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.

April 5, 2018

Last night I slept really well. I still woke up a couple times, and at one point I had to turn my heater on, but I got about eight and a half hours of sleep and it was really nice.

When I woke up I finished reading Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk. It was a very Chuck Palahniuk kind of book, and I liked it. It wasn't my favorite book by him, but like his other books, there are plenty of parts that make you think.

I was also able to read a couple more short stories out of Guardian Angels & Other Monsters by Daniel H. Wilson. I am liking the collection so far. I need to start writing my own short stories. The resolution has gone nowhere in the past four months.

After running on the elliptical, I got ready, ate lunch, and headed to work. I did a quick walkthrough when I got there to cover for someone and then I had two hours off desk. I was able to pull books for my display, take down the old display, and put mine up. Within thirty minutes or so of putting it up it checked out two books. I don't think that trend will keep up throughout the month (it didn't check out anything after that) but it's always nice to start off strong.

I eventually had another walkthrough and after that I was on desk for an hour. That hour was mostly spent working on compiling information from the tech classes we have had so far this semester. My boss wants to see the information, as well as a schedule for the classes next semester, when we have our one-on-one meeting in a couple weeks.

When I got back from dinner I had three walkthroughs. In between those I made new end cap signs for the latest shelf that has been filled from the pages shifting books, which they are doing after we get done weeding sections. This one was a little tricky because the range of shelves is split in two. The outside end caps display the full range but the inside ones only show the call number for the books in that section. So I had to get four sets of ranges and then make sure I put them in the right spot when making the signs. I really don't like our end cap signs. We changed them several months ago, maybe even the last time we weeded, and I still find them confusing. But I think my boss played a major roll in the re-design if I remember correctly, so I can't really criticize it. Unless I can make it constructive and provide better options. But at the moment I have too many other things on my plate.

The rest of the night was spent on the tech class information project. I compiled all the feedback into one document, which is convenient. I also found a formula for Excel that automatically calculates age and used that to get the ages for all of the class attendees. This was so I could get a more accurate idea of the age group attending our classes. Anecdotally, I can say we pretty much only get seniors, but now I can say the average age of attendees is sixty-nine, the oldest is eighty-five, and the youngest is fifty-seven (minus one twenty-four year old, which is definitely an outlier, so I didn't include them in the math).

We didn't have a custodian tonight so I had the pleasure of walking one of the sets of emergency stairs. The ones that have an alarm on the door and if you don't deactivate and reactivate it correctly the alarm will go off and freak out everyone in the library. And I have to deal with it so infrequently that I have to remember how to do it each time. Tonight I took a stab at it, and the alarm didn't go off, which was nice.

When I got home I watched videos and clicked around the internet for awhile before writing this. Now I'm going to put a hot compress on my eye for awhile and go to bed. I think my eye is doing better. Hopefully it will soon be a distant memory.

April 4, 2018

I still woke up a few times last night but I ended up getting a lot of sleep, so that was nice.

When I got to work I was off desk for the first two hours. Pretty much all of that time was spent compiling my parent cart book list. Then I had three walkthroughs. During one of them I met an older patron in the young adult section and learned that years ago she was the person who suggested starting a young adult section at the library. That was pretty cool. I also finished looking at a library magazine.

After lunch I had another walkthrough and then I was on desk for two hours. It felt like way longer than two hours. Pretty much all of that time was spent working on a Sci-Fi author handout. I'm just updating the old one, which was made a couple years ago, so it is still pretty good, but the format is updated. The goal is to have that one and a non-fiction handout done by Friday. That isn't going to happen because I also have other stuff I need to do that is a little more important, like getting ready for a class and coming up with the class schedule for the Fall. But we'll see.

For the last hour of the day I went up to the cubicle. I needed an escape. I caught up on the news, listened to music, and then worked on redesigning the summer reading raffle tickets because I wanted to feel productive but didn't want to commit to something that would fry my brain.

After work I picked up Chipotle. It took far too long to get a parking spot. Reminiscent of however long ago when I started going to Qdoba because I got tired of trying to find a parking spot at Chipotle. But I don't really like Qdoba. I think we need to find a place with a drive-thru. When I finally got to my Mom's we ate, talked, and watched videos. Good times as always.

When I got home I spent the rest of the night doing the same old stuff. It was uneventful. As always.

April 3, 2018

I slept a little better in the recliner last night but I still woke up several times. I think part of it is related to not having figured out the temperature and blankets quite yet. I keep getting hot in the middle of the night. I can't sleep when I'm hot. Maybe tonight will be better.

