October 30, 2017

 As expected, it took forever for me to fall asleep last night. Late afternoon naps aren't always the best decision.

I woke up this morning at seven o'clock but stayed buried under my covers because my noes was cold and I didn't want to get out of bed. But eventually I did, and did all the usually morning stuff before going to work.

Most of my day was spent working on my presentation. I actually started putting the slides together today so I am feeling slightly better about things. I'm still not feeling great about it, but slightly better is a good start. I had three free hours after lunch and I thought I'd be able to go up to the cubicle and really focus but another librarian was up there reading a book for a discussion so I was stuck at the desk with a lot of distractions. I should have made a lot more progress today.

The last hour and a half or so of my day was lost to an incident that ended with a police report, so that was fun. It started when the recent star of so many incident reports (potentially punching a staff member, destroying our bathroom) walked by and kicked a twelve year old sitting in a chair. The kid went and told his dad who went to confront the guy. That conversation got heated and eventually led to the guy walking out of the library, followed by the dad. This led to the dad chasing the guy for half a mile before losing track of the guy.

One of the other librarians and myself followed both of them outside but never caught up with them so we went back inside and hung out with the kid. One of the other patrons knew his mother and called her. I talked to the kid about school and video games until the mother showed up and she eventually got the dad to come back to the library and they called the police because they wanted to file a report.

We sat around and waited for the cop to show up and then waited while he took the statement of the kid and dad, and then he talked to us for a little bit. It sounds like because there weren't any witnesses there really isn't much that can be done from a legal point of view. All the guy has to do is say he didn't kick the kid. But, I think this might have been the final straw necessary to at least temporarily ban the guy from the library. He is suspected of punching a staff member, he has destroyed our bathroom, he has had confrontations with other patrons, and now he's committed battery against a kid. His behavior seems to be slowly escalating and I'd like if he wasn't in the library when it reaches its seemingly inevitable violent conclusion.

When I got home I did a lot of nothing. I ate the last of my leftover pizza, watched YouTube videos and a livestream, clicked around the internet, and farmed Halloween goodie bags in Terraria. Somehow I made it through an entire Blood Moon and only got one goodie bag. I call shenanigans. I also just realized the two sunflowers near my lava trap were creating a buff that reduced enemy spawn rates. Rookie move. I don't know what the percentage in reduction was but I got rid of them just in case. I want to say I notice an increase in the spawn rate but I think that is mostly psychological.

Anyway, I'm tired and have a headache so I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed.

October 29, 2017

 Today did not work out the way I had hoped but it did work out the way I had expected. I woke up early, after about six and half hours of sleep. I then spent the morning avoiding my presentation. I watched the occasional video, I clicked around the internet, I listened to music, and I continued uploading my audio journal videos to YouTube. I uploaded fifty-three videos today and I am now up to September 24^th. So still over a month behind but I made major progress today.

Throughout the day, along with uploading videos, I also farmed Halloween goodie bags in Terraria. It's an event that happens once a year (unless you mess with your computers internal clock or maybe with a mod) and I think it was last year that I made a lava trap. Now I can just go AFK and check back every now and then to pick up what's been dropped. I'm in it for the costumes and I got several of them, so I'm happy.

Late in the afternoon I got tired of having cold feet (because it was cold in my house) and I got tired of the overwhelming feeling I had from not working on my presentation, so I went to my room, turned on my space heater, and crawled into bed. It was great. I used the time to think about random things and to nap. It's always risky taking a nap so late in the afternoon but it needed to happen.

After dinner I finally got around to playing more Wolftenstein II, something I wanted to be doing all day but avoided because I felt like I should be working on my presentation. The game is still really good at making me feel uncomfortable and it is also a lot of fun to play. Easily the best part of the game so far was riding one of the giant mechanized flamethrower dog things. With an unlimited flamethrower. It was so satisfying just mowing down a bunch of evil Nazis.

And now it is audio journal time so I can go to bed. I'm not terribly tired due to the nap but I'll give it a try.

October 28, 2017

 This morning I woke up at eight o'clock and spent my morning playing Wolfenstein II. In the game there is an arcade machine that lets you play the classic Wolfenstein 3D. I kind of got sidetracked playing that and nearly forgot I was supposed to be playing Wolfenstein II.

I eventually got ready, changed my sheets, loaded up my car, and headed to my Mom's to do laundry. While I waited I ate lunch, watched Star Trek: Voyager, took a nap, and transcribed more of the chat I've been working on. We then had an somewhat impromptu family dinner night, my Mom got Little Caesars and my sister came over.

After dinner I came home and spent the rest of the night playing Wolfenstein II. I'm enjoying it. It's also an intense game, even more so due to the current political climate. There was a cinematic scene tonight in an interrogation room and it was really uncomfortable. I wanted to keep playing tonight but I got to a big choice, where I have to pick between three upgrades, and I figured that would be a good stopping point.

One o'clock is creeping up so I'm going to call this good and go record my audio journal. I have dreams of sitting down and knocking out my fake news presentation tomorrow so I don't have to worry about it anymore. I don't actually foresee that happening, but it would be great if I could do that.

October 27, 2017

 This morning I woke up a little after seven o'clock and stayed in bed until 7:30AM. And then I had to get up. Not a fan.

Most of my morning was spent coming up with descriptions for our adulting classes next semester. Neither the teen librarian nor I were interested in writing the descriptions because we're both focused on more pressing matters, but I think the calendars for next semester are being sent off in the first week of November, so we had a deadline. And I was trying to avoid my presentation so I was productive in other ways. Like writing all but one of the descriptions (because the teen librarian had already written one) and formatting the table she made so that it looked better, because I'm picky when it comes to table formatting.

I also had three walkthroughs and talked to the new librarian about the conference, because she went yesterday. And then I went to lunch. I figured out that I “worked” nine and a half hours on Wednesday for the conference so I had to lose an hour and a half today. I took an extra half hour at lunch which was great because it meant I got an actual hour for lunch, figuring travel time at about half an hour. Normally I would have gone to my house but my Mom was out of town so I went to her house so I could let the dogs out, and watch Star Trek.

When I got back to work I finished reading a Library Journal and then I was on desk for two hours. Most of that time was spent helping the occasional patron and reading a couple long articles. I also had to ask two teens to stops horsing around at the computers. One of our regular siblings from this summer took money from one of his friends. My interaction with them was awkward but they eventually stopped. I told the closing librarian about this and she texted me later in the night thanking me for telling her about that because something else happened later and she asked him to leave for the day.

I got off work an hour early to make up the last of my conference time and headed to Target on my way home. I ran into one of my high school English teachers and I think it was the first time a former teacher genuinely recognized me. I haven't seen her in fifteen years but she knew my name and remembered that I used to write humorous papers instead of talk during our Socratic seminars because they were always dominated by the annoying hippie kids who thought they were saying really smart things but they really weren't. My papers pointed this out. We talked for a little while, catching up, and it was pretty cool.

When I got home I made spaghetti for dinner and then spent the night watching YouTube videos and texting. I downloaded Wolfenstein II but got caught up watching videos and writing this so I didn't actually get to play it tonight. Possibly tomorrow morning before I go to do laundry.

It's now just after eleven o'clock and somehow it feels like it's at least three o'clock in the morning. Maybe it's just been a really long short week.

October 26, 2017

 I slept nearly nine hours last night and I woke up before my alarm went off. That's kind of the best way to start the day. With the rest of my morning I watched a livestream and clicked around the internet before getting ready, eating lunch, and going to work.

