March 20, 2018

Last night I got less than six hours of sleep. I felt the lack of sleep immediately upon waking up, and then continued to feel it throughout the day. It was great.

When I got to work I did the usual opening thing, and then I had to call all of my homebound patrons, and all of the patrons of the librarian I deliver with, and tell them that we wouldn't be out today, but would deliver next week. We originally moved the delivery a day early because the other librarian is going to a conference tomorrow. Then they forecasted bad weather at the conference so the librarian moved her flight to today to try and get to the conference before all the snow hit. Which is why I had to call all the patrons. About a half an hour after calling everyone, my boss told me that the librarian's new flight had been canceled, so we would be able to deliver books today after all. But I suggested sticking with next week because we had already changed the date on everyone twice and I thought it would just add to the confusion is we switched it again. Plus, there will be more staff available next week (we would have been down to just one librarian and my boss if we went out today). So we're going out next week. I felt bad for the other librarian because she went from working today, to rescheduling her flight and assuming she would be flying, to having that flight canceled and having to come to work. A real roller coaster of a day.

When we opened I was on desk for two hours. I helped the occasional patron, including my favorite substitute teacher, but most of my time was spent working on the new homebound bookmark. I'm good with the design for now, so today was spent copying it into all of my patron spreadsheets and adjusting the formulas so they reference the spreadsheet I pasted them into, not the spreadsheet I copied them from.

In the last hour before lunch I had a walkthrough and refilled the DVD display. Then I went upstairs to call the one patron I hadn't been able to reach earlier. And after that I took the survey about our catalog that our IT put on the website because they are going to a conference about it at some point and want feedback. It gave me a chance to rant a little bit about the pointless pop-up that shows up when you hover over a search result and shows the exact same information that is right next to the result (but the pop-up covers it up, I guess creating a need for the information to be displayed in the pop-up). It's dumb. I think they need to make it like Goodreads or NoveList and show a brief description of the book and maybe some metadata describing the item, like the genre or themes). They could also put the information about where the item is so patrons could immediately see when an item is due back if it is checked out or if it is on a display. All useful information that could be shown without patrons having to click through to a different page or pop-up. I also suggesting ignoring punctuation, like colons and hyphens, because right now if you don't use them properly it completely messes up the search results. It felt good to rant about that stuff.

When I got back I had two hours off desk. That disappeared. I was going to go around and put signs up telling patrons that construction was happening, but that didn't happen. We recently gave all of our sign holders to the PR person because we had to clean out the closet we kept them in. This is good for storage purposes but now every time we need a sign holder we have to track down the PR person. I let her know I needed some, and she wrote it down, but she had a lot going on this afternoon, so I never saw any holders. Instead, I worked on my bookmarks.

I spent a decent amount of time tracking down formulas that would output the row height because I wanted to make a template for how to format the bookmarks. I was tired of having to constantly check what the row height was in one of the finished spreadsheets, in order to adjust the rows in an unfinished spreadsheet. I could have done it once and typed the numbers in manually, but where's the fun in that? I found one formula that worked, but the result was in points, not pixels, and I needed pixels. Somehow I managed to track down an equation for converting points to pixels (pixels = points * DPI / 72, in case you're curious). I had to look up the DPI of the monitor, but other than that it was pretty simple, once I found it, and it did just what I needed it to.

I was on desk for an hour after that. I helped one patron fill out requests for out-of-state ILLs for two religious books published in the 1920s and 1930s. I don't fancy his odds of those not only existing near us, but also being lendable. But we'll see. I also had to tell a nice grandma to move out of the quiet area if she wanted to keep reading to her grandkid, because my boss was super stressed out and her major pet peeve is any noise in the quiet area, even if no one else is in the quiet area. She had already asked someone to leave and she didn't want to do it again, so I had the unfortunate honor. I felt bad.

I had one final walkthrough and then continued to work on bookmark stuff until the end of the day. I think I may have finished. I can't remember. But I think I finished.

When I got home I set up my new drawing tablet on my newer computer, as well as installed the painting software. Once I confirmed it worked, I ate dinner and watched videos. After dinner I went back out to play with the drawing tablet. The software came with several Bob Ross-inpsired brushes so I decided to open up a tutorial of painting one of his paintings using the upgraded version of the software I have. I thought I could manage without some of the fancier features in the upgraded version, but it turns out not all the brushes were included in my version. I tried to fake my way through it but could only do about half of the painting and it didn't look great, mostly due to talent, but also because I was trying to substitute brushes. I didn't even get to fill out the happy little trees because there is a special brush for that and I didn't have it. I think I might try to find tutorials that use the resources I have, so I can build up a little confidence and not feel as defeated. Sounds like a good plan anyway.

After I gave up on that, I played a little CoD: WW2. I exclusively played on Shipment because that is the quickest way to rack up kills for the various daily contracts. And I was successful in that. I also mostly went positive with my K/D. It is really easy to go incredibly negative if you're playing against good players that have the spawns locked down.

And now I am going to record my audio journal and go to bed. I would save so much time each day if I didn't take notes about my day, write a journal entry based on those notes, and record an audio journal based on those notes. Oh well.