Mid Winter

Have had the appropriate weather for such celebrations and have combined the two and used the opportunity to invite people round for coffee and cake , then dinner . Made a macaroon cake yesterday which was one of the family favourites in the fifities and sixties, prompted by a new recipe and cooking book which arrived in the library recently. The chapters on the thirties onwards written by family members make good reading and there are some interesting recipes. The four of us ventured forth into the cold after the mulled wine up to the food hall to sample Malaysian, Lao, Indian and, my favourite, Italian food (prawns and courgettes in a tomato cream sauce).

Murphy's law dictates that it is a beautiful crisp clear sunny winter's day so after our few chores we will be off to the North Shore for a walk along the beach , a look at the shops and library and a coffee somewhere.

Am reading the new Rita Angus biography which is superb, puctuated as it is with beautiful reproductions of her paintings, many of which are new to me.

Other bedtime reading is the Oliver Sachs book, Musicophilia which is all about the phenomenom of people hearing music all the time after suffering a seizure or some other kind of brain damage.

Library News

Nothing much has been happening on the home front apart from our weekend trips away to Orewa the last three weeks. Life at the library keeps me busy during the 3 days I am there. I have also been taking part in one of the classes offered by the Learning Services team of the Central Library before starting work on a Thursday afternoon. So far we have learnt how to transfer pictures from camera to computer, how to put them from there on to a CD , how to edit them and get rid of red eye and other such complaints! It is a free 3 week course of one hour a time, held on a week day and a Saturday for those who have more time on the weekend. A lot of our older regulars participate in these classes and I even fulfilled a useful role of blind leading the blind with my neighbour, Patrick, who had no camera or photos so practised with mine!

After that I have been going up to the free lunch time concerts on the second floor to unwind. The last two weeks have been students from Epsom Girls and St Mary's College. St Mary's now has David Hamilton, well-known NZ composer and conductor in charge of their choirs and they are very very good as they were in the past.

The library is getting a new website at the end of the month http://www.aucklandcitylibraries.com/ (Check out the before and after look). It will have a lot of new features - blogs, rss feeds, aquabrowser - a cloud of keywords you can choose to define your search topic more precisely, and lots of library and other lists librarians and the public can compile and share online. I went to some training on this last week too so I will be all geared up for the changes. We all did Web 2.0 training before Christmas over several weeks, learning all sorts of things that come naturally to the young like Facebook, blogs, the rss feeds and lots lots more. I am looking forward to the challenges ahead and challenges they will be.

Trotted up the road to Leys Institute Library today to look at the paper and return some magazines and took in a very interesting exhibition of old maps dating back to the subdivision of the area in the late 1800s. They had some framed prints of old Ponsonby villas too. I have some of these at home but haven't found the right bit of wall space to hang them yet.

Now to some anniversaries. I started work at Auckland Central Library 30 years ago on the 10 July 1978. I was Chierf Cataloguer for the next 5 years and inherited a big backlogwhich took many months to get rid of. It was still the days of catalogue cards and filing but the cataloguing was mainly original cataloging and very interesting. I did the cataloguing of sound recordings - still long playing records mainly, and maps.

Ten years before that I left my job as Intermediate Library Assistant in the Music Dept of the Central Library to go on the big OE. I had had a practice run a couple of years before that when I went to Germany for a year and did a bit of study at Saarbrucken University.

I had a job at Wolfsburg Public Library for 4 years with a short spell in the middle as an archives assistant at Hesse Radio. It was fun working in the German library - I looked after the hospital library for patients, wheeeling a trolley of books around the wards 3 or 4 times a week. I also looked after the Record Library which was only open 3 or 4 afternoons a week for a couple of hours each time, and later on a couple of small libraries, one attached to a primary school, the other in a shopping centre, both open only afternoons.

Of course all work and no play was not on the cards and Dieter and I did a lot of travelling every opportunity and hitched throught Germany a lot , then trained farther afield to Hungary, then Dieter got his licence and a nice orange VW Beetle and we went even further afield to Czechoslovakia, Finland, France and other places.

To finish on a library note, I came home in December 1972 and went to Library School in 1973.
My first job after that was at Hamilton Teacher's College Library where I was Deputy Librarian , then a couple of years later I went to Takapuna Library as Cataloguer where I stayed till July 1978!

Dieter's 70th Birthday

Well the birthday went off well; l took a couple of days to recover from it and then there was work Wednesday - Friday . Being a long weekend we went to Waiheke Saturday and Sunday and I just had Monday morning to make a dutch apple cake and a chocolate hazelnut cake. I was having my daily game of scrabble early afternoon when there was a ring at the front door - our first visitors who I thought couldn't come until 4pm were 1 1/2 hrs early.. That threw me . I had to do all the preparations - fancy tablecloths, get china out, make coffee etc. Another friend had suggested we meet that Monday so I invited her to join us which she did, then our goddaughter Jane emailed to say she was shifting to Karapiro to live with her parents so invited her so by that time I really was fluffing round . E came too of course. Roland is diabetic and brought a nice German yeast raisin loaf, and a fruit cake, both of which he could eat, so we had plenty of cake. Following that we celebrated with some Lindauer and feijoa wine. Some of us went to the Ponsonby foodhall for dinner afterwards so that made it a bit more of a celebration. Then on Wednesday night D and I went to AUT restaurant a deux and had a beautiful meal. I mentioned it was a birthday celebration and they brought his wedge of Mississippi Mud cake dessert out with 7 flaming candles and sang Happy Birthday which was quite unexpected. D was adamant he didn't want any fuss, and I couldnt have coped with doing a big gathering on my own anyway so it was just nice as it was. He got some phone calls and cards from Germany on the day and following day or two and I gave him a new backpack for taking stuff to Waiheke along with some other bits and pieces.