Wednesday, November 22, 2017

November 22, 2017

 Last night I got eight hours of sleep and it was great. Any day I can wake up without an alarm is welcome.

I spent my morning watching YouTube videos and clicking around the internet. I went to work at noon and ended up taking an impromptu route through town because the normal road I take was closed and I had to detour right after leaving my house. The route ended up being quicker than my usual one but it involved sitting at a lot more red lights. I don't know if it's worth that annoyance. And, who know what the traffic is like on a normal day when it isn't right before a holiday where a bunch of people leave town. I might try it again. We'll see.

When I got to work I had two walkthroughs. On the second one I woke a sleeper up and ended up having to shake the table he was leaning on because he was completely out, snoring and all, and my raised voice was having no effect.

Then I was on desk for two hours. Most of that time was spent watching usability videos for our website. At the end of that two hours I got a real reference. An old lady called and said she had a cobalt blue glass dish in the shape of a bull's head and she wanted to know more about it. She prefaced that by saying she didn't think it was much of a question. I then got a little more information from her and told her I would do some research and call her back because it was going to take me a little bit.

When I got off desk I went upstairs and dug into the antique glass world. My best guess is that the dish was made from a mold by the LG Wright Glass Company in the 1960s. This mold was based on a pattern from Atterbury & Company which was patented in 1888. LG Wright, although a glass company, didn't actually make glass things, they just made molds, and they outsourced the making of stuff using those molds to other glass companies. The company began in 1937 and went out to business in 1999, at which point assets, including their molds, went to auction. And, fun fact, the original design of the bulls head had a spoon, and when placed in the dish, the handle came out of the bull's mouth and looked like a tongue. Kind of clever.

After dinner, I was on desk for another two hours, and really for the rest of the night because I didn't have any walkthroughs. In that time I finished watching usability videos. In total, I watched 200 videos today. Too many. I reformatted a long list of phone numbers that we got from the former PR person. It's a list of who you should call for various emergencies, concerns, and random things, like if you smell gas or your neighbor has a non-working car parked in their driveway. The original list was just a Word document and kind of hard to read because you had to trace your finger all the way across the page and hope you got the right number. I put it in Excel, shaded every other line, and made a few more tweaks, so it is much easier to tell at a glance which number you need to call.

I also went back to messing with a better layout for my homebound spreadsheets. It has been months since I worked on that project and it took me awhile to remember what I was doing. I had buttons that activated macros that showed or hid particular rows. Once I got that sorted out I worked on the formatting and I think I have something that I like. It's clean and simple. I'm going to get some feedback on it after the holiday, and see if I still like it after the holiday, and then maybe start reformatting all of my spreadsheets.

It was a really quiet night at the library. The ticking of the clock next to our desk became very apparent. There was a brief period of time where a patron came in to use the computers and would violently cough every few seconds (and he refused a cough drop from another patron), but he eventually left and we were back to silence.


When I got home I watched videos, looked at video game sales, because I think every site I look at is having a sale, and now I'm writing this. I am tired and have developed a headache, so I'm looking forward to going to bed. It's going to be nice.

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