On To The Next One

The next top to be quilted is loaded on the machine.  It had been languishing in a box under my bed for ten years or more, but its time has finally come.

I'm hoping to finish making the binding for the previous one.....and maybe even get it attached before the end of the day.  Who really cares if there is laundry to be done, dishes to go in the dishwasher and pears & squash that need to have something done with them?  I'm in a mood to sew and quilt so sew and quilt I shall!!!

Appreciate Your Plumbing

How's that for a title?  You know, none of us truly appreciate plumbing until it doesn't work.  Friday after work my DH threw his work clothes in the washer, started it up and went outside to do whatever it is that DHs do when they go outside.  I was in the house and it was quiet and after a while I heard gurgle, gurgle, gurgle coming from the bathroom. Having had this experience many times since living in this house, I immediately knew the drain was backing up and dashed for the basement to shut off the washer. Too late, the water was already spreading.

Now, late Friday afternoon was the beginning of the Columbus Day long weekend, so that was one strike against me. I did get the town maintenance guy to come look at the sewer line under the street, but he didn't want to get the jet truck to jet the line because he was clocked out for the weekend and would be back to work on Tues.  Our regular drain routering guy was gone because they'd just had a baby and the baby was having some issues. Strike two.  So I called another  guy who had done our drains before. He wasn't home either but I left a message which never got returned. Strike three.

So this morning I set my alarm for bright and early and called no. 3 at about 7:15 and he agreed to send someone to my house by mid-morning. Then called guy no. 1 to make sure he remembered he was going to jet the main sewer line this morning. He did and he did. Guy no. 3's guy showed up and routered the line from the house to the main and all is well.  So, appreciate your plumbing. I appreciate mine more than I did last week.  You just don't realize how much you run water until you can only run a very small amount once in a great while.

After all that drama I decided I was going to get a quilt loaded on the Premier and do a little quilting.  The poor machine was probably thinking I'd totally abandoned it since it's been so long since I quilted anything.

Orange Crush loaded on the machine

I have more tops to do and hope the momentum will last until I get at least a couple more done.

CPD23 -- Week 15 -- Career

I always say I fell into a library career by accident.

I always liked to read but never set foot in a public  library until I was probably a senior in high school. When I was a high school sophmore I started volunteering in the school library because too many study halls were too boring.  By the time I was a senior I'd read everything in the school library and branched out to the public library.....and found that the librarian (the proverbial little old lady) thought I should only be reading the juvenile books, which kind of turned me off.

After high school I didn't have the opportunity to attend college, my parents thought it was a waste of money---especially for a girl. So I spent a summer working as a clerk in the County Treasurer's office.  Later that fall I got married and started working as a waitress in a small town cafe for a while, followed by staying home for several years with my kids. By the time my youngest was about three I was thinking about finding a job. There weren't too many choices in this small town and I knew I didn't want to waitress, tend bar or drive a fertilizer truck. I also knew I didn't want to drive 25 miles to work in a nursing home. So when a job in the local library opened up I applied and got it.  And that is where I've been ever since.

Libraries and librarians have seen lots of changes since then and I have had to learn so much -- the introduction of computers, the Internet, computer circulation & catalog systems, supervising a library enlargement, writing grants to pay for the new things,  -- learn, learn, learn.  I guess it's a good thing I like to learn new things.

CPD23 -- Week 14 --Thing 17 -- Prezi & Slideshare

Prezi -- I'm happy to learn that there is a more dynamic alternative to PowerPoint. I think I only ever worked with PowerPoint one time when a little 4-Her came into the library needing to make a PowerPoint presentation for the fair. Talk about the blind leading the blind -- but between her, her mother and me we got 'er done.

I've always thought PowerPoint presentations were boring, boring, boring.  Prezi allows a presenter to put on a much better show. After watching the demonstration videos on how to do a Prezi I think it would take me quite a while to get my brain around the process.  However, since I don't do presentations it's unlikely I'll ever do much with either Prezi or PowerPoint.

Two other  services mentioned in the Prezi page were ZamZou for free online photo format conversion and Picnik for online photo editing.  I played a little with both of them and they are pretty slick.

Slideshare    This would be a great service for someone doing lots of different presentations, especially if one traveled a lot doing so.  It's a service that hosts your presentations all in one place where they will be available on any computer with online access. How great would that be if you arrived at your destination and found that the file on your computer was corrupted?  It also makes your presentations available for others to find and share.  Can it be used for Prezis?  I didn't see anywhere that it said if it could or not.

