April 19, 2017

 This morning at work I took down the tax display and counted all the leftover forms and instruction books. I didn't do anything with those numbers because in the middle of counting I remembered that I needed to call my homebound patrons to let them know we were coming out this afternoon. During those calls one of my patrons told me she was getting through her books too quickly and wanted five more, on top of the seven I usually bring her. Thankfully I had enough time to pull and process all of those books before I went to lunch.

After lunch we went out and delivered books. It was in the low 80s today and that was enough to make it kind of miserable while lugging around a bunch of books and going in and out of warm houses and nursing homes. I pretty much spent the whole time sweating. And it is going to be so much worse as summer approaches. As for the deliveries themselves, they went well. I met my new person, who is really nice and she wants to give me a list of books every month, which makes my job a lot easier. I had another patron request more books next time, so now I'll be taking out more than 60 books each month. I learned that one of my patrons sat next to my grandma for many years at church. The patron recognized my name in one of the yearly family letters my grandma sends out to friends and family. I also spoke with my last patron for thirty-five minutes, according to the librarian I deliver with. She ended up coming to the door because she was worried I had been killed or something. I think if you combine all of my interactions with all of my other patrons the entire time I've done homebound they wouldn't equal thirty-five. It was kind of crazy. The conversation just kept going and I'm not good at getting out of conversations. I kept trying to subtly move toward the door but the patron is nearly blind so subtlety probably isn't the best tactic. It was a good conversation and I think she just needs more people to talk to, but we ended up cutting our schedule pretty close.

Normally when we get back we take our books to circulation to take all the bookmarks out and drop them off so they can be checked in. Today we got back a few minutes before four o'clock, which is when I was scheduled to be on desk, so I had to go directly to the desk. After responding to an email from the teen librarian about shifting books, which required a bit of math, I was able to deal with the homebound books. I still need to go through and update my spreadsheets with comments, and double-check accounts to make sure I got all the books back from last month. That can be a tomorrow project maybe.

Near the end of my desk shift someone in circulation reported that a puppy had been tied up in the front of the library for over an hour. They wrote down the phone numbers on the tags and thankfully the first number worked. A man answered and I told him I was calling from the library and asked his he had a puppy. He immediately knew what was up and sent his daughter out to the puppy. He told me they were just checking out DVDs but good grief, that doesn't take an hour.

After my desk shift I took my homebound books down to circulation and then eventually got off work. Tonight was Chipotle night and I got really lucky, finding a parking spot on my first pass, and I didn't have to wait in line. The food was about on par with what I have come to expect lately. After dinner we watched YouTube videos and then we talked for awhile. The night ended up being a little shorter than normal because of some potential bad weather coming through.

When I got home I spent the rest of my night watching YouTube videos and clicking around the internet. I've been kind of exhausted since the deliveries this afternoon. Which means I should have gone to bed awhile ago. And I didn't. So here we are. But now I'm done with this and it is eleven o'clock so hopefully I can knock out my audio journal quickly so I can go to bed. I open tomorrow which means waking up at six o'clock. Can't wait.