April 5, 2017

 I ended up spending most of the morning trying to figure out when our town first got electricity, after a a patron emailed us that simple question. And you would think it would have a simple answer, but it did not turn out that way. The librarian on desk when the question came in looked around the internet and I started looking through some of the books and calendars we have. I didn't have much luck with the books but the calendars are filled with pictures. I thought I could use the ones with electric lines that were dated as a way to narrow things down. A good idea in theory but it turns out electric lines look a lot like telegraph lines. I had no way of determining which was which. Kind of jokingly, when the head of technical services walked by, I asked her if she knew the answer off the top of her head. She got a huge smile on her face and named the author of a book. I found it on our shelf and she started digging through it. Turns out along with teaching English for twenty years she also occasionally taught a local history class. The book was helpful but between the three of us we were still only able to come up with vague time frames. I found that we got incandescent lights downtown on January 1, 1890. We also found when an electric company moved to a new location in 1902, but no word when they came to town. There were just a lot of roundabout dates but nothing explicit. Kind of frustrating.

The rest of the day just kind of happened. When I was on desk I helped patrons in all the various ways and worked on other things. I fixed the interactive Excel calendar I came up with for our Fall schedule. I had adjusted some of the cells on the calendar to fit certain entries but that ended up messing those cells in other months (because the calendar was all on the same sheet, sharing the same space). So stuff wasn't showing up because the formula wasn't working properly. But I got it all sorted. I also got the dates added in for the one-on-one tech trainer's classes. Now we just need to add the Childrens' stuff and we'll have an overall look at the Fall programming schedule. Hooray.

And I probably did some other stuff today but nothing worth remembering apparently. It was a weird day. I wasn't feeling it.

After work I picked up Chipotle and headed to my Mom's house. The food was underwhelming but the night was good. After dinner I showed YouTube videos and those went over fairly well. Later on in our discussions Key and Peele came up and we ended up watching a few of their sketches. With all the videos and talking I didn't actually get home until almost ten o'clock. Good grief.

It is now eleven o'clock and I'm tired. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will not be happening tonight. I'm just going to record my audio journal and go to bed. I don't work until noon tomorrow so that will give me time to sleep in, and I am looking forward to that.