June 1, 2016

 This morning I woke up, got ready, and headed to campus. My supervisor told me to meet her at the help desk but she wasn't there so I asked the girl working the desk if she knew where my supervisor and her guess was a room on the fifth floor. I took the stairs and thankfully my efforts paid off because she was upstairs. We were in a big room where all the 4-H kids were meeting. I think there ended up being around fifty or sixty kids, probably more, which seemed like a pretty good turn out. We stood around and talked for awhile and then after the explanation of the scavenger hunt and what the kids needed to do I headed with my supervisor to our station.

Our station involved the groups finding the book on the leisure reading shelf marked with their group's color and then telling us the copyright year of the book. All the groups started out at different stations so it took almost exactly an hour and a half for all the groups to come by. While we waited we talked about the ALA conference because we're both going and then we talked for a long time with an archivist. He was a really interesting dude. He said he knew from a really young age that he wanted to work in History and archives. It took him a long time to realize that actually knowing exactly what you want to do from such a young age is pretty rare. I'm a little envious of that because it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do, and I'm still not entirely sure within the field of librarianship.

The library is currently in the process of hiring new librarians so the archivist and a digital scholarship librarian who stopped by both brought up the different candidates with my supervisor that they had liked and what they disliked about the other ones. It was an interesting insight into the behind-the-scenes of the process. It also made me really glad I hadn't applied for any of the jobs because the things they were bringing up were things I knew I wouldn't be able to fulfill either.

Speaking of that stuff, my supervisor had to leave about ten minutes before ten o'clock to go get ready for a candidate presentation. About five minutes after that the last group showed up so I went back up to the fifth floor to drop off my paper and then down to the fourth floor to go to the presentation. I got there a couple minutes after ten o'clock and the presentation had already started but I walked in with a few other librarians so I didn't feel too awkward.

The presentation made me even more glad I hadn't applied for the jobs. This candidate was applying for the STEM job, which I wouldn't have gone for because I don't have the background, and this lady would have blown me out of the water. She just got her MLS but she also had a masters and undergraduate degree in some form of science. She has taught for sixteen years, including English in Poland for two years, and science and German over here for high school kids. So all of that was a little intimidating. The only thing I felt like I could hold my own on were the questions about library stuff at the end of her presentation. All of her experience with science and teaching were good but she's never worked in a library before so I was able to relate with her on that.

The presentation as a whole was about her thoughts on the position she was applying for and what she could bring to the position and the library. I'm not a big fan of talking about myself so I wasn't envious of that, or having to answer some of the questions at the end. The room was packed with librarians, which was a little intimidating just being a guest in the crowd so I'm really thankful I wasn't up front trying to sell myself to all of them. I'll probably have to do that at some point but hopefully I will have a lot more experience to work with by then.

There was nothing left for me to do after the presentation so after about two hours and fifteen minutes I called it a day and left. On the way home I stopped by Target to pick up a few things and then went home and didn't accomplish much. It was eventually time for lunch and then I went back to doing not a lot. Tonight I eventually got around to reading a couple chapters in the class book but that was about it. I'm really going to regret not doing more schoolwork when I start juggling a full-time job and a part-time practicum along with my schoolwork next week.

I bought more fountain pen stuff today, probably due to it being a distraction from my schoolwork. I'm okay with that. For now anyway. Again, next week will be a different story. I initially got sucked in by a big yellow pen that was on sale for seven bucks. Then a relatively cheap pen that has a screw-on cap. I'm toying with the idea of taking a fountain pen to the conference and using that for my daily journal and notes, and I would feel a little safer traveling with one that had a screw-on cap. There was a Goulet video where he traveled with several different pens on an airplane to dispel the myth that they would explode all over the place. On his first flight he traveled with them nib up and there really wasn't any leaks. On the second flight he went nibs down and I think a couple of them maybe dripped a little, but there certainly weren't any ink explosions. So I feel relatively safe about the airplane. My other concern involves carrying it around in my pocket and the ink getting on my clothes. I figure a screw-on cap is a lot less likely to allow that sort of event to occur. I also got a couple more ink samples and some ink cartridges for the screw-on cap pen because apparently it only accepts cartridges, not converters.

Tonight I practiced my penmanship a bit, watched a few episodes of The New Guys (because that was an incredibly underrated show and should have lasted way longer), and wrote a quote or two in my notebook. I was really in the mood to write but I'm finding it harder and harder to find quotes interesting enough for me to write down. I might need to switch over to facts for awhile.

Now it is one o'clock in the morning and I need to go to bed. My friend is coming into town and tomorrow morning we are going to go to the funeral of our old friend from Scouts. I hate funerals and I would say I've been to way too many. Scouts is really to blame for that. I met my two oldest friends in Scouts and have a lot of good memories but tomorrow will be at least the sixth funeral I have been to that was directly related to my involvement in Scouts. And four of those are kids I was in Scouts with. Unacceptable.