February 21, 2018

This morning I woke up before my alarm so I played Subnautica for about an hour before running on the elliptical and getting ready. In that time I built my first Seamoth (a one-person submarine), and also had my first Seamoth destroyed by a scary sea creature. Luckily I wasn't killed, but it was close. Then, I managed to gather the resources for a second Seamoth, which came very close to being destroyed by another scary sea creature. The second time around it only did 60% damage, as opposed to 90%, and I was able to get away and repair it. Fool me once and all that. I'm going to be more careful now, and hopefully avoid avoidable accidents.

When I got to work I had two walkthroughs. When I wasn't doing that, I refilled my DVD and Mystery displays, and I also refilled the tax instruction books. And then it was time to deliver homebound books. Our first stop was a small, hole-in-the-wall bookstore. I don't know how profitable it is but it's the kind of place I would like to have when I retire (as long as I wasn't depending on the income). I could just hang out and read and maybe sell a book or two. After that it was business as usual, just driving around, talking, and delivering books.

When we got back I got all the bookmarks out of the books, and left the books with circulation. Then I returned some large print books and the van keys to the basement and talked with a couple people down there for a little bit. Not long after that it was time for dinner.

After dinner I was on desk for two hours (and more than that because yeah, night stuff with only two people working in our department). A decent amount of that time was spent coming up with a template for making physical buttons (with a button machine). I wanting to have a masking layer, so you could take a square picture, center it how you wanted, and then put it behind the masking layer, leaving you with a round image and a black outline to cut along. It involved a lot of math and converting inches to pixels and using an online photo editor to create the masking layer that I then dropped into Publisher, and it's not perfect, but I think it's passable. I did a test print and it looked good, but I didn't actually try making a button. I also found that the black and white printer doesn't print at the correct size (and inch in Publisher turned out to be significantly less when printed from that printer) but thankfully the color printer was pretty much spot-on.

I got a brief start on updating homebound stuff but then there was another situation with one of our front doors. I think it was the last time I worked that the elbow joint on the door broke. In that case we just locked the door and all was well. There was actually a repairman there today fixing it. But tonight the lock fell out of the door. What the hell. The custodian looked at it and couldn't get it back on securely but decided we could just set it back in place and lock the door. This was relayed to me over the phone and it sounded good to me. Later on in the night he came up and gave me the lock and I decided I would go down and take a look. It took me about five seconds to stick my finger in the hole left by the lock and discover and little lever. It didn't appear to do anything but when I locked the door from the inside, I was able to unlock it from the outside by pushing on the lever. So that wasn't good.

We couldn't get ahold of the head of the maintenance department, but that wasn't surprising because it was getting late and he's usually at the library by three or four in the morning. I tried calling my boss but she was picking up her son and didn't answer, so I called her house and her husband said he would track her down. She ended up coming in later but we had just solved the problem. We called the assistant director in the meantime and he stopped by to look at the problem. I ended up suggesting we just lock it and tie the two doors together. The assistant director tracked down a chain and some locks, and that ended up working pretty well. I didn't get any credit for coming up with the temporary fix the last time the door broke so we'll see if I get any this time. I'm just glad we got it sorted, and with about ten seconds to spare before the closing announcement went off.

On the drive home there was some freezing rain. It hasn't started snowing yet but it is supposed to snow throughout the night and during the day tomorrow, with the possibility of rain tomorrow night. I have to open tomorrow so I wouldn't mind a snow day, or at least a delayed opening. Snow sucks but snow on top of ice is kind of the worst. I won't be holding my breath though. Don't want to get my hopes up.

When I got home I ate some dry Cheerios and watched videos for a little while before starting this. And now I will be recording my audio journal so I can go to bed. Sleep sounds pretty good right now.