Happy bday, Dad !

Sorry, Dad, no picture. I really should scan one soon. So instead, how about this--

Lord knows your birds would never need a map!
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I should be able to show you something of what I've been up to, but I'm an idiot. I was working away on my surprise only to end up with a tragic miscount that I couldn't figure out. So, into the trash with that one. To console myself I moved back to Beatrix Potter and I even took pics, but I haven't downloaded them yet. For the record, I have restarted the surprise, and so far, so good. Keep your fingers crossed.

I can however drag out pictures of one of my quail needlepoints that I recently (in the last couple months) started working on--


I the stitched bit is in Splendor. Overall the piece will be a mix of Splendor, Silk and Ivory, Bermalana, and Sampler Threads.

For you booky people-- [it's so comforting to know there are so many of us out there!] the library cataloging program I have is BookCat. It has issues (or at least it has issues I haven't figured out yet), but I like it overall. If I bought a barcode scanner and installed the Web at home I could wand in the coding from the cover and fly through the cataloging like a colt. As it is I am without those and I suffer from extreme persnickiness. I want all contents of anthologies included. I want notes on signatures and inscriptions. I want to know if it was a special gift. There are fields for all of those, but I'll always have to add those myself. Anyway, BookCat lets you put in the usual bookish info and things like purchase price, cover price, condition, purchase location, even fields for checking out material, etc. If you use it in conjunction to the Web you can pull info from numerous locations so you don't have to do all your own typing (for instance, the Library of Congress, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc). It'll pull in images, heck, it'll even pull in descriptions and reviews from the Web if you want it too. There are fields for your own notes and for a star rating of your very own. I'm still working out how to best manipulate it, but there is supposed to be a fair amount of customizability. That I need to work out because it's how I need to fix some of their "issues."

Among the issues I have so far (and I'm willing at this point to say they are my issues o work out the reprogramming on, not theirs for being lame... only time will tell) are things like their not so terribly helpful (to me) genre radials -- if you have a normal sort of bock collection, or you think of your books in a more normal way, you'll be fine with the standard offerings. I however, do not need things like "family" and "crime" but I do not understand at all their lack of a field of "art" (they have one for music-- what's wrong with art? A big part of publishing is art books. Sigh.). Also, they have a radial for "history," but anyone with any significant interest in history will tell you that having only "history" as a search function is useless. In that respect I want radials for Indian, Ireland, Europe, U.S., Irish America, and Canada as well as immigration, military, etc.

Beyond the radials, I need to work out a way to make it search and return what I'm looking for. If I give it an author search, it returns all books with that name listed in the author fields. I want it to return all things, including short stories, with that person as the author---- I am not going spending all this time to input every short story and have the info not be searchable.

Anyway BookCat's company also has a DVD version and other program options. They seem, overall, quite handy.

Speaking of this book stuff... I'm prepping for this week's adventure to Tempe for North American Discworld. Yes, the daily low temperature in Tempe is still hovering in the mid 80s. I expect I'll be moving around very early and very late and other than that staying in the hotel conference center. What with all the Pratchett fun and frivolity I don't imagine I will get bored. I wonder what sort of things Missy and I can get up to?

ttfn.....