March 8, 2017

 I forgot that yesterday I also took notes on one of the lectures for my class. To be fair, it was one of the videos from last week, because I'm still behind, and that fact is still a bit stressful, but I'm getting there.

Today was another one of those days that just kind of happened. Those seem to be popping up more frequently. Most of it seems to have just kind of passed in a blur. The best part of the day happened shortly after we opened thanks to one of our regulars, the old curmudgeon who likes to complain about kids. The first funny thing he said was that he was at a frat house (I'm assuming he's some sort of house dad or maintenance guy or something) and said they had a fish tank that they obviously don't take care of. He told me that a couple days ago he scooped out the gold fish and threw in some carrots and no one had noticed yet. That's pretty good. The best thing, however, was that he told me he doesn't believe we went to the moon. My initial thought was that he probably believes some random conspiracy theory. He caught me off guard with his real reason, which was that he worked at Cape Canaveral for two years, and as he put it “They were a bunch of idiots”, so there is no way they could have gotten to the moon. That's pretty great. It's a much better reason than some conspiracy theory.

I got a brief start on my homebound lists today. I think I might have finished two patrons, so not a great start, but it's still a start.

I played around more with the Sphero and decided that I'm going to use markers for one of the activities. Originally I wanted to use toilet paper roles, but I don't have any of those, so markers that are stood on their ends work fine. The idea is that we can try driving around them without knocking any down, or pick specific ones to knock down while avoiding others. It's a challenge to do that while manually controlling the robot and could be even more interesting if the robot has to be programmed to do it by itself. The same with the maze or obstacle course I want to make. There is still only one person signed up for the workshop but there's still a day left.

I inadvertently agreed to making another personalized reading list today. As I was about the leave the teen librarian in charge of our desk so I could go to the department meeting a woman walked up. It was a little confusing to pick up on what she was saying but it was something about how she got a new list of books every month but hadn't gotten one in a month or two. At first I thought maybe she was talking about an email list or something she was subscribed to but it eventually became somewhat clear that she was talking about personalized reading lists. I had no idea who she was and hadn't heard her name before but I figured maybe someone else had been doing it and I just didn't know. I eventually found some old paperwork from several years ago and told her I would look into it and if I couldn't figure out what was happening I would make a list myself.

Turns out no one else really knew what was happening. The library who has been there forever said she had made a list for the lady a couple times but that was last summer. It looks like the last list she got was during the summer, so not a month ago, but the fact that the lady's timeline was off was not surprising. The hard part of the list is going to be that she is a high interest, low level reader, and I don't know if we really have those type of books. I need to ask around. The notes from several years ago noted that they had started trying young adult books but she wasn't quite there yet. It's going to be a little bit before I can devote my entire attention to it but I think tomorrow I'll send out some emails to Children's Department and see if they have some suggestions.

The department meeting went well. We talked about the chapter we read and the policy we were assigned. Related to the policy we also watched a couple short videos about censorship and what happens when books are challenged in the library. It was interesting. Thankfully we don't really get a lot of challenges and the ones we do get tend to be about children's books. We also celebrated the birthday of one of the librarian's in our department, as well as the library director. This meant there was a little more food than usual at the table.

After the meeting one of my coworkers, who is in charge of posting our newspaper articles on the library blog, asked me if I was going to send him my article. This reminded me that I had not actually sent my article to the newspaper yet. It was due at five o'clock and my coworker asked me this question at 4:55PM. Yikes. I scrambled to log onto a computer, find out what address to send my email to, attach my article and picture, and make sure my name was all over the place and spelled correctly so that maybe they would print my real name this time. I'm just glad my coworker said something because I had completely forgotten.

I then spent the last hour of the day trying to figure out the mystery of the personalized reading list lady with one of my fellow librarians. It involved a lot of detective work just to figure out who she was (relative to her personalized reading list history, not identity, which we already knew). We then did some searching to see what kind of books were out there.

After work I picked up Chipotle, only having to drive around the block once, and then headed to my Mom's house. We ate, watched YouTube videos, and then talked for quite awhile. I didn't leave until almost ten o'clock. That's late. While all that was happening I also updated my phone three times. Apparently my phone doesn't do software updates automatically. Nothing seems any different on my phone after all that but at least I'm up to date.

When I got home I did the same old thing and now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. It's midnight and I want to go to bed. This is probably going to be a rambly audio journal unfortunately.