I Can Stop Any Time I Want To...really!

Have I mentioned lately how much I like having regular four-day work weeks? The ten hours of work on Monday and Tuesday are challenging, of course, but by Wednesday I'm already anticipating my three-day weekend. So I have Friday (on Thursday) and then First and Second Saturdays. (And I appreciate that Second Saturday as much as the hobbits covet their "second breakfasts.") Sundays are spent at church and doing whatever I can to avoid the dreaded "Sunday afternoon sleepies." So all in all it's a good thing.

So, I must now sheepishly admit that I spent much of my weekend cataloging our books. Seriously. For Valentine's Day I gave my beloved a lifetime account on LibraryThing and one of their little CueCat scanners (yes, it's cat-shaped!) And I do believe that was The Best Present Ever for him. (He got me strawberry plants, dinner at Johnny Rockets, and tickets to see Romance/Romance, so that ranked pretty high on the cool-gift-o-meter too.) Our LT username, you ask? Catalogingjointly. As in "Married, Cataloging Jointly". (We just did our taxes, you see...) We think it's a surefire way to prevent divorce - we hardly know whose books are whose at this point (well, the stuff in Greek is a dead giveaway) and trying to separate them now would be impossible. Voila!

Anyway, the philosopher and I have added over 1500 books so far, and there are more tucked away in boxes. I really am a frustrated cataloger, or at least an addicted one (I can stop any time I want to!) But I most enjoyed the challenge of finding *exactly* the right record that matched the work-in-hand. Those few times I had to add a book manually just made my day. And I wasted far too much time "cleaning up" the records, getting the authors and editors assigned their proper terms, and making sure the capitalization and punctuation falls in all the right places. Oh, and I shouldn't even mention searching for the proper book cover .jpg to display. It's probably a good thing LT doesn't use the MARC21 standards, because I'd really go nuts then. The fact that I can add call numbers is bad enough, right?

So that's how we spent our weekend - all three days of it!