Joanna says she hasn’t journaled much lately because I’ve been keeping her too busy. She’s been looking for a job, and when she’s not doing that, she’s shelving books, something that’s a bit more time consuming this time…
We decided to organize all our books according to the Library of Congress system for several reasons. While we can do okay without a “real” classification system right now, it will eventually become impossible to find anything and it’s much easier to start now than later. The library of congress catalog is fully searchable online, although the classification schedules are only available if you pay for them. (If anyone stumbles across an LC classification schedule that some library is throwing away because they’ve updated it we’d really like it…) Joanna had been arranging books according to her own little schedule, which is okay for one person but it means that I have to ask her if I can’t find something. (Not to mention that we had several disagreements about her system, one of them being that she separates “fiction” from “literature”. This makes sense if you’re talking about Tom Clancy and Melville, but isn’t always so clear cut. After all, when it came out, Catch-22 was considered pop fiction, and Mark Twain probably was as well. In her defence, the LoC did the same thing up until about 1960.)
I’ve nominated her to shelve books for a couple of reasons, the biggest one being that I used to work in a library and shelving books was one of my least favorite activities. I liked doing it at first, because it’s quiet, I’m all by myself and I’m doing the sort of mindless thing I rather enjoy. After awhile, though, the bottom shelves will really start to kill you. I got to where I just avoided shelving books altogether and moved from circulation to serials/cataloging.
And so I do the cataloging. About half of our books have the LoC call numbers in them already, and the rest I look up at the LoC website, and pencil the numbers on the books. Joanna says she’s gotten familiar enough with the system that she can shelve most things without looking at the call numbers.
In other, possibly more exciting news, I went by the flight school today to sign the contract, get oriented, that sort of thing. My instructor’s name is Michael D.. I didn’t see it spelled at first, and it’s pronounced Dorn. Michael Dorn played Worf on Star Trek, a fact that Michael D., surprisingly enough, didn’t know. He doesn’t look much like Worf, much shorter than me, heavy-set, and red hair. He’s from Wisconsin, and like many flight instructors, hasn’t been flying very long at all. Airman Flight school hires almost exclusively their own students as instructors, and Mike just finished and got hired a few months ago. He seems pretty quiet, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I’ll find out soon enough. I’m tentatively scheduled for my first flight on Friday at 2pm, depending on scheduling.
Mike wasn’t sure about the scheduling since he’s mostly instructed in C-152’s so far, but both of us are big enough guys that fitting in a 152 on a hot day would be uncomfortable enough, and with that amount of weight on a hot day, getting off the ground might be unnecessarily difficult. For those of you unfamiliar with light aircraft, that might give you a better idea of just how small the planes I’ll be flying are.
So he tentatively scheduled me for 2pm on Friday, subject to aircraft availability.
While I start flying on Friday, ground school doesn’t start until next Monday, 19 April. So while I’ll be flying a couple hours a day, I shouldn’t be terribly busy. And Mike said he prefers to sleep mornings as well, so I shouldn’t have to get up early until ground school:)