When I got to work I learned about the latest incident report regarding the guy who has been starring in so many of the incident reports lately, like possibly punching an employee and having confrontations with another patron. This morning there was apparently a really loud commotion in the second floor men's room. Loud enough that it was heard all the way over at our desk, which is on the other side of the library. My boss and the other librarian working headed over there and arrived about the same time the assistant director, administrative assistant, and head of maintenance came out of the office. And then the patron came out. The assistant director went to talk to him and he said he was the only one in the restroom. When they went to check the restroom one of the soap dispensers had been ripped out of the wall and one of the toilet paper dispensers was on the ground and looked like it had been stood on until it came off the wall, which was probably the source of the loud noise heard at the reference desk. And, even though multiple people on multiple floors of the library heard all of this noise and this patron was the only one in the restroom and he was seen leaving the restroom immediately following the noise, that is apparently not proof enough that he damaged the restroom. It's like he wants to get in trouble and we keep just missing his attempts.

I didn't work on my next presentation at all today but I was productive in other things. I started and finished writing descriptions for next semester's classes and workshops. I also finished writing the standard procedures for tech classes and tech drop-ins. I printed out forty-five brochures and used the folding machine upstairs to fold them. On one of my walkthroughs I was stopped by someone in circulation asking for brochures (which I just mentioned), I was stopped by the head of the youth services department and asked if I could point out the troublesome incident report patron because we're really the only department that has had to deal with him (so I pointed him out), and I was stopped by the head of circulation to talk about a damaged homebound book. It was an active walkthrough. I also looked up perler bead patterns for an upcoming craft night and starting reading a couple different articles. I needed a little break from presentations so I feel good about today.

After work I stopped at my Mom's house to help her scan some things. We used her printer to scan and save the files to a memory card, which we then plugged into her computer and uploaded to whatever website she was uploading them to. Then I helped her carry in all her plants on the front porch. She has a lot of plants and some of them were heavy enough that my back started going out on the last one. But now they're inside and I don't need to worry about them for awhile.

I got home a little after ten o'clock, moved my own plant into my garage (and hopefully that will be good enough for now), ate a snack, clicked around the internet, finished watching the South Park livestream, and now I'm finishing this.

It was a good day. And hopefully tomorrow I can make some decent progress on my next presentation. Fingers crossed.

October 25, 2017

 Today was a long day and this may be short because I'm tired and I have a headache. We'll see.

I woke up at 7:26AM this morning and my 7:30AM. Not bad. I was happy with myself that I remembered to turn off my alarm clock before leaving my bedroom. I usually forget and then become momentarily confused when I hear a noise coming from my bedroom.

I had plenty of time to relax and slowly get ready, which aided me in not forgetting to put anything in my bag. I seem to always forget one thing but not today.

I got to work a little bit early and had time to return a book and add a few DVDs to my display before we left. I rode in the backseat (technically middle seat) of the minivan on the way down. We got passed by two semi trucks on the highway. I feel like we may have been going slower than I am used to driving. We had some good random conversations along the way, as well as some library-related ones.

When we were almost there we stopped at Subway for lunch. I'm not sure the last time I ate at Subway but my first thought was Mitch Hedberg, it's for a duck!

We got to the convention center with a few minutes to spare, but then we couldn't find out how to get into the convention center. It's a pretty big building and we ended up walking around the entire outside of it. This included walking through the grass and trees, down some steep hills, and along a man-made river with a bunch of geese. We ended up going in through the hotel attached to the convention center, which was actually on the other side of the parking garage that was next to the parking lot we parked in. Had we parked in the parking garage, or at least gone to the left instead of the right we wouldn't have had to walk all the way around the building. My partner also said they ended up all over the place trying to find their way in, so we weren't alone. Signage could have definitely been better. I'm just glad I wasn't presenting in the first session.

After registering I talked to my partner a little bit and then went to my first session. I got lost and had to ask for directions because the building map was confusing. There were apparently two floors but neither were labeled as such and the second floor (which is the one I needed) had an area market “ground floor” on it. Ended up only catching the last ten or fifteen minutes of the presentation, which put me in the Q&A portion, and that was not very helpful.

The second session was better because I was there for the whole time. It was about mental health and I learned a little bit but it wasn't something I would pay for. The woman next to me at one point did a little dance with her hands and in general she was very antsy and moving around a lot.

After the second session was the keynote, which was rebranding libraries as educational institutions. It had some interesting ideas but I don't know how far you'll get telling a room full of librarians that they should be called librarians anymore and that they need to start introducing themselves as educators, not librarians. Yes, we educate people, but maybe we can educate them on the new library environment so they start associating libraries and librarians with those things, rather than getting rid of words and titles.

I left the keynote a little early so I could head down to the room I was presenting in. My partner was already there and getting her laptop set up. She went around and talked to people to find out why they came to our presentation and what they wanted to get out of it. I'm not a people person so I ended up standing up at the front and talking to the tech guys while they tried to get the laptop working (which they eventually did). I was a little worried because my partner said she had nearly forgotten the presentation was this week and she spent her day filling out a job application, so she hadn't really prepared for the presentation. But she's good at improvising and interacting with people, so it actually went well. We had twelve to fifteen people who ranged from new to old librarians, who seemed interested most of the time in what we were saying, and we had a good discussion afterward. And we were pretty good with the time. I was worried we would be short but we ended up being a few minutes long, and we started a couple minutes late, so that's not bad.

On the drive home I sat in the passenger seat and my boss drove. She may have driven slower than the technical services manager who drove us down. The drive back seemed like it took forever but we had good conversations about random stuff and about some of the things we had seen at the conference.

When we got back to town we ran into one of the other librarians at the gas station. She is going to the conference tomorrow and taking the minivan so she ended up following us back to the library so she could get the key. They had reserved one of the other vehicles but apparently admin overrode that reservation and took that car.

We parted ways at 8:00PM and I stopped by Freddy's on the way home to grab dinner. I had a headache from dehydration and hunger and Freddy's sounded good. I kind of regret the strawberry shake because of all the dairy. I don't think I've ever had one of their shakes so I don't know if this is new or not, but it came with a really large straw. It was also kind of flimsy so it took a bit to figure out how best to use it so that it didn't collapse on me before I could get any of the shake. Sonic needs to take note because with their strawberry drinks the chunks of strawberry constantly clog the straw. With Freddy's, they had much larger chunks of strawberry but they were easily handled by the big straw.

When I got home I ate dinner, watch YouTube videos, finished writing my notes for the day, and then started writing this. Now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I'm exhausted. In the last two hours I've downed 32oz of water so I'm a little worried I'll be up several times throughout the night. Time will tell.

October 24, 2017

 My alarm went off at six o'clock this morning but I didn't really wake up until 6:30AM. I then scrambled around in a fairly slow way, getting ready and eventually going to work.

Opening was fairly normal but we were updating our catalog this morning so I had to go around and put signs on all of the catalog computers letting people know what was up. When we opened I was on desk for two hours and three out of the four phone calls I answered were related to things not working because the catalog was updating. Could have been worse. Luckily the update was done around one o'clock. Along with the catalog, we didn't have access to patron accounts, which made things a little challenging, probably even more so down in circulation. They were also not able to check-in books so they had them piling up. I'm just glad we weren't busier. The few questions I had I was able to figure out using the catalog on the training server, which is five months behind, but better than nothing.

When I wasn't helping patrons I caught up on my missed emails from yesterday and planned out the sessions I'm going to tomorrow. I'm going to one about makerspaces, one about mental health, and then there is the keynote and my presentation. I'm looking forward to before my presentation and after my presentation.

When I got back from lunch I was on desk for an hour and then I went to be the backup person in the Pinterest class. That went well and I got to help some ladies figure out. One of them described her social media use as being a voyeur, which is accurate for my use. I follow people on Twitter and Instagram but I don't tweet or post pictures. And I only post things in my small library group on Facebook. I can't remember the last time I posted something publicly on Facebook.

After the class I had a photo-op with my boss and the group from the tabletop convention I went to a little while ago. They were bringing us the check for the money they raised during the convention and were donating to the library. We also talked about them helping out with International Games Day. They said they could provide access to their tabletop game library (1000+ games) and would probably have volunteers to go with it. That would be great. We were considering going pretty low-key with the event but we might need to put a little more effort into it.

