Friday, April 20, 2018

April 20, 2018


I got a bunch of sleep last night and then I went to work at eleven o'clock. That means I ate lunch around ten o'clock. That's the main downside of closing on Friday. It's like being back in high school.

I was on desk for the first two hours and my main accomplishment was finishing the nonfiction handout by picking a picture. In the last few minutes I had to work on it last night I found a few options and threw them into the Publisher document. Today I sorted through those, cropped and resized them, and eventually settled on an image that I think looks pretty good. I also caught up on the past week of the local newspaper. I need to get better at checking that out on a more regular basis.

I was off desk for the next three hours and most of that time was spent at the second computer updating statistics stuff. I updated my spreadsheets for the web traffic on a few of our pages, and I watched 100 usability videos for March. I'm obviously a little behind on those, but I got the recording for this month started, so I might be able to watch those sometime next week. After watching several of the recordings today I took a break to create a counter in Excel. It has a big cell to display the number, a big green button to add one to that number, a big red button to subtract one from that number, and a small black button to reset the total. I made it because a lot of the videos now start with someone searching the catalog and then it's just our stagnant homepage for however long the video runs, sometimes over forty-five minutes. With our updated website, when someone does a catalog search, the result opens in a new tab, and the video recording doesn't go to that tab, but it also doesn't stop the recording, it just sits on the page that no one is on anymore. It's not very helpful. And I didn't want to make tallies on a piece of paper to keep track of how many videos were pointless, so I made the counter, and it worked really well. I really just need the green button, but I figured I would make it more robust in case I need it for something in the future.

Near the end of those three hours I went upstairs to show one of the other librarians how to use the folding machine, because she printed out a few hundred of the new handouts we've all been working on. Folding those by hand would have been ridiculous. It took a bit of fiddling to get the settings on the machine right, but I got it dialed in and we knocked out the folding in minutes. It would be really cool to have a paper folding machine like that but I have absolutely no need for it in my daily life outside of work.

When I got back from dinner the first thing I did was pull books for the staff picks display. I even picked a couple books that I have actually read, which is rare. The librarian in charge of that display had already left but she gave me the bookmarks to put in them so I added them to the record set and put them down with the rest of the backup books. Later on another staff member dropped off books, and I didn't want them to sit at our desk all weekend, because if someone wanted one of them they wouldn't have been able to find it. So I added them to the record set, printed out more bookmarks (because she was one short in her backup supply), and put them downstairs with the rest of the books.

After I pulled the books I took down my tax display. We're past the submission date so I felt it was safe to do that. I put the display boards back in the basement and took the posters upstairs to put in my drawer for next year. I left the books and forms down in the mail room just in case anyone comes looking for them, but soon we'll recycle them.

The rest of the night was pretty much spent catching up on library articles from Library Link of the Day, which sends a daily article, and I was about three weeks behind. It was a pretty quiet night. I handled some purchase requests, and tracked down an ebook version of a bestseller from 1913 for a patron, but that was about it.

On the way home I made two stops. The first was the grocery store to get milk and eggs because I bought Bisquick (which I haven't had in many years but have fond memories of) and I needed milk and eggs. Then I stopped at my sister's because she had a plant to give me. I'm really hoping I can keep it alive.

When I got home I pretty much spent the rest of the night watching videos and clicking around the internet. And now I'm listening to music and writing this. I'm listening to Avicii because he died today. He was only twenty-eight years old, which makes the news that much more sad. In a relatively short career he managed to have a huge impact on the music world, his name almost becoming synonymous with EDM. He's got a lot of songs you know and bunch more you didn't realize were his but can still hum along to. It's crazy.

This weekend I want to make pancakes or biscuits with Bisquick, make one of my Hello Fresh meals, read a book, and play Elite Dangerous, because watching Lost In Space really made me want to jump back into a spaceship. Doing it in VR would be ideal but it has been so long I think I'll need to play it normally so I can see my cheat sheet for my joystick. But maybe I can graduate back to VR.

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