June 21, 2017

It's nearly midnight and most of this entry will probably be typed with my eyes clothes because I'm tired.

When I got to work this morning I was going to call my homebound patrons but that was quickly forgotten about when my boss asked me to go around and put up the weekly scoop, which is just a single sheet of interesting things for staff, that we put in staff areas. Normally it is done by one of the assistants over the weekend but it got buried in her inbox, so the task was given to me this week. It was quite a journey from the basement up to the third floor. But I think I got them all delivered. And after all that running around I completely forgot about calling my patrons. Something I didn't realize until right before lunch while I was still on the desk so I couldn't actually call anyone. I also forgot to mail the letters to two of my patrons who get letters instead of phone calls. It was not a good month for contacting.

I got to use the paper cutter in the basement this morning. I printed off another 400 prize tickets and didn't want to slowly cut them on the regular paper cutter. The hardest part was finding the key to the one in the basement. Admin was supposed to have one but the three people I talked to knew nothing about it. I lucked out when I asked the assistant director because the head maintenance guy was with him and he had a key, so I met him down in the basement. The cutting went very well and it is still fun to use the cutter.

When I gave the key back to the maintenance guy he made me hold up all of my fingers so he could check to make sure I still had them all. He said something along the lines of “Good, you still have all ten fingers.” And my immediate response was “But I started with eleven.” Earlier when I ran into him talking to the assistant director he said they were talking about me and it wasn't anything good. And my response was “So only great things.” I was on fire this morning.

After lunch we loaded up the minivan and headed out to deliver books. I startled my first patron a little bit because she was asleep when I walked in her room and had to shout to wake her up. I had a good conversation with my second patron. One of my patrons in the first nursing home was gone for the day, which I kind of didn't mind because she's the messy patron that I have to clean all of her books after we bring them back to the library. At the second nursing home I had enough time to cool off in the van and read about fifteen minutes of a book while I waited for the other librarian. It took me awhile to start the book so the overall wait was closer to twenty or thirty minutes. Her patron had fallen earlier in the day and landed on her walker. She was meeting with a couple nurses and the librarian had to wait for them to finish.

My last patron is the one with macular degeneration and I was looking forward to telling her about the rating system I came up with. But then her daughter answered the door and let me know that her mom was dying. She was in a hospital bed in the family room and wasn't looking too good. It apparently came on pretty suddenly. I offered to leave the new books but she wasn't interested in listening to anything so I took them with me. Along with the rating system I had also pulled a bunch of new authors for her and I was looking forward to a month from now, seeing if she liked any of them. The inevitable end is the worst part about homebound. This will be my third patron to die and not the last, unfortunately.

Following that we stopped for gas and then went to Wal-Mart to look for the Pioneer Woman magazine because a patron requested it and it is only available at Wal-Mart. We had no luck finding it and later on my sister said the first run sold out really quick, so we were never going to find it. So we headed back to the library.

We unloaded all the books and got the ready for circulation to check them back in. I took the audiobooks upstairs with me because I was on desk and I needed time to take all the pockets off that I had taped onto all of the cases for the rating shapes.

While I worked on that I talked with the teen librarian because she was at our desk. We continued talking while I worked on inputting the comments I got from my homebound patrons. I was nearly able to finish that. In my last hour of work I had a walk through, continued inputting comments, and talked to the new librarian about programming and other library stuff.

After work I picked up Qdoba and headed to my Mom's for dinner. We ate food, watched YouTube videos, listened to music, and talked. It was a good night and I didn't leave until ten o'clock.

When I got home I watched YouTube videos, clicked around the internet, and eventually started writing this. There have been numerous distractions. One of which was one of the streamers I watch, VernNotice reading a book. He has apparently started a book club, where he just reads on stream for awhile. Being a librarian, I really like that idea. I have dabbled in streaming before, doing some where I make cross stitch patterns in Minecraft, ones where I made my Mom and sister's cross stitch owls, and one playing CS:GO. I like the idea of just sitting and reading, though. My thought is to pull up somewhere in Elite Dangerous with a cool view and just reading. I started my audio journal as an excuse to talk during the weekends when I may go a day or two without speaking to anyone, which would present a problem when I got to work on Monday and my voice wouldn't work properly. Reading a book out loud would definitely help with that and it would be another excuse to read books. I'll have to think about it. My main concern is about the legality of it. I'm pretty sure reading a book on a livestream is probably a copyright violation. So maybe I would need to stick with public domain books. And then if it actually becomes a thing, asking authors or their agents if I can pay for the rights to read the book. I know on YouTube artists can pay a small fee to cover a song and I wonder if it is the same with a book. Maybe I'll find out at some point.

And it is now nearly 1:45AM and I am just finishing this. Good grief.