July 15, 2016

I can't really remember this morning. I think I slept in a little bit and then eventually had breakfast, got ready for work, and then ate lunch before going to work. I felt like a senior citizen in high school today. I ate lunch before 10:30AM and had dinner at 4:15PM. My meal schedule is probably the biggest downside of the job right now.

At work I did things. I spent a lot of time working on my homebound lists and I'm down to the last patron. Unfortunately that patron gets twelve books. The goal is to get those picked out on Monday and then go and pull the books for all of my patrons.

I also added a couple more authors to my local authors list. I'm getting closer to ten authors.

We're thinking about getting some tablets that have games for adults, like brain game kind of things, and we have one to try it out. I tried it tonight and I'm not that impressed. Two or three of the games were broken, I don't think one was compatible with the tablet, and a couple games just sucked. I think there is potential but not with the current game lineup.

The major event of the night was a guy's backpack being stolen while he was in the children's section with his kids. He did kind of blame himself because he said he had dozed off because he's been up late working on a project every night for the last week. The staff member in the children's section brought him up to talk to me, because technically I was in charge of the library, and he wanted to file a police report so I called the police department. I ended up passing the phone off to him because that made more sense and he was told that he would have to file the report online. I asked him to leave his contact information with circulation in case his backpack was found.

When he left I called my boss to let her know what was happening and she said I had done the right thing. She then explained that after he filed the police report the police would be able to get a search warrant which would allow them to review our security footage on Monday when the administration is back in the building.

While she was explaining this the staff member and the patron came back to the desk. Apparently the backpack had been found in the women's restroom but his laptop was missing. That really sucks. He said there was at least the positive that the library items he had checked out were still in the backpack. So at least he won't be charged for those.

I wanted to work on things when I got home but that didn't happen. All day tomorrow and Sunday will have to be devoted to work. I need to get in a lot of practicum hours and I need to work on stuff for my other classes. I have a lot of work to do for my capstone, which I have neglected. I'm behind on the discussion posts and haven't picked out any of my artifacts yet, which is kind of the point of the whole course.

It's midnight now and hopefully I can wake up relatively early so I can get started. And hopefully I won't be too easily distracted tomorrow. That will be the key. I'm so close to the end I just need to buckle down and finish things up.

July 14, 2016

My day started too early. Most days feel like that lately. I got up a little earlier that I would have normally because my mom was leaving on a trip to Colorado this morning and I thought it would be nice to say goodbye. Then I had a haircut at eight o'clock to make up for missing it on Monday.

After my haircut I had a meeting on campus at nine o'clock. My haircut went faster than expected and I was left with not enough time to go home and too much time to go to campus, so I drove around for awhile. And then I went to campus.

I met my supervisor in her office, where she was entertaining her officemate's two kids. We then headed downstairs for our meeting with the other librarian about the assessment. It was a productive meeting. We decided we were all going to grade the first ten responses in the data in order to calibrate ourselves. Then we talked about how we would actually calibrate, which is good because I was a little lost on that. Turns out there is a rubric and we are going to look at the responses in the data that align with the rubric and grade it as to how well they met each goal. There was a little worry at first that there wasn't a rubric and that we would have to create one. I think they still want to tweak the rubric but that is for another day.

There was time before the next meeting so I wandered around the library for a little while before heading up to the fourth floor. Going up the stairs I was behind a girl playing Pokemon Go. I was a good distance behind her but she was walking slowly and staring intently at her phone. I paused on one of the landings to check my phone to see if I had heard back from my adviser yet and by the time I got upstairs the girl was slowly walking toward the stacks. The are moveable stacks and she slowly walked up to one of the closed sections, and then cautiously pushed the button to make the stacks open. And then she headed in. It was pretty entertaining to watch. It was like she was an animal stalking its prey.

