December 4, 2017

 This morning when I went to pull out of my garage there was a car parked behind me. Luckily it was far enough back that I was able to snake out but I did nudge the trash can in my garage. There has been a lot more activity over there recently and when I drove past tonight the curtains were open and there were a bunch of Christmas decorations. Based on four or five cars and the noise, I'm assuming they were also having a party. I just hope they learn to park on their side of the driveway so I don't have to have any interactions with them.

When I got to work I was on desk for two hours. Most of that time was spent working on and submitting my monthly report, and reading news articles. And helping the occasional patron, answering the phone, and responding to a chat.

I had two hours off the desk after that and went upstairs so I could watch another leadership video on Lynda.com. It was shorter than the last one so I was able to watch it, take notes, edit my notes, and get them posted to the department blog. A productive two hours.

After lunch I went back upstairs for an hour and composed some emails. I sent to first one to a librarian at the university to set up a time in February for us to go back and sign up university students for library cards. Then I sent one to hopefully get instructors for two of our adulting classes next semester. After a few emails back and forth over the next hour or so I was able to nail down someone for the gardening class. Now I just need to figure out plumbing and taxes.

I was on desk for an hour and along with getting an instructor for the gardening class, I worked on the schedule printout a little bit. I added another comment to cover how to sort the schedule. I also reorganized all of the comment boxes so they flow better and are less scattered. And, I read a couple picture books that one of the other librarians wanted me to read. One was about a lost hat and the other was about a found hat. They were pretty good.

With my last two hours at work I had two walkthroughs and did other stuff. I updated our view count statistics for the pages of our website that I keep track of. Apparently I forgot to do that in October, which I find very believable. I read more news articles. I printed out tomorrow's room schedules because we're switching over to the new system and won't be able to print schedules in the morning. I also figured out how to use one line of code in my macros for my homebound spreadsheet idea instead of one line of code for each row I want to show or hide. I'm pretty happy about it.

After work I went to my Mom's house to feed the dogs and then I went to my house so I could get dinner and relax a little bit. I recorded my audio journal and then I watched videos and livestreams, and played a couple rounds of CoD: WW2 and finished a couple daily orders.

 Now I'm back at my Mom's house, writing this and watching Star Trek: Voyager. As soon as this episode is over I think I'll go to bed.

December 3, 2017

 Last night I got ten hours of sleep. I woke up after eight or so but decided to just role over and go back to sleep because my bed was feeling very cozy. It was nice.

Today was uneventful and I didn't really accomplish much. I would have liked to have been more productive but the motivation wasn't there. This morning I watched YouTube videos and AFK'd in Tera for awhile. They are doing a thing in December where you get a loot box each weekend for playing the game for three hours. I didn't feel like playing so I just faced a wall and put auto-run on so I didn't get kicked for inactivity.

Eventually I did end up playing Tera. The Gunner class gets a little more fun as you level up and get more abilities and can actually deal more damage. I leveled up to level twenty or twenty-four, whatever level unlocks the first dungeon, and then jumped into a dungeon because that's the quickest way to level up.

I recreated the Joker perler bead pattern I found in GIMP so I can use it as a cross stitch pattern. I also tweaked it a little bit to make it look better. I still want to mess with it a little bit but I think it will make a pretty cool cross stitch.

For dinner I made the bean soup that the one-on-one tech person gave everyone in our department for Christmas. She gave all of us a jar (or a a tin, in my case, because she ran out of jars) with all of the dry ingredients. I just needed to add water and a can of diced tomatoes. It took forever because the beans had to cook, but it ended up tasting pretty good. I also roasted potatoes, which were leftover from Thanksgiving, and mixed those in after the soup was done.

After dinner I played a little bit of CoD: WW2, just enough to complete a few daily orders. Then I played a battleground in Tera a few times so I could level up even faster. The battleground kind of sucked, you slowly walk over to the other team's boss and hopefully punch it once or twice before getting killed. Rinse and repeat. Over and over again. Luckily, three out of the four times I played my team won. I got seven million XP the first time because it was part of a quest, and then a million XP each the next two times, so I was able to get up to get up to level thirty-one I think. Not bad.

