January 12, 2018

 I slept in this morning, ran on the elliptical for fifteen minutes, ate a quick early lunch, and then went to work. I was on desk for two hours when I got to work. I answered phone calls, helped a regular patron print directions, talked to someone from the senior center about their tax service, and worked on my homebound list. Then I had a walkthrough and finished a short story that I have been trying to finish for awhile.

While I was sitting at the table reading, the librarian on desk got a phone call that, from my perspective, started off pretty mundane, and then took a turn. It was a man and he asked if we had any books on corporal punishment. We have a few parenting books and most of them are anti-spanking. Then he asked if we had any books on adult spanking... that's the turn. That went down a rabbit hole of erotica and BDSM. It didn't come across as a prank call, so to each their own. But the librarian kind of lost it after she hung up and had a good laugh.

I had a good conversation with two of my coworkers about a bunch of random things. It started with a discussion of the book The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn. It's getting a lot of buzz, possibly the next Girl on the Train or Gone Girl, and one of the librarians read it. I have no intention of reading it so she was telling me about it, and it sounds like it would make a really intriguing short story. The librarian said she almost gave up on it halfway through because it just kept dragging on, but she thought the ending was interesting. My initial guess on the ending was wrong but I would say it was as good as the actual ending. After that, the conversation moved from talking about a show that theorized that John Wilkes Booth wasn't actually killed and lived quite awhile down in Texas, to the assassination of Kennedy and 9/11, to WWII, PTSD, homelessness, and abused children. It was a good conversation.

On my way back from dinner I very nearly got in an accident. Thank goodness for anti-lock brakes. There was a truck in front of me that was stopped to turn at the same spot that I needed to. I started braking early but it was on a brick road, which are apparently as slick as ice rinks when there is snow on them. My tires stopped moving but my car kept sliding forward, always a disconcerting feeling. The anti-lock brakes kicked in and I was able to slowly guide my car just to the right of the truck in front of me, coming to a stop just past his bumper, so it definitely would have been an accident if I hadn't been able to turn. But I realized I wasn't too freaked out about it because at the time I was whistling along to a song, and I never stopped whistling.

With the rest of the night I talked to one of the other librarians about random things for an hour and then I was on desk for two hours. I spent that time updating the tax information handout for this year and then reading a few articles. I realized when I got home that I should have continued working on my homebound list but I completely forgot about that. We don't go out until Wednesday so I should have plenty of time to get everything done next week.

When I got home my garage door wouldn't shut. I tried cleaning the sensors and holding down the button on the wall but neither worked. So much for remembering that trick. I dug out the manual but it ended up just being an installation manual and didn't include troubleshooting. I searched around the internet and found a bunch of unhelpful information but eventually stumbled on a video that mentioned turning up the closing force (or something like that). In cold weather I guess the grease or whatever lubricant is used, can thicken up and not work as well. I brought my ladder up from the basement and climbed up to look at the garage door opener. It is different than the one in the video but had the up and down force adjustments, so I turned up the down force and that seemed to do the trick because the door went down after that. Before I found that video I had kind of thought I would end up having to leave the door open all night, so I brought all my valuable stuff inside (router table, air compressor, jigsaw, foldable workbench, saw horses), but then I got the door down, so I had to move everything back out. I may have been able to pull the emergency cord, but I was reading that it wasn't safe to do that when the door is up, because if the spring is broken, the door will come slamming down. That actually happened when I was younger at my Mom's old house. So I wasn't going to mess with that. And I didn't have to.

I relaxed after that by playing some CoD: WW2 for the first time since Monday. It was fun. I got in the top three several times in different game modes and even went decently positive with a shotgun in hardcore Free For All. That mode is like a completely different game and I need to play more of it. It is definitely the best way to unlock camo for shotguns, and I still think it is the easiest way to unlock the initial camo selections for the first sniper rifle. I might play around with that more tomorrow. I also play more 1v1 in the headquarters and I'm now one win away from finishing that challenge. I stuck around for a little while after my last match but no one would play me. Annoying.

I watched YouTube videos after that and started writing this. And then I stopped watching YouTube videos and continued writing this because the videos were far too distracting and it is now one o'clock in the morning. I'm tired.