The second meeting was a departmental meeting for the academic services department. We were joined by the three newest librarians because they work in a different department and the meeting started with all of the academic services librarians introducing themselves and saying what their areas of focus were so the new librarians knew who to send referrals to. They were going around the table and it got to me and I paused because I didn't think I was part of it, but apparently I was, so I said “I'm just hanging out,” which ended up getting a pretty good laugh. The best laugh however was when the other librarian on the assessment project introduced herself because she said “I'm so-and-so and I'm an ASS.” Turns out her title is Academic Services Specialist. That's pretty funny.

The new librarians briefly introduced themselves after that and the second one was a little too brief because as soon as the third one said his name the second one realized she had forgotten to say her name. And without skipping a beat the third librarian said “and that's so-and-so.” Another good laugh.

Following the introductions there were a few announcements and one was asking if there was interest in having a get together at the beginning of the semester where new faculty could come and meet the librarians. I guess they did it last year and it went pretty well so they want to keep it going and even invite non-new faculty. I think that's a great way to do outreach and put a face to the library to hopefully entice professor's to utilize the resources of the library more often.

The last half of the meeting was one of the librarians I interviewed for class getting the opinion of the group on changes to the website/catalog that he wanted to propose to the committee in charge of that. He had already brought up the ideas to the committee but they told him he needed the opinions of more people. So we went through them. The first was to change the “A-Z” link because no one really knows what that means. At least people who haven't gone to library school or aren't that familiar with library websites. One of the proposed changes is to have it say “eJournal List”, which gets right to the point, because it is an alphabetical list of all the electronic journals the library has access to. It also lists electronic periodicals and something else but the title would be much too long to say all of that. For me “A-Z” seems obvious but I also know what it is referring to, so I think it makes sense to change it.

The second proposed change was to hide the book and journal tabs in the Citation Linker, or at least reordered them so that the article tab was first since that is what most people would use it for. There was also a problem with the book tab only showing a single result. And that result was the first result in the catalog, which isn't that helpful. The librarian likened it to Google's “I'm Feeling Lucky” option. In the case of Moby Dick you would not be lucky because the first result is for a graphic novel adaption, so you wouldn't see the 127 copies of the actual book that the library has in its collection.

There is also a citation tracker that the librarian was curious about. When you click on one of the citation tracker links for a search result it will take you to a list of either a list of all the items referenced in the article or how many times that item has been referenced. The only problem is it isn't a comprehensive list for either. The feature is provided by a particular vendor I believe, and one thought is that it only shows the items in the lists that it has access to. Makes sense. The other librarians agreed that even if it wasn't a comprehensive list it was still a good feature. There was also a little note below the title of the lists saying that it may not contain all of the citations and it was suggested that the message be moved above the title and that it be made more noticeable.

And the last proposed change was doing something about all the items from HathiTrust showing up as available online even when they weren't. Almost all of the librarians raised their hands that they had received a question while working on the reference desk of someone being unable to access an item online from HathiTrust when it said it was available online. So it's an obvious issue. And there are no easy solutions. They only know of one other university who has solved the problem and it is suspected that it would take a lot of work to replicate. Other solutions involve taking all of the HathiTrust records out of the catalog so they won't show up in results and confuse people, figuring out how to turn off the little “Available Online” message on each record, and probably a couple other things that I'm spacing on at the moment.

After the meeting I went home, had lunch, and then went to work. It was a long day but it wasn't too bad. I got sidetracked a lot but I also did things. I finally finished the personalized reading list I started yesterday or the day before. I also briefly started working on compiling lists for my homebound patrons because we go out again on Wednesday and I don't work this weekend or next Tuesday, so time is running out. I helped patrons throughout the day, including several who were looking for books on a broad topic and didn't have a particular book in mind. And I took on a project of finding local, living authors in the county. That is a tall order. I lost too much time researching that tonight. And I wasn't that successful. But I did find more than I thought I would. That project will continue.

