Playing hooky on the slopes

[hrj]

Took a vacation day yesterday to run off with thread_walker and her brother-in-law to go skiing. They were doing downhill so they dropped me off at the x-country trailhead and came back for me at the end of the day. (This was at Bear Valley -- the place I did my first x-country last year.) I think I was one of about half a dozen people on the trails ... not counting the local grade school PE class that came through just after lunch. I'm starting to feel a lot more confident about downhills on the intermediate trails but haven't tried any of the expert trails yet. I got in about 25 km in about 5 hours with two snack-and-sit breaks, which left me totally exhausted at the end of the afternoon. In other words, just about what I was aiming for. I was chatting with the guy who ran the snack shop at the end of the afternoon, debating out loud whether to call it a day or go for one more loop. He opined as how he always quit after the next-to-last run, because it was the last run when you tended to get hurt. I saw the wisdom in that and used it as my excuse.

The monthly Research Open House was tonight and a couple of the stalwart regulars showed up, but I came to the decision to close out the project. I was originally going to run it for a full year, but it's really lost momentum despite my attempts to stir up fresh blood the last couple of months. So it's time. A noble experiment but it didn't go in the directions I'd originally envisioned and it never really built up a critical mass of interest. Ah well, chalk it up to the larger project in paradigm shift. I'll keep hoping that I'll run into people who might find my library useful and we can make private arrangements.

Comments

[kbhjs.livejournal.com]

do you use librarything.com or any other book cataloging service?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I have my own book catalog (currently in Excel but I may migrate it to FileMaker eventually) simply for tracking what I have and where I shelve it. I have a similar file to track article offprints and photocopied excerpts -- stuff that lives in the filing cabinets rather than on the shelves. I think I'd have to get a paid Librarything account to even begin getting all my stuff listed, and unless they have some convenient way of simply uploading my existing data ... well, that would be a lot of typing.

I have thought of putting my book catalogs up on my web site in searchable form (I always need more projects to exercise my php skills).

[xrian.livejournal.com]

and unless they have some convenient way of simply uploading my existing data ...

I think they do, actually, though it's probably from a database-format or CSV file rather than Excel. Check it out.