With the remainder of my day I almost read a magazine, checked my email, caught up on the staff blog, and talked to my coworkers. And then I went home.

For dinner I had leftovers. Last night I opened the wrong side of the lemon pepper lid and ended up pouring a pile of lemon pepper onto my food. I scooped a lot of it off but it was still overpowering. Tonight, I opened the correct side and put the correct amount on my food. It was much better.

I spent my night watching YouTube videos, texting, clicking around the internet, and watching a livestream. When I get done with this I'm going to look over my presentation stuff and then record my audio journal. Tomorrow we are leaving at ten o'clock, which is way better than super early in the morning.

October 23, 2017

 This morning I woke up a little before nine o'clock. I then spent the morning continuing to watch a recent livestream of TimTheTatman playing South Park: The Fractured But Whole. The game is hilarious and wildly inappropriate, and the gameplay has gotten old after hours of watching it, but I want to make it to the end. I'm not sure if he actually beat it before he left on a short vacation but I might eventually find out if I continue watching the long livestreams in short increments.

I also started upload my audio journal videos again. I think I only got eleven or twelve uploaded and I only just made it to August. I'm way behind and I'm running out of room on my hard drive for the recorded videos that haven't been uploaded yet. Well, I have another hard drive in my laptop that still has a few hundred gigabytes, so I can always change the recording location, but I'd like to just get everything uploaded. I need to start doing a least a few every day, so I'm at least eating away at the overall total.

I headed to my Mom's house this afternoon to do laundry. The other day I left my drill over there so she could install some solar lights in the backyard, but I didn't actually tell her how to use it, and it can be confusing if you aren't familiar with drills. So when I got there I showed her how to use it and we went out to the backyard to try out the first one. I also suggested she make a quick template so she wouldn't have to measure the holes each time on every fence post (which is where she was installing the lights).

While I waited on my laundry I read a little bit in Turtles All The Way Down, watched Night Court and The Drew Carey Show, and continued transcribing the chat. When my laundry was done I came home, ate leftovers, watched a few YouTube videos, and played Rise of the Tomb Raider. I still haven't figured out the percentage completed so I have no idea how close I am to the end of the game. I'm still enjoying it, though.

Now I'm listening to A Perfect Circle but I'm going to go record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I open tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.

October 22, 2017

 Last night I got seven hours of sleep, so I already off to a better start than yesterday. I woke up at 9:00AM, got out of bed at 9:30AM, and clicked around the internet for awhile, ironed my pants, and then got ready for the day. I actually forgot I had to be at work at 12:30PM, not 12:00, so after eating lunch it was like I gained another half hour.

Goodness. I've just been ridiculously sidetracked by installing and customizing a new messaging app.

When I got to work Circulation was listening to an interesting playlist. I came in to a hardcore rap song, later it was a slow R&B song, and by the time I headed upstairs it was a DMX song.

Counting the drawer at work today way not as fun as yesterday. It was really short on five dollar bills. I ended up just trading out the only five dollar bills (three of them) and some ones from the change box. I didn't hear any complaints during the day so it must have worked out alright.

Most of my day was spent working on conference presentation stuff. I made an outline for the slideshow with talking points for each slide. Now that I have that I am feeling much better about the presentation. I still need to practice and make sure I'm covering everything, but I'm getting there.

It was a busy day at the library but it was a pretty quiet day at the desk. Most of my patron interactions just involved handing over guest passes for the computers.

I refilled my DVD display a few times and I got all three of the Men In Black movies to check out. I displayed the first one on top of the second two and the first time I went downstairs only the first movie was taken. There was another copy of it on the shelf so I put that out and the next time I came downstairs all three were gone. I want to believe someone checked them all out to do a marathon.

There wasn't a closing custodian so I had to walk the emergency stairs and lock the elevator on the first floor. The emergency stairs have alarms on the doors that you have to un-arm and then re-arm once you go in. There is also a time delay on the alarm, to give you time to re-arm it. If you don't do it fast enough than the alarm goes off. At least I think that's how it works. I'm not entirely sure I re-armed it correctly but I feel like the alarm would have gone off if I hadn't. Hopefully.

When I got home I roasted vegetables, made brown rice, and scrambled eggs for dinner. I then spent the night watching a few long YouTube videos, reading stuff on the internet, and messaging with my Bumble match. We decided to exchange numbers tonight because the Bumble app is surprisingly awful for communicating. When typing a message you can only see two lines of text at a time, and you have to wake up your phone to see the notification for new messages, it doesn't have a light notification or at least wake up the phone screen. So now we're texting and it is so much more convenient.

That is also the reason I downloaded a new text messaging app. I was using the default Android messaging app but I never liked the notification light options, so I turned off notifications and used another text messaging app just for its notifications. It was convoluted. So now I'm trying a new app. The app itself looks really nice and I like the customization options within the app. I didn't get it set up until after midnight so I haven't been able to test out the notifications. I'll try that out tomorrow and keep my fingers crossed that they live up to my expectations.

And now it's time for my audio journal so I can go to bed.

October 21, 2017

 I woke up at 6:30AM this morning after a solid six hours of sleep. Six hours is not enough.

I ended up getting to work early because the traffic was favorable. When I got to work I counted the drawer, refilled my DVD display, and counted magazines. When we opened I was on desk for two hours. I was kind of on desk the whole day but that's how the weekends are when there are only two people in the department. I spent the morning working on the conference presentation. I added more to the notes and looked over the slideshow trying to run through what I would say in my head.

I ate lunch up in the cubicle. The teen librarian is also working this weekend and she was upstairs so we talked for a little bit before going to our respective cubicles and watching things while we ate. I ended up watching the latest Ark video from Neebs and the guys twice, because it was funny.

On a walkthrough after lunch I actually asked a patron if he was finding everything alright, and he wasn't, so I got to try and help him, but we didn't really have anything he was looking for, so I wasn't much help.

The next quote I want to cross stitch is: “Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” by Euripides.

I helped one of our regular patrons today with a couple things on the computer. Turns out I'm great at resizing images and creating two columns in Google Docs.

I continued looking at the conference presentation this afternoon but I probably spent more time reading stuff for the fake news presentation. I found a Pew Research Center study called The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online and I read about half of the overview. It was twenty-seven pages long so that's not bad. It had some interesting things to think about and it led to a rabbit hole of other studies and articles.

There was a brief emergency this afternoon when one of the circulation workers started having trouble with her eyes. They called up to the desk because she wanted to go to the emergency room and weren't sure of the procedure. We weren't either. I was pretty sure I wasn't allowed to drive her because it was a weekend and I was in charge of the whole building. But I wasn't entirely sure. I can vaguely remember maybe learning about it at some point but I couldn't find any reference to it in any of our notebooks or in the online documents. I made the call to have the assistant give her a ride while I continued looking for the information. Before the assistant could take her, however, she called her doctor who told her it was probably an ocular migraine, and not too long after that her vision cleared up enough that she decided she was able to drive herself home. I ended up emailing my boss about it and asking her what the procedure actually is just so I can know in the future.

I think I've had a few ocular migraines before. In my case I get tunnel vision and all of my peripheral vision is bright and shimmery. I have always equated them to excitement and/or not breathing enough, but I'm not sure. The last one actually happened at the library, I think on a weekend. I was sitting at the desk staring at the computer when I realized I had completely lost my peripheral vision. It's kind of scary.

A little girl came up to the desk this afternoon and asked if we had any cookies. That is the secret question for the ninth graders and she didn't look like a ninth grader. She said her older sister was a ninth grader but was too shy to come up to the desk. It was funny because when I told her what her sister's options were (a bag, book, or candy), she went over to her middle sister, who also appeared to be shy because she wouldn't come over to the desk, and the middle sister told her to pick the candy for their older sister.

