November 6, 2017

This morning I got to sleep in and that is always nice. I ended up not playing CoD: WW2 because I figured by the time I got into a match I'd only be able to play one before having to get ready. Instead, I just clicked around the internet for awhile, then got ready and ate lunch before heading to work.

I was on desk for the first two hours and spent that time working on my presentation. I ended up adding several slides about the CRAAP test and added to my script to cover those slides. That should get me closer to thirty minutes. I then had a walkthrough and an hour off desk, and all the time not doing a walkthrough was spent working on my presentation.

When I got back from dinner I took a personality test because we're doing something with that for our department meeting on Wednesday. I got INFJ. In grad school I got ISTJ. The middle two letters were fairly middle of the road both times so it's not surprising. I still feel like personality tests are a bit like horoscopes, but they're interesting to look at. After taking it I talked to my coworkers about my results as well as theirs.

When I got off desk I went up to the third floor to read a chapter of a book for the meeting on Wednesday. And I couldn't figure out how to turn the lights on. I tried each switch individually and was still in the dark. I think maybe I needed to turn all of the switches on, instead of just one, but I had that thought later on. Instead I just went to the cubicle and figured I could log in, pull up a blank Word document on both computer monitors (because they're bright white), and use that light to read by. But then it took me at least eight tries to type my password in. I couldn't see the keyboard and unfortunately my password is one that requires me to see the keyboard. I eventually turned my phone screen on to get some light but I couldn't type with the phone in my hand. It was a mess, but I eventually got logged in and was able to read the chapter.

With the rest of my night I worked on my presentation and looked up GIFs to add to my presentation. I also helped a patron with cloud storage, which is a question I've gotten regularly since I've been at the library.

On my way home I stopped at the grocery store. Among other things I got an eggplant, because why not, and fresh shredded Parmesan cheese for a mashed potatoes recipe. I think I might try eggplant Parmesan because I own a lot of Parmesan now.

When I got home I put my groceries away, got distracted by the internet, and now I'm writing this while watching GoldGlove play the CoD: WW2 campaign. I think he's finishing the last mission I played, which is perfect timing because I need to record my audio journal and I don't want spoilers.

November 5, 2017

This morning I woke up at eight o'clock and thanks to Daylight Savings, even though I went to bed at two o'clock in the morning, I got seven hours of sleep. That worked out pretty well for me. When I first got up I read through my presentation script. Surprisingly there were only a couple small changes that I needed to make. It took me about twenty-five minutes to read through it, which isn't too bad. I think there's still one more slide I want to add and I can do the news audit handout activity if I decide I need to fill time. I'm feeling good about it. And I'll feel better about it when it's over.

For brunch I made pancakes and eggs. I haven't made pancakes in months and I was out of practice, so they weren't the best I've ever made, but they weren't bad. I also should have used a different pan for the eggs or let it cool down more after the pancakes because they cooked way too fast. They weren't pretty, but like the pancakes, they weren't bad.

After I ate I played Wolfenstein 2 and managed to finish the main story. There are still a bunch of side quests, going around and killing Nazi commanders, but the main game is over, until the DLC stuff comes out. It was a really fun and satisfying game. It also had a happy ending and set things up for the third game. That's going to take awhile to come out, probably, and in the mean time I want to go back and play the previous two games, which include the first game in the trilogy and the prequel to the trilogy. I look forward to it.

Following that I started playing the CoD: WWII campaign. I think I played the first three missions. It's nice going back to the WWII setting and getting out of the future. It's also got an interesting health system, where your health doesn't regenerate. You have to use a health pack, and if you don't have one, you can either find them in the level or request one from one of your squadmates. That kind of makes me not want to play it on the the highest difficulty level because I think that would just be beyond frustrating.

After playing the campaign I did the prologue zombie level and got to see David Tennant's character, which was pretty cool. I'm an awful zombie player, and I wish I wasn't because it seems like it could be fun if I could survive more than a few waves. I think I'll probably try it again, just to see if I can get more of the story, but I imagine I'll probably end up just watching YouTube videos or Twitch streams.

