August 1, 2017

 This morning sucked a little bit. It started when I was ironing my pants and burned my finger on the iron. That stung and made my shower annoying every time my finger got under the water. Then, when I went to start my car, it just clicked. Nothing. Nada. No va. I didn't leave the trunk open, there weren't any lights on, so I don't know what happened. I first thought to call my Mom or sister to see if they could give me a ride but then I remembered the small charger my Mom got me after my car died twice in relatively quick succession. Luckily I charged it after she got it for me and when I pulled it out of my trunk it was still almost fully charged. It is a HALO Bolt and it is amazing. I wish I were famous so I could get paid to promote it. I plugged in the small jumper cables, hooked those up to the battery (which I learned how to do on my odd battery the last time I needed jumped), pushed the button on the device down for a couple seconds, it clicked, I turned my key, and the car started. It was incredible. I thought I would have to leave it on the battery for a long time and cross my fingers and be really late for work. Instead, it took a handful of seconds and I was only a few minutes late for work.

So yeah, this morning could have been better. It also could have been worse.

At work, I did things and I should have taken notes because it was a weird collection of things here and there. A lot of which I have probably forgotten. I used the old mechanical pencil sharpener for all of my pencil sharpening needs. I sprayed the bottom of the suction cup with Lysol and didn't have to reset it the whole time. The power of liquids.

I was on desk for the first two hours and I think that whole time was spent catching up on reference emails and personal emails that stacked up from my day off yesterday. Other stuff may have happened but I think it was all email stuff.

When I got off the desk I did a walkthrough, put up my DVD sign and switched out several of the DVDs from last month, and added a bunch of audiobooks to that display. It will be nice having the audiobook display this month because I filled it so many times last month when it wasn't my display.

All of that took me nearly forty-five minutes and I had time to print some more prize drawing tickets, because those are never-ending. I printed out another two hundred and this afternoon I gave a single person thirty-eight, so yeah, I'll probably be printing more soon.

My car started at lunch, which was a nice surprise. It also started every other time I used my car throughout the rest of the day. I need to get an oil change so I should probably just schedule a whole servicing thing and get everything checked out. We'll see.

This afternoon I did stuff. Probably. I cut the tickets I printed this morning. I also messed a lot with stats. I pulled stats for our website and then fell down a hole playing with Excel. At the moment I have a different tab for each year of stats. I decided I wanted to make a new tab that showed the stats for each month across all of the years for each page next to each other. If that makes sense. I wanted a chart that would show me monthly trends in page views. I may have also been bored. But I think it will be interesting. And it should have been a fairly simple task but chart was acting weird. It would just select the top row it kept going for the top two or three. It was super weird. I started trying a new tactic but got sidetracked before I could see if it would actually work. Tomorrow.

There was definitely some other stuff but I've been milking this entry for at least an hour, so lets move on.

After work I went home. I had no interest in cooking dinner and sat down on my couch for awhile and almost fell asleep. My couch is so napable. Eventually I ate a very adult dinner. I had the rest of my potatoes and rice cold along with a Havarti and Dijon mustard sandwich. That is a super fancy sounding cheese sandwich. Originally I was going to make it a grilled cheese sandwich, but I couldn't be bothered.

Around eight o'clock I decided to go to the store. Originally I was going to go to Target, but then I remembered I wanted to make a red potato salad, so I looked up a bunch a different recipes, found one that looked good, and headed to the grocery store. The recipe is just a mix of olive oil, parsley, lemon juice, green onions, Dijon mustard, celery, and garlic. Super simple. And I get to use my food processor. Always a plus. I probably won't get to make it until Friday but I'm looking forward to it.

I took a long way home because I was listening to an Authority Zero CD. I completely forgot they were a thing until I was adding new music to my thumb drive, and that is a shame because I love them. I've been in a very nostalgic music mood lately and Authority Zero is perfect. Another band that really holds up is Saosin.

And now I'm back from falling down a YouTube music rabbit hole. Good grief.

I spent the rest of my night watching a livestream and ever so slowly working on this. Originally I wanted to knock this and my audio journal out so I could play some video games. That was obviously never going to happen. Writing this is like homework. If I give myself a day, I'll take a day. If I give myself thirty minutes, I'll take thirty minutes. You'd think after so many years of doing this I would have a more efficient system worked out.

