Bits and Pieces of Past Roles

 As I am sorting through and disposing of "clutter", I have come across things that were useful to me at one time, but which I haven't used for years.

At our Dallas church I created flyers to publicize the ladies' Bible study. The church installed plexiglass holders on the inside of the women's bathroom stalls as well as having a central bulletin board. I tried to tie the theme to the season or the subject matter of the study. I never used the entire packet of decorative paper; sometimes I would use the same paper again during my two-year stint. Having been gone from Dallas for 15 years now, I find I rarely have a need for these papers. I am taking them to give-and-take table at Grace Village tomorrow. If I had timed it better, they could have been part of the swap shop, but I didn't sort these until this weekend. I did keep some solid-colored paper in various hues.

For a while as I managed the Grace Village library, I had somebody helping me with the hall bulletin board. However, for most of the almost 8 years of serving in this role, I decorated it. I used some of the paper above for poems or announcements or lists, photocopied book covers (the front desk receptionist was kind enough to copy them in color at no charge), or added seasonal/holiday decor. The framed corkboard was maybe 5 x 5 feet. It had a plexiglass "ledge" at the bottom where books could be displayed as well. Time to get rid of the bits still stored in my home. I do not foresee doing bulletin boards anywhere. They are good candidates for decluttering.

Margaret

 I haven't posted for a while because I haven't had much to share. I have done so much reading and playing games on my Galaxy tablet the past few weeks, I decided last night to do something different: color an autumn picture.

 I will have some nerve root block injections this Thursday (the 29th) at L5, a level lower than the last injections. Though I had less leg pain, the back and buttocks pain did not get better with the L4 injections. We will see what L5 tells us. The lessening of pain in my thighs is starting to disappear. Now the left leg again has a stabbing pain at times. It has been a little over a month since the L4 injections.

When my husband and I took over the supervision of the Grace Village library in February 2012, Margaret was already working there. I went to her funeral today. She was 101 when she died. I had not kept in contact with her for several years, especially when she moved to healthcare and the pandemic shut out visitors. I think I sent her one card, but I didn't try calling as she could not hear well enough on the phone. She had a wonderful smile and laugh; several people mentioned that about her today. I wish I had made more efforts to send her cards and notes so she could have had more smiles.

People shared memories. One woman had been a child living next-door to Margaret and her husband and eventually 4 boys. Her missionary parents in Argentina shared a building that had been divided into two apartments. Margaret became "Aunt Margaret" in her eyes.

Margaret was 90 years old when I met her, heading for her 91st birthday in about 3 months. She was an avid reader and sharp as a tack. I observed some aspects of her personality that were not shared today.

 She was spunky. While most of the retirement residents would not use the library stepstool, Margaret shelved books on the top shelves regularly. I watched closely the first time I saw her doing that. She carefully placed each foot firmly on the stool and just as carefully placed them on the floor when she was done. I had no qualms about her activity. When she reached age 95 or 96, I suggested she leave the high shelving to me. She also did not have the strength at that time to shove books around on the shelves to make more room. I am trying to remember when the two of us had a chat and decided she no longer had the stamina for that kind of work. She was 96 I think.

 She had been typing the book spine labels; unfortunately, the typewriter part that allowed one to roll the sheet of labels into the platen broke off. Grace Village could find no replacement part to fix the typewriter nor repair service for such an old machine; we were forced to generate labels using the computer. Margaret was pretty sure she didn't want to use the computer. I think she was almost 97 when she "retired".

She sat next to me in the alto section of the choir. Our director did not have a strong voice; many singers could not hear her announcement by title of moving on to a different piece. I knew that was a problem for Margaret. I would pull out the piece and show her. She sang on-key most of the time though her hearing gradually got worse; finally, she recognized that she could no longer participate in vocal and chime choir because of her profound hearing loss. It was a sad day.

She was not shy about sharing her opinion on any suggested changes to the library. I forget what my husband suggested, but she dug in her heels and said no. Of course, unless the changes directly affected her, she knew she had to accept them. She was not in charge.