I played one multiplayer match and went even, because thankfully the other team wasn't that great. It allowed me to get a taste of the game without getting completely frustrated with it. We'll see how my hands hold up but there is potential for it to be pretty fun. One issue I have discovered is with my mouse, which is an MMO mouse and has twelve buttons on the side. In the game, hitting the number 1 cycles your weapon. I have discovered that I keep inadvertently hitting that button in the middle of gunfights and switching to my pistol. This has yet to work out in my favor. I need to figure out a better system.

Throughout the day I watched The Race livestream because today was the last day for it and by the afternoon all the guys were there. It was a lot of fun to watch. In the last couple of hours they had a couple crazy donation trains that let them hit their goal of $100,000, and then in the last few minutes they managed to pass $125,000. It was intense. And then, to top it off, Activision donated $125,000, because they said they would match whatever was raised during the stream up to a certain amount. I don't think any of the guys were expecting Activision to actually do it during the stream because they all momentarily lost their minds. It was pretty cool.

Tonight I played a few more multiplayer matches in CoD: WW2 and I was reminded of how bad I am at the game. But I'm still trying to figure things out. And I can use that excuse for at least a little while. One of the coolest things about this new game is the headquarters, which kind of reminds me of the safe houses in The Division, where you're in a 3D environment and you can go to various people and interact with them. They also have a shooting range, so you can try out your weapons. I haven't figured out yet how to change weapons. They also have an area where you can try out killstreaks, which is a lot of fun because I'll never earn some of the cooler ones. But at least now I can play with them a little bit.

It is now late and I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I close tomorrow so I'm looking forward to sleeping in, and maybe playing a little more CoD: WW2 if I can talk myself into getting out of bed.

November 4, 2017

 This morning I woke up a little before nine o'clock. Once I convinced myself to get out of bed I watched more of The Race livestream and clicked around the internet. I also played a little GTA V because I saw that they were giving away in-game money to anyone who played within a certain window. I haven't really played the game in awhile but if they want to give me free money, sign me up.

At one o'clock I went to my Mom's to do laundry. I ate lunch, watched Night Court, watched The Race livestream, and avoided working on my presentation script for awhile. But I eventually started on the script and made decent progress. Before leaving I put together my Mom's new elliptical thing. It only required screwing the foot things on, but I nailed it.

When I got home I ate leftover Qdoba for dinner and spent the rest of the night texting, watching even more of The Race livestream, and working on my presentation script. It took me until one o'clock in the morning but I finished all but the conclusion for my script. I figure I will write that once I read through the script and see what makes sense for the conclusion. Overall, it's a six page script. I haven't actually read through it but I am hoping it is someone close to 45-minutes. I also have a handout activity if I find myself coming up super short.

And that was my day. It was incredibly productive. I was really tempted to pause on the script and finish it up tomorrow but I knew I would end up dragging it out over the whole day, so I buckled down (minus the conclusion). Now, other than reading through the script, tweaking it, and writing a short conclusion, my Sunday is open. And I plan to play video games and kill Nazis. I've been watching so much of CoD: WWII that I really want to jump into the campaign, but I'm also really into Wolfenstein 2, so I'll probably keep playing that.

November 3, 2017

 Last night I got nearly nine hours of sleep and it was fantastic. When I got up I watched more of The Race livestream before getting ready, eating lunch, and going to work.

When I got to work I was on desk for two hours. My main accomplishment was tracking down a primary source for the Ben Franklin fake news things I was reading about yesterday. Previously I was just finding articles talking about it, which at most linked to other articles talking about it. Today I found a full, typed version of the newspaper supplement that Franklin made up, and a scanned copy of the original newspaper. And it will be featured for less than thirty seconds probably in my presentation. Worth it.

