May 2, 2018

This morning I opened and did all the usual things, with a little extra running around because I needed to go up to the third floor (which I ended up doing twice because I forgot something the first time) and down to the basement. I also refilled the audiobook display and did a little work on my county map.

When we opened I was off desk for two hours so I went up to the cubicle. I listened to music and spent that entire time working on the map. I missed a number when I was putting numbers on the map, so I had to go through and change the majority of them, which took some time. I also had the thought after I finished the index to paste that list into a spreadsheet and sort it to make sure every number was accounted for. This turned out to be wise because I had used one number twice, so I got that fixed. I also ended up erasing all of the county names that were originally on the map, and replacing them with typed out names in Publisher so that they would be as clear as the index. I had to resize the map to get it to fit on the page and I was pretty sure the text would have come out too blurry for my liking. Then I fiddled with the formatting to make it look better. And I finished with just enough time to print it out and put it in our emergency notebook before I was on desk.

I took a little break in the map project to come down and say hi to one of my former classmates, who is good friends with one of the other librarians (who was also a classmate of mine), and was at our library today as a consultant.

The two hours on desk went by pretty quickly. I caught up on the local paper, and talked to my coworker about a lot of random stuff, like student loans and money in general because they are currently in the middle of posting all the public salaries in the paper. At one point we even pulled up Google Maps to look at a barn that is on the way to the town where I went to grad school and where her in-laws live. The drive itself is really nice and we both mentioned a barn that we liked. It took me awhile to decide if the one she was talking about was the one I was talking about, but in the end I decided it was, which was kind of strange, but also pretty cool.

After lunch I had a walkthrough and then spent the rest of the hour down in the Youth Services workroom playing with their die cutter. I decided to be in charge of decorating the assistant's locker for her birthday and instead of printing stuff out, I decided to see if they had a die cutter. And they did. They also had a big notebook that had an example of each pattern, which is a genius idea and made the whole process go a lot quicker. While I worked on that I talked to one of the workers down there (the same one I was talking to about cultural appropriation the other day) because she was working on creating a storytime slideshow. I learned she plays piano, so that's a fun fact. This came up because when I walked in she was jumping up and down on a large floor piano doing her best Big impersonation.

I had just enough time in the hour to take my cutout shapes up and tape them to the assistant's locker. I also used the outline left after the clown and dinosaur shapes and glued them onto a another piece of paper, because they looked cool. I was just going to throw them on the table up in the meeting room where we were going to have her gathering, but when I got up there I had a flash of brilliance. I bent a paper clip in roughly a ninety degree angle and taped one side to the back of each cutout, creating a small stand. Brilliant.

With the next hour I talked to the one-on-one tech trainer for awhile and then started on counting the leftover tax documents. At the end of each season I fill out a form with what we have left and send those numbers back to the IRS. I think tomorrow I'm going to make a spreadsheet with those numbers for the last few years so I can get a better idea of how much we actually go through each year. It seems like the distribution goes down each year, but I want to get all of the numbers in the same place to confirm this.

After my next walkthrough I went back up to the cubicle so I could listen to music while I continued counting several hundred forms. Based on last year's numbers we should have come much closer to getting through all of those forms, but we didn't. I think part of it has to do with there being such a delay in us getting forms. We were turning patrons away for at least a few weeks before everything finally showed up.

I finished that up and got the formed emailed with a few minutes to spare before five o'clock. That is when I was supposed to go home, but it was also the time scheduled for the assistant's birthday gathering, so I stayed for that. We basically just sat around and talked but it was nice.

The weather was slowly starting to get worse and by the time I left a little before six o'clock there was a really strong wind and horizontal rain. Had I left at five, I would have been perfectly fine. Instead, before I even made it through our parking lot my pants, shoes, and socks were completely soaked. And my bag and jacket were pretty damp. I started out trying to avoid the giant puddles, which were coming pretty close to ponds, but by the time I made it to the sidewalk leading to the public parking lot I walk just walking through them. It was kind of like being a kid again. I just had to embrace the complete wetness.

When I got home I threw my clothes and jacket in the dryer, just so they wouldn't be sitting in my laundry basic wet, and I propped my shoes and bag in front of a fan. I think my shoes will actually be dry by tomorrow, but even if they're not it doesn't matter, because I have to pairs and switch back and forth every other day.

While I ate dinner I watched videos, and then I played CoD: WW2. I couldn't get in a decent match of War to save my life. It seemed like only one group was playing because every time I tried to leave (even waiting awhile) I kept getting dumped in with the same players, and the connection was awful. Each match was filled with hit markers and me constantly getting shot around corners. I also think at one point there was a cheater because during the part of Operation Neptune where the attackers have to destroy radios, there were able to destroy most of them without getting into the bunker. There are a few you can shoot from the outside, but they were getting some that they shouldn't have been able to get from outside unless they were shooting through multiple walls. That is already the worst map, and cheaters make it all the more awful to play.

Despite all the rain, my basement remains dry. Let us hope that continues.