Calibre

A few months ago Matt introduced me to calibre, an awesome Free and Open Source Software e-book management/library cataloguing system. We had plans to start adding all the books we own to calibre for reference and fun. Not only does it record the basic important information (title, author, publication stuff, etc.), but you can also download covers and create your own columns for recording information. More on that later though.

I was a little impatient before we got started and decided one day to just get a rough count of the books in our house. As I tallied the books, I did a very, very general sorting of them by genre using my first impressions. Really sorting the books by genre would take forever and there would be overlaps. To the left is what I came up with at the time.

I had estimated we had about 590 to 600 books, knowing that I'd left out some in the living room and our cookbooks, and may have forgotten one or two others. I was pretty proud to have that many books, though, and to know that I'd read a significant portion of them.


Just before Christmas Matt and I finally set about putting all the books into calibre using the ISBN numbers. calibre is great (especially because it is free) and I would recommend any of you with personal libraries of your own to check it out -- it does have some annoyances though. Sometimes there was a little trouble putting in the ISBN numbers (and also, though this is not calibre's fault, ISBN numbers were not used until the early 70's, so earlier than that books will not have them and you will have to the enter the information manually to an empty template ... not too bad unless you have about 50 old/vintage books that you used for wedding decorations ... like me).

The other thing that sometimes made me grumble was how calibre gathered information for the books. Usually, it seemed to get the info from Google using the ISBN (although later we added isbndb.com as a source and I think that helped some). The info was not always correct or consistent. For example, when I put in the Harry Potter series, some of them were formatted as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone while others were formatted as The Prisoner of Azkaban: Harry Potter Book 4. So that was a little annoying to fix but not bad. When I would click on the ISBN link though, it would link to http://www.worldcat.org/. WorldCat is neat, and sometimes the information there was correct - so I'm not sure why calibre didn't borrow it from there. Other times WorldCat was also incorrect or the titles were screwy .... so getting the books in was sometimes a bit tedious is what I am getting at.

However, I don't want that to discourage you from using calibre if you want some free library software, because in the end, having all our books listed in one place is super awesome. I like that I can easily see what books I own and have yet to read (a lot more than I thought). I made a column for me and one for Matt that I can check "read" or "not read" or leave blank if it is something like a dictionary that no one really "reads." I can also see that I was WAY off when I estimated the count the first time.

At the final count of all the books in our house (before bringing over about 20 more from Matt's house after the official count) we had a total of 741 books. Let me say that with text, too, so you can feel the magnitude: SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-ONE BOOKS!!!

Whoa. How do those all fit in our small house? Well, I plan to write some future posts about how to fit a 1000-book library in your house along with you, your spouse, and a cat. Ok, so we aren't at 1000 yet, but we are up to 767 after bringing some from Matt's house, and he's still got more there. I don't have spaces for them yet, but we'll see ...

Here's some more library art. You can see I've read a significant portion of our "readable" (read: not dictionaries and cookbooks) books, but still have a long way to go to fill out the gray area. Matt and I have both read 46 of the books we own.

Llyr Montage

Here's a Llyr montage for you . . . because I know you are dying to see pictures of our adorable, ferocious cat. Why else did you come to this page?

June 2012. Tiny and adorable in our bird feeder swing.

Back when he still slept on our laps. He's so tiny and cute!

Can you see the kitty?

Pounce!

 

Llyr cleaned and did all my homework for me. Not.

August 2012. He liked to sleep in the papasan, all curled up.

Llyr really liked to lay on our clothes.

 

He is always looking out that window, wanting to go outside.

Then when we plan a trip *OUTSIDE*, he does NOT want to go.

Llyr happier later that day.

Meercat Llyr.

October 2012. Bothering the dog in the yard catty-corner from ours.

This is when we tried to keep Llyr off the counters with carpet tack
and aluminum foil. Yeah, right.

 

King Llyr for Halloween.

He does not look best-pleased here, but look at that handsome
moustache!

 

These are Llyr's "hunting eyes." Notice they are almost completely
black. He shares them with us often.

Llyr and my parents' dog, Dollar.

December 2012. Trekking through the snow.

January 2013. A special occasion - sleeping on Matt's lap.

  

No Term Limits

Just some thoughts I wanted to share:

Last night I saw this short article about ways to spark up your relationship if you are in a "long-term relationship." I shared some of the ideas with Matt. They were decent, but nothing we couldn't have come up with ourselves - just nice reminders of fun things to do. What I really wanted to talk about was a comment Matt made about the title of the article. He mentioned that the term "long-term relationship" seems kind of funny. I realize they were appealing to both married and non-married couples who have been together for several years, but I also think he makes a good point.

We discussed how if you are in a long-term relationship, why would you call it "termed" at all? It's not like you'd want to put terms limits on a relationship that will hopefully continue to last. I realize we were probably thinking about it too much - the writer of the article was mainly using that to differentiate and focus on people in that situation. Then again, how often do you hear someone say "Oh, I'm in a short-term relationship" as if they know it's going nowhere? I realize that does happen, but that just never appealed to me. Even before I met Matt, I didn't want to go out with someone if I knew I couldn't see myself possibly being with them indefinitely.