It's now after eleven o'clock and I've got a headache so I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed. It would be nice if tomorrow wasn't Monday.

December 2, 2017

 This morning I woke up at 8:30AM, which means I only got five and a half hours of sleep. But I was wide awake so I decided to get out of bed. I spent my morning playing a bit of CoD: WW2 and continuing to watch the recording of the first day of the Yogscast's Jingle Jam.

Around 2:30PM I finally made it over to my Mom's house to do laundry. If all goes well next Friday, I should be able to do laundry with my own washer and dryer next weekend. While my laundry was going I wanted to take a nap but I apparently wasn't tired enough because I couldn't fall asleep. Instead I watched Star Trek: Voyager and looked through a couple cross stitch books I checked out from the library. I also put up some Christmas lights on the front porch because my Mom wanted them.

When I got home I ate dinner, watched the Yogscast stream, and eventually played a little CoD: WW2. I unlocked the gold camo for one of my sniper rifles. Turns out I need to unlock the gold camo for the other three sniper rifles in order to unlock the diamond camo for all of them. That'll take awhile.

And that was pretty much my day. I just finished watching the first day of the livestream and now I'm watching YouTube videos. And soon I'll be going to bed. I'm looking forward to that.

December 1, 2017

 It's December already. Good grief.

This morning at work I restocked three displays. I completely restocked the Bestsellers, which is my display this month, by adding 40 books to the backup cart. I also restocked the audiobooks and DVDs because they were getting low. I also started making a list for the parent cart, because that is my other display this month. I haven't had it since June, so I need to try and get back into the mindset of a mother who takes her kid(s) to the library. We'll see how I do.

I spent at least twenty minutes helping an older patron get back into his Hotmail account by creating a Gmail account so we could reset his password. This is the same patron who came to the last few tech drop-ins and classes. I have also helped him get back into his Hotmail account before. I may have even done it twice before. And at least one of those times I created a Gmail account for him. I am hoping this time he won't misplace the information with his Gmail address and password. Or that he won't lose track of the paper with his new Hotmail password on it.

This afternoon I finished my list of books for the parent cart and had just enough time to pull books and get them on the display. I probably put too many books on it to start out but I'm going with it. A couple hours later two books had already checked out so hopefully that will be a sign of things to come. It probably won't be, but I can hope. I decided to go completely with nonfiction and I'm interested to see if that will work or if I should throw in some fiction books.

For the last two hours of my shift I was on desk and it was relatively uneventful. I made a quick printout for some of the holiday events happening around town. I also read a lot of news articles and talked a little bit with my coworkers. The loud phone-talking lady wasn't back today but the long haired older patron was and he came over to complain about two of the teen siblings after a very minor outburst, that remained under control, so it wasn't really even an outburst. I didn't have a problem with the teens' behavior because I thought they were doing a really good job of controlling themselves. I once again suggested to the patron that the tech center was a quiet area and that people were allowed to talk at the computers upstairs. He didn't seem to appreciate that. He went back to the computers for a little while and then left, either down to the tech center or possibly left the library. I don't know, and I don't really care. It may not have anything to do with race but his almost immediate reaction today compared to putting up with the white lady on the phone yesterday for over two hours seems to favor a different conclusion. He also brought up the fact that he had been assaulted at the library. I assume he is referring to when the patron who we later banned and was then arrested, lunged at him after he wouldn't stop staring at the other patron. It seems like he's looking for a fight, but not an actual physical altercation (I don't think he'd do well in one of those), he just wants to insert himself into situations and cause trouble. It's annoying.