Tonight when I got home I ate leftovers for dinner, watched a few YouTube videos, a little bit of a livestream, and then I played Rise of the Tomb Raider. I continue to make progress. I ended up calling it a night when the game crashed on me. It crashed the last time I played, too. It crashed almost immediately when I started it tonight but after closing my browser window that game ran fine. I'm not sure what the issue was the second time. I've heard that there are some game, Minecraft for example, that will occasionally keep storing stuff in memory and if you play too long the memory will fill up and cause a crash. I don't know if that is a thing or if I'm even remembering it correctly, but it's the explanation I'm leaning toward just so I have something to blame it on.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed because it is 12:42AM and it is becoming a struggle to keep my eyes open and not yawn.

October 20, 2017

 I forgot to mention my new notebooks and planner came yesterday. The planner is really cool and now I'm looking forward to the new year so I can start using it. The cover for it has shipped so it will be here sometime, but I'm not exactly sure when because it's coming from the United Kingdom. I started using one of the notebooks today to take notes about my day. As I will soon write, there was not a lot going on with my day, so there wasn't much to write, but it is good to get in the practice of it.

It was not a productive day.

This morning I woke up at 8:45AM and spent the morning watching YouTube videos and livestreams, clicking around the internet, and I started transcribing the conversation I've been having with someone on Bumble. I was curious how much we had actually managed to type and so far I'm up to ten single spaced pages, and that's only a small fraction of the conversation. I worked on that off and on throughout the day and I had to take breaks because my left wrist and hand were not enjoying all of the typing.

I went and got my haircut at 12:30PM, so now I won't have to worry about needing a haircut during my presentation next week. When I got home I ate lunch and then it was basically a repeat of my morning.

Later in the afternoon I took a nap, which was nice, and then I ate dinner and continued doing the same old thing. I wanted to play video games today but I didn't. Mostly because I also wanted to work on my presentation today, but I didn't, so I would have felt guilty playing games.

Right now I am writing this while standing in my kitchen with my laptop on the banister. I spent the vast majority of my day sitting down and I needed to stand up. I don't know if this will become a thing but it is a good way of keeping me focused on typing instead of getting distracted by watching videos. But to be fair, I stopped halfway through this to write an email to my friend who is currently deployed and paused numerous times to reply to messages with my Bumble match. So distractions are ever-present, regardless of my venue.

October 19, 2017

 This morning I woke up at 5:30AM, got ready, and left my house at seven o'clock. It's still dark that early in the morning. I left my house that early because I wanted to make it to the library by 7:30AM. Turns out there is a lot less traffic at that time of day and I ended up getting to the library at 7:12AM. I parked in the parking lot, because it was super early, and then went up to the third floor so I could run through the presentation a couple times. That was helpful and I'm glad I got there early.

Around 7:35AM I packed up and headed to the school to talk to a bunch of ninth graders. I connected the iPad to a new 80” TV, which was a nice surprise because I was expecting an old projector. I had three presentations to give and there was probably twenty minutes or so between them and spent that time reading a psychology reference book I found on a shelf.

The first class wasn't very enthused to be there and I'll attribute a lot of that to the fact that it was still really early. Only a few of them had library cards and none of them had questions, but I got a few laughs out of them so I'm counting it as a success.

The second class was a lot better. At least ninety percent of them had library cards, they laughed more, and they had several questions. I opened the question portion by asking “Does anyone have questions about the library... or life in general?” and then one of the kids asked me what the meaning of life was. I walked into that. I told him it's to be good to people. He seemed satisfied.

The third class was similar to the first. They weren't very engaged, most of them didn't have library cards, and I think I only got two questions. The weirdest part was in the middle of the presentation when the morning announcements went off. All at once the kids stood up, turned to the flag, and started saying the Pledge of Allegiance. A few kids did not participate, either because they were too cool or because they were on the football team and were doing it in solidarity with the NFL. I'm leaning toward the too cool for school explanation.

After the last presentation I headed back to the library and got there a little before ten o'clock. I stopped by the third floor to hand off the candy and iPad to the teen librarian who was giving the next presentation, and told her how it went. She was a little annoyed that I may have gotten more laughs than she did.

The rest of the day kind of disappeared in a haze of tiredness. I caught up on emails, looked at stuff from the virtual conference yesterday, kinda sorta worked on my two presentations a little bit, had three walkthroughs, refilled my DVD display, emailed a survey for the last adulting class, emailed the patrons from the 3D printing class to let them know their printed things were ready to pick up, and I read some library-related articles.

I got off at four o'clock because I work this weekend and on the way home I stopped by my Mom's house to pick up my Qdoba leftovers from last night. I usually close on Thursday night so I leave my leftovers so I can eat them for dinner on Thursday. I forgot I wasn't closing tonight. So I grabbed those and headed home.

I watched some YouTube videos and then took a nap before dinner. With the rest of my night I watched YouTube videos, an episode of Eureka, a livestream, and played Rise of the Tomb Raider. I'm beginning to wonder how long the game is. I think the percentages I was seeing were related to the specific area I was currently in, not my progress on the entire game. I could speed-run it but I like finding all of the secrets.

It is now almost one o'clock in the morning because good grief. I'm going to record my audio journal and then go to bed. Tomorrow I've got a haircut but other than that my schedule is open. I would really like to put some time into my presentation for next week. My partner put up the beginnings of a slideshow today, so progress is being made.

October 18, 2017

 This morning six o'clock came way too soon. But I got to bed at a somewhat decent time last night, so it could have been worse.

I had to be at work at eight o'clock for a staff meeting. Turns out the staff meeting only consisted of a presentation by my boss and one of the other librarians in my department, so thirty minutes later we were done. I figured there would be more to the meeting because it seems like forever since we've had one, but nope. The presentation was about customer service, and it was good, but the best part of the meeting was before it actually started. The head of the maintenance department was sitting behind me and I heard this interaction:

• Maintenance Guy: “These things are child-proof aren't they?”
• Tech Guy: “What is it?”
• Maintenance Guy: “Just a damn stick of cheese but I can't open it.”

I laughed so hard.

I was on desk for an hour and then I went upstairs because I had registered for a virtual conference. It was the same virtual conference I attended last year. I think the theme this year was digital equity and minimizing the digital divide. The keynote focused on that and net neutrality and it was really interesting. After that I was only able to watched a couple short things before I had to go to lunch. Everything should be archived so I can go back at some point and check out some of the other sessions.

I went to lunch slightly late because I was talking to the teen librarian, so I got back from lunch slightly late. And then we went to do homebound. It went about the same as always. I did learn while talking to one of my patrons that one of the grocery stores in own may do curbside delivery, so you can order your groceries online and they'll bring it out to you. I know the grocery store that I currently go to does the curbside thing in other towns but I don't think they do it here. So I might need to check into this other grocery store. I'm kind of tired of getting screwed on produce late at night.

When we got back to the library we dropped all our books off and then I went to talk to one of the tech people about a new project that I might get to pawn off on one of our assistants. That would be great. And then I was on desk for an hour while everyone else went to the second staff meeting (we do one in the morning and one in the afternoon so everyone can go to it regardless of when they work). I had enough time to finish updating my spreadsheets with the bookmarks I got back from homebound today. So I'm way ahead of where I was last month, when I kind of forgot about it for weeks. Then I talked with my coworkers when they got back from the meeting until it was time to leave.

After work I picked up Qdoba and headed to my Mom's for dinner. We ate, talked, and watched videos. Good times as always. And then I came home, watched YouTube videos, and started writing this.

And now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can think about going to bed. I have to be at the library no later than 7:30AM tomorrow which means I need to leave my house really close to seven o'clock. It's going to be a rough morning. But it's better than the teen librarian who did the presentations this morning because she has about an hour long commute. I'm giving the same presentation to three different classes, so I'm sorry to the first class because that one probably won't be very great, but I should be decent by the third one.

