The first two weeks of winter ...

 So how's the past two weeks been?

In one sense the big news, my finishing the cataloguing of Lake View House for the National Trust was underwhelming.

I'd told them before the close off meeting that I was going to resign, having worked myself out of a job, so it was simply a matter of quickly reviewing what had been done, shaking hands, and exchanging a few pleasantries.

I was far more excited by my finally building a workbench out of recycled materials in the outside studio.

And then the weather turned cold, then cold and wet, then even colder - the last few days we've been waking up to a thick layer of ice on the cars in the morning, and the heat pump has only just been coping in the mornings, but it's unusually cold for Beechworth so hopefully it will warm up a tad to normal winter chilliness.

All this cold and wet weather has of course meant no gardening, but it has allowed me to delve into how a 1890s Russian exile support group inadvertantly led to the popularisation of nineteenth century Russian literature in England, mostly through the work of Constance Garnett.

I've been finding that this delving into anti tsarist politics has been helping me brush up my very rusty Russian language skills, which is useful - for what I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find a use for them somewhere.

Up at the Athenaeum, it's been the grind of working through the supposed publishers and creating a controlled vocabulary.

I'm finding so many errors that the whole collection probably needs to be recatalogued, but for the moment it's a pretty mechanical exercise, chasing down obscure nineteenth century publishers. It's also a problem that, Australia being a small place then - the population at around Federation was only about four million - smaller short lived Australian publishers from the nineteenth century left little or no trace.

But even so there are snippets of interest.

Besides an 1863 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, there's an 1863 edition of Huxley's Lectures to Working Men, which is essentially a defence of Darwinian evolution, and an 1869 edition of Fritz Muller's (the discoverer of Mullerian mimicry) Arguments for Darwin, suggesting that one or more of the subscribers to the Athenaeum library was taking an active interest in evolutionary theory.

It also suggests there may have been an active Natural History group in and around Stanley, and tracing them and their meetings might give an insight into life in the goldfields after the gold began to run out and Stanley became a more settled community.

And along the way I've had a minor family history triumph, recovering some missing photos of J's ancestors from a twenty five year old CD-R, which is normally considered the upper limit for standard non archival CD's.

Not that I can claim any great technical skill, it was pure chance that the scruffy machine that lives in the outside studio that I use when I need to look something up had a working CD drive that could actually read the disk.

Still, all good experience...