Continuing randomness

eleasing all those books at the weekend gave me quite a few catches.  As well as the one I got on the day, I’ve had three more (three new members, too):

• 101 Cataclysms by Rachael Hale
• The Master Cat by David Garnett
• Time for Paws by Barbara Maguire

Not bad going!  And looking in my catches folder in my email, there’s been a steady trickle of catches from older releases, too:

• Final Jeopardy by Linda Fairstein – a book I registered and released in a hostel in Ireland, found in another part of Ireland, and now in South Africa!
• A Passage to India by EM Forster – caught two years after I released it, and travelled via Australia to the Netherlands.
• Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer – never journalled by whoever I gave it to at a meetup, but it did travel on, to be caught in a motel by a tourist from America.
• Vertical Run by Joseph R. Garber – a catch from the Queenstown convention.
• Mask of the Andes by Jon Cleary – two years to get from Rakaia to Picton.

I really must get back into the habit of releasing books more often…

I went out for dinner with Harvestbird last night, to celebrate a year of freedom on my part, and a belated birthday on hers. Our conversation, as usual, veered wildly from the deeply intellectual to the incredibly mundane, reminding me how much I’ve missed our regular lunches, which, for a variety of reasons, we haven’t been able to keep up with lately.  In the space of a few minutes we can go from sexual politics to blogging as performance to the toilet training antics of her children.  What more could you want from a dinner companion?
A lovely night, even though I missed out on the promised ogling of the gorgeous young Brazilian barman… 😉

It poured with rain last night, and it looks like the temporary fix Lytteltonwitch’s brother did to my roof didn’t entirely fix the leak problem, because there was a damp patch on the carpet below this morning 🙁  Think I might have to find a real builder and get it properly fixed… (easier said than done in Christchurch – they tend to all be booked out for the foreseeable future).

I’ve almost survived a whole week of being a managerial type, and so far it’s going well.  I’ve learnt the value of a chain of command – when a problem’s too tricky to deal with, you’re allowed to solve it by sending it up the ladder to the big boss (who I’m sure does his own share of escalating to his boss and so on all the way up to the VC…)  So far there’s only been a couple of those situations though, and one was actually just to confirm I was on the right track.  So I’m feeling, if not confident, at least adequately competent.