Tenerife Part 2

So, the wifi in the hotel isn't too good, which has thus far prevented me from skyping Mr W, so today I'm trying with the wifi up at the swimming pool which is all good so far, except that I forgot my camera cable so can't put any pictures up, which is a shame as I tried my new Fastskin Goggles today and I have some pictures of me looking really really cool!

Tenerife so far is even more wonderful than I could have expected apart from the blasted wisdom tooth (really hoping to avoid a trip to the doctor or dentists for the antibx that I think I need). The food is AMAZING - wonderful buffets full of Verity-friendly-food - I've never seen anything like it. The swimming is fantastic - we are using a 50m pool and a 25m pool. Yesterday we swam in both, including a 90 minute endurance session which was quite tough.

This morning we got up whilst it was still dark and walked to the beach during sunrise to then do some open water swimming in a lagoon in our wetsuits! We had the place to ourselves until a 50 year old woman came in for a skinny dip - we tried to avert our eyes.

After a large breakfast (seriously, could not believe how much the guys were eating!) (well, even I had a large breakfast compared to my usual standards of nothing), we came back up to the swimming facility (about 15 mins walk away) to use the hydrodynamic swim flume, which is a little pool where you swim against a wall of water and they film you from all angles. Would have been quite cool apart from my huge phobia of drains in swimming pools, so it was an achievement for me even to get in.

We've now got a couple of hours before we hit the 50m pool for another hour and a half's swim. I'm hoping the sun will stay out as it's a little cloudy which makes it chilly when we stop swimming for some coaching. Then we'll have a session of swim analysis looking at the videos that the coach has taken, before heading back to the hotel for food. Last night we were booked for dinner at 7.30 but all practically mutinied at the thought of waiting so long, not least because we've all been in bed by 9.30, so it will be an early dinner and another early night I expect.


Hope all's well in England - it's difficult for me to keep up with Google Reader, so do put links to any interesting posts on your blog in the comments so I can have a look when I get back.

Tenerife Part 1

So, Mr W, Bernard and I got up this morning at 4am, and Mr W drove us all to the airport. After a bit of waiting around (and yes, a book purchase, which had to be zipped into my jacket owing to Ryanair's strict cabin baggage rules and my cabin bag already being stuffed to the brim) at the airport, and then a 4 hour flight, I was suddenly in Tenerife! Flew in over the sea (never done that before!) and greeted with sunshine, and a warm breeze. The weather here is about 19/20C today, quite windy, and some cloud, but it's a great improvement on the UK... I was met by another camp participant and we had a transfer to our hotel about half an hour away, which gave me a chance to see a little bit of the island, and now I've got three hours to unpack (why did I bring so much stuff?), try to get online (success) so that hopefully I can skype Mr W tonight, and to purchase some essential supplies (which necessitated an anxious conversation via text message with Mr W where I tried to establish the Spanish for "rice" (Verity friendly) and "wheat" (not Verity friendly). There is a view of the sea from my room window (how strange to see black rather than white/yellow sand) and the hotel itself has a lovely pool if I can muster any energy for any extra swimming. Or maybe I'll be able to collapse on one of those sun loungers...

PS: Wisdom tooth on the other side from the one that caused all the trouble in the Autumn is being tricky - please cross everything that I can get through the week ok!

PPS: Having waited 20 minutes to try to upload my photos and failed, I'm giving up for now which is a shame - I managed to get some on facebook so if you want to look me up there then do :)

A hectic weekend

It's been a hectic weekend, but I have done lots of lovely things! Well, I say lovely, but I'm not sure the first one was.

On Friday night Mr W picked me up from work and we went straight to the cinema to see The woman in black. I've been looking forward to this for ages - the book scared me enough to give me nightmares for several days, fortunately I was a bit less scared by the stage version. However, the film should come with a health warning - it was at least ten times more scary than the book, and I can't believe it had a 12A certificate. I'm glad to have seen it, and although I am less than convinced by Daniel Radcliffe, the settings and the atmosphere were top notch. Plenty of moments when the film made you jump as well as be absolutely chilled by it. Even Mr W admitted to being scared. Came home and we had to put all of the lights on, and sleep with all of the lights on too.