Prezi, Picnik and SlideShare all have limited free versions. If you want a little more they all cost money. Prezi - $59 yr., Picnik - $2.08 mo., SlideShare - $0 - $249 mo. with special pricing for non-profits.  I think I'm seeing a trend here -- the programs we use being "in the cloud" and us needing to keep paying a monthly or yearly fee to use them.  When will all this become too expensive for the average working person to afford?  Think about it -- every program you need to use to do word processing, bookkeeping, play music or videos, edit & store pictures, manage your family tree -- all in the "cloud" and demanding monthly or yearly fees to use & have access to your material.  I don't think I want to go there.

Holiday Decorating

In years past I have gone all out with decorations for the various holidays. There are boxes & boxes of stuff in the basement. Last year I was working on my kitchen so nothing got put out for Fall/Halloween/Thanksgiving and very little for Christmas. Lo and behold, I discovered that more is NOT better and I like the simpler look. Here's my effort for Halloween this year.

My Halloween decorating effort

Just a few things on top of the entertainment center, a pair of painted wood pumpkins leaning against the side, a small decoration on the front door, and a little ceramic jack-o-lantern on the end table.  It's enough.  At the end of the month I'll just switch out the Halloween things for a few Thanksgiving things.

Last year my Christmas tree didn't go up until just a couple of days before the big day  with just lights and few colored globes. I liked it. (Other years I have always had the tree completely covered with ornaments collected over the years.)  Added a few of my Santas on top of the entertainment center, Santa's hat over the corner of a picture frame & decorating was done. I'm thinking maybe I'll do the same thing and just add a very few of the collected ornaments to the tree this year.

Somehow, so much of the holiday decorations just seem like clutter to me anymore. I'm seriously thinking of going through everything, picking out my very favorites, and hauling the rest off to Good Will.

Yesterday I Sewed....

....all afternoon and got this done...

....the pieced border sections for Roll Roll Cotton Boll. One of these days I'll have to shove all my living room furniture back out of the way and lay out the blocks. The end is in sight and I'd really like to have this completely done and on my bed for the Christmas season. It has enough red and green in it to pass for a Christmas quilt I think. Bonnie H. has already mentioned the next mystery quilt on her blog so it's time to finish this one up.

I suppose the next thing on my agenda though will have to be getting caught up on the 23 Things library course again. Somehow I always find myself getting behind and then doing a marathon session to catch up.  Is that a personality flaw??

Mission Accomplished

Still need to trim the dog ears then on to assembling the border strips.

It's Been a While

It's DEFINITELY been a while since you saw anything quilty from me so here's a little tidbit.

Yesterday I cut the brown triangles for the pieced borders on Roll Roll Cotton Boll. This quilt was my summer project and now summer's over so I should get busy and get the top finished at least.  This afternoon I intend to get those triangles sewed to the pink/green parts.

Something new

My women's club is planning to collect hats, gloves/mittens and scarves for a Giving Tree at the Library for Christmas. Member Jennie brought in her knitting looms and some yarn to show us how to make hats. After vowing to not start any new craft I came home from Norfolk with THIS on Wednesday:

That's right....a knitting loom set and a couple skeins of yarn. And just today I kicked myself for forgetting to take along my 40% off coupon for Hobby Lobby. Those looms would have been QUITE a bit cheaper if I had.  Now let's see what sort of hats I can come up with.

CPD23 -- Week 13 -- Thing 19

Wow, a catch-up week....and I've just spent 3+ hours catching up!!  Great minds, and all that....  I might have time to read others' blog entries this week. Wow!!

It's nice to have a week to just look back on how far we've come and to think about how we can use what we've learned in our work/everyday life.  I already know there are some I will never use. And some that I use and will continue to use, like blogging, RSS feeds, Dropbox, Facebook.  I can see some uses for screen capture software for helpful tutorials for staff and patrons and I want to learn to use Audacity.  Also maybe dig a little deeper into the organizing programs such as Zotero.

Now, if I could be magically given many more hours in a day to do it all as well as keep up with work, home, family, quilting, genealogy, reading, etc. maybe it would all happen.

I do know that I am definitely looking forward to the next "things" on the list.

CPD23 -- Week 12 -- Thing 18

Screen Capture:  I've seen instances of this in action on how-to videos on YouTube, but knew nothing about how it was done. After reading about Jing, Screencast-O-Matic, Camtasia Studio and Lightshot, I now know how they do those videos.  The great thing is that these tools all have free or trial versions to try them out.  Jing and Camtasia Studio also have good tutorials...Camtasia's is very thorough.  While Jing and Screencast-O-Matic both have free versions, the later has a longer recording time which could make a difference as to which one to try.

After learning about these tools, my first thought was of using one to do a little tutorial video of learning to use the library's OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog). It's simple enough, yet someone using it for the first time is always hesitant....and they're so afraid of breaking something if they poke the wrong button.

