April 11, 2018

Last night I went to bed early enough that I should have gotten eight hours of sleep. Instead I woke up a bunch of times and probably only got about seven hours. Once again, another restless night. I'm not sure what has been up recently but it is getting kind of annoying.

I opened this morning and did the usual opening stuff. Then I went upstairs to grab the old summer reading raffle tickets so I could continue shredding them. I stopped to talk to the teen librarian and she asked what I was doing with the tickets. When I told her she held up a small plastic bin with random paper in it and told me to put them in. There is apparently a big trash can in the copy room (which I have seen before but never paid attention to it) and it is for bulk shredding. I guess we fill it up and at some point it gets shredded. That is good to know, because shredding thousands of paper tickets a few at a time is incredibly tedious, and loud. So I'm really glad I stopped to talk to the teen librarian. After that I had some extra time to kill without the shredding happening, so we talked about books and music for awhile before I headed back downstairs. It's going to be weird when she's out on maternity leave, but at some point after she comes back she'll be joining our department, so that will be cool.

I was scheduled to be on desk for the first two hours, which I was, and I spent that time working on the non-fiction handout, reading news articles, and talking to my coworker's husband about ink and fountain pens. Then I went on a quick walkthrough and was back on desk for another hour because one of the other librarians called in sick and when my boss redid the schedule she missed putting someone on desk. And even if she hadn't, that someone would have been me, because the only other librarian was covering the outreach event that the sick librarian was supposed to be going to.

When I got back from lunch I was off desk for an hour and caught up on news, including local stuff. I diligence of keeping up with local news ebbs and flows. I need to get better at that. After that I was on desk for an hour and worked on coming up with the tech class schedule for the Fall. And I made decent progress. I got everything scheduled but the workshops. And I'm kind of debating whether or not it is worth even doing the workshops because the attendance is so poor. They don't require a whole lot of effort on my part but I still put work into them and then when no one signs up it is a bit demoralizing. So we'll see.

Then it was time for our monthly meeting. It was restricted to an hour, instead of the usual two, but the content really only took about half an hour. We managed to drag it out for another fifteen minutes talking about random things, and then we called it good. Following that, most of us headed down to the storytime room for a presentation about the new keycard system, which will go into effect sometime early next month. We'll have new badges, which will serve as the keycard, and they will get us into the building, as well as a few places in the building. The main focus on this first wave is the outside entry to the library. Keeping people out that don't work at the library. Later on, we might start expanding it to more of the internal doors, which would be really convenient.

For the last thirty minutes of the day I talked to one of my fellow librarians about the keycards and then spent a lot of time talking about the genre handouts we're making. She's the one that created the new template and is having us update the old handouts. Apparently I'm the only one who has actually followed the template so far. I'm a big fan of formatting and paying attention to the little details, and the other librarian is very detail oriented, so we were able to relate in our discussion of what wasn't happening with the other handouts that should have been happening. Sometimes you just have to vent a little with someone on the same page as you.

When I got home I ate dinner and then spent the rest of the night watching videos and investing in some game, VR, and app making online courses. The goal is to learn how to make apps and VR experiences. I'm not terribly interested in making VR games but I do want to make hangouts, like a cool room, and maybe eventually a virtual library. As for the app making, that goes back to my interest in making an AR app. And the game making courses will give me more experience using the programs needed for making apps and VR stuff. It all makes sense right now, I just need to maintain interest and actually get through some of the courses so I can make what I want to make later on. I just need to pretend it's for-real school stuff and set aside time to work on it. I need to get my school discipline back. That'll be tough.

And now it is just after ten o'clock and I'm going to attempt to go to bed, because I have to wake up early for a haircut. Hopefully I can sleep tonight. My house is warmer because we got into the 80s today, and it is supposed to be even hotter tomorrow. But I'm not going to turn the air conditioning on because there is a chance of snow on Saturday. Mother Nature. Killing it.