August 16, 2014

I should have written this when I got home because at the moment I am incredibly tired and want to go sleep for ten hours or so. We'll see how this goes.

I woke up at six o'clock this morning. And then pretty much just laid there for about forty-five minutes before finally getting up. Fast forward a bit and I got ready and left the house a little after eight o'clock. For the first half hour or so of the trip it was foggy. Visibility was around a hundred yards and I occasionally had to use my windshield wipers to get the precipitation off my windshield. It felt like if I looked hard enough out across the fields I might catch a glimpse of Brigadoon.

The fog eventually cleared up and the drive was fairly uneventful until the tricky turn. I struggle to even describe the turn because it is hard to make sense of. It isn't labeled well and it is kind of hidden until you're right on top of it. I knew it was coming and when I saw it I turned on my blinker and started to take the turn. And then I saw some headlights and caught a “Do Not Enter” sign out of the corner of my eye. Turns out that wasn't the turn. It was the turn before the turn. It was for the cars coming onto the road I was on from the road I wanted to be on. I missed its existence when we went down for my interview so I wasn't expecting it. I made a quick correction, getting back into my lane, and then driving the hundred feet or so to the turn I actually wanted to take. I hesitate to think what was going through the minds of the drivers in the truck behind me and the truck coming up that one-way road. I probably looked like an idiot. After taking the right turn and getting on the road I needed to be on, I looked over and noticed my water bottle and all the papers I had the passenger seat had ended up on the floor in my violent correction from turning too soon. Hadn't even realized that had happened.

When we went down for my interview we ended up on the opposite side of town from the library and had to drive through town. The directions I got from Google turned out to be slightly different there at the end because I got into town right next to the library, so that was convenient. I managed to find the student union without a problem and got a parking spot right across the street.

I had never been in the union before but I knew the name of the room we were supposed to go to on the second floor so I climbed the stairs right inside the door. When I got to the second floor I took a look around. One way didn't look like it really lead anywhere so I walked the other direction and turned a corner, continuing to walk and eventually finding the room. I was shocked at my luck.

I grabbed my name sticker and name card for the table, signed in, and took a seat at the table in the back. A short time later a lady asked if she could sit down next to me and we ended up striking up a conversation. I'm glad I got a little conversational practice in at work in the last few days because there were several times throughout the day where I started conversations by asking questions, not just waiting for the other person to start them. This is a skill I should have learned as a child but I'm getting there.

Rather than standing up and introducing ourselves, which I was afraid would happen, we were tasked with talking to the person next to us and then introducing them. That was an interesting twist on the classic introduction and I appreciated it because it actually made standing up in front of a room of strangers a lot easier. Because I had already been talking with the lady next to me we had actually already covered most of the introductory-type stuff. We wrote it down and added some more stuff and then waited our turn. Which ended up being last because of how they were snaking around the tables. Some of my hobbies were mentioned in the introduction and during the first break and talked with a couple different ladies about knitting.

There ended up being quite a bit of diversity throughout the room. Not so much in race because almost everyone was white, but in terms of backgrounds. There were a couple people that came from Nebraska and Oklahoma. The lady I talked to had a four hour drive and I think it was another Nebraskan that drove eight hours. That is just crazy. Most of the people in the room were older with some probably around my age, and a few were recent undergrad graduates. Including myself there were six guys and the other fifty or so were girls. There were educators, current library workers, bookstore employees, telemarketers, office workers, and various other professions. It seemed like a fairly eclectic group.

Orientation started with a talk from the president of the university. He seemed like a pretty cool guy. At one point he asked graduates of the university to raise their hands, there were several. Then he asked them to keep their hands raised and asked the rest of us to look at them and remarked “look how bright they all look.” He told us a story from a couple days ago when he was sitting out on his back porch drinking coffee in the morning when a small group of freshman walked up. They asked several questions of him and it became clear early on that they didn't know he was the president of the university. Eventually they figured out the president lived in the house, and despite many hints that they were talking to the president, one of them asked if the president was inside the house and if they could meet him. The university has a lot of work ahead of them with that group. The last story the president had for us was about Abraham Lincoln. The university was started when Lincoln was President. He was the sixteenth President and the president of the university is currently the sixteenth president. He mentioned some qualities they share in common and ended with the fact that he avoids theaters, just in case.

