April 6, 2018

Last night I slept horribly. I went to bed early enough that I should have gotten around seven and a half hours of sleep. Instead, I probably got around six and a half hours. It felt like I was constantly waking up. Kind of sucked.

When I got to work I was off desk for two hours. I got feedback on the summer reading raffle tickets and made the final version. I also looked over the handout and presentation for next week's tech class and made a few edits. It didn't require a lot of work because I taught the same class a few semesters ago and I plan on doing basically the same thing. It'll involve a brief overview on my part, then scanning pictures and editing them. There are nine people signed up, out of ten spots, so that's not bad.

I was on desk for two hours after that and a lot of that time was spent working on the Sci-Fi handout. And that just involved looking up the authors on the old handout and making sure we still have books by them. It's tedious. When I get done with that I need to find more diverse authors. Right now there are a lot of old white men and the occasional woman.

My boss also told me about two more projects I would be working on. One is teaching the Circulation staff about our online resources and the other is helping with our program that is kind of like a TED talk. Previously I had agreed to edit all of the slides from the different presenters into one big presentation. Now I'm taking over half of the responsibilities, along with the librarian in charge of programming, because my boss will be taking on a lot of different responsibilities in the near future and won't have time to work on the program. Both projects are a ways off, but will be taking place around the time that I'll be working on the podcast project with another librarian. It will be interesting times next semester.

I had a twenty minute phone conversation with an older male patron who had me looking up DVDs, some of which he couldn't remember the title of, just vague aspects of the plot. While I was looking up the first movie (which I had to get through interlibrary loan) he asked me if I was new. I told him not really, and then after a long pause, he asked if all of the girls were out to lunch, wondering if that was the reason I was answering the phone. And I told him no, I was a librarian. That seemed to lead to a confused silence on his end. In the way that he said it, it was obvious he thought only women could be librarians, and not in a positive way. But the best part of the interaction was that one of the movies he wanted was The Notebook. A man who came across as not holding women in the highest of regards, happens to like sentimental movies based on Nicholas Sparks books.

I had two walkthroughs after lunch, during one of which I refilled the backup cart of books for the Bestsellers display. I spent the rest of the time up in the cubicle. I was able to read some library articles and I also ordered a pizza for dinner. It is really convenient being able to order a pizza online hours ahead of time and scheduling when you want to pick it up.

I was then on desk for an hour. I talked with our regular curmudgeon of a patron for awhile because he was waiting for one of the computers to open up. It took awhile. But he was in a good mood today so it wasn't too bad. And I was able to continue working on the Sci-Fi handout because looking up authors doesn't take much thought. I also talked to my boss and other coworkers about weeding and other mostly work-related things

These conversations carried over into the next hour so my last walkthrough was slightly belated. After refilling the DVD display, the rest of the hour disappeared.

The highlight of my day was when one of the assistants came over and said she was going to borrow the master key and grabbed the phone cord instead and started walking off, unfortunately stopping before the phone fell (because that would have been even funnier). With all the prep for the remodeling, we don't have anywhere secure and convenient to put our master key, so we put it on a black coiled bracelet/keychain thing, so that we can wear it around our arm. When the assistant needed the key, I had it hidden under my notebook but out of the corner of her eye she saw the black coiled phone cord and thought it was the keychain. It may have just been a long day that began with a lack of sleep, but I thought the mistake was pretty funny.

On my way home I picked up my pizza from Papa Murphy's. And when I got home I read a short story while it baked. I think I may be finally getting back into reading. I just finished the Chuck Palahniuk book, I recently finished an audiobook in my car and I am about halfway through another one, and I'm working on the short story book and one other one. I still need to get better and devoting more time to reading, but I'm making progress.

After dinner I watched videos for awhile and then I played a little CoD: WW2 for the first time this week I think. It took me a little bit to get back into it, but I got there and had a pretty good night. I managed to come in first place quite a few times, which means I got lucky with the internet connection tonight.

And now it is much too late. I'm going to go to bed.