On Saturday, I went to a workshop organised by Free Cakes for Kids Oxford - a lady from the Sugarcraft Guild had volunteered to come over to spend the afternoon with us to show us various sorts of ways of writing on cakes. I learned to make a piping bag out of greaseproof paper (no more expensive ones from Lakeland for me!), and to use it to pipe royal icing with. I also learnt two different ways of making roses - bit more practice there I think! Nice to meet the rest of the volunteers.

Finally, on Sunday, Mr W and I had a masterclass with a man called David Thornton. Unless you are into brass bands, this name will mean nothing to you, but he is a virtuosi euphonium player who plays with the Black Dyke Band (my favourite band and arguably the best in the country). We are helping out another band with a competition called The Areas in mid-March (Mr W on trombone, myself on the timps), and he had been invited along to put the band through their paces. As a euphonium player myself, I couldn't decide whether I was relieved or disappointed to be playing the timps. Very useful workshop for the band and at the end he played a virtuosi solo "Grandfather's clock" which was great!

(Oh, and talking of Free Cakes for Kids, my butterfly cake that I posted a few weeks ago is their "cake of the month" and you can see their blog post with a mini interview with me here.)

Apologies if this week is quiet on the blogging front, a family member has to go to hospital for an overnight stay and I'll be on taxi and visiting duty. I also have a crazy amount of things in my work calendar to get done before I have a week off, and somehow I need to pack and leave lots of surprises for Mr W around the house.

An evening with the Hummingbird Cake Days book

Apologies for lack of posting this week - snow, much else to occupy my brain this week, and getting ready to go away in 8 days time seem to have disrupted things. Still, at least I haven't be disrupted on the baking front and on Wednesday I spent a delightful hour and a half in the kitchen baking. I admit that I was sniffy about the first Hummingbird Cookbook (mistakes, oddities, and the requirment to own an inordinate number of different sorts of tins), but I have to say that the second one is excellent. Perhaps this is because they got the more mainstream recipes out of the way in the first book, leaving the second one opened to more interesting things! I did put my own spin on the three recipes that I tried, partly to de-gluten them but also to just do things my way!

Mr W had some good job feedback on Wednesday, and to celebrate I decided to make him a special cake. As he's out on Tuesday (Valentine's Day), I decided to combine the two. I made the black and white chocolate cheesecake slices. As you see, I didn't quite make slices as I used my heart shaped tin, and rather than putting the topping on at random, I wrote a secret message in it :) Although I made this gluten free, I haven't got around to trying it yet, and Mr W is adament that I wouldn't like it!

I then made the apple and oatmeal cookies - I modified these as I didn't have the patience to grate my apple, so I just put apple chunks in instead. Very tasty, although quite crumbly, but I suspect that that was due to my substitution of gluten free flour. Most have gone already and the remainder are earmarked for Mr W's packed lunches.

Finally, I had a craving for a really tasty and refreshing cake, so I decided on the orange almond and yoghurt loaf. I didn't have any yoghurt so made it without and it still tastes absolutely wonderful! Will definitely be making this one again!

Weekend in the life...

After a busy week at work, it's time for cake making. I had two birthday cakes to make today and also made some biscuits - Mr W's family have a bubble of birthdays in early February and we're having a bit of a party tomorrow afternoon.

Michael was 16 on Tuesday, and as a total surprise for him, I've made him a cake to resemble the electric guitar he was given. (I had been planning to do one like his old guitar and had to hurridly change my plans when he had this exciting present). I know the neck is a little short, but it wouldn't fit on the tray, so we decided to cut it short! The rest is a replica of this guitar.


Emma is 11 on Monday and had asked her Mum for a cake with "drama masks" on; she is a budding actress. I found some moulds online, but neither sugarpaste, royal icing nor marzipan worked well enough with them, but thank goodness chocolate did. The cake is a sponge cake filled with white chocolate buttercream and raspberry jam and dark chocolate masks.


It would be impolite to reveal Mr W's mother's age, but it was her birthday on Thursday. I was told not to make her a cake, so have made her shortbread biscuits with her initial on

Happy birthday everyone!

Library Day in the Life Round 8: Friday

It's the final day of the week, and goodness me it's been a busy one. Usual wake up etc, although the extreme cold meant that I needed two pairs of leggings on to cycle to the pool, and that the pool was pretty empty.