 She chided me once for weeding out some old book-of-the-month-club books. I had placed the withdrawn books on the give-and-take table. She had taken them to reread. These were mostly published in the 1940's and 1950's, and I doubt most people were familiar with the authors (I wasn't). But she considered them treasures. We had to make more shelf space, and these seemed good candidates, not only because they were old (but not classics), but the print was very small. I was surprised she could read such fine print. Her hearing might not be good, but her eyes still worked great.

One time when I mentioned to her that I was taking a book over to Assisted Living for Kathryn (the fellow missionary she knew in Argentina), she confided to me that she and her husband tried to avoid eating at Kathryn's place while missionaries because Kathryn wasn't a very good cook. Today several people mentioned how Margaret was excellent at feeding crowds of people tasty food. Probably Kathryn's cooking was passable but not up to the standards of Margaret at least not in Margaret's opinion.

Speaking of cooking, my husband at my request helped me with the preparation of the two Home Chef meals we received Thursday. They were considered "oven-ready" but did require washing produce, adding seasonings and making sauces. He did a good job. I haven't been ordering many because of the expense, but I kept my membership because if I have surgery these might be do-able for him. 

Stepping Down

I have been overseeing the Grace Village Library for over 7 years; next February would have been my eighth year. I worked on the library committee for 6 months before taking over management of the library with my husband. (He discontinued his efforts after 2 years). During the 6 months on the committee I worked extensively on the LibraryThing input project, sometimes putting in 5 hours a day 3-4 days a week. I see that data base as my biggest accomplishment. Our 4,000 books are now searchable by author, title, series, subject headings, keywords. You can even browse the "shelves" by book cover. Sadly, few residents use LibraryThing.

I have been growing weary of some of the tasks. Now that I have pelvic and back problems, I can no longer haul off unwanted donations and weeded books to donation sites; too heavy. The past few months I have been putting them on the book truck and taking them to Give 'N Take table, but I know the housekeeper who is in charge of that table is not happy when I fill it with books because she has to get rid of any that the residents don't take.

 Right now the pc is unable to connect properly with the wifi so there is no internet. It has been almost 2 weeks since I talked with the administrator in charge of computer service. People can use the Telekin computer, which is actually easier to use but novel to most so they avoid it. Yesterday the monitor of the pc was inoperable; users can still use Microsoft Office 2010 and play games on the pc, but not without a working monitor. I spent time checking on cables, etc. and finally got it to display. I also cleaned the grime (including food stains) off of the Telekin keyboard and mouse. These are the types of things I don't like doing. As of December 1st, they will be somebody else's problems.

I liked seeing the books we added to the library. When I received monetary donations I even actively bought used books to fill fiction series gaps and an occasional new book. I think it is a diverse collection that seems to meet the users' preferences, especially the fiction section.

My replacement is the man who was librarian before my husband and I took over. He will be assisted by the lady who did shelving and bulletin boards for me; she will now take over "cataloging" (adding to LibraryThing) and end processing (labels, stamping) while a new volunteer who has already started will take over shelving.

 I spent some time with the new librarian 2 weeks ago. From his comments, I can see making decisions about which donated books to keep and which books to discard to make shelf room is going to be his biggest challenge. He asked me, "How do you know which to keep and which to get rid of?" My new shelver is an avid fiction reader so maybe he will get input from her. Other than obvious condition problems, a librarian has to use his/her best judgment. That is not something I can teach him; he will have to learn through experience, just doing it. 

I am looking forward to some more free time and not having to go over to the main campus in winter cold and snow. I can stay in my cozy condo working on jigsaw puzzles or reading.

Getting Ready for Easter

As a girl in California, the special treat at Easter was a See's Candy chocolate egg. If there were a store near me, I might continue the tradition, but alas I must substitute. But I have some good subs. Dark chocolate of course. We will see how the Godiva compares to the Lindt bunny.

Yesterday I bought an Easter lily at Meijer. I tried to find one with unopened blooms. The one I picked out had one bloom just starting to open and another not far behind. This morning they are both open a bit more. I really want to have a plant full of blooms on Easter Sunday, but the timing is always tricky. I really like the patterned purple paper around the pot.

