February 7, 2017

 I got a bit of a late start this morning. I need to get better at respecting my alarm clock.

On my way to work I nearly got in an accident. The person in front of me came to a sudden stop so I had to come to a sudden stop. I'm just glad the person behind me did the same.

We're falling behind on sharpening pencils in our department. I ran out of sharpened ones this morning before I could fill up all the missing ones and was then only able to sharpen maybe ten more before the sharpener overheated and died. We need a new/better pencil sharpener.

I helped an old man on the phone this morning with his ebook app and it was an interesting experience. The phone was initially answered by another librarian but she wasn't sure what to do so she said she was going to hand the phone off to me. The man didn't even stop for a breath and was speaking for several seconds in the span of time it took me to walk over to the phone. And then he kept talking. And talking. I kept trying to interject to find out more information, or even what the problem was because he didn't get the memo that he was being handed off. When I was able to ask a question he kind of acknowledged it but then kept talking about whatever he was talking about. At one point I held the phone away from my ear for about ten seconds just to let him talk before I tried again. I eventually got him to give me his name and number so I could look into the problem and call him back.

I found some information on what I thought the problem was and gave him a call back maybe five or ten minutes later. I caught him off guard because he wasn't expecting me to call back so soon. At first he couldn't hear me because his TV was on. On the way to the TV I heard a bit of a commotion and he informed me he was in a wheelchair and had run over some stuff. And by the end of it I was still having to practically shout into the phone, repeating myself multiple times, because the battery in his hearing aid died in the middle of the phone call. We never heard back from him so hopefully my solution solved his problem.

I discovered the link to my Minecraft class page was broken today. The permalink for the page was missing a slash and I tried two different ways to correct it but it wouldn't save my changes. I'm assuming I don't have the privileges to make those kind of changes. The PR lady couldn't figure it out either but she had a lot of other stuff going on. My solution ended up being to change the link on the image the patrons click to get to the Minecraft page. The syntax of the address is not technically correct but matching the link to the page address ended up working out so I'm happy.

And speaking of the Minecraft page, I updated it with a list of library books and other links that I thought might be useful. It's nothing special but hopefully it will be informative. I'm up to one person signed up who I have actually seen in person so I know they exist, and one person who probably lives in New York, so I'm not holding my breath. I've got until Thursday for more people to sign up. Plenty of time.

Our dawdling patron was there today and the library who introduced her to Google Drive wasn't there yet so she pulled me over to ask questions. It basically consisted of me trying to describe “the cloud” and the pros and cons of saving things in multiple places and in multiple formats.

I spent way too much time working on an updated label thing for our phones. Three names have changed since it was last printed and it has annoyed me since I started working at the library. So I avoided other things by working on that. The most frustrating thing was that I downloaded a PDF template from the phone manufacturer and it was too small. I will blame our printer though because even when I measured the space with a ruler and created my own template in Excel to that exact size, it still came out small, even though I told it to print the actual size. It took several little tweaks but I ended up getting it close enough and called it good. And now our phone labels finally have the correct names. I also saved the template so that if anyone else decides to quit or change there name, we'll be good to go.

I ended my day with two hours on the desk and in the middle of it things got a little crazy. In a very short span of time All of the following things happened.

• I helped a couple figure out saving pictures on the microfilm machine.
• I got a chess board for two teens.
• I got tape for another patron who had already helped herself to our scissors.
• Our frequent caller called four times to get address and phone numbers for church-related things all over the county. She had already called three times earlier in the day.
• I responded to a chat but only once because I was juggling so many other things that they left before I could respond again.
• I showed a patron how to use our printer.
• I signed out our three book talk books to a patron.
• And, I helped an older patron print out tax forms.

This last one was a bit of a redemption for me. He had called earlier when I was on the desk and asked what tax forms we had. He was hard of hearing and I couldn't speak loud enough for him. For the second time today I was basically shouting into the phone (while in a library) but it wasn't quite good enough and he sounded a little frustrated by the end of the conversation.

And then he showed up at the library. He got the form and book he needed downstairs but then came upstairs because he needed help printing out all the other forms he needed. It is surprisingly easy to find tax forms online so I was quickly able to find all of the federal and state forms he needed. I downloaded them to a flash drive and then we went over to a public computer so I could log him in and print everything off. That is the easiest way to print things for patrons and still have them pay for it.

