April 22, 2017

 This morning when I was about to walk out of the house my Mom called me on her home phone because her cell phone was acting weird. I guess yesterday it drained really fast and she couldn't charge it because every time she plugged it in she got a message that moisture was detected. Due to construction I drive by her house on my way to work so I told I'd stop by and grab it. Which I did.

When I got to work I counted the money drawer and it went really well. I like when there isn't some random shortage or odd collection of money that causes me to do extra math. And because it went so well I was able to restock my DVD display before we opened. There were thirty DVDs when I left work Thursday and this morning there were three left. It has easily moved hundreds of DVDs this month. It's kind of crazy.

For my Mom's phone I read a little bit and tried a couple things that didn't work so I ended up setting up a small fan in our storage room and putting the phone in front of it, with the plug-in jack facing the fan. After a couple of hours I checked it and it was still giving the moisture detected warning and not charging. So I put it back in front of the fan for another four or five hours. When I came back to it again and plugged it in, there was a little hesitation and then... it started charging. Thankfully. By the end of the day it was back up to 100% and all was good. At least as far as I know. My Mom has texted me a few times since I dropped it off and hasn't mentioned anything about it crapping out. Although maybe it died so she has been unable to tell me about it. Hopefully not.

I pulled books for the staff picks display because we were down to only two in reserve and the librarian in charge of it texted me last night asking if I could pull some to get us through the weekend. She even left me bookmarks for the books. I think I've mentioned before that my new goal for my staff picks are to go with books I want to read. Today I pulled books based on RUSA reading list for this year and I think there notable nonfiction books from last year. There are so my interesting books out there that I will never get to read.

A school librarian came in today and was looking for poems about wolves, because one of the teachers at her school ask her for poems about wolves. She didn't want to go through every single poetry book and looking through the table of contents and index and was hoping we had a better solution. We did not. I gave her a couple books to look at but then got her email address so I could keep digging. I ended up finding three websites that may potentially be useful. To varying degrees they all allowed searching large databases and archives of poetry from throughout history. It seems like wanting poems about wolves is such a simple question but it turns out it isn't.

I got a call from circulation this morning because there was a teenager who had read an historical fiction book about female spies during WWII. The spies were fictional but they were inspired by real women in WWII. The teen needed to either dress up like or make a presentation or something about one of the real women. The book was helpful for this because it had information in the back about the real women, but the girl had left the book at school and we didn't have a copy of it. And that's where I came in. They had done some searching in circulation but were just getting a bunch of reviews that mentioned the inspiration thing but didn't give any of the names. My initial searches turned up the same thing but then I stumbled across one of the pages in the back of the book on Google Books that listed three of the real women that inspired the book. Bingo. Using those names I searched our collection and found two books that mentioned them. I emailed the teen the excerpt from the book, and the call numbers for the two books in our collection.

We had several geocachers in the library today. What they were looking for was not in the library but it was in our parking lot and all the clues were based on Dewey Decimal numbers, which I thought was pretty clever. They helped people down in circulation and I had one person at the desk that I helped, thanks to my handy Dewey Decimal Word document.

This afternoon I helped an old man scan several pages out of an old yearbook. I believe they were all pictures of him when he was an athlete in college back in the 1950s. And by helped, I mean I did it for him because sometimes you pick speed over teaching moments. And he really wasn't interested in learning how to use the scanner, he just wanted the pictures. Originally he had been using the copier but that wasn't working out so circulation called up to the desk and I came down. I got everything scanned and emailed and then ran back upstairs to get it all printed out for him. He was very thankful.

And I think that was pretty much everything that happened at work today, minus whatever I have forgotten.

On my way home I got gas, cleaned off my windshield and back window because they were covered in something from a tree I had parked under, and then stopped by my Mom's house to drop off her phone. I also got to see her new car for the first time. At leas the inside for the first time. I got a brief glimpse at the outside this morning when I picked up her phone. It's pretty cool. It also doesn't have a CD player so I told her what kind of USB drive to get and now she's working on picking out CDs for me to put on it.

When I got home I ate dinner and watched YouTube videos. Then I watched Killer Elite to keep with the Jason Statham theme from last night. There were a lot a scenes in the movie that seemed vaguely familiar but other parts did not, so I'm not sure if I actually saw the movie or if I just watched parts of it while working at the theater. I think the latter is more likely.

Without even thinking about it I put my computer to sleep this morning and it actually went to sleep without waking back up. So maybe that issue has resolved itself. The issue of my new hard drive disappearing has returned however. I now believe it is associated with my computer coming out of sleep mode, because it seemed to be working just fine when I was shutting my computer down every time. So who know what's up with that. I've looked into it a little bit but haven't come up with anything yet. I might just start shutting my computer down. That will at least encourage me not to have a million different windows open.

It is now after midnight and I am going to record my audio journal. Because it has been a long, productive day.