The daffies are opening up now. I had tried to replant some of the bulbs deeper last fall as the winter soil heaving had brought them partially to the surface; but I still have blind daffodils (no blooms) any way. Still it is nice to have a few cheery blooms. Now I will have to keep my eyes on the tulip plants in the neighborhood so I will know when to visit Peabody Retirement Community again for its multitude of flowers. Probably not until May this year.

Our roller coaster weather goes from 70 one day to 45-50 the next. The ten-day forecast even shows the chance for light snow. We have sat in our sunroom twice for lunch in the past week and a half with the patio door ajar to hear the bird sounds. Too windy to sit on the porch yet. 

I don't buy an Easter outfit each year like I did as a child and teen. No matter what the weather is like that day, I can just pick something out of the closet that is suitable. I am going to Fort Wayne on Friday and will look for a Springy top or blouse, but not with the idea of an Easter outfit.

In the past few weeks I have arrived at the library to find plastic bags of books one time and three boxes of books another time. The bags held large-print fiction books. The lady who was donating 8 Love Inspired books each month has stopped. I moved the non-fiction large-print books (about two dozen) to the countertop next to the Love Inspired books. That was the only way to have room for the fiction gifts. I am almost done cataloging them.

Most of the books in the boxes duplicated what we have; there were maybe a dozen keepers. I have my book truck shelves double-rowed I have so many books to process. I am busy with other things and unmotivated to spend time in the library other than to shelve returned books. It may be several weeks to clear off the book truck. I have a tablecloth draped over the truck because in spite of a sign saying not to remove items, they were disappearing. The cloth doesn't quite cover the bottom shelf. Sure enough, a book from there is gone. There are also grimy fingerprints on the tablecloth where somebody eating in the library decided they needed to explore. It is what it is. The library is accessible 24 hours a day; no way to monitor what happens.

The Cow Shed

When my husband visited the Cow Shed in Nappanee about a month ago, he noticed the book shop. He didn't bother to check on the pricing, but he noticed they had used Christian fiction books.

Today I drove there to see if they had some books I was looking to buy. Some friendly advice: don't go when it is 90 degrees outside like today. The Cow Shed has no air conditioning. The fans helped some, but in the books area, there was no breeze. I was soon sweating.

This building is just west of the famous Amish Acres on Highway 6. It sells crafts, decorative items, books, antiques, jewelry.

I was here for the book stock. 

Before heading up Highway 15 in Warsaw to my turnoff for Nappanee, I stopped at the public library to drop off book donations. Last week I did a major weeding of the non-fiction shelves of Grace Village Library.

These six bags were today's load, but last week I had almost this many I dropped off as well.
At the Cow Shed, I bought 5 books, 3 which filled in my series gaps. They were priced between $2.99 and $3.79. I also bought one of Karon's Mitford series books in large print. We have several of this series in large print, but not this title. We have them all in regular print though. 

When I left the Cow Shed, I headed east on Highway 6 to Coppes Commons. There is an Amish grocery store, fabric store, Christian book/gift store, deli, coffee drinks, baked goods, antique store, and a museum about Hoosier cabinets which were originally made in this building. Ah, sweet air conditioning. After browsing the baked goods and the antique store, I returned to the book store where I had seen a small display of sales books near the entrance. I bought Colleen Coble's Where Shadows Meet for $5. This is a new 2018 book. I think I will read it before cataloging it and putting it in the Grace Village hall display. 

Because the library received a generous gift of $200, I should be able to buy the series gaps books on my list. I bought Patterson's and Clinton's The President Is Missing for myself. My husband is reading it now; once he is done, I will donate it to the library. I haven't read any Patterson, so I don't know if this is representative of his writing. It is a pretty good suspenseful read.

The Blue and the Gray

We have had lots of rain the past 1 1/2 days; more could come tomorrow and Monday. We needed the moisture, just not all at once. The lawns are greening up some, but my flower plot next to my patio does not drain well so the plants are in pooling water. 
The sun came out about noon today and lasted for 20 minutes. Now we are back to gray skies.