The patron who came in a few weeks ago, multiple times, getting different librarians, including myself, to print off information about a car he was trying to sell, was back in the library tonight. I assume with his wife. This time he wanted help with the actual sale of the vehicle. Like the forms needed and figuring out how to add in an 'as-is' portion to protect himself after the sale. I've never tried to sell a car before so I don't know anything about it but I tried to help them out. I probably helped them a little more than I should but also not as much as I wanted to. It was so tempting to just do it all for them. I think the guy has a problem with silence because he'd ask me to look for something, which required reading through a bunch of stuff, but as soon as I would start to read he would start talking to me and then just ramble on and on, which made it really hard to focus on what I was reading. He also had no idea what he needed and wasn't convinced by what I was telling him half the time, which just made the process even longer. The wife was also fed up and they ended up rushing to print things before we closed, so I'm almost certain he'll be back looking for more help.

A guy who briefly worked at the theater came in to use one of the rooms at the library tonight. He's a unique dude, to put it one way. He thought I looked familiar and I asked if he ever worked at the movie theater. His eyes got real big and said “You worked at the movie theater!” Then he gave me a very awkward hug. I obliged with a pat or two on the back but he just kept holding on. For at least five seconds after I stopped. It was better than his old hugs where he would go in cheek-to-cheek. I never need to find out a dude hasn't shaved by feeling his stubble on my cheek. Anyway, he also remembered my friend because when he came out to borrow and dry erase marker he said “Remember Levi? Levi, 501 blue jeans!” The memories.

When I got home from work my sister was there taking care of the cats so we talked for awhile. I also showed her my new fountain pens because those arrived today. They get here really fast to begin with but I managed to order than early enough that they shipped out the same day. I got a Jinhao x750 and a Jinhao x450, both matte black, the x450 with gold trim and the x750 with silver. They both look really nice and hopefully they write well. I wasn't very impressed with the big yellow Jinhao 150 I got so I hope these are better. I'm not expecting greatness out of pens that ended up costing me about five bucks a piece but it would be nice if I didn't have to put a fifteen dollar nib on them to get any use out of them.

Good grief, it is one o'clock in the morning and I've been tired since I woke up this morning.

July 13, 2016

This morning I was scheduled to work at eight o'clock, which originally annoyed me. Then, sometime between eight o'clock and nine o'clock, there was a torrential downpour. The giant atrium windows looked like a car wash and the view out of another large window was just blowing trees and horizontal rain. It also looked like the middle of the night outside. It was crazy. Some of the surrounding neighborhoods lost power but thankfully we did not. It seemed like losing power would be a big hassle. And I am glad I was there at eight o'clock and not nine o'clock is because the librarian that came in at nine o'clock got soaking wet. She spent the first few hours of her shift just trying to get dry. That would have sucked.

I worked on a personalized reading list for awhile, talked with my coworkers, transcribed some of the notes I took on an article because I took too many the first time, and helped the occasional patron. I had a couple wins with patrons today which is always a plus. It sucks getting a question I can't find an answer to. Or an answer that satisfies the patron. But today was good.

This afternoon we had a departmental meeting. It started with a tour of the building by the head custodian, showing us how to turn off the water in the bathrooms, how to shut the water off in the entire building, how to turn alarms off and reset them, where to guide firefighters if alarms or elevators need to be turned off, and probably some other things. Then we went to the boardroom to talk about weeding and displays. We each talked about the article we read about weeding and then we had a group discussion about displays because those are currently in a state of transition and we are trying to make them better.

The tour and the meeting lasted almost exactly two hours, which took me right up to the time I had to leave. It is kind of nice getting off at five o'clock but I don't know if it is worth going to work at eight o'clock. But it is also kind of nice being there at eight o'clock because we don't open until nine o'clock and after doing all the opening stuff you can just sit there in the quiet. And during the week you don't have to deal with the money, which is nice.

Tonight I put an hour into my practicum by learning more about Twine and envisioning how I can use it for the scavenger hunt. There is an overwhelming amount of potential and I would really like to make something with it. I feel like even if I don't have time to do it within the scope of the practicum I will work on it as a side project. If I can find the inspiration. And if I don't get completely sucked into No Man's Sky.

Tomorrow morning I've got a haircut at 8:00AM, a meeting with my practicum supervisor and the other librarian about the assessment project, I get to sit in on another academic services meeting, and at 12:30PM I go to work. It's going to be a long day. I thought today was going to be long but it wasn't actually that bad. Tomorrow I will be doing things between 8:00AM and 9:00PM, when I finally get off from work. I think it will live up to being a long day.