After work I stopped at my Mom's house to set up her new TV in the basement. It's not too heavy but it is awkwardly big and hard to hold onto. I was pretty proud of my genius idea to open up the bottom of the box, as well as the top, so I could just lift the box off the TV, instead of trying to pull the TV out of the box, which was never going to work out. After getting it out of the box it didn't take too long to get the feet installed and get it set up.

I got home a little after seven o'clock and then ate dinner and started watched the recording for the earlier Yogscast livestream. Today was the first day of their Jingle Jam, which they do every December. It's a livestream that lasts all month long and all the money they raise goes to charity. It won't keep the same pace all month long but by the end of the day they had already raised $1.3 million. That's kinda crazy.

November 30, 2017

 It took me forever to get to sleep last night so I ended up only getting about six and a half hours of sleep. Six o'clock came really quick but I managed to get up without much problem, which was a pleasant surprise. And I ended up getting to work early because the traffic was favorable.

I did all the usual opening stuff and learned the elevator right by our desk was broken. Not long after we opened an elevator technician came to look at it. When he got there, he stepped in the elevator, hit a button, and as the doors closed I heard him say “Oh, no.” Not really the most reassuring response from the guy there to fix the elevator. I'm not sure what ended up being wrong with it but he did find a big book somewhere inside the shaft.

After he was done fixing it, we discovered it kept making a repeated series of high-pitched beeps. I narrowed it down to happening whenever someone or something was over the threshold of the elevator. So as people stepped in or out of the elevator it would beep. Or if you just held your arm over the threshold it wouldn't stop beeping. I also noticed that crossing the threshold when the door was closing would cause the door to open without it even touch you. Before you had to grab it and kind of pull it back open. Now it's like a garage door that will automatically open back up if you trip the sensor. So that's nice, but the beeping was really obnoxious. I thought the technician had left so I sent an email to the maintenance guy, the assistant director, and the rest of the department just to let them know the elevator would beep anytime it was used. Not long after that the assistant director came over with the technician and he was able to turn the beeping off. My main worry, other than being frequently annoyed by the beeping throughout the day, was that another book or something would get dropped in such away that we couldn't reach it but it would trigger non-stop beeping until a technician could get there. We would all go nuts, employees and patrons alike.

Today was a productive day. I edited and posted my notes for the leadership video I watched to the department blog, along with an appropriate GIF of a woman dance-stepping up a stair machine at the gym. I also edited and posted my notes from the virtual conference I watched a few sessions for awhile ago. The keynote was about net neutrality and I used a slow loading GIF that represented what the internet would be like if net neutrality went away.

This afternoon I spent awhile creating a mock-up of how I would change the tech training page. The main thing was just moving the tech class and workshop stuff to the bottom and adding buttons for each of the classes so that people could use those to either navigate to the class page and access the resources for the class, or open up the registration page and sign up for the class. The page I made was a combination of screenshots from the current page and Publisher elements. It's not that pretty but I think it gets the point across.

For the last two hours of work there was a woman at the computers who was talking loudly on her phone while she worked through signing up for college. It was pretty annoying but she was at least trying to improve her life, which is a lot more than most of the loud people at the computers. And, no other patrons complained and I think that is unprecedented given the length of time she was talking. Not even the old long-haired patrons who was constantly complaining about the teen siblings and the guy who got kicked out for a year and then arrested. Coincidentally, the lady today was white, and people he has complained about in the past were not. Coincidentally.

On my way home I stopped at Target. Among other things, I got frozen pizza. One of my fellow librarians said she was going to have cold pizza for lunch, which sounded really good. And then, the teen librarian had pizza delivered to our desk for her event this afternoon. It smelled so good. Like, best pizza I've ever smelled, good. I thought about ordering a pizza but decided to save money and get a frozen one. And I didn't have to wait for the delivery.

When I got home, I ate pizza, watched videos and clicked around the internet, and then played a few matches in CoD: WW2. My first game was Hardpoint and I went 35 and 21 with a sniper. That a ridiculous K/D for me in general, but with a sniper? Good grief. My next game, also Hardpoint, I went 17 and 13, so not as good, but I also had almost three and a half minutes on the harpoints, which was over two minutes longer than anyone else.