October 17, 2017

 This morning I slept in a little bit and then watched a recorded livestream for awhile before getting ready, eating lunch, and going to work.

I was on desk for two hours but when I first got to work I ran around to get the whiteboard set up to advertise the tech drop-in and the signs put up for the healthy cooking class. When I finally got back to the desk I spent my time working on my conference presentation. I'm feeling a little better about it but it's still really up in the air. And time is running out. Yay.

When I was off desk it was time for tech drop-in. We had two patrons, I helped the old man while the new librarian helped a woman who came in a little later. The old man was the same one I helped during the ebooks class where we got a little distracted by YouTube. I helped him for an hour and forty-five minutes and in that time I learned more about him, which was pretty cool. He used to be an electrician in the army and went to a few different colleges to learn about electronics and programming. This was back when you programmed in binary or cards and then read the output in an array of small light bulbs. It was really interesting. I helped him with his Kindle Fire and found a book in our collection that would help him further. I also found an old book on Project Gutenberg that his grandpa used to think was funny and he was interested in reading it, and I put it on his Kindle for him. I also inadvertently taught him that the power cord for his Kindle could be unplugged from the plug and then plugged into a computer.

Following tech drop-in I went to dinner. When I got back I was on desk for an hour. I did stuff during that time and then I had two walkthroughs. In between those walkthroughs I started setting up for the class tonight. The teen librarian wasn't scheduled so I had to do all of the running around. We ended up having six people show up. Would have been nice if it there were more people but it could have been worse. The class itself was really good. I got some good tips on and resources and the people who attended seemed to like it.

The class ended at eight o'clock which gave me plenty of time to pick everything up and take care of several things before we closed. I restocked the DVD display, wrote down magazine information (because we're tracking what is being read), uploaded attendance statistics, wrote a Thank You note for the speaker tonight, and took a few notes about my day.

On the way home I got gas, because I needed gas. When I got home I ate a snack, clicked around the internet briefly, and then started writing this. It is late and I have to be at work tomorrow morning at eight o'clock for a staff meeting. That's going to be rough. And then Thursday I have to be at work by 7:30AM so I can do an outreach thing in the morning. So this week I close twice, open twice, and then I'm off on Friday. It's a weird week.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed.

October 16, 2017

 I took notes today but it was a fairly boring day. Which I guess is the best time to take notes because the boring days are the most forgettable.

I slept in this morning, finally getting out of bed around nine o'clock, and then I spent the rest of the morning watching old YouTube videos and reading some of the random articles I opened in new tabs and never got back to.

I went to work at one o'clock because I'm have to lose time for working this coming weekend. I was on desk for two hours and it took me that entire time to print out bookmarks, stuff them in books, and update my spreadsheets. I also had a few breaks in there to help patrons, but it was pretty much just homebound stuff. I love the service but it is such a time-sink every month.

On my walkthrough I refilled my DVD display and then ran around a little bit doing things I can't remember. I then I started looking at the book I got through ILL for my fake news presentation until it was time for my dinner break.

When I got back from dinner I continued looking at Infamous Scribblers, the book about the beginning of journalism in the United States. And then one of the other librarians and I tried to figure out the new admin copier. Not too long ago we got a new admin copier but it kept printing rainbow lines randomly across all full color prints. The rainbow being yellow, magenta, and cyan because I'm assuming it had something to do with the toner cartridges. The color was also really washed out. They tried replacing a few different things but it didn't work, so now we have another new copier. It's kind of annoying because we had all just figured out how to use the old new one. It took a few trips back and forth but we got to a point where we could reliably print things. It'll go quicker once I've done it a few times but right now it seems very convoluted. There are a lot of things that need to be clicked just to print something. And I think the new one is more convoluted than the old new one. But the print quality seems like an improvement over the old new one, so we're doing better.

The rest of the night went pretty quickly. I read more of Infamous Scribblers and a few articles from the library link of the day emails I get. Some of them were about Google, Facebook, and Twitter promoting misinformation following the Las Vegas shooting, and how poorly they dealt with fake news during the presidential election. Possible things to talk about during my fake news presentation. I also had a good conversation with the dad of the librarian who was hired with me and is now in Japan for three years.

At one point later in the night one of our regulars stopped by the desk. She said she had parked her car in our parking lot Sunday night and today it was gone. I didn't find any mention of it being towed, which I think is something that would have shown up on the staff blog, so she decided to call the police and I gave her the non-911 phone number. I'm hoping she just parked it somewhere else and forgot. She was with a guy who was a bit eccentric to say the least. He talked constantly and was pretty funny but also mildly inappropriate at times.

After work I went to the grocery store and tonight was easily the most disappointing in terms of their produce selection. I ended up with bagged cauliflower and baby carrots, a couple small things of broccoli, and red potatoes. I need to get over going during the day and go during the day when I can get more vegetables. I also had to get two smaller jars of peanut butter, because they didn't have the big jar. And they didn't have the bread I like. I've had better trips to the grocery store.

When I got home I put the groceries away, watched a few YouTube videos before switching to a Twitch stream, clicked around the internet, messaged with my latest match, and slowly got around to writing this. My sleep schedule continues to not be great this week. It is 12:17AM and I need to put a pin in this so I can record my audio journal and go to bed.

October 14, 2017

 This morning I woke up early because I had to. And I'm glad I got up earlier than I needed to because the cable guy ended up calling at 7:45AM so say he was on the way. I didn't go out and check his work but I think he ended up just patching the line in the two places it was cut through. I was a little worried that this was happening in the rain (and that it continued to rain throughout the day) because this all started when water got in the cable two weeks ago. So far it has survived the day so all seems well. Now they just need to come and bury it before the mowers come again.

While the cable guy was here I started making bread in my bread machine. I didn't get to try the bread until tonight but it turned out really good. It still looks kind of sad, which seems to be par for the course with bread machine bread. Previously I have made Italian bread and wheat bread, both of which were underwhelming. Today I made the white bread recipe and it is way better than the other two. The flavor and the consistency are both better. It's still not great for sandwich bread. I need to find a good sandwich bread recipe.

With the rest of my morning I read Turtles All The Way Down, watched YouTube videos, and took a nap. I was a little hesitant to leave with all the rain but after checking the basement several times I was satisfied enough that there wouldn't be another flood, so I went to do laundry. While I did laundry I read for awhile, took a brief nap, looked through the vegan cookbook I checked out from the library, and watched a couple episodes of Monk. I haven't seen that show in years and it is still funny.

I had planned on going to the grocery store before heading home but it was pouring rain so I went to Sonic for dinner instead. When I got home I ate dinner and continued watching YouTube videos. I am just now starting the last video to get me caught up on everything I missed. Good grief. While I watched videos I continued looking at the planner I want to get. I think I'm close to buying it. I'm still trying to figure out the cover, though.

And that was my night. I wanted to play Rise of the Tomb Raider but that's not a good game to play while watching videos. Maybe tomorrow. I need to be productive tomorrow, like working on my conference presentation. We'll see what happens.

October 13, 2017

 Today is Friday the 13^th. It seemed like it was a much bigger deal when I was a kid. Now the day seems to come around much more often. It's cool that it is in October because it goes along with Halloween, but for all I know it happens this way every year. I don't really pay that much attention.

This morning I woke up at 6:30AM intentionally. I will often set may alarm for 6:00AM and then lay there for half an hour, but today I decided to actually set it for 6:30AM, and I think it was a good choice.

When I got to work I did all of the usual opening stuff. It was very underwhelming. Then I spent the next two hours on desk. I worked on my fake news presentation a little more. I read more stuff and started rewatching one of the webinars. I'll need to rewatch both of them soon so I make sure I cover everything. I also helped the occasional patron but for the most part it was a fairly quiet morning.