July 12, 2016

It's 12:30AM and I regret being awake.

Today was fairly boring. I slept in a little bit because it was needed, and then I got up and worked on my practicum. I started by working on the assessment data. I did a couple more formatting things, including setting up the random numbers for both data sets, and then sent it off to my practicum supervisor.

After that I switched over to the scavenger hunt which took me most of the day. I came up with the rest of the clues to match my questions and then I made an answer sheet that not only included the answers but also the pictures I took that match the pictures the students are supposed to take throughout the scavenger hunt. All of this took a surprising amount of time. It is hard to force clever and I think I probably only had marginal success. When I had finished I sent it to my practicum supervisor and she will hopefully get back to me with some feedback. I still consider it a rough draft because it could definitely use some polishing. Now that the bulk of it is done, however, my mind keeps wandering to how I can turn it into a choose-your-own-adventure game using Twine. I've still got plenty of hours to fill so I might be able to make that happen.

This afternoon I remembered that today was the last day to sign up for a free health screening for work so I logged in and got that set up. We have to have it done by sometime or we get charged $25 a month. It was the same way with the school district but that wasn't going to affect me until this coming school year and I eventually knew I wasn't going to be there so I didn't worry about it. And now I have to worry about it. My screening is near the end of the month. Just one more thing on the list.

Tonight was Chipotle night and the guy took me at my word when I asked for extra rice and beans. I was actually able to divide it into two meals, which I am excited about, though I will probably forget I have it tomorrow and make something else for dinner. For dessert I had Canadian candy that my sister's husband got when he was up there recently. I don't technically eat candy anymore but I'm telling myself I never specified a country, so maybe I don't eat American candy but I do eat Canadian candy. Ignoring that Canada is part of America in real life but in the United States we have kind of adopted the word 'America' for ourselves. Anyway, I had candy for dessert.

After dinner I continued working on practicum stuff. When I had finished I wanted to do some schoolwork but that didn't happen. My brain was kind of over it at that point. Story of my life recently.

So now it is one o'clock in the morning and my previously mentioned regret stems from the fact that I work at eight o'clock in the morning. Good grief. It is going to be a long day.

July 11, 2016

This morning I woke up early, laid in bed for awhile, and then got up and put in a few hours for my practicum. I started cleaning up all the data for the assessment project. That involved combining the two data sets into one file but different pages in Excel, just so they're easier to work with. Then I did some basic formatting stuff so it was easier to read. Lastly, I went through and hid all the things that seemed irrelevant. There might be some other stuff that my practicum supervisor wants to hide, because I'm not entirely sure what all we're going to be looking at, but I think I made a decent start. I only had a little bit of time left to look into coming up with how big our sample size needs to be so that is on my list for tomorrow. Once that is determined I can use a random number generator to pick the responses for the sample and then divide those up between myself, my practicum supervisor, and the other librarian working with us. It looks like I can do the random number thing in Excel. Then I can just sort by those numbers and we can pick the first, second, and third however many rather than having to scroll through and find our numbers. I'll save that for tomorrow, though.

I was feeling pretty good about my productivity this morning and then I went and checked my phone. I had received three texts from the lady who cuts my hair, wondering if I was coming in. Dang it. For some reason I had the 13^th in my head, which I think is the date it was last month. I also kind of felt like it was next week. Basically I blew it. I went years, if not decades, without missing an appointment, and now it seems to happen far too regularly. Granted it has been a really long time since it has happened. But still. I feel like an asshole, as I should. Thankfully, she is very understanding about my stressful existence and my scattered brain at the moment and we were able to reschedule for Thursday morning. I went with eight o'clock, which sucks, but I figured that would force me to get up and around and I might be able to get some things done when I get home before going to work. I will regret the decision when I'm stuck at work until nine o'clock at night.