I also played a little bit of Tera tonight because they released a new character class today and they're doing another leveling event. I don't know that I'll go all the way to max level this time but we'll see.

Now I want to go to bed, so I'm going to record my audio journal. I'm glad tomorrow is Friday. This has felt like a really long week.

November 29, 2017

 I'm ready for bed and I'm not looking forward to opening tomorrow. But I get of at five o'clock, so we'll focus on that.

Today was kind of a weird day. On three occasions I kinda felt slightly attacked and/or made to feel kinda dumb by my coworkers, so that wasn't a good feeling. I assume most of that is on me and my interpretation of events and being unable to see things differently. I'm not sure why I ended up in that funk today. It would have been a good day if it wasn't for that, so I don't know what's up.

My morning was spent upstairs watching and taking notes on a Lynda.com video about leadership. It's the one I started to read the transcript for the other day but had to stop because the transcript was awful. Turns out the video was pretty good but the transcript was still pretty terrible. I'm interested how it was made. There were some misspellings, missed words, and what seemed like misinterpretations of other words. Aside from the transcript, the content was good and I think I got some useful things out of it.

This afternoon I was desk for a couple hours. I helped patrons, talked to my coworkers about a tech class, and tweaked my room schedule printout. And then, at five o'clock I went to the boardroom to show some of my coworkers the new room schedule program. My main focus was on printing out room schedules and they had a bunch of questions about actually reserving rooms, which I really wasn't capable of answering beyond the basics, so that was good. Hopefully they got something out of what I had to show them.

After work I forgot it was Wednesday, I think it kind of felt like a Tuesday all day, but luckily my Mom caught me before I left the parking lot. I headed to Qdoba and then to her house. We ate dinner, watched videos, and talked about random things until eight o'clock when I headed home.

At home I clicked around the internet, watched videos and livestreams, and now I'm writing this so I can then record my audio journal and go to bed. Sleep sounds really good right now.

November 28, 2017

 I got about nine and a half hours of sleep last night and it was amazing. And then on my way to work, the stoplights were acting like golights, which was a nice turn of events compared to my usual drive to work.

My first hour of work was spent dealing with email things mostly and then I was on desk for two hours. And I continued working on the room schedule printout. I came up with a complex formula, patched together from a few different formulas, in order to properly display the setup/takedown time with the regular time for a meeting, all of which are pulled from another sheet in the workbook. It's actually faster to just type in that information, rather than editing the formula, but it's cool that I figured it out.

I had a walkthrough and then I went down to help cover the youth services desk during their department meeting. Thankfully one of their assistants was also there because she was getting questions I wouldn't have been able to answer. I only got one question and then spent the rest of the time typing up my notes from the conference last month. It's taken me awhile to get around to that.

My drive back to the library after dinner was the same as my drive to work this morning. So many golights. It was nice.

I spent some time refilling my Mystery and audiobook displays, eventually had a couple walkthroughs, and spent the majority of the night on desk. I finished typing up my conference notes and got those posted to our department blog, and then I worked on turning my room schedule spreadsheet into more of a template with a bunch of comments to help my coworkers out when I'm not there. There are three sheets in the workbook: one to paste the information copied from the room schedule report, one for the printable version of the schedule that pulls information from the first sheet, and then an example of what the final schedule should look like. Tomorrow I will actually try to explain the whole thing to my coworkers, so we'll see if it actually makes sense to anyone. My fingers are crossed.

When I got home I played a couple games of Domination in CoD: WW2 so I could complete a daily order to get fifteen kills with a silenced SMG. It took a little longer than it should have because I kept forgetting to put the silencer on. Also, I'm not very good. But I eventually completed it. Then I clicked around the internet before starting this. And now, as always, I will record my audio journal and go to bed.