Cataloguing my library–that's about as geeky as it gets. I'm using The Library Thing which has a number of bookish features, but mainly what it allows me to do is find each book's Dewey Decimal number and generate a master list sorted by title or author. In the dim past I shelved my books by personal association but now there are so many that it gets confusing. DD it is.

My grandfather, Dr. Pavel Katz, was a book and print collector in Prague between the two World Wars, and I suspect that my grandmother, Dr. Bozena Katzova, was one too. When they escaped after Hitler's invasion in 1938, they converted everything they were allowed to take with them into a bookplate and print collection. They bought themselves medical degrees in Bolivia with some of the collection. Most of the remainder of the collection was sold after the end of the war in New York so that my grandparents could get medical degrees in the USA (this time by taking classes rather than by bribing people), but a few of the dregs survive, carefully preserved in tissue paper in a few flat boxes in my loft. Now and then I take them out and gloat.

Here's a bookplate sheet I made some years ago, back when my surname was Loyd. I print them on regular computer paper, cut them out, and rubber cement them onto the first page:

And here's some from nowadays. I do a print run of 16, and then move on to a different picture. It's amusing to open a book and see a different picture each time. The first are of pelicans I saw while visiting my charming son in Oakland last summer.

These are a version of a forest near my house:

I saw this little beauty on the road between Camaguëy and Bayamo, taking lots of photos to use in this composite watercolor.

I met my daughter and friend in Cuba just after Winter Solstice, and fell in love with the country (I already love the people I was meeting). 

About 20 years ago, I'd decided to learn birding but one thing led to another and the years slipped away. I remembered and renewed my vow while preparing for the Cuba trip, and designed a class through the Heritage Institute to keep myself motivated this time around. One of the assignments is to use my rough notes to make a birding journal for the trip.

Some of the drawings are from my field journal or from my photos. Others, especially of the birds, are from "Aves de Cuba" or from the Internet, often from The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. My renditions are fairly idiosyncratic so I don't think I'm violating any copyrights.