March 6, 2017

 This morning was a little hectic at work. I got to work a couple minutes late because I left my house a couple minutes late and then hit all but one stoplight. It was mildly frustrating. And when I got to work it was kind of non-stop for over three hours. I did all the usual opening things and then grabbed a few more books for my article before we opened.

For the next two hours I was on desk. I wanted to work on my article but that didn't happen. There were several emails from the weekend that required my attention, mostly purchase requests. I also had four chats, one of which lasted for over an hour, during which I was also answering the phone and helping patrons in person (which included helping a patron print, printing a map for another patron, and helping another patron with microfilm). Hectic. And not productive when it came to working on my article. Or doing anything other than playing catchup.

When I was finally off desk I was able to work on my article a little bit but I spent the whole time researching how many books are published each year. I found a repeated statistic online that reference UNESCO but I couldn't track down the original source. I also looked through a couple of the books we have but my boss said the one that would probably have the answer we don't buy anymore. I was eventually able to get a number from an annual report from the International Publishers Association. In 2015 there were more than 338,000 new title published in the United States alone. After all the morning stuff I was a little brain fried but I eventually did the math to figure out it would take someone more that 6,500 years to read all of those books if you read one a week. And more than 920 years if you read one a day. At least I think my math is correct. Those are some insane numbers.

When I went home for lunch I had to carry Tanner back up the stairs again. He apparently got down alright but never came back up and when I went to the basement he was waiting at the basement door, possibly because that's where I let him in this weekend. He then made no effort to come up the stairs so I took my jacket off and then carried him upstairs. And then used a piece of packing tape to clean my clothes because I was covered in hair.

This afternoon I was on desk again and had an hour at the end of the day to go upstairs and work on my article. I've got a decent start but there's definitely a lot of editing to do so I can trim some stuff and talk about more books. I had planned to work on it tonight but that hasn't happened yet. I'm not giving up hope though.

On my way home I got caught in a bit of hail. It went from very aggressive raindrops to hail very quickly. I would have missed it entirely but I stayed late talking to one of the other librarians. That's what I get for being social.

When I got home I made brown rice and roasted vegetables for dinner. I also had a black bean burger with the avocado pistachio dip on top. And I had a couple of my biscuits from yesterday. They were better than yesterday but still very dense. Overall, not a bad dinner. While I ate I watched YouTube videos, because that's what I do, and now I'm watching a multi-stream of three people playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands together. It looks like a pretty fun game to play with friends. Thankfully I do not have any friends that play games so I won't have to worry about buying it. I have enough open world shooters that I have never finished.

Tomorrow I need to be productive. It was difficult today because we had one person gone for a family emergency and another person out sick. Hopefully the sick person will be back tomorrow so we're not trying to cover two people again. I need free time.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal so that maybe I can work on my article a little bit. Maybe.