It's now nearly midnight so I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed. Tomorrow, I am hoping my car starts in the morning.

July 31, 2017

 So I didn't go to the store today. That is not surprising. I did leave the house but that was only to step out on the front porch and water my flower. I don't know if that counts.

I slept in a little bit and then read in bed for awhile. I then spent a decent chunk of my day researching monitors and really fell down a rabbit hole. I decided I wanted a bigger and better monitor for my new computer. At the moment I'm using one of my 24” monitors from my old computer and I sit too far away from it. I also want to take advantage of my GTX 1080 Ti, which can walk all over a 24” 1080p monitor. I ended up going with a 27” 1440p monitor with a 144hz refresh rate. I spent more money than I would have liked but paid a lot less than I could have. My fingers are crossed I don't get a lemon because it looked like that was a possibility based on some of the reviews. I do know that I'm going to take a break from spending money on electronics. I need to go back to just spending money on food. It's much easier to save money when you just buy food and pay bills.

Throughout the day I uploaded twenty-five audio journal videos to YouTube. That only catches me up through June 11^th. I've still got a long way to go, but it is progress.

I did not play video games as much as I would have liked today due to the monitor rabbit hole. But tonight I did put in a little time. I tried out Tilt Brush, which I got as part of my free month subscription to Viveport. It was a lot of fun. I'm not that artistic but I can see the potential and I might have to buy it the next time it goes on sale. I do still have the $50 Steam gift card but I don't want to waste it on full-priced games.

I successfully played Star Trek Bridge Crew thanks to being plugged into the internet. I only went through the tutorial but that took me nearly an hour. I'm looking forward to jumping into the game itself. It would be fun to play with other people but I don't think I'll ever jump in with random people. Luckily I can do the solo thing. The strangest part was that the tutorial character was a girl and it really weird looking down to use one of the buttons on the captain's chair and seeing a non-male chest. It's an odd experience.

I jumped into the regular Elite Dangerous and created bookmarks for the next several systems I needed to jump to. I still need to peak out from under my headset to see which planets I need in the system, but I'm at least not having to type or cut and paste while in VR. I'm going to look around for mods to see if there is a way I can get a notepad or something in-game that I can write down individual planets on. Once I was in VR, I upped the in-game supersampling to whatever the highest option was, 2.0 or 2.5. I also upped it in SteamVR to 2.5. I've read that some people have issues going too high when they are in a highly populated station, but most of my time is spent out in the middle of nowhere and I haven't noticed any issues after bumping everything up. I also haven't experienced any of the slight motion sickness I felt the very first time I tried out the game in VR. I also haven't done any crazy barrel rolls, which might explain it. I think I have become more accustomed to it, though, and I think it helps a lot having a computer that can maintain a high FPS so the game stays really smooth. Just to test it I went into combat training and that went pretty well. It is a lot easier to keep track of the bad guys when you can turn your head and look out of the top, sides, and back of the cockpit. Before I was having to rely on the map but I didn't look at that a single time in VR. The game was a lot of fun without VR but it is definitely turned up to eleven in VR. I'm also about nine hours away from buying an in-game bobble head for my ship. I know I said I was going to take a break from electronics and whatnot but the bobblehead has been a 60-hour goal since the beginning, so I'm sticking to it.

It is now nearly midnight because it wouldn't be a journal entry as of late if I wasn't constantly sidetracked during the process of writing it. Tomorrow I open, so waking up in the morning is probably going to suck a little bit. I'm not sure what I'm going to do tomorrow. I need to give the LEGOs back to the childrens department and put up my DVD display sign. That won't account for very much of my day, though. I imagine I might try and continue working on the tutorial thing. And I might count some prize tickets. So there will be things to do. There are always things to do. And things to be avoided because they aren't immediately necessary to worry about.

July 30, 2017

 This morning I slept until about the time I set my alarm clock. Or at least the time I intended to set my alarm clock. Turns out it works better when you actually turn the alarm on. Thankfully it wasn't an early work day.