This morning I was rota'd to work at the Main Enquiry Desk, so after dumping my wet swimming things and changing my shoes, I headed over to the Old Bodleian, the next building. The Main Enquiry Desk is the first port of call for readers with enquiries or difficult problems which we recieve by phone, email or in person - it's also where new readers can attend for some help. It's a pretty quiet morning there reader-wise, I only help a couple of readers wanting to top up their photocopying/printing accounts, and there aren't too many emails either - I order a book for a reader coming on Thursday and pass on an enquiry about interlibraryloans to the document supply department.

In the meantime I get on with some of my own work. This includes looking at next week's rota and allocating shelving responsibilities to my team members (we all take turns to help with the shelving in the new large open access stack area called The Gladstone Link), and then looking at it to arrange training for a new member of staff and two meetings, and sending emails to organise these. I then finish the workflow for periodical parts that I've mentioned on the last two days and email it to my manager for approval. I have a discussion by email with some other members of staff about counting the number of empty desks at set points each day next week. I help one of my team sort out an enquiry that he hasn't been able to deal with by reminding him who it needs to be referred to. And I discover that it is SCONUL counting week next week which is where we have to count the number of readers in the library at set points during the week - could be a lot of counting next week!

Halfway through the morning, I am taken out for coffee by the Head of the Department which is a nice diversion.

At 1pm, it's lunchtime and I go to buy some more black icing for one of the birthday cakes that I'm making this weekend, along with lots of chocolate. It's that sort of day. Very cold.

After lunch I have a meeting with the colleague in charge of the Gladstone Link project planning - it was supposed to be handed over to me last October, but the advent of another project has put paid to this for now. We have various things to discuss, including the book moves planned (and need to update the maps) and the progress with the project to scan each book as it is reshelved to generate data to find out which books are being used most and which not at all (this will be over a 12 month period).

I come back to the Lower Camera and sit down to update the Gladstone Link maps for the third time this year, and ask for new colour ones to be printed and circulate the black and white version to the rest of the department. The workflow has been approved so I send that around too. We've got to measure some of the collections in the reading room so while teabreaks are happening and one of my team is busy measuring, I hand out quite a lot of books to readers.

Today has been busy so I'm glad to go home even if I have to spend most of the next 24 hours making birthday cake...

Library Day in the Life Round 8: Thursday

I think Thursday is my favourite day of the week. My schedule enables me to mix time for myself with time of the household and time at work. On Thursdays I don't start at work until 12pm, and although I usually then work until 7pm (which means I snag a lift home from Mr W), because I worked until 7 on Monday, that's over for this week.

On Thursday mornings, my alarm goes off ten minutes later, an extra 10 minutes of sleep for the pair of us. Defrosting my car rather than my bicycle, I drive to the pool where I get to swim for over an hour and a half, completing 200 lengths in the process. The reason I've taken the car rather than my bike is because afterwards I head to Sainsburys to get the big grocery shop of the week. Four bags of shopping comes to nearly £60 which is scary - the costs of groceries have really been racheting up recently. MUST eat more from the stock piles in the cupboards. Then home to made soup (carrot and swede) and some biscuits for the epic weekend of cake (more about that tomorrow). Then a big clean of the kitchen, hoover of the house and tidy, before a shower for me, and a 5 minute sit down with a bowl of soup and a book at 11.20 - I'm quite hungry! Then on with the warm weather gear as it's cold outside, just a rucksack today and no panniers as my swim is completed, and then half hour bike ride to work.

Arrive at 12pm and have a quick chat with my colleagues in the Lower Camera to see if anything exciting has happened. Unusually, nothing has, and everyone is merely envious of the colleague going to the Galapagos Islands tomorrow. I'm not scheduled to be on a desk until 2pm so I go upstairs to my "off-desk" in the Upper Camera and catch up with the mornings emails. My fellow Reading Room Supervisor has reviewed the workflows and made one change, so then I spend quite a while adding arrows and boxes to make them into a proper workflow before reading them over again and then emailing them to my manager. There are six in total, although two have two halves.

I cover the Upper Camera while a colleague goes to the Newsletter meeting; when he gets back, I'm finding the quiet conducive to finishing the workflows (Thursday is always bizarrely the most quiet day in the Upper Camera, I think it's because most history students have their tutorials that day!) I suggest that we swap places for the remainder of the afternoon.