I also wrote an incident report about the police officers looking for stolen things in the parking lot last night. Not long after that, a couple officers showed up to talk to the guy who is a potential suspect for hitting one of our employees in the back. There is apparently no resolution at this point, so we need to keep acting civil, but the one plus is that we know his name now. He always uses a guest pass so we've never been able to get his name.

When I got off desk I had a walkthrough and then had a little bit of time to pull homebound books. For one of my patrons I kept repeatedly not finding the books I had on my sheet. I was later able to find most of them in large print, which reduced my stress a little bit. There were also a few books that should have been on the shelf but I couldn't find them, so I put a hold on them in the hopes that circulation will have better luck than I did.

After lunch I was on desk for another two hours. Those two hours were highlighted by two patrons. The first wanted plans for building a wooden carry case for a shotgun. I was unsuccessful. I found a lot of pictures and vague plans but nothing specific. The patron said he needed exact plans because he was going to take them to a builder to make the case. My two main ideas were to find plans for a guitar case that could be tweaked or to find a smaller box or case that could be scaled up. He wasn't interested in either option. We also took a look at some of our woodworking and gun books but none of that worked for the patron. I wanted to get his information so I could keep looking and contact him later but he wasn't interested. Oh well.

The other patron was looking for practice material for the driving test. She is not a native English speaker and said that the handbook was useful but the actual questions on the test were confusing in how they were worded. So she wanted more experience with those. Turns out there is a whole bunch of helpful books to stuff for the CDL test but very little for the regular driving test. I found one book that sounded really promising but it wasn't on the shelf. I put a hold on it for her so I'm once again hoping the skills of the circulation workers will trump mine.

When I got off desk I pulled more homebound books and then went upstairs for about twenty minutes to do some stuff. Then I had a walkthrough and pulled the rest of my homebound books. I got all of the books bagged up but I still need to print/cut/stuff bookmarks and update my spreadsheets. I should have plenty of time to get that done.

It took until the last fifteen minutes of the day but I remembered to send the survey about the workshop last night. I had completely forgotten about it. I also completely forgotten about wanting to restock the DVD display again. I ended up doing that right at five o'clock when I should have been going home. Don't tell my boss.

The one-on-one tech trainer occasionally gets braille materials. A few weeks ago she gave me a card with the alphabet on it and today she gave me a large pamphlet that is entirely in braille. I have no idea what it says but I intend to find out. My main worry is that it won't be written in just the alphabet but use shorthand, which I am not very familiar with. But I'll figure it out. Or get distracted by some other interest.

I am now at my Mom's house so I can write this and check a few internet things. I just got the call confirming my service call tomorrow morning. It will be nice having the internet again. I'm two days behind on YouTube videos. It was a pain last time and I only missed one weekday of videos. This time I'm missing two. I just hope they get around to burying the cable this time.

Now I'm going to go home and eat dinner. With my night, I'm probably going to watch DVDs and maybe play a video game. I also want to read more of Turtles All The Way Down. Whatever I end up doing, I'll be getting to bed at a decent time because I need to wake up early for the service call.

October 12, 2017

 This morning I woke up early, went out to the living room, put on Spotify's Autumn August playlist, and started reading Turtles All The Way Down. I'm about fifty pages in but have decided I need to go back and start writing down all of the good quotes. I could start from where I'm at but there have already been several, and it shouldn't take me too long to skim through what I've already read.

Around 9:30AM I heard the mowers and shortly after that my music stopped playing. It is a very first world problem to say my mowers cut my internet cable, but it is also a personal problem, and I'm annoyed. I feared when the strung the cable across the yard that something like this would happen. They missed it the last time and I was hoping this time was just a coincidence and that my router needed to be reset. But it wasn't my router. After my shower I went and walked along the cable. It was cleanly sliced through about halfway along the line and it was completely chewed through near the post. Once wasn't good enough apparently.

Rather than trying customer service again, which would just have me restart my router and then give me a service time sometime next week, I told my sister and she got on Twitter again. Based on my schedule they weren't able to come until Saturday, but it's Saturday from 8:00AM to 10:00AM. I'll be at work most of tomorrow so this is better than a couple weeks ago. Still annoying though. Hopefully it will get buried more quickly this time. One funny thing came of my sister's Twitter conversation. After telling them the cable had been cut in two places they told her I would be charged $75 for the visit if the problem ended up being something inside the house. I'm fairly confident the problem is with the cable being cut in two places.

When I got to work I caught up on emails and the staff blog. Then I read a few news articles before I was on desk for two hours. In that time I helped one patron find a book, I helped another with her resume on the computer, and I worked on homebound stuff.

After my desk shift we had a meeting at the desk with the teen librarian. She made a presentation for us to show next week at our outreach and she wanted to go over it with us. It ended up taking about an hour. The information didn't take that long but there was the occasional patron to help and a lot of random tangents that were mostly library-related.

When I got back from dinner I was on desk again. I continued working on homebound stuff. After the hour on desk I had a couple walkthroughs and in all of that time I was just able to finish my homebound list. Tomorrow I might be able to pull my books but I'm on desk for four hours, which really cuts into my book-pulling time. We'll see.

After my last walkthrough I went to the classroom because we had our 3D printing workshop tonight. By the end of it we had twelve people show up, which is really good for an evening class. Or for any class actually. The presenter, who works for our library system, covered a whole bunch of information about 3D printing and then the attendees were able to look at and play with different software for making 3D models. They had the option of picking one of the already made files or creating their own, and then having it printed for them. Surprisingly only five or six people chose to do that. Overall, I think it went really well. I'm going to send out the survey tomorrow so we'll find out what everyone thought.

I had enough time to upload statistics and the attendee list before we closed. After we closed there were a couple cop cars in our parking lot. I went over to talk to one of the officers and apparently some stuff had been stolen at the high school and they found one of the phones in our bushes. They didn't need anything from us and as we walked away several teen girls with their mothers showed up. I'm assuming they are the victims. Tomorrow I'll tell my boss and possibly write up an incident report just so everyone is aware that this happened.

I am now at my Mom's, using the internet, but I will shortly be leaving so I can go home, record my audio journal, and go to bed. I open tomorrow, which I'm not looking forward to, but at least I'll get off at five o'clock.

October 11, 2017

 Last night I woke a couple times and my feet were freezing. I usually sleep with my feet hanging off the end of the bed (but still under the covers) so I pulled them up from the edge, threw another blanket over the end of my bed, and I turned on my space heater. That's the first time I've had to do that since last winter but I think my house was somewhere around 62 degrees, which was obviously too cold for my feet.

I woke up a little earlier than normal so I could go get a flu shot before work. I got there at exactly 8:30AM but had to park in a spot off the street because the parking lot was full. And the one spot off the street had a big mud puddle right where I needed to step to get out of my car. I probably looking like an idiot getting out and later getting back into my car while trying to avoid the mud.

As for the shot itself, it took less than five minutes for the whole process. Unfortunately the nurse jabbed me like I had just broken up with her best friend. I could immediately feel it start to stiffen up and hurt. Which only increased throughout the day. Now it just feels like I got punched really hard.

I got to work really early so I ended up going upstairs and listening to music for awhile before I came back down to be on desk when we opened. I was on desk for two, very uneventful hours. I helped a patron with the microfilm, I answered one phone call, and I answered one question via chat. In between all of that I read some fake news stuff and got on a website, that looked like it was made in the '90s, about about the moon landing was faked. On the site, people who believe we landed on the moon are referred to as skeptics. I thought that was an interesting twist.

When I got off desk I had a couple hours free so I went upstairs to zone out with some music and be productive. And that happened. I started by getting slightly sidetracked by a conversation with the teen librarian. We talked about an upcoming outreach thing next week, some other random work stuff, and then just life stuff. It was a good talk. Then I went and worked on an outline for my fake news presentation. It is super basic right now but it is the start I needed. I'm feeling good about it.

