheet for my 2nd cycle.
I’ve been entertained by our forthcoming new reading business system with the constant booking and cancellation of dates for testing the functuality of the circulation module. Now, things have now been put on hold which is a bit of an anti-climax. I’ve had my initial training of how we should be carrying out the testing, the question which remains on everybody’s lips, when will we see this new system? I guess it is better that the data’s correct than rush it through regardless and the system is unusable.
It seems a month for cancellations. We’re being treated to a new carpet, it’s our first one since the building was built well over 20 years ago and with nearly 100 people in the office, it’s well used as you can imagine. We had a mad couple of hours clearing cupboards and filling the skip and shredding box today only to be told late this afternoon that there’s been a delay! We’ve just got to remember where we put the various cupboard contents for the next few days.
I don’t know if it was just me but I thought the Update was particularly dull this month and I struggled to find anything of interest. I keep meaning to go through the Phil Bradley’s column and trying some of the sites but it’s just finding the time.
We had our book club meeting last week. This time it was The Reader to go under the spotlight. On the whole, the book was well received, mainly getting 8’s and 9’s though it did get a 4 from one of our members. There wasn’t much fondness for Hannah except for the bit when she asks the judge “What would you have done?” and perhaps the beginning when she takes Michael home after he falls ill. Some of us couldn’t quite work out why she considered it more of a crime to be illiterate than the atrocities that she was accused off when she was an SS guard and that she preferred to go to jail rather than say she can’t read or write. There was also some confusion about when Hannah and Michael first met, some of the group thought that this had happened before she was a guard while others thought it was after the war. There was a thought that Hannah has a vicious streak in her, the fact that she hit Michael with her belt and cut his lip when he off to get some breakfast and left her a note and also her behaviour on the tram. This was a book that raised lots of questions – why did Hannah suddenly stop looking after herself once she had learnt to read and write, Michael’s relationship with his father that he had to make an appointment to see him, should Michael have told the judge that Hannah could not read or write so could not have written the report and had Michael really betrayed Hannah?
We had to do 3 month’s book selection pick this month to take into account of the forthcoming upheavals with the Stockport staff relocating into a drier place that isn’t falling down around their ears (a bit of an exageration here!) and the braille and giant print books coming back down to Peterborough. There’s a real good mix of new titles with highlights including a bit of true crime Midnight in Peking, Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Way, Hilary Mantel’s follow up to Wolfhall and A Cat Called Bob (including scarf of course). Collection Development titles concentrated on minority sports and include biographies on Barry Sheene, Nadal and Colin Montgomery’s latest autobiography. The imports more or less picked themselves and include new novels by Joanne Harris and Michael Frayn, the latest autobiography by David Essex and Ann Patchett’s A State of Wonder. Missing series is also a good mix from Colin Forbe’s A Savage Gorge (the only Tweed one that we haven’t got), Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments as we bizarrely only had the third one in the Barrytown series and the usual 3 favourites – Lee Child, Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin - that we’re trying to fill in. We’ve also discovered that Donna Leon and Harlan Coben isn't an Import, always a big excitement when one of the big crime favourites hasn’t succumbed to Isis, Audiogo or Oakhill.
We’ve now reached a record 55 requests for people waiting for 50 Shades of Grey to be completed. Hope the studios aren’t going to be too long!