When I got to work I was off desk for two hours. I made an end cap sign for one of the shelves with the appropriate call numbers, accurately reflecting the newly shifted books. I was also able to finish my latest weeding list and withdrew the few books I pulled (the cookbook section is well used). I also cleared off one of the shelves on my cart. My cart has been completely filled since the last time we weeded, with books I want to read. But that's been maybe a year ago and I have pretty much just ignored my cart. I had switched all of the shelf locations for the books to my cart, in case anyone tried to find them, but today I went through and withdrew all of them. And I picked several of them (enough to free up one of the shelves), and added those to the weeding cart with my name on them. I've gotta be getting close to pushing the limit on free books. I got a stack of them back today from ones that got sent up yesterday. If anything they'll get tired of bringing them back down for me.

After my walkthrough I went up to the cubicle and caught up on the news and looked through the obituaries and arrests for the last week or two in our local newspaper. One reason for looking at both is that they're on the same page. Another reason for the obituaries is because I haven't heard from one of my homebound patrons in a little while and I'm a bit concerned. Thankfully I didn't find her name. As for the arrests, the head of the IT department was fired over the weekend, escorted down to his office to collect his things and all that, and the reason is still a mystery. I found out about it yesterday but it wasn't officially announced until today. And it was a weird announcement, because the majority of the blog post was congratulating one of the other IT people for being promoted, and then almost as an afterthought, mentioning that the old IT no longer works at the library. So we're all trying to figure out the real reason, without actually going to the top and asking the director or assistant director. Or even the managers. There are several people in the library that know what's up, so it's only a matter of time. They would have saved a lot of staff hours if they just started with the details, because now we're just sitting around talking about it and coming up with ridiculous scenarios.

I had two walkthroughs after that and looked at library magazines after each. Then I was off desk for an hour after lunch. I went in and talked with the one-on-one tech trainer and the volunteer for awhile during the first hour of the tech drop-in (which no one ended up coming to). And then I went back to the library magazines because there wasn't a computer available.

I was on desk for two hours after that and it just flew by because there was just a constant stream of things. I looked up a baseball schedule for a patron. Only one of them had the game times in the central time zone, all the other ones were eastern, which I think is stupid because it was for a team located in the central time zone. Whatever. I also looked up the second fuse diagram for a pickup for a patron who was in the other day looking for fuse diagrams. He thought he only needed the one but it turns out he needed the other one as well. I also helped a patron on the phone asking about a Steven Seagal DVD, but I had no idea which one because his accent was so thick. And not a foreign accent, just a unique, difficult to understand, way of speaking the English language. Through various ways I asked him to repeat the title he was looking for at least four times. When I determined we didn't have it (only because we have a single Steven Seagal DVD and it didn't seem likely that was the one he wanted), I switched to ILL and had him spell the title. Twice. An that's when I finally figured out the title and was able to request it from another library.

When I wasn't directly helping patrons, I finally got started on my book list for the parent cart. I didn't make it very far with that because the phone kept ringing. It was just one of those desk shifts that was filled with patron stuff so I didn't have much time for other stuff.

In the last hour of work I talked to my coworkers and continued working on my book list.

After work I was going to go to the grocery store but I went through the parking lot and it was completely filled, so I said screw it. I'm going to go tomorrow after Chipotle night. I can survive a day without cheese sticks.

I made dinner when I got home and then spent the rest of the night watching videos and clicking around the internet. I also briefly messed around with a program for creating augmented reality stuff. One of my latest things is wanting to created an augmented reality pop-up for books. We'll see if that goes anywhere.

Now I'm going to put a hot towel on my eye for awhile and then go to bed (aka the recliner).

April 2, 2018

Last night I slept in a recliner in the hopes that my eye wouldn't be as swollen this morning. It may have worked but who knows. I slept decently but I did wake up a few times and my knees kind of hurt throughout the day. I might try putting a pillow beneath my legs tonight.

I was off desk for two hours when I got to work but ended up being around the desk for the first hour, talking to my coworker and boss, and covering the desk a little bit. Then I went and weeded for an hour.

I was on desk two hours after that and spent a decent amount of time withdrawing the books I had pulled. I ended up finding several that were still listed as new and one with a misspelled call number in the catalog. I also helped load up one of our giant cabinets on a cart (after I just watched the maintenance people load up the first one, and kind of helped with the second one). They all got moved upstairs because there is a chance construction stuff might start tomorrow. Or sometime soon. Other than that, I answered the phone and responded to emails.

I had two walkthroughs when I got back to work and after each I weeded. I'm very close to finishing my latest section. I was on desk for an hour after that which gave me time to withdraw the books. There were several cookbooks, and I didn't put my name on any of them (I did do that this morning, however), but I did take pictures of several recipes that looked good.