After lunch I read library magazines until our staff meeting. In the meeting we talked about the book chapter we read, gave out kudos, talked about one of our policies, got an update on how to submit our plans for programs, and then talked about ideas, both big and small, for the future of the library. We each wrote down a few ideas on a piece of paper, then passed it to our left, built on the new ideas in front of us, passed to the left, and so on and so forth until we had expanded on the ideas of everyone else. And then we talked about some of them. It was a fairly productive and interesting discussion.

After the meeting I had a walkthrough which allowed me the chance to refill my DVD display. I also refilled the staff picks display, the bestsellers, and wrote down all the magazines that had been read, because we're keeping track of that right now. I then spent the rest of the hour talking to a fellow librarian about journals and planners, almost read a magazine, and copied a few pages about readers advisory for different genres from one of the magazines I had read earlier.

At six o'clock I went to Qdoba, and then headed to my Mom's house for dinner. We ate food, talked, watched YouTube videos, and at eight o'clock I headed home. My goal was to quickly knock this out and record my audio journal so I could start reading Turtles All The Way Down. By the way, that arrived today. Only a day late. Only.

It is now 9:40PM because I got distracted by videos, so I probably won't get very much reading done tonight. But I don't work until noon tomorrow and I will most likely wake up at a decent time so I should be able to read a little before work. I'm looking forward to it.

October 10, 2017

 We are in a bit of a cold snap here and it took awhile to find the motivation to get out from under the covers. But I found that motivation and eventually went to work.

I thought about taking notes today but it was kind of a slow day with not a lot going on. It was also extra quiet because the air conditioner wasn't on all day (due to the cold nature of the weather outside).

A lot of my day was spent reading articles that were library-related in one way or another. Most of them had some connection to fake news because I'm still coming up with ideas for my presentation. I also talked with my coworkers a lot. I wanted to hide upstairs so there weren't those distractions but that didn't really work out. So there was a lot of distraction.

I took a break from the article reading to restock my DVD display a few times and I even had to refill my second floor display, which is unexpected because I was not expecting to have to do that this month. Hence the use of the word “unexpected.”

In unfortunate news, I learned that over the weekend the newest librarian in our department was called a “whore” over the phone because she couldn't find the answer that the caller wanted. And second, one of the girls in circulation was punched in the back after we closed on Sunday night while walking away from the library. Based on the description of the puncher, it sounds like the guy who is in everyday, all day, who has a tendency to fall asleep, can be disruptive while at the computers, and can get to the point where he smells pretty bad. In the last week or so we have gotten very close to asking him to leave for the day based on the sleeping thing because we can't be spending half our day waking the same person up over and over again. But, if he does turn out to be the puncher, that would earn him at the very least a six month bad, possibly even a lifetime ban. I know patrons have received extended bans just for being verbally abusive, so I imagine physically attacking a library employee would have severe repercussions, as well as legal repercussions if the employee decides to press charges. The blog post about the incident was posted after admin had left for the day so we'll see what happens tomorrow.

John Green's new books, Turtles All The Way Down, came out today. I pre-ordered it ages ago when pre-ordering went live for it, and it was supposed to be delivered today. It even said out for delivery and was expected to arrive before 8:00PM. Well, it is now 8:55PM and the status has been changed to an estimated delivery between today and Thursday. What the hell? My plans for the evening were to eat dinner and then stay up way too late reading a book. I fulfilled the first part of that, and my dinner was very tasty, but then I fell back to watching YouTube videos and looking a planners and journals. I'm mildly annoyed because I've been waiting for this book. I would be less annoyed if they had been more realistic about the delivery date. And not said it was out for delivery all day when it clearly wasn't.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can get that out of the way, and then maybe play a little Rise of the Tomb Raider. I want to get to bed at a decent time because I have to wake up early to go get a flu shot. The new assistant said that she went this morning and they had run out. Hopefully that isn't the case tomorrow morning. I imagine I would find that mildly annoying.

October 9, 2017

 I took notes today. That should make this go much quicker. Depending on how distracted I get.

Waking up this morning sucked and I yawned so many times throughout the morning at work. I tried to help myself wake up a little bit by driving to work with the windows down and the music up. The crisp air helped but the yawning was still a thing.

I traded more pencils with circulation so I had something to sharpen. I also had to go out to secure some plastic bags over parking signs. The signs usually indicate library vehicle parking but we wanted to free up those spots today. They had bags over them but it was a windy day (one of them had already blown off) and my boss wanted me to secure them. She handed me some rubber bands and a few paperclips. I secured the two that were still on and had to get a step ladder to put the third bag over the sign so I could secure it. The signs are probably nine feet tall, which is ridiculous because that makes them really easy to miss when you pull in with a car.

Not long after getting back in my boss had me resize a poster for her. She made it 8.5” x 11” and wanted it to be 11” x 17”, so I resized it really quick and printed it off for her. Then I helped the occasional patron. The first two patrons that came up looking for books, several minutes apart and completely independent from one another, both wanted books with the same call number (but different authors). It was much easier finding the second book because I knew exactly where to look. Another patron wanted a book that was listed as non-circulating and in technical services. I called up there and the technical services manager said it had actually been taken down to the director's office last week. So my boss called the director and she wasn't using it so she brought it over. We checked it out as a reference book, which means he can only have it for one week and there are big overdue fees, but I don't think it was technically a reference book. Oh well, incentive to bring it back on time.

With the rest of my morning I read fake news stuff. After lunch I had two free hours so I went upstairs to the cubicle so I could listen to music and read the next chapter in the book that we are reading for our department meeting. I feel like this book would be much more effective if we didn't stretch it out so much. We only read one chapter a month and for awhile there, maybe over the summer, we stopped reading it. I have forgotten far more than I actually remember.

When I was back on desk I had a patron call asking about one thing, which I helped her with, but then she seemed to get distracted and started telling me about today's Dr. Phil episode. It was interesting.

In my last hour of work I continued looking at fake news stuff and then I messed with the Spring schedule. I added in tech drop-in dates and then updated the printed schedule I have. I also added in the off-site classes that the one-on-one tech lady does. This semester is flying by. As is life.

For dinner I made a repeat of the last thing I made, minus the fake chicken. I roasted the rest of my broccoli and carrots, made rice, scrambled some eggs, and threw in the last little bit of cheese I had. The cheese isn't really that noticeable because there is so little of it but I'm glad I made it through all of it this time.

After dinner I played more Rise of the Tomb Raider. It is such an easy came to get sucked into because there are so many side quests and random things to find. I went from 14% complete to 24% complete. Progress.

And now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I am hoping to be less tired tomorrow. We'll see how that goes.

October 8, 2017

 This morning I woke up early and managed not to take a nap the entire day. I'm a little surprised by that. I spent my morning catching up on The Orville, and then I watched Life and Spider-Man: Homecoming. I enjoyed Life. I didn't really look into it much and had kind of forgotten it even existed. Then I remembered that Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal were in a movie together, and they are two of my favorite actors. It was kind of a terrifying movie. Makes me glad I'm not an astronaut playing with life from other planets. I also liked the ending. I guessed it later than I should have but I liked it. As for Spider-Man: Homecoming, I really enjoyed it. The new actor is well cast and the movie was really funny. I'm looking forward to the next one.

While I watched that stuff I create a bookcase cube in Hexels. I haven't played around with Hexels in forever and yesterday during my deep dive into DeviantArt I saw a cool bookcase cube and I decided to recreate it in Hexels. It took hours but I made it. It doesn't look as cool as the one on DeviantArt but it turned out how I wanted it to. I think it would be cool to make something in Hexels and then put it in another program to draw over it to make it look cooler. Like add more shading and detail. I need to spend more time with Hexels, though, because it's pretty cool but I'm barely scratching the surface.