After that the faculty members got up and introduced themselves. At least the ones that were there. One is currently in Tucson, Arizona so he recorded a video, which ended up being really funny. He recorded it on his laptop and he was sitting pretty close to it and talking quietly. He said he had to be quiet because he was in a public library. He said he was a librarian so he hangs out in libraries. Throughout the video he would pause and look around and at one point he commented that people kept looking at him like he had food. Immediately followed by the confession that he had just eaten a sandwich. Very funny.

We followed that with a brief tutorial on how to use Canvas, the online class environment, and it seemed fairly straightforward. Thankfully.

For lunch there was a taco bar. I was a little worried about the meat thing but I ended up being able to make tacos with rice, beans, lettuce, and salsa. That was way more than I expected. While trying to cut my hard brownie with a fork half of it shot off my plate and hit me in the chest. It was pretty funny. I ended up sitting with the same lady that sat next to me earlier and we were later joined by our adviser.

After lunch we listened to a panel of librarians. There was an academic, law, public, and school media specialist librarian. The academic librarian started and he didn't ever tell us what a typical day was like but his speech did kind of get me fired up to be a librarian. It was all about the history and importance of libraries and librarians. The next three librarians covered more of what their typical responsibilities are which was interesting. There was also a video from the archivist at the university because she was out of town and couldn't attend orientation. The major problem with the video was that it was shot vertically on a phone. It was hard to watch. But becoming an archivist still sounds like it would be fun. I don't know how old the lady in the video was but she was on the younger side and in part of the video she was explaining how she had to evaluate new items to be added to their collection. Her example was some cup or horn or something and when she looked at the date on the bottom it was from 1976, and she said “so it's pretty old.” Half of the room groaned and laughed because they were obviously around for 1976 and don't count things from that time period as being old. It was pretty funny.

When the panel was over we broke into two groups. One going to get their ID cards while the others, myself included, stayed in the room so our adviser could go over the information in the folders we were given. Then the two groups switched and we were free to go as soon as we had our IDs. When we were standing in line there was fairly consistent undergrad traffic filing by and they all looked so young. I commented to the two people next to me how waiting to get my ID card made me feel like a freshman again but I felt much older. As I sat down to have my picture taken the guy told me to hold until the flash. I immediately blinked when I heard the click of the shutter and the flash probably caught me in mid-blink and mid-explanation from me saying I had blinked. So the guy retook the picture, and I didn't blink. It actually ended up being one of the best pictures I have taken. I had in my head that we were going to be there until six o'clock but I think that is when we come down for class. After getting my ID, using the restroom, and walking out to my car, it was only 3:30PM.

Before heading home I went and found Spangels and ordered food to take home for dinner. I only took one wrong turn but it was easily corrected and I was able to get my food and an orange juice slush. The drink was probably a mistake because I had to use the restroom for the entire last leg of my trip home.

Speaking of, the trip, not the restroom, I went home a different way. According to Google it was slightly faster. I ended up crossing over the interstate three times, which seemed a bit excessive, and then took a long detour around farmland. I was a bit concerned when the road kept going east for so long but it eventually turned back north. And I eventually made it back home, in exactly an hour and a half, with a peak average MPG of 33.1, which I am happy with. The MPG that is, I wasn't that impressed with the time because it was supposed to be faster. Later in the night I took a closer look at the map online and discovered I had inadvertently taken the third suggested route, which did go farther east than the one I intended to take. In my defense, the road I was supposed to get one wasn't really labeled well and it ended up being a smaller looking road which was attached to the road I was on and a sharp bend. So if I had been drunk and kept going straight I would have ended up on the right road, but I kept with the curve, if that description makes sense. It turns out I got kind of lucky that the third route existed because if it didn't I may have ended up in Missouri before I realized my mistake. One of my fellow students ended up being about two hours late to orientation because she had gotten on the wrong road and ended up several towns away. I think that would have been worse than getting turned around and arriving home a little late.

Tonight I watched YouTube videos and started crocheting my mom's cotton thing. She said she doesn't want to use it as a dishcloth, maybe as more of a decorative thing, so I'm not exactly sure what I'm making. After persistent questioning I managed to get her to tell me how wide she wanted it, so that is a start. It took me a couple attempts to get the size right but I ended up pretty close. Now I just need to keep going. It'll end up being bigger than the one I made my sister so I'll have a chance to remember how to switch threads.

With frequent pauses to just sit here with my eyes closed and wish I was in bed, this took me around an hour to write. Good grief. I'm going to bed now.