New Science Library

We had a tour of the unfinished UWA Science Library on Friday. It's looking good, though there's a fair bit of work to do. Seems so BIG at the moment. The furniture selection is fabulous. Very high end and stylish - but of course it's not in the building yet. I spent a fair bit of time on the weekend working on the 5000 metres of fixed book shelving - how wide each bay is, how many shelves are in each bay, where the reference collection, quartos and folios go, how much room there is if we shelve at 80% full ... We don't have all 900 mm shelves, but some are 600mm, 1050mm or 1200mm. A bit unusual, but it's so our shelves fit around pillars and look like they're of a uniform length. We also don't have all bays with 7 tiers of shelving. Most are 7, but we have some 6 tiers, and quartos are 5 tiers. Makes the calculations nice and complex!

Next job is to get my staff to fill in how many mm of space each call number from each of the 5 collections we're merging takes up so that we can tell the removalists where to put all the books. And this is before we even look at the 8000 metres or so of shelving for journals!

Above is a photo of Friday's tour group. I'm in the red shirt - can you tell I'm 7 months pregnant? Jill is next to me in black . She's doing my job while I'm on maternity leave.

Daylight savings

Our third year of trial daylight savings ends on Saturday night/Sunday morning (Simon’s birthday) in WA.  We won’t be here for the referendum to decide whether to make daylight savings permanent in WA.  I’ve found it great for evening walks after Harrison’s in bed (it’s too difficult for us to get ready for work and day care AND fit in a walk in the mornings, but pretty easy for me to leave Simon doing the bedtime story while I hit the pavement in the evenings).  It was lovely over Christmas when we could have friends over and have the kids running around the backyard while the adults relaxed.  We haven’t had a problem getting H to bed in daylight.  Many millions of people are putting kids to bed in countries where the sun sets at 10pm or later in summer without any difficulty.

Back to normal?

After 4 and a half weeks of incredibly high stress, this morning we passed the baton to the rest of Simon’s family to deal with the crisis.  I’m sure Simon will continue to be involved by phone, but the family in Qld will be able to bear most of the burden from today onwards.  Simon is absolutely exhausted – and has to give a 2 hour lecture to Masters students today.  Once that’s over, he could well sleep for a week!

On hold

We’ve had a few weeks of family crisis over here (not our own little family, thankfully), but it has meant lots of guests from Qld, and weeks of late nights and worry.  Not sure when it will be over, but things are a gradually settling down and we’re trying to get back into something resembling a normal life.  There is still heaps to organise for Canada, and lots more to catch up on at work after having both had several weeks of either no work or very broken episodes of work.  We’ve got 7 weeks to go in Perth, I’m now 6 months pregnant, and our own lives have been put on hold for a while, but we’ll get there.  Simon had borne the brunt of it, and is emotionally and physically exhausted.