1. I want all the books.
2. I want time to read all the books.
3. I am pleased to see that God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian has been released with a foreword by Neil Gaiman and is in the Staff Choices bit, but dismayed that people think it's okay to charge eight pounds for a book that is less than a hundred pages long, even with foreword, list of personages and so on.
4. Kurt Vonnegut presents classification problems, as he tends to. I found the rest of his books under general Fiction, even Armageddon in Retrospect which is another of his non-fiction works, but no copies of God Bless You, Dr Kevorkian or The Sirens of Titan in Science Fiction (in two different editions)
5. The staff, who didn't seem too busy, listened with apparent mild interest when I mentioned this, but gave no indication of whether they felt like it was a problem that someone should really fix some time. Apparently the system says Sirens of Titan is sci-fi.
6. There is a Smart Thinking section, which struck me at first as a stupid name for a section, but I can see why they have it, looking over the collection of hard-to-categorise non-fiction books about assorted interesting ideas.
7. The Philosophy section is tiny and incredibly hard to find, but full to bursting. Each shelf was packed to its physical limit, making it hard to put things back, while a whole separate collection of Penguin editions of philosophical classics is invisible from there.
8. I bought exactly one book, which I count as a win.
9. The book is Delusions of Gender, by a neurologist who is also a feminist. I had the feeling that I should really read it some time, and the strong suspicion that if I didn't buy it then, it would never come up again. Having read the introduction now, I still think I should read it, so that's good.

• I'm making a giant puppet for Beltane this year. I've been wanting to get into making puppets for ages, and this is a great opportunity to do it. It's also a relatively low-time-commitment way to stay involved with Beltane.
• I've got a new housemate, the girlfriend of one of my existing housemates, with a van. Indirectly this has made it possible to completely rearrange the kitchen here so it's a pleasure to use, no longer cramped and misshapen. It also means we now have a truly massive tea collection - her collection's about as big as mine, and mostly but not exclusively herbal, so there's now a full shelf of tea tea and a full shelf of tisanes. We should probably have a tea party.
• I've been playing about with jQuery, a beautifully designed JavaScript library. Among other things this has allowed me to hide the trickier bits of my page about trigonometry under expandable headings. I'm quite pleased with the effect, and I'll probably be using jQuery to make better interactive diagrams for the page later. I do like interactive diagrams.
• I finally retrieved my wood-carving chisels when I was down in London in the Winter - someone had tidied them away unfindably a few years ago, much to my disappointment. I've just about finished carving a snake into my monopod-staff now, doubling as grips for my fingers.
• I had fun reading the odd little piece 'The King, Multidimensional', about fifteen ways for Elvis to die, for the next Everything2 podcast. Hear it here if you're interested.
• I made myself a pinhole camera! Actually I made the pinhole bit about a year ago, but got stuck trying to figure out a way to build a winding mechanism for 120 film into the tea tin I'm using. Went to a pinhole workshop at the Forest yesterday and discovered there was an old Hasselblad back kicking around in the darkroom! That takes care of the winding very neatly - all I had to do was cut a square in the back of the tin for it to sit on top of, and apply gaffer tape to hold it in place. I'm not confident it's sufficiently light-tight, and I'm not sure how far I should be turning the handle for each frame, but these are things I can sort out after I've run a film through it.
• I'm going to the Miyazaki double bill at the Cameo in an hour - the new one, Ponyo, plus Spirited Away. I've been watching quite a bit of Studio Ghibli lately - I think I've got through most of them now.

2009