I did end up scrambling around a little bit before work because I got sidetracked downloading drivers on my old desktop and taking apart my laptop. Last night I typed most of my journal with my laptop on the carpet in the basement while waiting for the new desktop to do the memory diagnostic thing. Following that, my laptop started getting really loud and I'm thinking it had something to do with sitting on the carpet. I opened up the bottom and nothing seemed off. It's completely clean inside, too. So I don't know what's up. At the moment it is quiet but we'll see.

At work today I spent most of my time working on a personalized reading list. It was a little difficult because the person only wanted audiobooks. Thankfully they were okay with digital audiobooks because I think I only found one book that we actually have on CD. I also found a bunch of books that would have been perfect but we didn't have access to them. That is always annoying. But I managed to find enough stuff to finish the list and I ended up checking out a couple audiobooks myself. I probably won't get around to listening to them but it's the thought that counts.

I printed more prize drawing tickets because they were apparently four short yesterday. Could have been worse. I printed out four hundred and cut half of them, we'll probably need the other two hundred but just in case I figured I would wait. Yesterday they also ran out of solar eclipse glasses. In the last week or so, however long we've had them, we have given out 1500 pairs. That's a lot of glasses. We still have some but those are for the events we're having at the library.

Other than that, I filled out my monthly report, helped patrons, and left a request for whoever opens tomorrow to make state library card for a patron. They jumped in chat less than two minutes before we closed so I didn't have time to do it but told them I would have someone make it tomorrow morning.

When I got home tonight I made dinner. I roasted red potatoes and scrambled some eggs to mix in with my leftover brown rice. I seasoned everything with garlic powder, onion powder, rosemary, and lemon pepper. It was very tasty. The combination of everything seemed a little random, and there's a chance I may be pregnant based on my cravings, but I'm already looking forward to the leftovers.

After catching up on YouTube videos I watched the movie Sand Castle on Netflix, which is about the war in Iraq. It was not an uplifting movie to say the least. It was along the lines of Generation Kill in terms of the tone. My interpretation of the title is that you spend so much time building a sand castle but ultimately it is still a precarious structure that takes very little effort to crumble. This whole movie the main focus is rebuilding a water pumping station, which ends up being a futile endeavor that cost way more than it could have repaid. It was an interesting movie.

I was going to play video games tonight but I lacked the motivation. I really need to get better at pulling the trigger when it comes to doing something. Too often I want to do too much and end up doing nothing. I am really tempted to come up with a schedule for my personal life. So specify times for video games or random other hobbies, and stick to it, so I end up actually doing things with my time instead of clicking around the internet doing nothing.

It is now late and I am going to record my audio journal. Tomorrow I want to go to the store at some point and play video games. We'll see what ends up happening. Probably a lot of nothing, but sometimes that is a good thing.

July 29, 2017

 This morning I slept in a little bit and got a solid nine and a half hours of sleep. I needed it after sleeping very little Thursday night. When I got up I let the dogs out and fed them, started my laundry, and then took a shower. I planned on doing a lot of reading today but I ended up only reading for about thirty minutes. Not great. I'm not really sure what happened with the time today. There seemed to be a lot less of it than usual.

I watched Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and that drained me. I enjoyed it because it was very well written and the actors nailed it, but it was also really sad. Something that can be inferred from the title. Also, I asked one of the other librarians about it and she told me what was going to happen. Given the title, it's kind of like going to see Titanic and hoping the ship doesn't sink, but I always hold out hope for unrealistic but happy endings. I do think realistic and sad endings make a movie better and more powerful, but I also find them draining and I often avoid them. I'm glad I decided to go with the movie instead of committing to the book, but if the book is even half as funny and witty as the script it is something I would like to read at some point.

After I fed the dogs dinner I packed up and headed home. Once everything was unloaded I ate my own dinner, the last of my stir fry, and watched YouTube videos. After dinner I tried playing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (forever after known as PUBG) but when I launched it my keyboard shut off. That has happened a few times lately and I'm not sure what's going on. Sometimes I can unplug it and plug it into a different USB port but this time I had to restart my computer. I then tried updating a couple drivers, a Razer one for the keyboard and an AMD one, but both seemed to freeze on me and then wouldn't run after I tried starting them again. I gave up on the updating but then PUBG just gave me a black screen and I couldn't get the sound to work in my headphones. It was all super annoying.