I also thought of little tutorials on how to do helpful things on the computer, like making the text on a page larger or opening a second or third browser window. Those are things some of us do as a matter of course, but are new and wondrous to the less computer literate.

Podcasting:   Many moons ago I had iTunes installed on my computer (it may still be there for all I know) and had it set to record certain podcasts. However, I never got around to listening to them so I abandoned it. I'll bet a lot of us don't realize there are other "podcast catching" programs available other than iTunes so I found the site listing the others helpful and have bookmarked it.

As far as creating podcasts, I really don't think that's in my future, though I do appreciate the reminder of Audacity. I understand it's an excellent audio recording/editing program. And best of all, being the tightwad I am, it's FREE. (Open source is great and all the open source programmers deserve a big round of applause.) While I don't expect to be doing any podcasting, I do have some old record albums and cassette tapes at home that I'd like to record to MP3. 

It's too bad that CPD23 can give us all this wonderful inspiration but can't give us more hours in the day to make use of it all.  Apparently what every library needs is a person who deals strictly with the computer/digital stuff....or a librarian who only has to work the desk a few hours a week yet gets paid to do this the rest of the time.  We can dream, can't we??

CPD23 -- Week 11

Thing 15 :  Attending - Presenting - Organizing

I'm good at attending! :-) I've been attending meetings, workshops, etc. for many years now.  Sometimes the offerings get repetitive when you've been at it for so long, but I know to go to the event anyway because even if the presentation is a repeat of something I've heard before I will learn from other attendees. No matter what kind of meeting or educational opportunity I attend I ALWAYS learn something from others who are also attending. So, my advice is even if you think the event is just a repeat of something you've already learned, go anyway if you can because there is always something to be learned.

Presenting (or, YIKES public speaking).  I'm much better at attending, but I have had to get up in front of people and speak---County Supervisors, Village Board, county librarians, computer classes at the library. All I can say is do your preparation so you know what you're talking about and try to relax enough to actually be able to get the words out. And, if someone asks a question you don't know the answer to right off hand don't be afraid to say you don't know.....but tell them you will find out and let them know and then DO IT.

I must say I enjoyed Ned Potter's slides on how NOT to do a presentation.  How often have you seen all those things done? Or been guilty of doing them yourself?

Organizing events is always stressful. I don't care if it's a Story Hour for four year olds or weekly computer classes or an author visit.  But, it's part of a librarian's job and eventually we get over the feelings of panic. And, there will always be the event  no one comes to. To me that is the worst...I'm embarrassed, the presenter is embarrassed, and I just never want to plan anything ever again.  Yet I must and so do you, it's all part of the job.

Last, but not least, I learned how to embed fonts into Power Point presentations.  I'd never even thought of needing to do that before.  It's the little things isn't it??

Thing 16: Advocacy

Advocacy....a word we hear a lot. And one that no doubt means different things in different communities.  In my small community/library it amounts to doing everything we can to get our patrons what they are looking for, a semi-regular Library News column in the local newspaper, reports to the Village Board and County Supervisors, as well as short talks to both at budget time (they really don't like long-winded speeches).  Sometimes I lay in bed making lists in my head of all the things we do for our patrons, all the things we offer them, and especially justifications for our computers and Internet access in a place where way to many people in charge still think of the Internet as only games and and kids getting into pornography.  And also the belief that everyone has Internet at home. I imagine that if we were faced with closure or major budget cuts it would be different and we would pull out all the stops.  Hey, I write my best Library News columns when the library is faced with some sort of challenge.

I really think the best advocacy for the library, or our library at least, is by building good will among library users by doing all we can to help them in whatever way we can on a one-to-one basis.  If they make positive statements about the library to others even the non-users will see that the library is important to somebody. And we all know that if someone ISN'T pleased with the service they received they will tell even more people than they do when they ARE pleased.

Great meeting

We  had a great meeting of the Antelope Co. Library Association this morning.  We're a group of librarians, staff and board members from seven libraries in the county who meet every other month at a different library in the county each time on a rotating schedule.  At each meeting the host library lines up some form of continuing education that lasts about an hour.  Each attendee gets credit for one Continuing Education hour towards either Board or Librarian certification through the Nebraska Library Commission.

At this meeting Anita Hall, Antelope Co. Extension Educator, was our guest speaker.  She gave a presentation about how we can make a difference in the lives of the youth in our communities, including the 40 Developmental Assets for  Adolescents that the Search Institute of Minneapolis, MN has identified as the positive experiences and qualities that all of us have the power to bring into the lives of children and youth.  The presentation led to some lively discussion among those present. Since all but one of the group was age 50 or better we could also see very different ways young people are regarded between our generations and the current.

Anita's presentation made me aware that we don't always give our youth an opportunity to participate in ways that will help them grow up to be concerned, involved adults.  I don't know how or if we can work this into the library, but it's certainly something for us to keep in mind.