He was incredibly grateful for my help and I think I made up for not being very helpful on the phone. He also had a pretty good sense of humor in person. The funniest thing was when he dropped a coin that rolled over to another patron. He went over and told the patron he had dropped a nickel by the guys foot as he bent down to get it. He then discovered it was a dime and said it must have multiplied on the roll over. I thought that was pretty funny.

All of this stuff probably took less than half an hour, even though it felt like it had been several hours. And I still had forty-five minutes to kill.

But I eventually made it to five o'clock and was able to leave. On my way home I stopped by my mom to pick up the pants I had ordered, because my Amazon stuff is still delivered to her house.

When I got home I ate dinner and then spent the rest of the night watching YouTube videos, paying bills, and clicking around the internet. I need to get better at doing productive things with my evenings. Or not. But probably.

I did manage to start writing this a little earlier than normal so it's only just after ten o'clock at the moment. Not bad. Now I'm going to record my audio journal. I'm not sure what game I'm going to play yet. Probably Minecraft so I can just zone out and dig tunnels while I talk about my day.

February 6, 2017

 Today a patron said he was “fine as a frog's hair.” I need to incorporate that into my own lexicon

Today was one of those days at work where I did things but it didn't really feel like I accomplished much. Thankfully I took notes because it is also one of those days where I would have forgotten everything.

When I got to work I had two free hours. I started that time by refilling the tax stuff and my DVD display. It checked out a lot over the weekend. It would be nice if we kept track of those stats because it would be interesting to see how much it checks out a month. I also restocked my African American History display. I think only two or three books have gone off it but I added several more just to fill up the spare books. It would be nice if it were more popular because there are a lot of interesting books on there.

I spent the rest of the two hours upstairs. I finished watching usability videos, watched instructional videos on how to drive a Prius, and looked up Minecraft books for my class on Thursday. So far only one person has signed up and I'm almost certain they won't be there. They just signed up for a library card online today and they have a New York address. That'll be a bit of a commute.

I was then on desk for an hour and spent that time answering the phone and the chat, and occasionally helped a patron in person. I also spent that time catching up on chat stats. I would like to keep up with it a little better than I did last month.

I typed up and printed three homebound letters and got started on my lists but only briefly. One of my patrons was gone last month so I'm going to reuse that list. Another patron hasn't been doing well and has switched to audiobooks that his wife picked up so I imagine I won't be delivering to him this month.

After lunch the day just kind of disappeared. I was eventually on the desk for two hours. There wasn't a single email or chat but there were several phone calls. There was also an interesting musical chairs experience, twice. I was on the main computer but got up so one of the other librarians could check something because I wasn't doing anything important. And then I needed to print a guest pass for someone so I had to get on the second computer that another librarian was on. Later on that librarian ended up doing something on my computer for some reason and at the same time I needed to do something so I was on her computer again. I don't know if any of that makes sense. It was just strange because it seemed like neither of us had anything to do until we let someone use our computer.

Because of the conference thing on Friday I have to make up the extra time, assuming the event and the trip will last longer than a normal work day. I made up one of those hours tonight by getting off at five o'clock, which was fantastic because I was running out of things to do.

When I got home I had delicious leftovers for dinner, watched YouTube videos, and played Minecraft. I also watched Doctor Strange. It was interesting. I enjoyed the humor and the possessed cape.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I need to get better at writing this and recording the audio journal earlier. It's not really necessary to wait so long because it is rare that eventful things happen to me late at night. I'll try to get better about that.

February 5, 2017

 This morning I slept in a little bit but set my alarm so really I only got seven hours of sleep. But then I got up and made pancakes and eggs. I tried using a lower temperature on the stove for the pancakes and it kind of worked. They came out a bit tough and I'm not sure if that is because they took a long time to cook or if I put the melted butter in the batter before it had cooled down enough and maybe it started cooking the stuff in the batter. I don't know, it's still a work in progress. The eggs were good. I used cold water this time instead of milk and then kept it in the fridge until I needed them. I think they were better with milk but water is passable.

After breakfast and dishes I moved boxes downstairs. The living room looks better but I still need to do something with my ladder and space heater boxes. And a bunch of other little things. Much like the pancakes, the house is a work in progress.

