A chilly start to the week

It was cold this morning, 3, possibly 4C, but nothing ventured I was off on my bike half an hour or so after dawn for my 10km circuit.

Brilliant sunshine, but too too early for there any heat in it, and it made for an enjoyable little ride, even if I did have to stand under a hot shower for longer than usual afterwards to thaw out.

This year I'm not growing any tomatoes or zucchini (possums), and probably, given the temperature this morning that's a good thing, it certainly would have been cold enough to knock off any tomato seedlings.

On the positive side, not only are our potatoes up, our broad beans are beginning to pod nicely. I'm also trying one of these potato grow sacks this year, where every time the seedlings pop their heads up you add an extra few centimetres of compost, the idea being that you can grow a continual crop of new potatoes for a month or so.

If it works we'll have home grown new potatoes for a potato salad at christmas.

Otherwise I've been pressing on with the cataloguing exercise up at the Athenaeum. 

I'm finding that my experience of cataloguing artefacts for the National Trust is paying dividends in helping me look at the books not just simply as books, but as artefacts.

So, both the Mudies Circulating Library sticker and the Treloar's Hygenic library sticker, tell us things about the times they represent - the Mudies sticker shows how the book trade was beginning to globalise, just as a Hayman's Balsam bottle shows the beginnings of a globalised patent medicine industry.

The Treloar's sticker tells us something else - that after the 1919 flu pandemic people were not only more aware of the risks of transmission, and that some people, at least, were worried enough to ensure that items they borrowed did not constitute a risk, especially as there had been a major outbreak of polio in the late 1920s in Melbourne.

The weather in the past week has been cold and at times very wet, so I havn't got as much done in the garden as I'd hoped, but I did spend an afternoon playing with windows user configuration, something that was tedious in the least ...