I also realize there are terms such as "committed relationship" which get across a similar idea without the word "term." So that's what Matt and I are in. No term limits on this marriage! It will still be Carver-Carver in 2016, 2020, 2024, and as far into the future as we can see.

DIY Correspondence Book with Stab Binding

How many of you out there would like to write a book someday? I'm with you. I've started lots of stories and I still hold out hope that someday I will have the time and inspiration to finish one, even if for only myself/friends. If nothing else, one November (National Novel Writing Month!) I'll FORCE myself to crank one out, even if it sucks, just to say I have. But right now with Graduate School and everything, there's just not time to sit in front of the computer trying to come up with material. I only work on fiction if I am hit with sudden inspiration. Unfortunately much of that is drained by Graduate School papers.

However, that doesn't mean I can't make other "books" in the meantime to somewhat assuage my cravings to create. Over Christmas I taped together 18 "Ancestry Books" with my and husband's immediate and extended family trees (after doing HOURS of research, making calls, and using the free trial on ancestry.com to get information) to give to my family members. They turned out cute and interesting, I think, if almost too small to read on a few pages since I printed it on 8.5 x 11 paper instead of something bigger.

I've also been working on another "book project" that I finally finished today. For this one, I already had all the text material - I just needed to format it, print it, and assemble.

I recently used Facebook's new tool to download and backup content (like messages and pictures) from my account. During our 5 years of dating, Matt and I often used Facebook to send messages to one another, especially in the early months when we normally saw each other only 2 days a week and weren't quite brave enough to call each other all the time. My parents were usually unhappy about the length of those calls once I did cross that threshold. We used Facebook like instant messaging sometimes, so there ended up being a lot of messages. Being a collector of things, such as all of Matt's letters and notes to me, of course I needed to save these messages. In the past I'd tried copy-&-pasting these to Word documents. The new "backup" tool is much more effective.

I downloaded all the messages from 2007, when we both started using Facebook, to our wedding in April of this year.

At 12-point font, there were 602 single-spaced pages.

I lowered the font size and deleted extra spaces to lower the length to a manageable size. The only bad thing was that I can see the date of each post in my download folder, but not when I copy the text over to LibreOffice Writer, the program we have on our main computer. I decided NOT to go through and type in the date for every post. That would have been a nice touch, but maddening. I did type in the name of each new month so I could keep some track of time. Then I selected all the posts from 2007 only and decided to start there, saying I'd possibly move on to later years in the future.

From just July to December 2007 takes up about 80 pages at Times New Roman 10.5. I wanted to make a small-size book, so I formatted the page landscape-wise with 2 columns. Basically most of the rest of the work consisted of making everything justified (because then it looks like a novel), formatting every line that ended a paragraph to fix the word spacing that justifying created, and tabbing in most new paragraphs by hand since it copied as straight text with almost no formatting. Whoo. Took forever.

Then the fun part. Printing each page front-and-back manually so I didn't waste paper and would have an 80-page book instead of a 160-page book.

Then came assembling the book.

Matt got me a really awesome book called Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book. It has everything you'd need to know, from ISBNs to self-publishing to design. Towards the end is a section that shows you how to create your own books on a small scale, such as with pamphlet pages or stab binding. I used stab binding to create my correspondence book:

Line up all the pages and the cover (which needs to be twice the width of a page plus the width of the stack of your pages ... my cover needed to be 11 3/8 inches because the stack was about 3/8 of an inch tall). Secure the pages and cover in place with binder clips. Measure, mark, and punch the holes. They suggest using a "screw punch." I don't have one of these and I'm impatient, so I used the long, sharp, needle-like instrument you see in the picture, which is a scrapbooking tool for poking holes. I had to hammer it through the pages and eventually do the back side as well to make the holes large enough for my needle. Still, it was hard to shove the needle through later. Make sure if you ever do this to make the holes large enough.

Thread the binding. There is a funny formula for how to bind the book to make it look uniform and sturdy. I'm not going to go into all that detail here unless someone asks. Also you can probably find out how to do stab binding online somewhere. Tip: Make sure your thread is PLENTY long enough the first time. Probably three times the length of the book is good. I just about ran out.

Tie it off and you are done! Here's my finished book that more than anything I just wanted to share with everyone after the hours of work I put into it. And I didn't even fix all our typos in the text! I decided that made it more realistic (and we apologize for them in many messages) ... plus, that would have driven me crazy. I can now look back at our messages whenever I want ... but I can also pretend that Matt and I wrote a book together. We basically did! I remember when "text message" novels for teens were kind of popular, or diary-entry novels ... this is just like that. And we didn't have to make anything up, it's all what we really wrote. Pretty fun, I think. But I'm also a hopeless romantic.