But I've got a new computer now, so I said screw it with my old one and went down to the basement. It didn't take long at all to install PUBG on the new computer thanks to the ethernet connection I set up the other day. I should have forsaken wifi a long time ago. I do still need to try my new wifi adapter, but I'm loving the wired connection at the moment.

I ended up only playing one game of PUBG but I ended up coming in fourth place I think. And I died from the gas, not another player. I was moving to the new zone but was already low on health and my timing was off. I was hiding in one house and I knew there was a player in the house next to me and was waiting for him to leave but the timing didn't work out. I also made it that far without firing a single bullet. My passive style worked this time. I feel like if this was a real thing, I would play it by hiding and trying to avoid contact as much as possible. And in the game it seems like a viable option. I would like to get it working on my other desktop where I have a better mouse and a bigger screen so I can change keybindings to my mouse buttons and so I can actually see things. Then I will feel better about actually engaging other players. I would have been a little screwed if I got into a fight tonight, and not just because I didn't find any good loot.

After that I played Elite Dangerous in VR. I can't remember exactly what it looked like before but I bumped up the supersampling on my headset to 2.0 and I think it looked a lot better. It may be all in my head but I would like to think it isn't. As for the gameplay, I made a lot of progress on my exploring quest. I'm getting better at inputting destinations and navigating the system map. I can still do better, though, because at the moment it involves a lot of peaking at my desktop under the headset, which can get annoying. Baby steps.

I heard back from CyberPower and they recommended running Windows Memory Diagnostics. That ended up being confusing because when I tried running it the first couple of times my screen went black when I restarted the computer. I think it was working but it wasn't showing up on screen because it was treating my monitor as the second display and the Vive headset as the first display, even though nothing was showing on the headset. Once I unplugged it from the computer all was well. Minus the fact that there weren't any errors, which I guess is good, but it would have been nice to have something to point to. They also asked if I tried disabling XMP mode. Enabling XMP mode was the only thing that reliably allowed me to start the computer, so disabling wouldn't be good. I might try it though, which means I'll have to move the RAM sticks again, but maybe the diagnostics tool will show an error when XMP mode is off. I'll mess with it tomorrow.

I got my first match today on my dating app. I was wondering if I would actually see matches or if I would only know when I actually got a message. Turns out you see when you get a match but it is still up to the girl to send a message within twenty-four hours of the match. This is good to know but it also means after all the swiping I have done over the past few weeks, I've only had one match. Dating, even online, is a numbers game but I'm apparently not that great with numbers. Oh well. The girl actually messaged me, though, and we have been texting throughout the evening. It's an interesting experience. It's kind of like a modern day pen pal.

And it's now after one o'clock and I need to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I don't work until noon tomorrow but I would still like to get a full night of sleep and not have to run around getting ready for work.

July 28, 2017

Should I have taken notes today? Maybe.

I woke up this morning, got ready, and then went upstairs to feed the dogs and let them out. I eventually ate lunch and went to work.

I made two display signs today for the DVD cart next month. I couldn't pick my favorite so I'm just going to swap them out halfway through the month. I once again went with a broad topic, shenanigans and escapades, so that I won't have to make a list, and because that seems to be what the patrons want.

I also made a small diagram showing how to thread the microfilm machine for one of the other librarians. She had the idea but wasn't able to make a diagram she likes so I gave it a shot. We're going to put it on the machines to hopefully help the patrons who aren't as familiar with our machines.

I counted more prize tickets. I also cut two hundred more tickets. And may need to print more. Good grief. But we're in the home stretch.

This evening I looked through a few magazines because I have a massive backlog of magazines to catch up on. I still have a massive backlog but there are three fewer in the stack. Progress.

Other things may or may not have happened today. I can't remember.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal and then go back to my Mom's house. I think she is supposed to be back tomorrow. I've got the day off but then I work on Sunday. We're having to cover for the assistant who quit. On the plus side, I'll have Monday off.

July 27, 2017

 I got up early this morning so I could get ready and deal with the dogs before my haircut. Since the last time I got my haircut, the lady who cuts my hair got everything hooked up with her cochlear implant so she can hear way better. They're still trying to dial things in but she was able to hear most of what I was saying, which is impressive considering the sound of my voice.

