May 23, 2017

This morning I slept in and I feel like I could have laid there the rest of the day. But I like my job so I got up and eventually went to work.

Today at work is kind of a blur. I was on desk for two hours, off for two, went to dinner, then on desk for two hours, and off desk for two hours. My main focus for the day was to work on my presentation for the staff meeting next week. And I made decent progress on that. The stuff I am supposed to cover is covered but I still want to add a slide in about hate speech. I also want to add the Orbitz commercial that involves the line “Who are you calling a cootie queen, you lint licker?” The verbal abuse stuff gets a little dark so I need some stuff in there to lighten the mood a little.

Tonight I got the briefest start on the summer reading presentation I am giving next week at the senior center. All I made was the title slide. But it's better than nothing. I talked with my boss today about the presentation because talking about summer reading doesn't really require a dedicated presentation. Unless you want a five minute presentation. I also kind of feel the presentation is pointless because two other librarians will be going there two days after me to sign people up for summer reading. I think the summer reading program is somewhat self-explanatory and even if it weren't, the other librarians could easily spend five minutes explaining it before signing people up. I didn't mention my feelings of the pointlessness of the presentation with my boss but I did say it was going to take about five minutes. She suggested also mentioning some readers advisory stuff, like the resources we have for finding new books and our personalized reading list service. So maybe I can get the presentation up to ten minutes.

I helped the teen librarian move one of the small tables from behind our desk over to the unfinished part of the library so that she will have room for the big cart of books that are a reward for teens who read for five hours during summer reading. I also went with her down to the basement with a couple empty boxes so she could show me where all the reward books are being kept for both children and teens. They have a bunch of boxes on their side so they can be used like little shelves to keep things organized. Pretty clever.

I helped patrons throughout the day. I helped one lady with our digital library resources, helped people with the computers and printing, and helped other people find books. There was never a rush of people but I did seem to help patrons throughout the day, which is always good.

I had a new idea for our homebound service today. Previously, I have wanted to switch to taking out a bunch of books each month and allowing the patrons to pick out the books they wanted. So basically a mobile library. My new idea is to get a grant or find money to buy a Kindle for each patron (not personally but enough to cover the patrons we have). They could adjust the font size so that it is to their liking, whether they like regular print or large print books, and they would potentially have access to a greater selection of books, especially the large print patrons. The tricky part would be figuring out the books. At the moment our ebooks can't be checked out for a month, which is how long the physical books are checked out for when we deliver them. It would be great to just load each Kindle with hundreds of books but that is easier said than done. I think there is potential in the idea though so I need to talk with some more people about it.

On my way home I stopped by my sister's house to get air in my tire. I need to get my own air compressor with how often I have to fill my tires. I also need new tires. That might help. But I could also use an air compressor for shop things, if I ever get around to setting up a shop in my garage.

While I was there my sister told me that my Dad had torn a tendon in his finger and wasn't planning on getting it fixed because it would cost too much money. This would also leave him with a permanently bent finger. When I got home I ate a delicious Rice Crispy treat with Fruity Pebbles on a stick that my sister made, and texted my Dad, saying that we should get his finger fixed. I told him I got a decent tax return and that I really only spent money on bills, food, and cheap video games. And that I already had more video games than I could ever play and that fingers were cooler than video games. I haven't heard back yet but hopefully he will change his mind and let us help out.

And it is once again audio journal time. I've got quite the backlog of videos because I haven't uploaded in forever. I need to do that at some point.