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.