Today at work I had my first month review and that went well. Considering I was gone for about half of the time since I was hired. I was able to bring up my idea for ESL classes, which would take a lot of work to get set up, but it's a goal to work toward. We also talked about a bunch of other things and then it was over and I was able to go eat dinner. At four o'clock in the afternoon.

Tonight I had a long conversation with one of my coworker's husband. He is a nerdy guy and apparently my coworker thinks we should be best friends. This is now the second person at the library that thinks I need to hang out with their husband, following the PR coordinator basically trying to set up a play date with her husband, which was pretty funny. At some point, when I'm done with school, I should start pursuing these opportunities because I don't have any friends in town and that is something that I should work on.

The old men in the carving group were back in the library tonight. I think when I looked it up they come in every other Monday. I spoke with them briefly tonight as they were cleaning up and one of them said they've been coming in for the past four or five years. I'm slowly working up the courage to ask them more questions about their group and learn more about them. I think it's a cool hobby and they make me nostalgic for grandpas. I don't want to interrupt their time hanging out together but I really want to be a fly on the wall and take in the grandpa-vibes.

The night as a whole went well. I worked on a personalized reading list, pulled some more books for my historical fiction display, helped a few people, and had random conversations with my coworker. We closed at nine o'clock and tonight was the first time it really seemed dark outside when we left the building. It was still light outside because it's the summer, but it seemed noticeably darker than the last time I closed. Just an observation.

Now I'm going to go to bed so I can wake up early-ish and work on practicum and school stuff. My days off from work are going to be my savior for this practicum. It's still going to be close but I should be able to make up for lost time if I put in enough hours on those days. I'll need to do the math. I also need to leave time for schoolwork. I've been dropping the ball with my capstone and I need to get a lot of work done on that by the nineteenth, like have all of my artifacts chosen. Yikes.

July 10, 2016

My alarm went off at six o'clock this morning. And I stayed in bed until seven o'clock but then I got up and worked on my blog entries. I managed to finish my first entry and started to think about the second one but that's when I stalled out again. It was about the time I had planned on stopping, however, so I took a shower and ate lunch before getting ready for work.

It was a slow Sunday at work. Although I don't know if there are fast Sundays, so maybe it was just a Sunday. This worked out in my favor because I was able to work on my second blog. And I nearly finished it, so that took some stress off of me.

While at work I also did work. The counting of the drawer went better this morning but I think that was mostly because I didn't have to make a deposit. A lady came in looking for books by a certain author but she can't walk very so circulation called up and asked if I could grab a few and bring them down for her. It turned out we had a lot of books by that author so I grabbed a bunch and went downstairs and sat down with her while she picked out the ones she wanted. Then I took the rest back upstairs and re-shelved them. I helped the “new” school teacher at the school find books on Colorado. I helped another lady find books on a couple different things. I thought about signage in the library, focusing on how we can do a better job at labeling the shelves. At least for the non-fiction books I would like if the numbers were bigger. You've got to be pretty close to them to see them and there is plenty of room to make them bigger. I'll bring it up and see what happens. I probably did some other things as well but apparently nothing worth mentioning.

Right before closing an alarm started going off. The custodian went and shut it off. It turns out a dad and his two kids accidentally rode the elevator to the basement instead of the first floor. And instead of taking the big staircase back to the first floor they chose to take the stairwell. And the door to the stairwell has an alarm on it even though it isn't labeled. Or maybe it is but it isn't labeled very well. Either way, it happened. Thankfully the sound of the alarm is more of a nuisance than an ear-shattering annoyance.

When I got home I did laundry and my sister came over for a family dinner. My mom grilled burgers and made pasta salad. My veggie burgers got a little toasted and they were a different type of burger, a garden burger I think, that didn't really go well with the grill. Normally they taste way better on the grill but that was not the case this time around. They were still edible though, so life goes on.

After dinner I continued doing laundry and I worked on my blogs. I got both of them posted around nine o'clock. I only made minor edits to my PLA blog and added a sentence or two to the LITA blog. Posting took a little bit because I had to go through and add in all of the links to my sources and the other things I mentioned. I also had to come up with unique titles. Everyone else was kind of going with boring stuff and I am slightly sleep deprived and in the mood for clever, so I went with “Nice to Meet Ya, LITA” and “A Brief Foray with PLA”. Not overly clever but I'm happy with them.