I spent the rest of the day not really doing much. For the most part I played Minecraft and watched movies. And I'm okay with that, it was a good lazy Sunday.

I brought my projector into my office and basically had a 73-inch TV on my wall. It's pretty sweet.

I watched Arrival and thought it was decent. I'm always up for an interesting sci-fi movie. It raised what I think is a good moral question, assuming you can change the future once you know about it. Would you still have a kid if you knew he/she would die from cancer while still young and that the knowledge of this would lead to your divorce? That seems like a choice that could be avoided once you knew about it, having a kid, not like some random event. I don't know that I could go through with it.

After that I needed something uplifting so I watched The Nice Guys. I really didn't know what to expect but it definitely wasn't what I was expecting. The overall story was a bit ridiculous but so was the movie, I guess. It was also hilarious. My favorite line was when Ryan Gosling said “Jesus Christ!” after his daughter's friends were all talking at once. One of the friends told him he had just taken the Lord's name in vain and his response was “No, I didn't, Janet! I found it very useful actually. Okay, Janet?” It was pretty great. I need to add The Nice Guys into my yearly rotation.

Next up was Passengers. I liked it. And it also had an interesting moral question. If you would almost certainly be guaranteed to live out the rest of your life alone on a spaceship, would you wake up one of the other passengers, essentially condemning them to the same fate, just to escape your loneliness? I would argue that is a much tougher decision than the Arrival question because it would be much easier to not have a baby. Trying to imagine living entirely alone for an extended period of time, basically living a Groundhog Day existence, is hard to imagine. I'll admit it does sound kind of appealing, but I know after a certain amount of time I would probably start to lose it. It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around the rest of your life. I also liked how the movie was kind of like a post-apocalyptic, end of the world kind of movie, except being set on Earth with a small band of survivors, it was on a spaceship.

And lastly, I just finished watching The Edge of Seventeen. Also enjoyable. My favorite character was Erwin, followed by Woody Harrelson as the teacher. I also liked all of the fast-paced dialogue that Hailee Steinfeld had. She pulled it off well. It's another one that I wouldn't mind seeing again.

It's already after eleven o'clock so I am going to quickly, hopefully, record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I'm going to try playing Tera tonight as the video background because I played so much Minecraft already today. We'll see how it goes. I am hoping that it isn't too laggy and that it is actually a game where I can kind of zone out and talk about my day without thinking too much. We'll see.

February 4, 2017

 This morning I woke up earlier than I would have liked, got ready, made my lunch, ate breakfast, loaded my laundry into my car, and headed to the mall for the outreach event. That ended up being kind of boring. It was an interesting experience, though.

When I got there I helped the other librarian set up the table. Then one of the IT people and the head of circulation showed up and got the laptop setup for signing people up for library cards. I think this was the first real-world test of signing people up at an outreach event. I think it may have been tried at a school a couple months ago but I feel like there were wireless issues or something. And today was a successful trial. In the three and a half hours I was there we signed up five people for library cards. Not great but also not bad.

None of us were happy with the table placement because it kind of felt like we were out of the way and not facing the right direction. We also didn't have very good signage. The library logo was on the front of the table skirt but unless you were looking at the front of the table you couldn't see that. I guess we used to have a tall standing sign but the pole went missing. In a small attempt to present something interesting I quickly looked up logos for several of our resources and had them rotating as a slideshow on our laptop. Not great but better than nothing.

In general I don't think it was a great setup as a whole for an outreach event because the tables were scattered throughout the mall and the vast majority of the people at the mall were there to be at the mall, not participate in an outreach event. They just wanted to do their mall thing, not talk to people sitting at a table. And I'm not one to bug people who show no interest in being bugged. Despite that I did end up talking to several people and had extended conversations about our services with at least three people. The other librarian was killing it, however, because she had no problems going up to people. Her tactic involved grabbing a stack of our handouts about programming for kids and whenever she saw someone with a kid, she would walk up and ask if they had a library card and if they knew about the programs we offered. She's the normal outreach librarian at the library and now I understand why.

I stood up for at least the first couple hours and then sat down spoke with the head of circulation while we waited for people to stop by. She is the mother of a girl I graduated with and one of my former managers at the movie theater. Small world. We talked about a lot of different things, which made the time go by at a decent pace.

