May 16, 2018

Last night I got nine hours of sleep. And it was a restful nine hours, I don't think I woke up a single time. That needs to happen more often. Then I read in bed for awhile before running on the elliptical, getting ready, eating lunch, and going to work.

I was off desk for an hour so I went upstairs to call my homebound patrons. Then I read emails, and worked on my newspaper article, editing it based on suggestions from two of the other librarians.

Then we went to deliver homebound books. Our first stop was to buy a newspaper, then we went to a new patron's house, which turned out to be an apartment inside of a house that was a little tricky to find, but the other librarian had to do all of the finding, and she found it, so it worked out.

My first patron wasn't home, but this is the patron who is hard of hearing and not very mobile, so she leaves her door unlocked and I let myself in. Which means I didn't realize she wasn't home until I was already in the house and had walked back to her room. It went from feeling normal, to feeling a tad awkward. I stood there for awhile thinking, and then looked around for her books from last month. I found the bags but six books were missing. I ended up taking them anyway and left the books for this month. I went back out to the van and told the other librarian what happened and asked if she thought I should leave this month's books or not. She thought maybe just one bag (this is also the patron that gets sixteen large print books each month), so I went back in, which was still awkward, and grabbed one of the bags.

My second patron was home, and she's the one I end up talking with awhile because she used to work at the library at the university and she's just fun to talk to. We talked for quite awhile today. Following that, the rest of the deliveries were pretty usual. When we were done I drove right by the library toward the public parking lot. I was talking to the other librarian and was just on auto-pilot, because I usually drive by the library and park in the public lot. So we drove through the lot and then turned around and went back to the library. It was actually kind of funny.

I had about a half an hour after we unloaded all of the books, so I refilled my audiobook display and then talked to my coworkers. Instead of going to dinner at four o'clock (which is the normal time when closing), I was on the desk at four o'clock and had dinner at five o'clock. A decent chunk of that hour was spent talking with one of the other librarians about my article, and making several tweaks that were made more difficult because I was so close to the 750 word limit, and all of my changes involved adding words, but then also having to get rid of words to get me back down to 750 words. It's like a puzzle. I finally got it sorted and sent it off to the newspaper so I could stop thinking about it.

When I got back from dinner I was on desk for two hours. I had one phone call almost immediately, and the line immediately went dead. Later on I had another call that sounded like whoever dialed the number somehow managed to call two people at one. I would swear there were two people on the line that hadn't started a conversation yet but sounded surprised that I was there. It was weird. With the rest of my time on desk I caught up on the local paper and signed a teen up for the summer reading program.

Today was the first day to register for the program but when I got to work at noon and checked our website I couldn't find anything about it. It should have been featured prominently on the homepage but there wasn't anything. And there wasn't anything until almost five o'clock because apparently there was a lot of miscommunication. But the information is there now, and the world didn't end, so we will carry on.

The last hour was spent off desk, which means I was just sitting at the second computer. I caught up on my written notes for the day and registered my Mom and sister for summer reading. It was a really slow, quiet night at the library. Usually when I say that I just mean upstairs, because back where our old desk used to be we really couldn't hear anything outside of a small radius from our desk. Now we can hear everything on the second floor and pretty much everything on the first floor, too, and that's usually where the action happens. But tonight it was silent, and it was nice.

The weather had cooled off quite a bit so I drove home with the windows down. I'm a little worried I'm going to wake up and my left eye is going to be messed up from allergies or something, but we'll hope that doesn't happen.

When I got home I ate a snack (cold cheeseburger pie is very tasty) and then watched the first four episodes of the first season of Santa Clarita Diet because I had forgotten most of the first season. While watching that I worked on typing this. And now I'm listening to music while typing this because watching things while typing things is very distracting.

Now it is after midnight and I am going to go to bed because I'm tired. I close again tomorrow. Can't wait. But then it will be Friday. The plan is still to head out of town after work on Friday and meet up with the academic librarian and her friends. I'm excited to see the academic librarian, but I'm also mildly anxious about driving two hours away to a town I haven't been to since I was a kid and certainly never drove to. And I don't know exactly where I'll be going or what the parking situation will be like or the environment, and I'll be meeting new people and I'm awkward when meeting new people, and when I'm around someone I like in front of new people. So I'm stressed a little bit, and I have a couple more days to be stressed about it, but then I'll be thrust into the situation and life will go on. I'm going to bed now.