multi-day

A lot of things have been going on. I'm still spending most of my days over at my congregational library, trying to organize, supervise, and put my own hand in to our barcoding project. Despite the decline in volunteers (we originally only recruited them for a few days at the start of the project), it's plugging along and I'm determined to get all the circulating books barcoded by the end of this, the second week of work. Then we can reopen the library to circulation, from which it's been effectively closed. Then another week should take care of the reference books and the obsolete media, and then the project will be over but I get to plunge into the online cleanup, which I may attempt to describe when it happens.

It's interesting being in charge of this project. I've worked on large organizing projects in professional libraries where I've worked (including being on the teams reshelving all the books that fell over during major earthquakes), but this one I had to plan and organize myself. Fortunately I've been observing long enough that I knew what to do. It's turned out pretty well, and the inevitable glitches haven't been paralyzing.

Meantime I also have reviews to write. Feeling guilty about having missed the Redwood Symphony's last regular concert of the season because I was in England, I decided to attend their annual outdoor pops gathering. There wasn't a lot to say about it, and I had to finish it off in a blazing hurry, but that got done. The Daily Journal likes me to end reviews with alerts for upcoming concerts. It was easy enough to cut-and-paste a little about Redwood's next pop concert from the press release they sent me without any prompting from me, but the beginning of next season? At the concert they said a brochure was available, but I forgot to pick one up, and the info wasn't on their website; in fact, two weeks later, it still isn't. I had to find out what they're playing, and when, from the website of a ticket broker service.

Then I got to the Silicon Valley Music Festival, which was just crammed full of weird stuff, which with considerable handling I managed to get into a review. When I called one piece "reassuringly postmodernist," I meant it: after all this strange and exotic music, it relaxed my listening tension to find something in an idiom I comfortably understood.

The Redwood concert was on the same day as the Solstice Party, a major event on my social group's annual calendar. I thought I might get over to the party first before the concert, but I was just too busy and it didn't work. I did, however, drop by the still flickering party after the concert, where quiet conversation included my insistence, in response to a question, that no, I'm not attending the SF Opera Ring cycle. I've heard all these operas on recordings, and I am not sitting through any more of them on stage.

One day while I was at the SVMF, B. was off at an evening (fortunately, as the daytimes are too hot for this) march and rally to protest family separation and the administration's other inhumane refugee policies. I'm pleased we got represented, at least. B. carried a sign reading "Brown Families Matter," which I thought was cleverer than any of the signs I saw reproduced in photo reports of the rallies.