At one o'clock my shift was over so I headed out and went to my Mom's house to do laundry. To make up for starting late I did everything on the fast cycle, which takes thirty-five minutes rather than fifty-seven. Not bad, and I can't tell any difference in the outcome. While my cloths were being laundered I watched the last part of a documentary on the two girls involved with stabbing another girl over Slender Man awhile ago. It was interesting because I had only ever heard headlines about the incident. When that was over I watched Star Trek: Voyager and read. I started reading the book for our upcoming reader's advisory conference thing but I can only get it on my phone (or computer) and reading a book, that I'm not interested in, on my phone is not appealing. I don't know how many pages the actual book has but because so few words and lines fit on my screen, the book is over 1000 pages. It's annoying and I doubt I'll come anywhere close to finishing the book. I'm okay with that.

I was able to head home around five o'clock and started cooking dinner. It was probably the first and last time I'll cook with an acorn squash. So much time was spent dealing with that thing. I only used half of it because there was a bad spot on one side and it would have been too much of a pain trying to cut around it. It was already bad enough trying to peel the thing and clean out the inside. I didn't end up with that much edible squash after all the work so it definitely wasn't worth all the effort. And it just tasted like a mushy potato in the end. The best part was that I saved the seeds and after dinner I roasted them. They taste just like pumpkin seeds.

I watched YouTube videos tonight and got about an hour into a movie before I gave up because my internet was acting up. I believe I'm supposed to get 150Mbps down but tonight I was getting 2Mbps. It was frustrating and I had to stop watching the movie because it kept pausing every few seconds for several seconds at a time. This has happened at least once or twice and it is annoying. Now I'm up to 50Mbps, so I might try to finish the movie before I go to bed, despite it being 12:45AM at the moment.

While I was watching, or attempting, to watch things I played Minecraft. I made more progress on my house, which I am really liking, and expanded my island a little bit. I can just see what looks like a cave system on my map when I am down in my mine so I need to start working my way over there and see if I can find more dirt. All important dirt.

Tomorrow my main goal is to move all the random boxes in my living room down to the basement, so my living room doesn't look so messy. I meant to do that last weekend but apparently ran out of time, but tomorrow is the day. Maybe.

February 3, 2017

 This morning I got to sleep in again and then I eventually got ready, ate lunch, and went to work.

At work I did not take notes so I have forgotten a lot. I'll never learn.

I had a walkthrough when I first got to work and then I covered the desk for a little bit while the other librarian went to talk to the PR lady. Eventually I was on the desk for real and it was uneventful. At least uneventful enough that I can't remember it. Oh, I watched a bunch of usability videos. That's what I did. There was something else, which I still can't remember, but I spent most of the time watching usability videos and occasionally helping patrons.

I had two free hours after my desk shift so I went upstairs and watched a training video for Mango Languages and wrote a post about it for our department blog. I wasn't expecting to get too much out of it but I did learn some things that I might try to incorporate into other things in the future. All the things.

Other stuff happened, I think I went back upstairs, after another walkthrough, and worked on the Pinterest class for a awhile before going to dinner. When I got back from dinner I had to wait for the librarian on the desk to finish helping a patron and writing an email before I could get on the desk. I spent that time looking through an issue of Library Journal and talking with the teen librarian. She showed me a video clip from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which is a show I hadn't thought about in years and didn't realize anyone else knew about it. It was hilarious.

I didn't really have much to do with the rest of my night. I spoke with my coworker for awhile and then spent the rest of my time making a small sign to go on my African American history display that has links to a few more resources that I read about in the Library Journal issue I had been looking at earlier. The first print came out looking weird because the color messed up, so I did a bunch of things, like saving it as a PDF, printing it as an image, and my coworker changed some things on the copier. And that print came out looking much better.

Overall it was a very quiet evening, which I am okay with.

When I got home I ate some popcorn and sourdough bread. Separately, not like a sandwich. I also watched YouTube videos and clicked around the internet for awhile. Now I'm going to record my audio journal. It's only ten o'clock, which is somewhat early for a Friday, but I'm doing the outreach thing tomorrow morning so I have to wake up early. I'm not looking forward to the waking up part but the outreach thing should be fun. Hopefully. It's going to screw up my laundry schedule, which is going to screw up dinner schedule, but I'll figure it out.

