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.