I wait on tenterhooks for teatime as Yvann (aka Ms Reading With Tea) is in Oxford today and is working in the Rad Cam so we will take a break together. Finally it comes! Peppermint tea (strangely for me rather than Ms Tea) and hot chocolate is taken in the Bodleian Tea Room and we have a nice chat.

Back to work and I need to create some instructions (with screen shots) for the thing that I worked out how to do yesterday so it can be shared with the rest of the department. I help a student with printing, pass out the hole punch/stapler a couple of times and hand out a couple of books that are held behind the counter.

Suddenly it is 5pm - feels lovely as I'm normally here til 7pm. Cycle home to finish the things I didn't finish this morning and await the arrival home of Mr W. We may go out to eat tonight to celebrate our 6 month wedding anniversary!

Because....

Mr W and I have been married for six months today!

Library Day in the Life Round 8: Wednesday

So - you know the routine by now - alarm 6.05, husband's packed lunch, defrost bicycle seat, cycle 3 miles, swim 1.5 miles, arrive at work.

Today I'm based in the Lower Camera all day. There are several of us to sort the room out first thing so it doesn't take long - I switch things on and refill the copiers. We do the turnout which takes a while as it always does in term time and there is a very brief respite before 10 boxes of books are delivered. Coffee times come and go and then it is onto the excitement of the day - it is my first session on the online help desk. This was set up last summer and is manned by people in the various different Bodleian libraries across Oxford - our department has just had four people trained, including me, and it's my first go (we will be doing an hour a week on average). I don't actually have high hopes of anything happening at all as the last two hours have not had any enquiries, but after watching the screen for 40 minutes I finally get a question from someone having problems with electronic journal access. After experimenting, I have the same problems and it's not something I can sort out so I take the reader's email address and get in touch with the E Resources team. Unfortunately the reading room and phone gets quite busy while I'm doing this (should have gone to my "off-desk computer") and For the rest of the hour, I answer some emails and forward something about a course that I need to attend to my manager.

Helping a reader on the live help should be the highlight of the day, but it's not quite. Immediately afterwards I have my lunchbreak and go to Specsavers to get some new prescription sunglasses for my holiday in a fortnight's time. While I'm there, I ask the assistant to fix my drooping glasses as they have been annoying me. A ten second fix not only stops them drooping but brings the world back into focus! I had been worrying that my eye sight was deteriorating after only having a new prescription 2 months ago, so now I feel five years younger!

I get back to work and carry on sorting out the problem from yesterday as I have had advice from the systems support. This involves doing some shelf checking (actually one of my team goes and does this), following instructions on the system to make them look like they are in the right place again. Still two mystery items which I can't find, but they were last seen out to another member of the department so I have asked her to look!

Another large delivery of books takes us to tea time - when I get my break I carry on reading Jeanette Winterson's memoir which I'm REALLY enjoying. (If you enjoyed Oranges are not the only fruit, then you should definitely read this as it puts it into context)

My team member has reviewed the workflows and made several helpful suggestions which I incorporate and then I ring my fellow Reading Room Supervisor and ask her to look at them tomorrow when she has some off-desk time. This will give me time to review them when I come in tomorrow lunchtime and then get them to my manager by Friday morning, hopefully earlier than she was expecting!

I am supposed to go for tea at 3.30 but I got distracted by trying to sort out Crockfords Clerical Dictionary. We have a 2006 edition on the shelves in the Lower Camera, and the latest edition is at the Main Enquiry Desk, but now due to come to us. Unfortunately, the system thinks that the whole run is in the stack, and since we changed library systems in July I have no idea what to do. I ring my manager but she's busy and isn't 100% sure either but a brief hint that she gives me enables me to work it out. I manage to create a "temporary location" for this volume (since we'll get next years in due course and send this one to the store) and in the excitement I forget to go to tea. I tell my manager with glee (putting it down to my adjusted specs) and she asks me to write up a procedure that everyone can use. Luckily one of my colleagues agrees to man the fort on his own while the rest of us go for tea at 4.