Yesterday before the winds and heavy rain arrived, I picked a hydrangea from the side of the house. I also cut a wee rose off the front bush to add to the two I already had in the bud vase. I was afraid the blooms would be beaten down by the storm.

I did buy 5 pounds of blueberries at the grocery store. I may have misquoted the price in my previous blog. With my Martin's card, the box of berries was $9.99, limit of one box. Regular price $11.99. I spent this morning washing and sorting. In the box were a few dried-up berries, some stems, no leaves or twigs, and best of all no bugs. A few of the berries were smooshed. I disposed of them in the most efficient manner: popping them in my mouth.

 I think these Michigan berries have a deeper flavor than the ones we picked.  I am pleased with the quality of the berries. They were picked and packed in South Haven. My husband is already hinting that maybe next year we should just buy the blueberries from the grocery store. We'll see. I think the berry picking is a nice diversion from our routine day as long as it isn't hot and humid or rainy.

I had already removed and processed berries from the above box; it was fuller before the photo. With more berries than we usually pick, I will have to get out some of the recipes I saved these past few years and bake something or make my blueberry sauce. Many of the recipes can use frozen berries. 

I had a gift of $100 to the Grace Village library. Yesterday I went on a spending spree, ordering 22 books from Better World Books and from ebay. I am starting to like ebay for buying books now that the sellers don't charge shipping and offer buy it now option. You can even add books to a cart if you have more than one from the same seller. I received 10 per cent off after I bought more than 4 books from one seller; another had buy 2, get one free. It makes the money stretch further. I spent almost $82. Most of the books were listed as "very good" condition. I get annoyed with Better World Books sometimes because it is hard to tell if the book is regular or large print. When the email confirmation came, it showed 2 of the books as large print which is good for the library, but not what I would want for my own personal library. It should be more obvious in the description what the print size is. 

By the end of next week to the middle of the following one, books should start arriving. I will be busy. I now have 16 books on my series gap list to find; I started with over 150. Real progress was made in the past 2 years because of generous monetary gifts. I have also used some of the money to buy non-series books.

Since April, Wall Street Journal has been offering to its subscribers one free e-book a month through BookShout. I downloaded the app to my ipad. Usually there are 3 book choices. This month was Magpie Murders by Horowitz, a book my husband borrowed from the public library and is currently reading. This is only the second book I have added to my ipad from them via WSJ offer. Normally, these books would have a fee if not subsidized by WSJ. I have to log in with my WSJ ID and password to get the free book. I browsed BookShout and found a free book I also added. I will save Magpie for my cruise reading.

My Domain

In February I will have been overseeing the Grace Village library for 3 years. I started out on the library committee of 5 people in August 2011, then my husband and I were asked 6 months later if we would supervise the library as the person doing that wanted to step down. My husband has decided he doesn’t want to be actively

involved so for the past year it has been mostly me. I have a 92-year-old lady who helps to shelve books and infrequently I ask her 

       to type labels for the new books.

 We are situated at a main passageway that residents pass by often on the way to the dining room or front lobby and mail boxes. The library gets a fair amount of use from the apartment residents and the condo residents. A few assisted-living residents and nursing facility residents have relatives who take books to them or wheel them over to select books. Staff also take books to nursing facility residents who are interested.

The previous librarian had moved some of the non-fiction books into categories with shelf labels ignoring what it said on the spine label. It concerned him that books on prayer, for example, did not sit together on the shelf. This was the result of the Dewey Decimal schedule making a major change at one point, creating a new number for prayer leaving earlier books behind in the old number. This is always a problem in libraries that have existed a long time and do not have the manpower and time to relabel books. Dewey Decimal Classification is not static.

When we first served on the committee, it was decided that a computer listing/inventory program would be helpful. What we ended up with is more than that as we went with LibraryThing. This would not only provided a record of books owned but suggested a Dewey number and provided subject headings often. It had keyword searching which meant one could try to find a book by author, title, subject, series even only knowing a few words of the title for example. Now one could search for the books on prayer and find all of them even though they did not sit next to each other. It was internet-based so one could search it on any computer anywhere with internet access.