CPD 23 - Week 10, Thing 14a,b,c,

This weeks Things were all completely new to me...had never heard of any of them before. After reading about all three and watching the videos I chose to explore Zotero further, thinking it might be the most useful to me though I don't expect to use nearly all of the features.  This thing is feature rich.  I like the word "free" too. LOL

As an add-on for Firefox it's ideal because Firefox is my preferred browser. I often find articles online that I'd like to keep....that's why my Bookmarks list is longer than my arms. Being able to share and access what I've saved from any computer is a plus too. Though as I understand it, all three of these "Things" have that ability. At times the ability to make notes about what I've saved would be ideal.

Since I don't expect to be writing any research papers or articles requiring lots of research I don't see myself much more that skimming the surface of the abilities of this program.  And since my library is small and rural we don't usually have college students researching major papers here and the high school students don't seem to do much in depth research for their papers, but a little info about this program and the others might be a topic for a library news column sometime in the near future just so our patrons know about it and can do their own exploration.

CPD23 -- Week 9, Thing 13

Since I am already somewhat familiar with Google Docs and Wikis I decided to learn more about Dropbox.  It's been discussed quite a bit on genealogy blogs as a way for family history researchers to save their databases, share them and sync them between computers.  One of my greatest fears is that I'll lose my database even though it's always backed up to a flash drive and an external hard drive, all the while knowing that it should be backed up off-site as well. What if something happened to my house and I wasn't there to grab either the computer or one of the backup drives? All that work lost....doesn't even bear thinking about.

So, I signed up for the 2GB free version, downloaded the software and installed it on my laptop. Following the directions, I moved the file with my database to the Dropbox folder and logged into the site. All the data in that file was automatically uploaded to Dropbox where I can access it from my computer or any other computer with access to the Internet.  One fear relieved.  Now I just need to install it on my desktop and sync the files. Another problem solved...I no longer need to worry about having something added to the database on one computer but not the other. Sneaker net doesn't always work as well as you'd think!!! LOL

While I had read about Dropbox on the genealogy blogs this exercise gave me the kick in the pants I needed to actually make the move to using it.  I also have lots of other files that need to be backed up off site but some of the off-site storage options are a bit pricey, including Dropbox.  I'm thinking one called Carbonite might be an option since for one price storage is unlimited.  In researching I also came across one called SugarSync that works much like Dropbox, but again, it might be too pricey for me. More research needed.

Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes

They started out slow.

Only five quarts from the first picking.

This batch getting canned today.

Seven quarts in the canner as I type.

This batch got picked this morning.....almost two 5-gal. pails full.

Should be ready to can by Friday. I estimate another 12-14 quarts.

Why was I worried that I wouldn't get any tomatoes?  There will be plenty more to pick too.

Annual Family Get-Together

Not such a big crowd this year.  A few Risinger cousins usually come, including some of their kids, but this year that branch had a wedding in St. Louis over the weekend.

We didn't lack for desserts. Or any other food for that matter.

As usual, there's no evidence I was even there. LOL

Daughter's Surprise B-Day Party

Her 40th b-day is coming up and her kids & DH decided to surprise her.

Here she is just after discovering she'd been had...with the party hat she refused to wear. Her SIL took her out for drinks while the fam set up the party & guests gathered. Just before I took this picture she turned to SIL and says, "You lied to me!"

Part of the crowd in the backyard. I think some may have left before I took this picture but I heard the last guest left at 3:45am.  Guess it was a good party.

Recently Quilted

Baby quilt.  All embroidered.

Will Kindles kill libraries?

This is an interesting article I came across online.  Will Kindles Kill Libraries?  That's the 64-million-$$$ question.  While quite a few people own eReaders and like them, many, many more swear they will stick with real books.  Guess we'll have to wait and see. I will say though, that Overdrive, the major distributor of eBooks to libraries has a way to go.

I've researched Overdrive a little, thinking it might be time for my library to get on board.  However, every time I check on the availability of a book I might want to read there is always a waiting list.  Sometimes two on the list, sometimes 5 or more.  I think the record was 26.  Multiply that figure by the 2 or 3 week checkout period and you can see how long it will be before #27 gets the book.  Waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy   to frustrating.  And buying & downloading popular books gets expensive since they average $9.99 to $15.99 ea., with a few free offerings and 99 cent books thrown in.  Not only that, eBook sellers can zap them off your reader just as easy as you downloaded them, if they so see fit.  Amazon has done it. Is it any wonder voracious readers with an eReader turn to pirated copies?

Really, I don't think libraries are in nearly as much danger from eBooks as they are from short-sighted politicians who see them as easy targets for funding cuts.