Almost the end of November ...

 Frightening to say but it's almost the end of November.

The weather is seesawing about, one day cold and wet, the next overcast, then pleasantly warm, then raining again - typical November weather.

The potatoes are up, the beans are podding and the first strawberries are ripening.

I'd been threatening all spring to get my seriously big extending ladder out and earlier this week I actually did.

I propped it up against the house and scrambled up it like a stiff old ape and cleaned the gutters which sorely needed doing due to the build up of elm keys from the street trees - I didn't clean the gutters last year, which was a mistake, and we actually had seedlings growing in the gutter above the front door. Picturesque, but not what you want.

I still have bit more gardening to do, clearing weeds from the path down the side of the house - we never use it so it gets neglected and clearing the weeds from the street side of the fence, and then we should have finally caught up with all the jobs I left undone last year while I was trying to get the documentation of Lake View House finished after the delays due to mould and damp.

With only the Athenaeum, this year is not nearly so hectic, especially as the thing about the guerrilla cataloguing exercise is that there's no timeline, or reporting deadlines.

The guerilla cataloguing exercise continues to throw up surprises with the latest a near illegible 1860s label from Mullens circulating library in Melbourne, in their time as least as significant as Mudie's in England.

At the same time I've been trying to run down some more information about hygenic libraries and precautions to stop the spread of infectious diseases via library books.

I remembered that as a child, the Stirling Burgh library as was had rather a stern sticker inside their books warning that in the event of an infectious disease occurring, the book had to be returned to the Sanitary Officer for disinfection. (Remember that in the early sixties when I was a small child and starting to use the library, vaccinating children against polio had only been routine for five or six years, there was no MMR against measles, and smallpox and tuberculosis were still considered serious threats.)

Out of curiosity I emailed their successor organisation and asked them if they still had examples of the label and a record of what the disinfection procedures consisted of.

This obviously piqued their interest, because, not only did they go to the trouble to find a copy of the infectious disease label on a book in their stacks, they promised to have a look and see if they had any records of the disinfection procedures used.

Strangely, Facebook is actually proving very useful with links to various local historical societies, many of whom  to have a static webpage which is never updated but do have an active Facebook page,

I've been deliberately not contacting any of my previous Facebook contacts from the time before I dumped Facebook, along with almost all other social media - I reckon that we will all have moved on and perhaps have less in common than we once did - I reckon that an important part of maintaining contacts is letting go as life changes, but I'm happy to accept friend requests.

I've also joined pixelfed - I found I needed a way of sharing images (old library book labels) by url and pixelfed lets me do this and also means I don't need to rejoin instagram.

As far as playing with hardware, I actually bought myself a second refurbished Acer Travelmate to replace/supplement my old Windows 10 Lenovo Thinkpad.

It came from the refurbisher with an eccentric setup with a local user pre-installed. However my experience rebuilding the other Travelmate came in handy and I managed to reubuild it with my Microsoft account in under three hours, which I reckoned was pretty good going, considering how long it took me last time ...