Before inputting books into LibraryThing, the committee decided to shelve the non-fiction by the Dewey number again. 4 committee people started adding books to the online system, but that fizzled out, leaving me and my husband. The end is in sight, but it has taken over 3 years of inputting data. Sometime in the first half of 2015 the project will be complete. There are approximately 4000 books in the library. The titles on the Kindle e-readers are also represented in the data base.

The previous librarian had been campaigning to get more room by knocking out a wall and taking over the vacant apartment next to the library. That had been vetoed by the administration.

Fiction section as of January 14th, 2015

 When I became librarian with my husband, the fiction shelves of the library were totally full. To add a book, one had to discard a book. The library committee had done a survey of the residents. The main “want” was for large-print books. There were 3 shelves at the end of the fiction where some large-print books sat. We set about weeding the fiction of duplicates and older books we thought people were not reading. The library is totally dependent on donated books (and more recently funds) so we did not know how fast it would fill up.

 When we received a donation of over 100 large-print fiction books, and the lady who had started donating her large-print Love Inspired books was bringing in 6-8 books a month, we knew there would have to be some changes. We hurriedly finished weeding the fiction, removed the large-print books from the hard-to-access corner next to the wall and behind the typing desk, shifted all of the fiction toward the windows, and then processed the donated books and shelved all of the large-print books next to the door. Several of the people needing large print also had mobility impairments and used canes, walkers, wheelchairs.

Those reading the Love Inspired books asked that they be shelved by date, not by author as the other fiction was. They wanted to be able to locate the new books quickly. We did that and put them near the bottom of the large-print fiction. One day my husband came into the library and found a lady sitting on the floor. She had bent down to get a Love Inspired book and found she could not get back up so sat down. He helped her up; she had not been there long. Because the Love Inspired books were multiplying like rabbits, we had been discussing moving them to the counter space. This incident was an impetus to do that quickly. However, these books continue to grow in number and have taken over the counter and the shelves above which had Reader’s Digest condensed books which nobody seemed to use so we got rid of them.

I would love to discard the older Love Inspired books to make more room, but I find the older ones read as much as the new ones. They are the most-circulated items in the library.

We have made many changes besides trying to keep up with the space crisis. In the photo above, you will see under the counter pull-out drawers full of paperback books. The tight quarters and the fact that the chairs because of arms will not scoot under the table meant that people had to maneuver around open cupboard doors to access these books if they could even remember they existed. By removing the doors, people can get to them more easily and the books are fully visible.

People rarely stayed in the library to read because the wooden chairs were not comfortable. Despite the limited space, we did add 2 armchairs to the library. They were cast-offs from the lobby. They are sat in often, sometimes by people using the library as a meeting point or as a resting spot during the long walk to their apartments or by readers. I would like a smaller table and different chairs around them; that probably isn’t going to happen. The room is used for meetings, was used for a reading group though that has ended, by people with projects or for playing games when the usual game playing spots are busy.

We discovered the library had a wireless connection to the internet that nobody used because nobody thought one was there. We posted that information and the password at the end of the desk; now family and visitors often bring in laptops and tablets.

I posted earlier about the free Telikin computer we received after I applied with Telkin Cares. I wish more people would use it, but maybe when the library “catalog” is done, I can push accessing it on the touch-screen computer more.

The library is my bailiwick. I sort through donations, weed and shift to make space, troubleshoot the computers, answer questions about the resources, continue to create the data base, advocate for more space or equipment (right now compatible printer for Telkin), try to round up money for purchasing books, go to library booksales and Half Price Books to use the limited funds I have to the most purpose, search for free books for the Kindles (which are not really part of the library but I inherited when the activities director retired), monitor supplies, process the new books, update and print the existing list of fiction, and decorate the bulletin board.

 A lot of unanticipated duties so to speak but it is a place for me to serve and to be a good steward. For the most part, I enjoy it and people are very appreciative.