I had another walkthrough to end the day. I refilled the audiobooks, because the librarian who has it this month was sick today, and the DVDs, because the librarian who has that is usually somewhat delayed in taking over displays at the beginning of the month. I was going to start making a list for one of my displays but then got sidetracked by patrons. One was our new regular who always asks me computer questions and likes to get in my space. Today she was rambling about email. I also helped a couple with the microfilm machine and then with printing. I didn't really have much time after that.

On my way home I stopped by my Dad's house to help him figure out a computer issue with his tax software. It took two hours because there was a lot of random, non-tax related conversations, but I think we managed to get things sorted out. We'll find out if I hear from him tomorrow.

When I got home I had dinner and ate way too much because I was starving when I got home. And now it is 10:30PM and I want to go to bed. But first I am going to put a hot towel on my eye for awhile. That was one of the recommended things the last time so we'll see if it does anything. Fingers crossed.

April 1, 2018

This morning I slept in until 10:00AM and it was really nice. Then I got up and fiddled around on the internet for awhile before running on the elliptical and getting ready.

At one o'clock I headed to my Mom's house for Easter lunch. I nearly lost it going around a roundabout because there was freezing rain and it was apparently a bit slick. But I arrived in one piece. Ate a good lunch, met my Mom's boyfriend's son for the first time (he seems like a pretty good guy), and later on we got Easter stuff. My Mom gave me a card with a math problem on the outside and the answer inside. The outside: “Suzie has 10 jelly beans. Timmy took 7. What is Timmy?” The inside: “Timmy is an asshole. Happy Easter.” It's pretty great.

When I got home I set up the air compressor and put air in my tires. The weather has been all over the place lately and my tires don't know what to do with themselves. After that I decided to be a little more productive and I ironed my pants for the week. Now I don't have to worry about doing that each morning. Then I watched videos and looked at plans for workbenches and various brush pens, because my interests are all over the place right now.

After dinner I played CoD: WW2 and prestiged for the eighth time. Max prestige is ten, which definitely seems within reach at this point. Once you get to ten, instead of the level stopping at fifty-five, it just keeps going. I like that because I like leveling up, and it gets kind of boring if there isn't the leveling up aspect. I probably wouldn't lose interest in Tera so quickly if I could continue gaining levels after sixty-five. There is still stuff to do in that game after maxing out, but that requires more time and effort than I'm willing to give. I just want to level up.

Anyway, it's after midnight and I'm tired. Still no audio journal. It's going to be a pain to catch up on those but I still plan on doing it. Tonight I'm going to sleep in a recliner because my left eye is still being a nuisance and I want to try and keep the swelling down a little bit. Sleeping in a more upright position will help that. At least I think it will. That may have only been helpful when I also had the issue with my upper eyelid. The swelling didn't seem to go down much throughout the day today, but we'll see what things look like in the morning. Probably the same, but I can try to be optimistic.

March 31, 2018

This morning I woke up earlier than I would have liked, but that seems to be a thing that happens on a regular basis. I read in bed for awhile and when I got up I started my laundry and did my taxes. Taxes are always a bit tedious, but they could be worse, so I'm not going to complain.

This afternoon I played with my drawing tablet for awhile and then I took a nap on my couch while listening to the Mister Rogers marathon. After dinner I played CoD: WW2 for awhile and had some decent games. I'm probably two or three games of War away from being able to prestige again. I'm hoping that they leave the Shipment playlist in game because I'm having fun with it. It's not as fun as Nuketown, but it's still a good small map so you're immediately back in the action. Most of the map is spent playing, rather than running around looking for people. I like that.

After that I ran on the elliptical, took a shower, and then started trying to catch up on YouTube videos. I really haven't watched any since last week, so there is quite the backlog. I liked taking a week off, and wouldn't mind continuing that trend. YouTube videos are such a time-sink.

I think it was sometime last night my left eye started feeling a little uncomfortable. This morning when I woke up the lower eyelid was a little swollen and now it is also a bit sore. I thought my problems with my left eye had finally resolved themselves because I haven't really noticed it throughout the winter, but it seems like they just went dormant. Previously, I had a bump on my upper eyelid as well, but that seems to have gone away, at least for the time being. And hopefully the lower eyelid thing will quickly resolve itself. I liked when I took my left eye not being annoying for granted.

And now I'm going to go to bed because it is late. I set up my microphone and mixer today but I still need to record all of the past audio journals, so I'm going to hold off yet another day. Maybe tomorrow.