Relaxing with all deliberate speed
Dec. 30th, 2010 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSince I have five more (well, now four more) days of vacation with nothing specific I have to do (although lots of general stuff) and nowhere specific I have to go, I'm giving a shot at getting to sleep without my audio sleep aids. It seemed to go fairly well last night -- and I even got in some scene-writing time as I was drowsing. (Worked out the contents of a conversation in Part I of Daughter of Mystery which had been left as a placeholder because it needed to provide some deep background on supernatural stuff, as well as being the conversation where my two protagonists discover their deep and enduring bond over being philosophy geeks.)
The rest of the day was spent finishing packing up the fiction that I'm keeping -- 16 boxes worth -- as well as sorting out the book-discards that have been spoken for and doing a complete shelf-check. I'm down to only a dozen or so books that I haven't been able to account for. Some I know I've seen around recently (and some may even have gotten packed without getting ticked off in the spreadsheet). Some I believe I either lent out or gave away at some time in the past and didn't record it in the spreadsheet. The last time I did a fiction shelf-check was in 2001, so that's not too bad.
I've also started the scanning of my filing-cabinets-full of journal article offprints. This may turn out to be too much of a cat-vacuuming task for the pre-move period, but if I can manage to put in an average of an hour of scanning every evening, who knows what might be accomplished. Quite frankly, the articles are likely to be far easier to access and use in scanned form than in paper form even aside from the storage issues. Just to give a notion of the scale of this project, the spreadsheet I use to track my article offprints claims I have 1666 articles in my files -- something around 10-12 drawers worth. Not all of them are going to get scanned -- I probably won't bother with a lot of the linguistics ones that I got for working on my dissertation but that aren't of any conceivable future interest. But my ScanSnap sheet-feeding scanner is starting to get the workout it was purchased for. (Due to issues of the physical quality of the offprints I have to feed the sheets into the feeder one at a time, but it's still much faster than placing them on glass, and the accompanying software automatically converts the results to a single pdf per continuous feeding session. And since I already have the spreadsheet with all the bibliographic information, documenting the results is just a matter of adding a field for the filename of the scan.
It occurs to me this is the first New Years Eve in several years when I'm at home (and haven't been traveling all day to get there). I wonder if there are any congenial parties going on.
The rest of the day was spent finishing packing up the fiction that I'm keeping -- 16 boxes worth -- as well as sorting out the book-discards that have been spoken for and doing a complete shelf-check. I'm down to only a dozen or so books that I haven't been able to account for. Some I know I've seen around recently (and some may even have gotten packed without getting ticked off in the spreadsheet). Some I believe I either lent out or gave away at some time in the past and didn't record it in the spreadsheet. The last time I did a fiction shelf-check was in 2001, so that's not too bad.
I've also started the scanning of my filing-cabinets-full of journal article offprints. This may turn out to be too much of a cat-vacuuming task for the pre-move period, but if I can manage to put in an average of an hour of scanning every evening, who knows what might be accomplished. Quite frankly, the articles are likely to be far easier to access and use in scanned form than in paper form even aside from the storage issues. Just to give a notion of the scale of this project, the spreadsheet I use to track my article offprints claims I have 1666 articles in my files -- something around 10-12 drawers worth. Not all of them are going to get scanned -- I probably won't bother with a lot of the linguistics ones that I got for working on my dissertation but that aren't of any conceivable future interest. But my ScanSnap sheet-feeding scanner is starting to get the workout it was purchased for. (Due to issues of the physical quality of the offprints I have to feed the sheets into the feeder one at a time, but it's still much faster than placing them on glass, and the accompanying software automatically converts the results to a single pdf per continuous feeding session. And since I already have the spreadsheet with all the bibliographic information, documenting the results is just a matter of adding a field for the filename of the scan.
It occurs to me this is the first New Years Eve in several years when I'm at home (and haven't been traveling all day to get there). I wonder if there are any congenial parties going on.
