February 4, 2017

 This morning I woke up earlier than I would have liked, got ready, made my lunch, ate breakfast, loaded my laundry into my car, and headed to the mall for the outreach event. That ended up being kind of boring. It was an interesting experience, though.

When I got there I helped the other librarian set up the table. Then one of the IT people and the head of circulation showed up and got the laptop setup for signing people up for library cards. I think this was the first real-world test of signing people up at an outreach event. I think it may have been tried at a school a couple months ago but I feel like there were wireless issues or something. And today was a successful trial. In the three and a half hours I was there we signed up five people for library cards. Not great but also not bad.

None of us were happy with the table placement because it kind of felt like we were out of the way and not facing the right direction. We also didn't have very good signage. The library logo was on the front of the table skirt but unless you were looking at the front of the table you couldn't see that. I guess we used to have a tall standing sign but the pole went missing. In a small attempt to present something interesting I quickly looked up logos for several of our resources and had them rotating as a slideshow on our laptop. Not great but better than nothing.

In general I don't think it was a great setup as a whole for an outreach event because the tables were scattered throughout the mall and the vast majority of the people at the mall were there to be at the mall, not participate in an outreach event. They just wanted to do their mall thing, not talk to people sitting at a table. And I'm not one to bug people who show no interest in being bugged. Despite that I did end up talking to several people and had extended conversations about our services with at least three people. The other librarian was killing it, however, because she had no problems going up to people. Her tactic involved grabbing a stack of our handouts about programming for kids and whenever she saw someone with a kid, she would walk up and ask if they had a library card and if they knew about the programs we offered. She's the normal outreach librarian at the library and now I understand why.

I stood up for at least the first couple hours and then sat down spoke with the head of circulation while we waited for people to stop by. She is the mother of a girl I graduated with and one of my former managers at the movie theater. Small world. We talked about a lot of different things, which made the time go by at a decent pace.

At one o'clock my shift was over so I headed out and went to my Mom's house to do laundry. To make up for starting late I did everything on the fast cycle, which takes thirty-five minutes rather than fifty-seven. Not bad, and I can't tell any difference in the outcome. While my cloths were being laundered I watched the last part of a documentary on the two girls involved with stabbing another girl over Slender Man awhile ago. It was interesting because I had only ever heard headlines about the incident. When that was over I watched Star Trek: Voyager and read. I started reading the book for our upcoming reader's advisory conference thing but I can only get it on my phone (or computer) and reading a book, that I'm not interested in, on my phone is not appealing. I don't know how many pages the actual book has but because so few words and lines fit on my screen, the book is over 1000 pages. It's annoying and I doubt I'll come anywhere close to finishing the book. I'm okay with that.

I was able to head home around five o'clock and started cooking dinner. It was probably the first and last time I'll cook with an acorn squash. So much time was spent dealing with that thing. I only used half of it because there was a bad spot on one side and it would have been too much of a pain trying to cut around it. It was already bad enough trying to peel the thing and clean out the inside. I didn't end up with that much edible squash after all the work so it definitely wasn't worth all the effort. And it just tasted like a mushy potato in the end. The best part was that I saved the seeds and after dinner I roasted them. They taste just like pumpkin seeds.

I watched YouTube videos tonight and got about an hour into a movie before I gave up because my internet was acting up. I believe I'm supposed to get 150Mbps down but tonight I was getting 2Mbps. It was frustrating and I had to stop watching the movie because it kept pausing every few seconds for several seconds at a time. This has happened at least once or twice and it is annoying. Now I'm up to 50Mbps, so I might try to finish the movie before I go to bed, despite it being 12:45AM at the moment.

While I was watching, or attempting, to watch things I played Minecraft. I made more progress on my house, which I am really liking, and expanded my island a little bit. I can just see what looks like a cave system on my map when I am down in my mine so I need to start working my way over there and see if I can find more dirt. All important dirt.

Tomorrow my main goal is to move all the random boxes in my living room down to the basement, so my living room doesn't look so messy. I meant to do that last weekend but apparently ran out of time, but tomorrow is the day. Maybe.