May 4, 2018

This morning I woke up half an hour early because that's what my body wanted apparently. Bodies are weird.

When I got to work I was off desk for the first two hours so I went out and weeded. I'm using one of the other librarian's weeding lists and she is a much more aggressive weeder. I overrode a few of her decisions but for the most part I went with it because I could see the justification. I made it through the first half of the list and pulled 129 books. That's a lot of books.

I was on desk for the next two hours and a decent chunk of that was spent withdrawing all of the books I pulled. The easiest way to do it is to scan them all into a record set, which is like putting them into a folder, and then you can select all of them and change their status to withdrawn all at once. But that still involves pulling all of the books off the cart and scanning them. After lunch I went and got a big weeding cart, because I had used two other carts when I was pulling, and I very nearly filled the entire, double-sided cart.

I took a break from that to go take pictures of the construction. The demolition kind of started Wednesday afternoon but really took off yesterday and today. My boss wanted me to “sneak” behind the plastic wall and take pictures when the workers went to lunch, so I did. I took several pictures but one of them is a panorama of where the reference books were, my bosses old office, and where the reference desk was and it looks really cool. I also really like the plastic wall. I would think they would use a more heavy duty tarp but it's basically a giant, cheap trash bag. As you walk along it the whole thing expands and contracts, rippling with your passage. It's kind of fun.

On my way back from lunch I was behind a moving truck and the driver had the leadest of foots. It was impressive but also terrifying, so I kept my distance.

I had a walkthrough when I got back and then it felt like I was kind of all over the place. I pulled more books for the audiobook display on the first floor, went up to the third floor to get the big weeding cart, brought it down and loaded it up with my books and took it back up to the third floor, grabbed another cart because I knew I would need it, addressed an envelop for one of the other librarians and dropped the mail off in the basement, went back up to the third floor to put a finished PRL in the notebook, and then sat behind the desk for a little bit talking to my coworkers.

I had the last three hours off desk and I went back out to weed. I finished the second half and pulled another 151 books. I took the big weeding cart out with me but filled it up so I had to swap out near the end. So many books. When I got done pulling I had to scramble a little bit but had just enough time to withdraw all of them and take the cart of books up to the third floor. My main goal today was to finish weeding and I accomplished that.

When I got off I ran home to change shirts because after all of the running around today I just felt kind of damp. Then I went back across town for dinner at the academic librarian's house. I found it on the first try, which I was pretty happy about, because usually I end up doing an accidental drive-by when I'm looking for a place for the first time.

She had gotten a start on making dinner but I was able to contribute by chopping the bell peppers. We had a cold rice salad with the bell peppers, shredded cooked carrots, black beans, spinach with lemon and avocado, and a creamy sauce made with almond flour and nutritional yeast and other things. I will admit I was a little hesitant about the nutritional yeast because my only experience with it was years ago and it smelled/tasted like dirty feet. But it was all very tasty. We also had mochi ice cream, which was interesting and also tasty, and a Korean melon, which reminded me of cantaloupe, but better.

After dinner we talked in the kitchen for awhile before moving out to the living room. We ended up talking until almost one o'clock in the morning. She has led a fascinating life so far. She lived on an island in Maine and worked on a lobster boat, lived in Tanzania in the Peace Corps, biked across the United States, was a volunteer EMT, went to college in Canada after her parents didn't want her to go to the local music school in North Carolina, and the list goes on. I need to do more interesting things (I say as I plan to spend the weekend not leaving my house).