After my haircut I stopped by my house to put some new music on a thumb drive. And then I went back to my Mom's house and eventually ate lunch and went to work.

Work was a thing that happened today. I thought about taking notes but then thought nothing exciting was happening so why waste the time. Well, now I can't really remember what I did most of the time. I remember working on a template for tutorials. I tweaked the one I made for my online class and merged it with the PowerPoint I made for the tour I gave. I don't know if I'm totally happy with it but I think I'm close.

Speaking of the tour I gave, the librarian who made that happen, and who asked to collaborate on a presentation proposal for a conference, was in the library today. We talked for a little bit and then I had her talk to my boss about an idea she had while I left to go to dinner. I haven't heard back about the proposal but I'm also not sure how long it generally takes to hear back about that stuff. The conference isn't until October so I imagine they can take their time. It would also be nice if they sent a rejection letter, just so we know.

Tonight the phones went down for maybe an hour. We couldn't call out or within the building and if someone tried to call the library they just got a busy signal. The assistant manager in Circulation texted one of the IT guys and we both sent help tickets. One of those things worked and we think he was able to reset something from wherever he was because the phones eventually came back online. Unfortunately it broke the closing announcements so I had to make those. I'm not a fan of that but I survived.

I was talking to the teen librarian this afternoon and she mentioned that she and a couple other library people were talking about me last night at a social gathering last night. She said they came up with someone I should date at the library but she wouldn't tell me who. Tonight, when I went around to see if everyone was having phone issues, I was talking to the lady in Childrens, who was one of the people talking about me last night, and she gave me more details. The girl they are thinking about is a summer worker in Childrens, has been for awhile now, and is and English teacher during the school year. I looked up her picture and I remember the picture but I don't remember ever seeing or talking to her. I imagine I was introduced to her at some point but I can't remember. We'll see what happens, the lady in Childrens tonight seemed very determined to make things happen.

After work I came back to my house so I could write this and record my audio journal. Surprisingly, it has taken me forever to write this. It didn't help that I took time to take a picture of my fountain pens, ink, and paper for the teen librarian. But now I'm going to wrap this up so I can quickly(ish) record my audio journal and go back to my Mom's house. I've been doing everything journal related on my laptop and I don't have that with me, so I've been writing this on my desktop and I'll be doing the audio journal thing on the desktop as well. It's been awhile so we'll see if my settings are alright.

July 26, 2017

 Good grief I'm tired all of a sudden.

I briefly thought about taking notes today but I didn't. It was an uneventful day. Over the course of the day I finished my latest personalized reading list and I feel pretty good about it. I also found a few different books that I want to read. After I finished and sent the list, I went to put the request back in the notebook and saw that we had previously made a list for this patron and I don't believe we ever received feedback. In theory, patrons can't request another list unless they have given us feedback on their previous request. It is so rare that people request a second list and even more rare that people give us feedback, so I never think to check. Maybe I'll remember next time.

I emptied prize jars and worked on numbering tickets. I also got a couple of the other librarians to help out so I am much closer to being caught up. I still need to look into the random number generator and see which one I want to use.

I talked to the teen librarian for quite awhile about fountain pens today. She's interested in calligraphy so I've been explaining what I know about fountain pens, letting her try mine, and showing her resources.

I had a meeting with my boss and the one-on-one technology lady about the classes from last semester. Very soon we need to start talking about the Spring classes, which is ridiculous because the Fall classes haven't even started yet. I like the idea of being prepared way far in advance but it is also a little overwhelming. I fear it will feel like there is never a break because we will constantly be either planning classes or teaching classes.

My throat hurt all day except when I had a small, half-priced strawberry milkshake from Sonic. I don't think the price of it helped my throat any but I think it probably made it taste better. I took some cold medicine this morning because I was beginning to think that maybe it had turned into a cold. I no longer think that because the medicine seemed to have no effect. I'm wondering if talking aggravates the healing process. Probably.

After work I went to my Mom's house to feed the dogs and then I came home to eat dinner, after I finished my strawberry milkshake. I then may or may not have taken a nap in my chair. I need a better napping office chair.

Now I need to record my audio journal, load up my car, and head back to my Mom's house. And maybe call it an early night if I'm lucky. Fingers crossed.