February 2, 2017

 This morning I slept in and it was fantastic. The best way to start a day.

When I got to work I went down and set up my love and war DVD display. My favorite part about it is that it will be easy to refill. Also, while looking for DVDs I saw that we had a couple that I want to watch but haven't found online, so I might need to check those out sometime. When I was done with the display, I worked on statistics stuff. Which involved putting the totals for the chat service last month into a table. Tedious but informative work.

After that I went upstairs so I could read the book chapter for our upcoming staff meeting next week.

And then I went to lunch. A two hour lunch is really nice. I went home, watched YouTube videos for awhile, eventually ate my leftover Chipotle, and then eventually went back to work.

I got back a little bit early so before I got on desk I went down and refilled the tax instruction books. And then I was on desk for pretty much the rest of the day. I was only scheduled for two hours but I didn't really have anything to do off-desk so yeah. I caught up on all of my monthly statistics stuff, and that is exciting. I even reorganized the web statistics information, giving each year its own sheet in the Excel file, which makes me happy. I didn't even realize we had stats going back to 2013 until I started unhiding columns.

I ended the night by starting and finishing a personalized reading list. I think I did a pretty good job, and I added a few more books to the list of books I want to read. An ever-growing list that will never come close to being completed.

While I was working on all of that stuff, there was a Harry Potter event happening in the library. The final best estimate for attendance was 271, which is pretty good. Based on the noise level and the amount of traffic by the desk I would have guessed it was much more. We had a potions room, trivia, dueling, wand making, divination, and live owls. From what I could see everyone was enjoying themselves, not only the patrons but also the staff and volunteers, so I will say it was a success.

When I got home I had some popcorn and watched some YouTube videos before diving into this. Now it is getting late so I am going to stop writing so I can record my audio journal. I started on January 2^nd so I have officially made it a month. I believe that is longer than the last time I tried an audio journal. Hooray.

February 1, 2017

 Today I didn't have to be at work until 10:30AM so I got to sleep in a bit. It was nice.

When I got to work I started my day by setting up one of my displays. I pulled off all the books that were from last month's display and added mine. I think it looks pretty good. We'll see if anyone checks any out.

I also made my sign for the DVD display. I went with the title Love & War, I made the overall background a gradient of red and blue with transparent explosion over the whole thing, rows of hearts that changed color on each row, and a transparent silhouette of a couple kissing. It's over the top and obnoxious but I kind of like it.

I cut out the last of the props for the Harry Potter event tomorrow night. My fingers appreciate that because although we have several pairs of scissors to pick from, none of them are that great.

On one of my walkthroughs this morning I stopped over in the Children's department because the three big chairs in the Young Adult area had all been moved off into a corner and I wanted to see if that had been purposeful. I ended up talking with them for awhile before I went back to the chairs with the teen librarian to move them back where they should be.

I was on desk for two hours this afternoon and spent my free time updating my chat stats spreadsheet because it is a new month and I need to update all of the stats I keep track of. I just barely finished because I kept getting sidetracked by other desk things. I responded to emails, answered phone calls, helped a few patrons find books, and offered my feedback to the librarian gluing sticks to all the props we have been cutting out over the past few days. I also spent the last hour helping an older lady get ebooks on her phone. That ended up being a success and she was really happy and appreciative. That completely works for me. I'm still getting used to people wanting to know my name after I have helped them. I have never been a troublemaker but every time a patron asks me my name I feel like it is so they can go complain about me. It's weird.

Tonight was Chipotle night and that went well. I only had two videos to show after dinner but then we ended up watching several clips of Bill Burr on Conan. I don't know why he has been on show so often lately but I'm okay with it. I'm a fan of his angry, yelling rants.

When I got home I watched YouTube videos, caught up on internet stuff, and that's about it. When I finish this I'm going to play Minecraft while recording my audio journal. I couldn't find any coal last night while recording but afterward I remembered how to make charcoal by burning logs, which allowed me to go deep enough to find coal. Exciting times in Minecraft.

Tomorrow I don't go in until noon. I'm looking forward to sleeping in.