After a late lunch (because I was working on the picture and forgot I was hungry) I played Rise of the Tomb Raider. I really liked the last game but waited until I could get a decent price on the new one because I'm cheap like that. I watched a livestream of the first part of the game and I haven't gotten farther than that in my playthrough, but it has been so long that I'm getting a vague sense of deja vu as I play. It's weird. But it's fun. I was a little worried at the beginning because the camera shake was horrendous and I didn't think I was going to be able to play the game. It was making me a tad nauseous. Apparently they didn't have an option to reduce that when the game first came out because there was a lot of complaining about it online. Once I found that option in the menu the game was much more bearable. You can't get rid of it completely, which I don't understand, but it's better. I don't get why camera shake or head movement or whatever is added to games because our brain compensates for head movement in real life. When we are staring out into the world and walking down the street, the world is not bobbing up and down. It doesn't need to bob up and down in a video game.

Tonight I started re-watching Eureka because I pulled it out last weekend when I didn't have the internet and I've just been staring at it. It's been long enough that I don't immediately remember everything and I didn't see a lot of it near the end I don't think, so maybe I can make it there this time around. While I watched Eureka I played Terraria. I made it through two Blood Moons and I got really deep into a jungle biome. I also may have cheated in a few things to make my life easier. Like a couple bags that will automatically hold coins and certain materials so it frees up inventory space. And a couple things that allow me to summon more minions. I have been able to have two flying guys previously but tonight for some reason only one would come out at a time. So I got a couple things and now I can have four minions at once. It's great.

It is now 10:45PM and I need to wrap this up so I can go to bed. I open in the morning and I'm not looking forward to it.

October 7, 2017

 Today was another Saturday. I woke up around 7:30AM and spent the morning catching up on YouTube videos and playing a bit of Terraria. Then I spent the afternoon at my Mom's doing laundry. While the clothes got clean I read a book, watched Star Trek: Voyager, and took a nap.

I took the long way home so I could listen to music and then when I got home I put my clothes away and ironed my pants so I don't have to worry about it next week. Then I made dinner. I cooked rice and eggs and added that to my leftovers from the other night with a little bit of cheese, because I need to use it before it goes bad. It was tasty.

Tonight I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and it was worth it just for the opening scene with tiny Groot dancing. It was fantastic. The rest of the movie was pretty good as well. Now I'm watching Overdrive. I'm about halfway through it and it isn't as bad as I was expecting. I was expecting it to be really cheesy, and it is kind of cheesy, but it reminds me of Gone in 60 Seconds and The Transporter movies, which are cheesy, but I think they're great. I probably won't ever watch this movie again but it's not bad.

While watching things, I looked at notebook covers. I want to get a Hobonichi planner so I can keep better track of my work stuff, and I want to get a cover for it. They have had some cool covers in the past but they come out with new ones every year and I don't really like any of them for 2018. On Etsy I found some cool tweed ones. There are a crazy number of color options and a couple different style options, which has me over-thinking everything, but I've got a couple months before 2018 rolls around so there's no rush.

And now Overdrive is over. It had a happy ending but I'm a little confused by the plot. I can work out what happened but it was all a little too convenient. I'll get over it and quickly forget about it.

October 6, 2017

 This will be a short entry because there wasn't a lot going on today.

I slept in, probably getting nine or ten hours of sleep, and I really needed it.

At work most of my day was spent looking at stuff related to fake news, trying to come up with ideas for my presentation. I'm getting closer to actually working on the presentation. But I also need to work on my conference presentation. It's a juggling act I haven't figured out yet.

I had my monthly meeting with my boss today. It went well. Not a lot had changed since last month. She did acknowledge how busy my last month was, so that was nice.

I had some time before my dinner break so I cleaned out my inbox and came across my homebound bookmarks from last month. I had completely forgot about them and never got around to entering in all the feedback into my spreadsheets. I managed to finish that tonight. I also updated most of the return dates for the books because I was off a day. I was off a day on the bookmarks I made last month and had to write in the correct date by hand, but I hadn't thought to check the computer record, and it makes sense that it was off as well because I had gotten the bookmark date from the computer record. But everything is good now.

I tried watching usability videos but the site we use was acting up so I finally gave up because it was an incredible waste of time. It was taking forever to load a video and then the CSS was broken (in the recording, not on our website, however that happens) so I put a picture of the meme “Ain't nobody got time for that” into my spreadsheet where I write down issues I spot, and moved on with my life.

I ended up watching several climbing videos when I got back from dinner. Another librarian and I were both trying to avoid work and we got on the topic of rock climbing and I mentioned bouldering, so I pulled up a few videos, and then we switched to speed climbing, and then one finger pullups with a fingerboard. It was a rabbit hole, but we both needed it.

When I got home I ate a snack and watched YouTube videos. Now I'm writing this and occasionally checking my basement because it is raining pretty hard outside. So far the makeshift cover on my window well is doing its job but I'm going to continue to periodically check it and probably won't go to bed until the majority of the storm has passed. Yay.

October 5, 2017

 I forgot to mention that last night when I got home I called my friend, because I had missed his call during dinner. He was going out on the ship today and won't be back until May. By the time I got back to him he was on his way to meet his brother for dinner so we only got to talk for a little bit, but it's better than nothing.

This morning I opened at the library and I traded circulation some sharp pencils for some of their unsharpened ones so I had something to sharpen. I would say it was a fair trade. And I got to sharpen about sixty pencils, so I was happy.

I think overall I was still recovering from a lack of sleep because today felt like I was just trying to get to five o'clock. Most of my morning was spent upstairs. And a lot of that was spent finishing my Publisher picture editing to show what I think our library should do in terms of signage. I even went downstairs a couple times to take pictures so I could add signs on top of them. I spent way more time on it than I should have but I think I'm done now. Unless another idea comes to me.

I also briefly looked at the future event scheduling system (which looks a lot better than the current one) and I started looking into my fake news presentation. I only have a little over a month to get that sorted out. And I've got less than a month to figure out my conference presentation. The stress level will be slowly ramping up over the next month. Can't wait.

Two things broke the monotony of the day. The first was five minutes after my boss told me I was in charge of the library because she was going to lunch and the director and assistant director were gone. And then the power in the entire building blinked out. Thankfully it quickly came back on and everything went back to normal. It could have been much worse.

The second thing was a bunch of teenagers playing tag throughout the library. I talked to one or two of them a couple times, one of the other librarians talked to a couple, and the teen librarian spoke to them, but they kept it up. I eventually had a walkthrough and tracked them down. I caught one girl heading up the stairs and she was trying to ignore my presence so I ended up having to say “Hey, come down here,” and I felt really old. I then ran into the whole group of them and was able to talk to them and tell them they needed to stop. One of the kids I have met before because he was hanging out with the two teen sisters we have had issues with over the past couple of months upstairs. He's a super friendly kid and seems to have a decent head on his shoulders, he just needs to be careful of his company. He introduced himself again and I shook his hand but held onto it and continued the handshake a little longer so I could talk to him without him walking off. It felt like a very dad move, but it worked.

And that was my day at work. At least the broad overview of it. It was a very long/slow day and I would have preferred to just stay home and take an eight hour nap.

On my way home I stopped by Target to get more cheese sticks and they still don't have the big package so I had to get the small one again. This time I bought three, just in case I don't make it back to the store this weekend. I also bought some Beyond Meat chicken strips. At some point I want to try their burger but they only have it at one of the grocery stores. I also thought the chicken would go well with my dinner. When I got home I roasted broccoli and carrots and scrambled some eggs and made the chicken. I didn't mix it together but that will be my dinner on Saturday. I also thought after the fact that I should have made some brown rice but it worked out without the rice. I'm not sure how I feel about the chicken. It wasn't bad but I think I've had better. I also don't know that my body appreciates soy that much, so over the last year I've kind of gotten away from fake meat.

After dinner I played Terraria and watched YouTube videos. Once again I made it through yesterday's videos but still have a lot from today. I should be able to catch up this weekend. Maybe. I kind of wish I could do a mini-hibernation over the weekend and wake up rejuvenated on Monday. I don't foresee that happening.