The rest of my night was spent finishing my laundry and putting a few hours into the scavenger hunt for my practicum. It is hard coming up with clever clues. And some of them have to be straight-forward, not clever. My goal is to get that finished in the morning before work. Or maybe I will work on cleaning up the survey data for the assessment project and save the scavenger hunt for work, when I can think about clues in between doing other stuff.

Now I'm going to go to bed because it is creeping up on one o'clock and I need to wake up earlier than I would like so I can work on my practicum stuff.

July 9, 2016

This semester, my last semester of graduate school, I believe I have finally flown too close to the Sun. There are just barely enough hours in the day to meet all my obligations and that's only if I don't do anything else, like get a full night of rest, or eat food. And of course I'm doing everything but the things I need to because I am in full shutdown mode. The stress has broken my will. It is overwhelming and oppressive and obnoxious. All I can do is focus on how little time I have, which means I have even less time because I have wasted it calculating my time rather than using it wisely. Classes are over on August 5^th, which is great, but also terrible because I need more time. I will definitely make it to the 5^th but I don't know if all of my assignments will make it there with me. I feel like I need to just start drinking caffeine again and pull all-nighters every night until this is over. I would say this is when I start regretting all that time I spent earlier in the semester doing nothing but I also kind of feel like this was an inevitability. All of my years of procrastination and just skating by have finally caught up with my in my last semester of school. I feel miserable but physically and mentally. Or maybe just as a human being in general. All I want to do is focus and get shit done but I can't. I can't focus on any one thing because as soon as I try I start thinking about all the other stuff I need to do. I am exhausted and completely drained and it is becoming increasingly harder to try and hide that fact. I don't even know anymore.

But let's continue avoiding the things I need to be doing and talk about my day. When I got to work this morning my main responsibility was counting the register money and making a deposit. It got super confusing because when I was trained the drawer worked out perfectly and this morning that was not the case. It took me way too long to figure it out and I'm not entirely sure I did. And no one else could help me because the only people trained in doing that are the adult services librarians, of which I was the only one today. It doesn't seem like the best business strategy to keep the knowledge base so small.

I took down two displays today and put up new ones. The first was my Hamilton Read Alike display. One book was checked out from it shortly after I put it up, so that's a good start. Although my Classics DVD display also had a few checkouts shortly after I made it and now it has slowed down. I blame the location and the presentation of the tiny cart the DVDs are on. Anyway, I also took down all the books on the Historical Fiction display and replaced them with my own. I don't have a lot of faith in that one because it also has a horrible location. But we'll see.

I also helped a couple people with the printer, an old man find a bunch of hotels for an upcoming trip, read through some of the operations manual, and I finished reading the article on weeding that I think I have to talk about next week. So I did things.

The end of the evening announcements were working tonight, although the volume fluctuated a few times so I was worried. It did make my life a little better as soon as they came on and I realized I wouldn't have to make the announcements over the phone.

During lunch I wasn't able to leave the library because I was in charge of the place, which is ridiculous, but I spent the time working on one of my blog entries. I made progress but haven't made any since I've been home. Which is unacceptable at this point. I am completely behind the wheel of my own self-destruction right now and I can't seem to do anything to correct it. I would really like to stop sounding like an emo kid and go back to enjoying life a little more.

Now the question is, do I go to bed now and wake up early to work on my blog posts before work, or do I stay up late to work on them and then wake up early to work on them some more. I think I'm going with sleep but I'm worried it's one of those times where even though I am drained I will just lay in bed, unable to turn my brain off. I guess we'll find out. I should be able to get in at least four hours tomorrow before work. And possibly some time at work because I don't know that I have anything pressing that I need to work on. Ideally I would be done before work or at least before I leave work so I can get them posted and then spend the rest of the night putting in hours for my practicum. It all sounds good now but I know it won't go that smoothly. My brain won't allow it.