Organızıng My Books/Free Online Photoshop Like Program/Black Water

I've got lots of books on lots of topics.  They're in bookshelves in different rooms, on tables, and other flat horizontal surfaces.  There are some stashed in the garage.  

I decided several weeks ago that I really need to sort through them.  Some can be traded in to Tidal Wave (a local used book store) but I they don't take all books and I hate to just throw books away.  

Here's the 'guest room'.  It was one of the kids' rooms, but they're long gone.  It's been a storage room on occasion, but we can clear it up if we need it for a guest.  I started taking books off the shelves and trying to put them into a more sensible order.  It's not that there is no order.  There are sections of different public administration related books.  But one of the problems with these book shelves is shelf size.  I can put related books together until we get some books that are too tall for that particular shelf.  

I also started a category I'm calling "books important to how I think."  These will be the books I'll most want to keep in the end.  

The picture above is a mashup of two pictures - it's basically what that corner of the room looks like, but a little distorted.  As you can see, I've been doing my sorting on the bed down there.  Another book sorting hazard is that I start reading the books.  

So as I was working on this, I thought, I should just google "how to sort home libraries."  There's lots of stuff out there.  One was just basic sorting ideas - Keep; Give Away, Throw out.  

But then I came upon LibraryThing.com.  Here's their overview of its uses:

WHAT’S GOOD?

• Catalog your books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 4,941 other libraries.
• Catalog your movies and music too.
• LibraryThing is entirely free.
• Find new books to read.
• Talk about what you love with other committed bibliophiles.
• Track and lend your books.
• Snag a book from over 2000 early-release books every month.
• Available in many languages:                       (others)

My interest was to catalog my books and hopefully be able to sort lists by category.  There is a tag section, but I'm not sure how well that will sort things.  

It's fairly easy to make a list.  You can write down the title and then it shows you a bunch of covers for that book.  Then you click on the one that matches yours.  It fills out the form for you.  But I have a lot of older books - before, say, 1990.  Some of my covers didn't show up.  

That's when I discovered putting in the ISBN number was a better way to do this.  

So I've catalogued 14 books.  This could be a long project.  

When I looked at my list of 14 books I found one section particularly interesting.  It tells you how many people on Librarything have that book.  For some books it also tells you how many people are looking for a copy and how many are available.  Just in that 14 there were five or six books that people were looking for.  So maybe this will be a way to get rid of books.  

You can also see how many people near you have catalogued their books on Librarything.  Anchorage has a fair number of folks.  

So, I have one more long term task for my to do lists.  

Here are some more ideas for sorting your books from the American Library Association.

Photopea

I'd also note that the other day I came across a site called Photopea  It's essentially a free Photoshop knock off.  My access to Photoshop lapsed a while ago and I've played around with Sketchbook, but Photopea is a much better option.  But for those who haven't used Photoshop I'd warn you that it is daunting.  Lots to learn.  I took two semester long courses where I learned to use it.  On the other hand you can google most any question like "How do I make X in Photoshop?" and get a step by step youtube video telling you how.  

Photopea also says it has versions of other painting/drawing programs.  

I used Photopea to merge the two book photos.  It took about ten minutes, but then I've used Photoshop a lot. 

Black Water 

We had maybe an inch of fresh snow this morning and I had a doctor's appointment.  I took this photo of the creek flowing through the dorm area at UAA as I was walking back home.

Point White Pier

 I went along with my daughter as she ran errands around the island.  The last one was near Point White Pier.  The sun was below the hills and the light was magical.  The clouds were moving and the water was moving and there was a kaleidoscope effect on the water.  

I saved this picture with higher resolution so you could enlarge it to better see the king fisher sitting on the adjacent dock.  

Here's looking down at the rocks through the water below the pier.  

Working On A Truncation Post, But In The Meantime A Visual Break

 When I sat in at the Redistricting Board meeting when they were doing truncation and then assigning Senate seats to the required staggered terms, I kept scratching my head and wondering, what is happening?  Lots of things didn't make sense.  So I've been listening to the video of the meeting and trying to write down exactly what was said so I'm certain about what I'm writing about it.  It's taking forever.  Especially with an eight year old granddaughter who hasn't seen her grandparents in almost two yers.  So here are some pictures - mostly ones she took yesterday.  I won't say which are which.  Today we baked a bread, played war, and were very silly, and I didn't get much done on the Board.  But priorities.

Downtown Seattle off in the distance

This one we played with together in Photoshop

Swans At Taku Lake on Sunny Grey Day

You can listen to this song as you read.  It should make sense by the end.  

The sun kept a steady beam shining through the clouds as I biked over to Taku Lake today.  I reached my 745 km goal (a vicarious bike ride from Chiangmai to Bangkok) on September 13.  There's a tension between the benefits of riding the bike outdoors regularly and how my knees feel.  It's obvious that three or four days without being on a bike makes my knees feel much better.  I can live with a little pain if I know that the damage done is temporary.  (It doesn't hurt while I ride, just later on.)  

But there was still good biking weather and so I made a new goal.  800 kilometers.  I reached that goal October 4.  So what next?  A quick and dirty calculation of .6 * 800km got me to 480 miles, so I needed 20 more miles to get to 500 miles.  That would be about 32 more kilometers.  It's not all that important and I didn't set out to go that far today.  But the weather was good, everything was beautiful and a changing seasons way, and I got to Taku Lake feeling good.  

At the south end of the lake were four swans (and a number of smaller and darker water birds) taking a rest on their way south.  

Then back home with a stop on one of the many bridges that cross over the meandering creek to  get a picture of the sun's reflection (maybe glare is a more apt term) on the creek.  Although the sky was mostly grey, the sun made its presence known most of the way.  

It ended up being 13+ kms.  All but about three kilometers were on dedicated bike trail in the greenbelt that buffers the creek from residential and commercial streets.  There's only one non-residential street that I have to cross.  So I now had 816.5 kms for the summer.  Time to check precisely how much more before I hit 500.  So I googled 500 miles = x kms.  Turns out the simple .6 rounds off more than I thought.  804km = 500 miles. 

 I was already there when I started.  So know I'll just ride until it's icy on the trails.  Winter biking, will be on the bike with studded tires and only for short distances if there's what used to be a normal snow covering - without ice.  

Meanwhile, I'm working on a post on how the different redistricting plans move me from one district to another.  Enjoy your Sunday.  Find something wonderful - whether it's the bark on a tree or an old picture of people you love.  

Beautiful Day For Hike Along Eklutna Lake

 Didn't get to the keyboard until about 5:30 pm today because we went to Eklutna Lake to take advantage of the beautiful day.  Maybe low 70s, sunny with some decorative clouds.  And it's a Tuesday so it shouldn't be crowded.  And it wasn't.  Although it's not far (maybe 20 miles away) we haven't been there since our kids were little.  Just going to offer you some pictures.  

Looking north.  We started near the low point on the left.  

Looking South

People in the canoe are not us.  They just paddled by while we were on the shore having lunch.