February 13, 2015

 I just realized as I was typing the date that today is Friday the 13^th. I went all day without that realization.

I woke up this morning and eventually got up and around. After a quick lunch I went and got gas and picked up the Valentine's Day flowers I bought for my mom and sister. I won't get back into town tomorrow before they close and I didn't know what my mom and sister's schedules would be so I couldn't have them delivered. I asked the florist if they could just leave them outside but they said they couldn't, so I picked them up today and put them in a closet downstairs. My mom ended up giving a tour of the house to one of her friends today so there is a good chance she saw the flowers. Oh well.

This afternoon my mom and I picked up another para from work and we all went down to the staff pub crawl, or “fun run” as it was referred to. I spent most of the time watching the US vs. England women's soccer game that was on one of the TVs but I did engage in a little conversation. I learned that the new PE teacher is the younger brother of a girl I went to high school with. I wasn't friends with that girl but I did know who she is. I only got to stay for the first bar so as they were transitioning to bar number two, I headed back to the house so I could pack up my stuff and head out of town.

The drive was thankfully uneventful but I did yawn a whole bunch. I never really got stuck behind any slow drivers, including on the final stretch of highway where I always seem to get screwed, so I made it down here in record time. It was about the average estimated time but it was still faster than I have ever made it.

Right off the bat the professor started talking about systems and processes or something, sailing through it, and I was pretty much completely lost. And this is the class that doesn't have the convoluted textbook. But then a librarian (who is actually the current president of the KLA) came to teach us how to use Zotero. The ultimate goal was to demonstrate how a reference librarian would teach a class but Zotero is actually a pretty cool program/website that helps you collect and organize all the various sources and files you find online, which would come in handy when working on a project or paper or even a PhD. Hopefully I start using it.

Near the end of class we were given the information we would need for our first assignment, creating a handout and giving a presentation as if we were a reference librarian and teaching a class. My topic is Basecamp, a website that allows group members to work on a project at the same time. At least I think that's what it is for. I'll figure it out eventually. There were several other options that would have been way easier to make a presentation about but I wasn't that lucky when I signed my name next to a random number.

Then, we were broken up into random groups for the two-minute presentations we are going to give tomorrow over some aspect of reference service. It was very confusing at first because the professor went about the whole thing like we already knew what was happening and nobody did because she never really told us. My group got lucky because one of our group members is actually in charge of recording everyone tomorrow so she had a little more insight. As a group we picked a service, we went with outreach and marketing because none of us were to familiar with it and we wanted an even playing field. Then we went back to the computers (we met in a computer lab) and individually made a single slide that will be the basis for the presentation. Tomorrow, groups will take turns going into a separate room and they will each give their two-minute presentation, using their single slide, to their group. These presentations are going to be recorded so afterward we will have to watch ourselves present. I'm not really looking forward to that. The idea is so that we can see how we present, which wouldn't even be fun for a presentation we had time to actually work on and practice, but it certainly won't be fun for something so spontaneous. I believe this is also going to be our group for the real group project later in the semester so this is also a chance to get to know each other better.

Now I am in my hotel room and I am tired. I'm going to try and plan out my two-minute presentation a little bit and then watch some YouTube videos before I go to bed. The only thing I forgot to bring was my alarm clock. I'm going to try setting the one in the room but I will also set the one on my phone as a backup. I'm assuming class starts at eight o'clock tomorrow morning but that is only a guess. Seven o'clock sounds too early and nine o'clock sounds too late, and that sounds like Goldilocks. We'll hope I'm right.