January 2, 2018

By some miracle, I actually ran on the elliptical this morning. I'll admit, I laid in bed for awhile after my alarm went off, but I did eventually get up. It helps that I'm not up to the point of running for thirty or forty-five minutes. That's when the struggle will be real.

According to my car it was negative one degree outside on my drive to work. Needless to say, I did not drive with the windows down.

When I got to work I did opening things. It took me awhile to print the room schedule, and I had to do it twice because it wasn't quite right the first time. And then I didn't get to sharpen very many pencils because the director came over to talk to my boss and I didn't want to be rude and make them shout over the sound of the sharpener.

I was on desk for the first two hours and it was surprisingly busy. I caught up on emails, both the reference account and my own. I also dealt with several phone calls and helped a patron print concert tickets. Other than that I didn't really accomplish much because it was just a constant stream of work.

Then I had a walkthrough and pulled some books to fill out the inspirational display. Right before lunch I got into a conversation with the lady who lives across the street, is often late getting off the computers, and kind of treats the library like an extension of her house. She went to a community square dance on News Years Eve and she told me all about it.

I was off desk for two hours when I got back from lunch and almost all of that time was spent working on my biography display. I pulled thirty books for it, took down the old display and made sure all of the books were accounted for (and added ten of them to my display because they were on my list, too), and put out my signs and books. I also talked to my boss and coworkers a bit, which added to the time it took me.

Right before getting on desk again I started looking at the library's button makers, which then carried over into my time on desk. The PR lady had said they were broken but hadn't specified any details. There is a bigger one and a smaller one, but no parts for the smaller one, so I could only experiment with the bigger one. Based on the few messed up buttons that were with the supplies, my best guess for both, is that the paper circle (that is the image of the button) wasn't big enough. This led to issues of the image not fully covering the button if it wasn't lined up perfectly, and I think it didn't provide enough surface area for the plastic to grab onto. I could be wrong though. I made two buttons and they turned out fine, but because I don't know what the actual issues were, I may be missing the actual problem. Or maybe I just got lucky with those two and over time the actual problem would present itself.

When I was done messing with that, I spent the rest of my time on desk formatting the new book kit list, which consists of the book kits we can borrow from other libraries, typically for book clubs.

I had a walkthrough during my last hour and spent a decent amount of time talking to the teen librarian and one of the childrens librarians in the childrens room. It was kind of nice to have a little human interaction after four days with almost none.

Before I left for the day I went upstairs to call one of my homebound patrons back. She hasn't wanted books for the past two months I think and she ran out of her own books. I told her we would be back out again in two weeks (her response was “Oh, agony”) and I offered to drop some off on my way home but she said she would just re-read some of her books.

On my way home I made three stops. The first was to get gas. The second was to pick up a few things at Target. And the third was to get a Powerball ticket because the pot is up to $440 million. I haven't bought a ticket in awhile, and I don't know that I will get back in the practice of it, but I had two dollar bills in my pocket, so it was meant to be. I am obviously not going to win, but it is still fun to think about.

When I got home, I made dinner. I got the rice going and pre-heated the oven while I cut up vegetables. While the vegetables were roasting I went out to my garage and put air in my tires because the negative temperatures finally caught up to them. I also managed to wash all of my dishes before the vegetables were done, leaving only the vegetable pan, the rice pot, and bowl/fork/cup I used for dinner to clean afterward. It is so much nicer cleaning as I go.

While I ate dinner I watched YouTube videos and a livestream. Then I played a little CoD: WW2. It was noob central tonight and more often than not I ended up with them on my team. But I still had fun. I was a little annoyed that they had gotten rid of all of the winter event stuff. I thought today was the last day, and it was still there this morning, but I'm guessing it ended at noon or something. Oh well, I got what I wanted out of the unlockable things last night.

It is now nearing 11:45PM and I am tired, so I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed. It is much simpler recording the video portion of the audio journal without a video game. It only took me a year to figure that out.