Winter! (perhaps)

 It's been a funny autumn so far. Dry, and while it's been getting steadily colder at nights, it's been warm and pleasant during the day.

Well, that's the way it was until a couple of days ago when not only was it markedly colder overnight, the daytime temperatures were struggling to reach double figures.

The cats, lazy heat loving things that they are, were loathe to go outside, and I actually had to put on socks inside the house for the first time since before Christmas.

The trees have turned a magnificent array of reds, yellows and oranges, but we are finally promised rain this weekend, which probably means that the garden will turn into a seasonal mix of wet soggy leaves and bare leafless branches, a bit like it decided to do when we attempted a winter walking trip a couple of years ago.

Still, we're getting there, I can take the saga of the studio reverse cycle air conditioner off my Trello list - we finally had it installed yesterday after various delays - I should have known not to order anything the week before Easter, orders being lost, and installers being booked up - who'd have thought that there would be a rush to get new heaters installed before winter proper?

Anyway, a month later than we planned, we now have heating and cooling in the outside studio, which should make the space usable the year round. I even have a plan to build myself a work table using an old shower screen and two old kitchen units, which should give me somewhere other than my rather crowded and messy desk to work.

In between times, I've been going up to the Athenaeum in Stanley to work on the heritage book collection.

Creating a controlled vocabulary for publishers for the Athenaeum Heritage Book Collection has turned into a marathon, not a sprint - it's not the big well known publishers who are a problem, its the small publishers of what I'll loosely call 'pulp fiction' 1930s crime novels and westerns, which were popular reading at the time.

Unfortunately, a lot of them were published by small local publishing houses that have disappeared without trace.

But, as one of the important aspects of the heritage book collection is that it provides a snapshot of what people actually read, as opposed to what you might think they read on the basis of book reviews of the time it's probably worth the effort tracking down what little information is available online about these small local publishers.

I've also taken advantage of my extra free time now I'm finished with Lake View House to finish off my researches into the afterlife of Katherine Scragg and Ethel Voynich, who turned out to be more interesting than I expected - I originally expected her to be a sort of nineteenth century groupie hanging round the Russian exile scene in late nineteenth century London, but no, she appears to have been involved in the early development of the Fabian Society and middle class socialism in England, as well as mixing with spies and book and newspaper smugglers.

And in my eternal quest to find a lightweight writing machine, (and partly inspired by my success using a Chromebook to research Katherine Scragg) I picked up an old Asus Chromebook that had fallen off the update list, and was hence cheap, but Google Docs runs fine on it, making it another possibility as a tool for simply getting things down to work on later ...