The Kwongdzu has enormous claws;

Its character is full of flaws.

Edward Gorey, The Utter Zoo Alphabet

That’s today’s Gorey quotation, and it feels rather appropriate. It’s been another warm and rather exasperating day without a functioning catalogue. I’m going home now.

Hmm. When playing with the related:URL search at Google, I found that my home page is apparently similar to this site.

Hmmmmm.

Det var en liten ekorre,

en mycket liten ekorre.

Han hade inte mycket förstånd

men han var varm och luden.

Nu är han kall, alldeles kall,

och alla hans små ben är stela.

Men han har fortfarande

den vackraste svansen i världen.

Tove Jansson, Trollvinter

<!–There was a little squirrel,

A very small squirrel.

He wasn’t very clever

But his fur was nice and warm.

Now he’s cold, quite cold.

And all his legs are numb.

But he is still the squirrel

With the marvellous tail.

Moominland Midwinter, translation by Thomas Warburton–>

I have just buried a squirrel. Not the cats’ doing; it had drowned in the water butt and I found it when I went to get a canful of water to provide for the plants. At first I thought it was a pine cone. . . but that was its tail; it was floating there quite peacefully. Unless all the crime novels I’ve read lie, it can’t have been in there too dreadfully long for it was quite stiff — all its legs were indeed numb — and rigor, I have learnt, leaves the body after a few hours. I buried it between a couple of roots beneath a birch. Good thing we don’t have dogs; while the furheads were interested, they won’t start to dig it out.

Unless I’m much mistaken it is about to start raining. (I hope it is; it’s been dreadfully close and clammy today and I’ve had a roaring headache almost all day.) If it had started a little bit earlier I would never have felt the need to water the redcurrant bushes, and hence wouldn’t have discovered the poor squirrel. I can’t say that prompts me to any deep philosophical thoughts, but it is nevertheless true.

Back at work. The library catalogue doesn’t work today because of a server overhaul, which means a lot of my normal work is impossible. Today’s quotation from my Edward Gorey desk calendar is

Forbear to taste

Library paste.

I’m not certain what library paste is, but I’m sure it is good advice all the same.

Brief notes:

Visited Pemberley for the first time in many moons to post about the delivery of Steven Brust’s latest to the editor. I was received with cheers — they have missed me!

I also visited the Stockholm underground (this was a real in-the-flesh visit as opposed to the Pemberley one) and was struck, again, with how much more at home I feel in the London Tube. Yes, I know that’s sad.

And in one of the major daily newspapers, the Nigeria letter scam was presented as “New Email Hoax” today. (I only saw the headline, but that’s what it said. . .)

And in other news, I didn’t get the job I applied for at SIPRI. OK, I didn’t really expect I would, and I’m not at all sure commuting to Stockholm would have agreed with me. . . but I did hope I’d be called for an interview. Ah well.

Been in Stockholm all day to learn more about providing library services for students with disabilities. Really interesting, even though there won’t be anything about how to adapt web sites (which was the reason I was sent rather than anyone else. . . I’m not complaining though!) Tomorrow we are going to learn all about what we need to do in our local libraries; it had better not be anything that costs money!

Seriously, food for much thought has been had today, which may or may not result in further musings here. Right now I need to go fetch my bike from the station, though.

I mended the link below so it leads to Open Directory’s Parts Unknown links rather than straight to Cheapass. Wish I’d thought of it myself instead of having to have it pointed out to me by my resident Open Directory editor.

Board gaming yesterday: we finally got to play Parts Unknown which was a lot of fun though nine players may have been slightly too many; it made it difficult to keep track of who was displaying what in their shop windows and that slowed it down a lot. Another result of being so many was that the town kept growing — at least we think there wouldn’t have been quite so much of a population explosion with fewer players. I wouldn’t want to meet some of the new inhabitants, though. . . certainly not the ones built entirely of mold, or of giblets.

Been playing around a lot with Kevan’s blog twinning project, which is a fun gadget; I haven’t looked at enough of the blogs to actually do any twinning but I did find a couple of excellent ones: How to Learn Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons (difficult? Hey, Swedish is simple! and librarian.net. Very pleasant discoveries, both of them. So many blogs are utterly uninteresting (although to be honest I suppose this one is, too, for people wholly unconnected to me!) that I don’t bother clicking around much at Blogger; the links from logs I read are sometimes different, but Kevan’s blogtwinner is better still.