5pm and I'm off home, still feeling jolly about my eyesight. Decide to make macaroni cheese for my husband and a gluten free chocolate cake for me, hopefully my husband who has cycled to work today will be home faster than when he cycled on Monday - 7.45 pm, if not I shall watch some iplayer. I do have a difficult email to send which is that I was supposed to be running the Brighton Marathon for Mind in April, but a combination of ankle injury over Christmas and iron deficiency anaemia has made it difficult, almost impossible for me to train more than the short runs I've been managing. The anaemia should be treatable and I'm taking iron supplements and should be sorted in three months so I'm confident that I'll be able to give it a go in 2013; it is one of the things on my list of things to do before I'm 30.

Library Day in the Life Round 8: Tuesday

So, today, it’s Tuesday, and it starts pretty much the same as Monday, only with the addition of some moaning about how tired I am, and with me putting a packed tea as well as a packed lunch in my husband’s bag as he is out tonight. I defrost my bicycle seat and cycle to the pool where despite feeling tired, I manage my 100 lengths and get to work at 8.25.

This morning, although I will be based in the Lower Camera, I start my day with half an hour in the Upper Camera, getting it ready for the readers, as the colleague who will be based there this morning doesn’t start til 9. This involves switching computers and copiers on and sorting out about 50 books, most of which need to go back on the shelves in the reading room and some of which need to be returned to other locations on site. I’m tight for time to do this amount of books on my own, so I sort the books fast and practically fling them into their places on the shelves. The good thing about a fairly static collection where the books have actual homes is that there is generally an obvious gap to put them into!

At 9am, I go back downstairs and we begin “The turnout”. When readers order books from our remote store in Swindon, they are held in the reading room or “reserve” that they have been ordered to for a week; each morning we get a automatically generated list of the books which have been in the room for a week, we retrieve them from the reserve shelves, scan them out of the reading room on the system (“Aleph”), and put them in boxes to be returned. Some of the books have been reserved by readers at other libraries so we have to send them on separately.

At 10am, just as we’ve got rid of the old books, the new orders arrive (and the filled returns boxes are collected – well most of them, we’re sending back so much this morning that there isn’t space on the van). 10 boxes of books! We unpack them onto the four staff desks, scan them in on the Aleph, put them back onto the table sorted into alphabetical piles, and then put them away in the reserve.

At the same time, we’re passing out requested books to readers, helping people with the photocopiers, and pointing out where the toilets are.

Teabreaks also start at 10, there are four of us to go, and we also need to cover the break in the Upper Camera, so this is always tricky logistically!

At 12pm we get another delivery – it’s usually smaller but this time a couple of boxes of books were held over from the morning delivery so we need to put those away too.

At 1pm it’s time for my lunch. I head to the public library to pick up a couple of books, buy gluten free crumpets in Marks and Spencers, ring my husband, and eat some butternut squash soup.

At 2pm, I was supposed to have a meeting for an update on a project, but it’s been postponed, so it’s straight back to the Lower Camera. Immediately I have a couple of enquiries from other members of staff to deal with – one involves me hunting for (and finding!) a book, another involves a system oddity that I will need to talk to my manager about as it’s not something I’ve seen before. Probably needs the systems people to sort it out.

At 3pm, the teabreaks round starts, and the afternoon delivery arrives. It’s another big delivery but the readers don’t really bother us while we’re processing it so it goes away fairly quickly.

At 4.15 I go for my break – it’s a late one as I’m working til 7pm tonight. I normally work til 7pm on a Thursday night but someone needed to swap so here I am. Come back at 4.45 and shortly afterwards send the others home whilst awaiting the arrival of the other person on 5-7 duty. He arrives promptly and after a quick chat he goes off to do some shelving. We don’t shelve during the day as we’re busy and it’s disruptive to the readers, but it’s a priority during evening duty. Whilst he’s busy doing that there are a constant stream of people wanting books from the reserve, it feels like each time I sit down I have to get up again, and it’s almost a relief to have someone ask for help with the photocopiers!

My manager rings me back with an explanation about the system oddity, but I will still need the systems people to sort it out. She also suggests asking for a report to see if there are any other books which think they are somewhere that they’re not!

Finally it’s time to go home – 10.5 hours is a long day when usually I start at 12pm on a 7pm finish. Luckily, even though Mr W is going out tonight, he agreed to come and take me home first so I don’t have to tackle a 30 minute cycle ride in the cold when I’m quite so tired! Definitely a ready meal on the agenda for tonight!