June 7, 2017

 A decent chunk of my morning at work was spent decorating the box for staff members to put their prize drawing tickets. And I nearly finished it. I'm spending way too much time on it but I needed a bit of a distraction. I also helped patrons in all the various ways (in person, over the phone, email, and chat), so I wasn't completely wasting time.

I also called the homebound patrons I was delivering to. And this afternoon we did the delivering. It was in the 80s outside, and nursing homes are always warm, so I did my fair share of sweating, but it could have been worse. I did like that all of my patrons today were in one nursing home. For my regular patrons I go to four houses and two nursing homes, so this was way easier. There was probably a lot more walking today because I was moving across three different floors and a lot of long hallways, but it wasn't too bad.

I also had several good interactions. The best was one of the ladies who said she really liked my green checkered shirt. I thanked her and said I try to match and pointed to my green Chucks. She hadn't even noticed my shoes and she completely loved that I had them on. It was pretty great. My last patron wasn't back from an appointment yet so we left and delivered to a couple of the other librarian's patrons who aren't in the nursing home and then came back. And she was there the second time around, so all was good.

When we got back from delivering books I did all the processing stuff and it was really nice not having to clean any of the books, which I have to do with one of my patrons. Then I went upstairs and saw I had some deliveries. I got the two Kindles that are grand prizes for summer reading. I also got the lincoln logs that we got for passive programming. I didn't have very much time before I was on desk but I quickly made a display sign for them and set them out on a table.

My hour on desk disappeared. I caught up on a lot of emails that came in over lunch and when we were doing homebound. That has resulted in me saying I would write a proposal for the adulting series by Friday. Good grief. On top of all the other stuff that needs to happen. I could use a vacation.

After work I picked up Qdoba and went to my Mom's house for dinner. After we ate we watched a bunch of YouTube videos and then talked until about 8:30PM. Then I had to leave so I could drop off my leftover food and my house and then head to my Dad's house so he could help me with a project.

I also volunteered to cut the holes in the lids for the containers for the new grand prize options. My original thought was to drill four holes and then connect the dots with my router. I couldn't think of how to clamp that down without interfering with my router so then I thought I would try and freehand it on my router table (rather than holding the router) and hope for the best. After texting with my Dad about it he suggested using his rotary cutting tool. I had thought it would have been a perfect Dremel project, but I don't have one. Fortunately my Dad has a Craftsman tool with a bunch of attachments.

We originally tried using a pointy diamond tipped attachment, which worked alright but when I used a higher speed it melted our practice lid, which then hardened around the attachment and I had to run it over sandpaper to dislodge it all. We then switched to a list disc cutter and that worked much better. I improved my technique as I went and by the fourth one I was pretty good at it. After this initial cutting we used a sharp knife to shave off some of the sharper edges and melted plastic, and then sandpaper to smooth everything out. It took about two hours to finish all four lids, and they're not perfect, but I didn't crack any lids and they will get the job done, so I'm happy with it.

I left my Dad's house around 11:30PM probably and it is now 12:46AM. I'm freaking tired. Hopefully I can make it through the tour and presentation tomorrow afternoon without yawning a million times.