Belated introduction.

There have been some new faces appearing on this blog. Hello and welcome :) I thought it would be nice to do a quick introduction and explain a bit more about me.

My name is Laura and I am a 25 year old student living in Glasgow, Scotland. Currently I am studying towards a MSc in Information Management and Preservation. Hopefully this will allow me to enter the field of archives and records management. Unfortunately, as with every other industry at the moment, jobs are a bit thin on the ground. There are big sporting events taking place in the UK over the next four years: the Commonwealth Games in 2014 in Glasgow and the Olympics in London in 2012. Funding for public archives tends to fall under the umbrella of 'Culture' which includes sport. As a result a lot of money is disappearing into this black hole and fewer permanent non-project jobs are available. I highly doubt I will be able to get a job in my chosen field for the next couple of years. At the moment I am trying to fix up some volunteer posts once I have finished my course.

My situation is part of the reason why I have become more interested in book blogging. My free time is going to rapidly increase and I am not very good if left to my own devices. Much as I hate to admit it, I need some form of schedule or routine. Hopefully I can get a better structure to my blog by timetabling topics for different days, such as the Library Loot posts on a Tuesday/Wednesday.

That's the doom and gloom over! What else? I live with my lovely boyfriend, Him Indoors, our goldfish, Dougal, and our lovely kakariki, Dante. Him Indoors is not a big reader but he does try. We're currently going through an experiment to cut down the amount of television we watch. We have a nasty habit, me in particular, of having the television on as background noise. I read Living Outside the Box this week and a lot of comments in the book struck home. The author explains watching television is a passive experience. Whilst watching a favourite TV show can be good for us, watching TV for the sake of it can have a negative effect. I was one of those people who would say "I don't watch much TV apart from the news. And Wife Swap. And *insert reality show title here*....." Once I thought about how much television I watched, I was rather horrified. Him Indoors and I discussed it and decided we are going to seriously trim the time we spend watching TV. Exceptions are Glee and Doctor Who which amounts to under 2 hours a week. We are currently working our way through Battlestar Galatica so that maybe takes us to six hours a week. Also, we are going to have one evening a week with no scree time; including laptops and other computers (between us we own one PC, two laptops and one netbook!).

I switched to the radio for my 'background' noise this week and have really enjoyed it. BBC Radio 4 has had some excellent programs and their breakfast show is a lot better than the fluff BBC1 has become. The threatened BBC Radio 6 is fantastic and has some wonderful music choices. Apparently audience figures have risen dramatically since the BBC announced it was being axed next year. Fingers crossed they keep it.

Next Saturday is my exam so I shall be a tad quiet this week. Last minute panic works for my studying method so I will be tearing through my class notes at rapid speed. I have got some books I want to review in the near future. Google Docs lets you post directly to your blog which is excellent. I am going to try and keep a list of the books I read to keep track of potential reviews.

Enjoy your Sunday, fellow bloggers. I have coffee, BBC Radio 6 and some chilling out to do.