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Saturday, Delia had a soccer game in the morning. There was just enough sun to make sitting, watching the game, reasonably pleasant. The game was at a middle school with large fields. They put six different games on the field simultaneously. The challenge is always finding which of the fields our game is on. The signs can be really hard to spot, and the numbering never makes sense to me.

Both teams played well, but the other team managed one more goal than Delia's team. Delia played goalie for half the game. She likes to do that. None of the other girls really like playing goalie, so Delia gets half the game most games.

All three of us forgot Delia's water bottle. Fortunately, there was a partial bottle of water in the car. It wasn't much, but it got Delia through the game. Scott commented that he'd almost thrown that bottle out a time or three because it had been sitting in the car since July.

Sunday was pretty laid back. Delia played with other kids in the neighborhood. I did laundry. Scott ran some errands. In the evening, we did a pretty thorough search of the house, looking for a lost library book. We failed to find it. I think we're going to have to pay for it. The whole thing is a pity because Delia never got to read the book and she really wanted to. The book in question is the most recent Girl Goddesses book, The Girl Games. It's been missing for about three weeks.

Delia was disappointed at how long the search took. She'd hoped for some time to play Wii games with Scott, and it didn't happen. She did get to go out with him on Monday to practice some soccer stuff. She actually turned down an invitation from some neighborhood kids in order to do that.

This morning is the first session of Cross Country Kids. It's a program that runs for an hour before school, every Wednesday. The kids are supposed to run a course to get in shape for a 5K (I think) run in June. Delia chose not to do the 5K last year. She tends not to run at these practice sessions. She likes to walk the course while chatting with her friends.

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Yesterday was my afternoon in the school library. I like the new librarian. I'm glad of that because the whole thing could get fairly unpleasant if I didn't like her. I'd still volunteer because I think it's important, but I might have to resort to Ativan or something.

Getting used to the new procedures will take some time. I had four years to get used to the old librarian's way of doing things, and I have to learn the new procedures on the fly. I think the new procedures won't allow me as much time for shelving as the old, but I'll have to see how things work out.

I do book check out with the kids. Each child has a scanner barcode that calls them up on the computer. Each book also has a barcode. The old procedures used a binder with a sheet or two of paper per class with all the students' names and barcodes in one place. The new procedure involves giving each child a bookmark with their name and barcode on it. They hand it to me to scan when they want to check out books.

The complicated part is that the librarian wants me, before check out time every week, to sort the markers. If the child has returned his or her books, the child gets his or her marker. If not, not. I'm not sure how the timing will work out for doing that. It'll depend on whether or not the class turns in books early in the day so that they're all checked in by the time I arrive. It'll depend, too, on what the librarian has the kids do immediately on arriving. I have a suspicion that she likes to do book check out first thing with activity time (computers, her reading a story, research projects, etc.) last.

None of this is insurmountable. It just requires that I learn the new procedures and develop a routine.

After the kids left, I shelved quite a bit. Then the librarian asked me to place some holds. She has kids who want particular books put their name and the title of the book on a sheet of paper. I worked from that and placed quite a few holds. There were some I couldn't do because I couldn't find an entry for the specific book the child wanted, sometimes because the library doesn't own it and sometimes because the title was too generic ('Dragons,' for example, brought up a couple of dozen books). There was one hold I couldn't do because the child hadn't included his family name. There are dozens of kids across the school district who share his name. I had no idea which one was him.