October 17, 2015

 Most of my day was devoted to working on my collection development project. Or thinking about the project. Or avoiding the project. Either way, that was my day. I have a newfound respect for librarians that have to buy books, especially one at a time. I totally get the appeal of buying packages to avoid having pick out individual books. I spent hours today reading through syllabi and reading book reviews trying to find Sociology-related books. I'm lucky that it is a fairly broad subject area but it is still narrow enough to make it a bit of a challenge. Added to that is the goal of not having any books over five years old. I'm trying to be less selective, however, because I have $2600 to spend. So far I have found eighteen books and spent $358. A drop in the bucket. With an average of about $20 per book that means I have over 100 books to go. Good grief.

In the process of looking for books I came across Jane Elliot's anti-racism experiment with her third grade class back in the 60s. She had the idea after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and she was struggling with how to explain it to her class. Her idea was to divide her class by eye color. One day the brown-eyed kids were made to feel more important and the blue-eyed kids were inferior. The next day it switched. I ended up watching two documentaries, one of the original experiment and one where she did the same thing with a group of college kids. It was shocking how quickly the kids changed, assuming their new roles, either seeing themselves as inferior or seeing the other group as inferior. It was pretty powerful.

I called it a night after dinner and played video games. Like last night I started with Minecraft and then switched over to Creativerse. In Creativerse I did more digging and exploring, upgraded some things, started a garden, dug out more to make my house bigger, and decorated the outside a bit. While doing that I watched YouTube videos and two Kevin Hart specials. Not a bad night.

I forgot to mention this but yesterday morning I watched Tremors 5. I had no idea there was even a plan to make another movie in the franchise and there it was on Netflix. I own the box set of the first four so of course I had to watch the fifth one. And it was surprisingly good. I'll have to go back and watch some of the other sequels but I think this one was better than some of the previous ones. That was surprising enough but the co-star of the movie was Jamie Kennedy. I didn't even know he was still doing stuff. I'd watch it again.

Tomorrow I want to do my reading for the upcoming week and maybe add another twenty books to my collection development project. Lofty goals.