There was an insurance meeting at the library first thing this morning but my boss didn't want me to have to come in at 7:00AM when I didn't work until 11:00AM. Instead, I went to the meeting this afternoon at the fire station. It was an insurance meeting, so of course it was boring, but then it ended with a fifteen or twenty minute walkthrough of how to enroll on the website. It's literally just filling out boxes, and we had already been given a packet of step-by-step screenshots. Then the internet connection crapped out halfway through, so the lady pulled up the Word document of the screenshots and showed that on the screen. But she didn't zoom in properly so you couldn't really see anything. It was a great use of my time.

I got back to the library shortly after 3:30PM and spent the short time I had before dinner reading magazines. And then I went and ate dinner at 4:00PM. Not as bad as my lunch at 10:00AM.

When I got back from dinner I was on desk for an hour and continued working on my presentation. Which is what I pretty much what I did the rest of the night when I wasn't doing other things. Because that's how that works. By the end of the night I had come pretty close to finishing it. I might have one more slide to add, plus the conclusion, which I think is just going to be a recap of the objectives. And I might add a list of references but probably not because I found so many freaking articles. I might just make a list and offer to email it people if they're interested.

When I was working on my presentation I told a group of teens to keep their voices down because the entire library could hear them, I found a book for a patron, I did a walkthrough, and I refilled three displays (DVDs, Mystery, and new audiobooks). It was a relatively quiet night (minus the teens) and I was productive.

When I got home I spent the rest of my night watching The Race livestream, clicking around the internet, and texting. And it is now after 1:30AM. Good grief.

November 2, 2017

 Six o'clock came way too early this morning. I had planned on getting at least close to seven hours of sleep but then I decided to ask out the woman I've been texting and that led to a logistics conversation, which took awhile and I didn't get to bed until after midnight.

I ended up parking my car at eight o'clock, because I left the house a few minutes late, traffic sucked, and I think I hit every single stoplight. So I was a couple minutes late, but my boss was several minutes late, so it was all good. The opening stuff was the same as usual but I only got to sharpen a few pencils because we're out of unsharpened ones (minus the box in the workroom that I'm leaving in case we need unsharpened pencils to hand out.

I brought my flex nib pen so that the teen librarian could try it out because she has one on her Christmas list. I also brought some Rhodia paper because it handles the ink a lot better. Regular copy paper looked awful with the flex nib and all the ink it lays down.

I found out the year-long banning of the patron last night went well. The police arrived, they handed him the letter, and he calmly walked out with them. He's very unpredictable so I'm glad it went smoothly.

When we opened I went upstairs for two hours to work on my presentation. I accomplished some things but not a lot. I'll admit I zoned out a little bit. After that I had an uneventful and continued working on my presentation. Once again that was pretty much my day, working on my presentation and occasionally helping patrons or talking to my coworkers.

Over the last two hours at work I helped a family print a form and then scan and email it. It took so long because they were trying to print from their phone and that can be tricky. I eventually had them log onto one of our computers, helped them reset their email password (which is a common thing because so many people only access their email on their phone and never have to log in), and printing was so much easier. And scanning was a piece of cake.

When I got home I ate spaghetti and spent the evening watching YouTube videos, and now I'm watching The Race livestream that they do every year when a new Call of Duty comes out. It's got GoldGlove, Vern, TmarTn, Hutch, and Tucker and it's usually pretty entertaining.

It's only 9:30PM now and I'm tired, but I close tomorrow so I'll get to sleep in tomorrow morning. I'm looking forward to that.

November 1, 2017

 Well, it's November already.

I was slow getting around this morning but I made it to work on time, and that's what is important. I spent my first two hours at work up in the cubicle working on my presentation. I assume I made progress but I can't really remember because I worked on it throughout the day and it all kind of blends together.

I was on desk for an hour after that and read an article about how news goes viral and it used a contagious virus outbreak as the model to explain it. One person gets it, shares it with their friends, who share it with their friends, and so on like a pyramid scheme. It was interesting.

After lunch I was on desk again and once again worked on my presentation. I learned about attention economics, which views attention as a scarce resource that is consumed by information, and it is a struggle in our age of information overload to keep people's attention. Makes sense.

I had a couple walkthrough and my second one lasted the whole hour because I ended up stopping and talking with the teen librarian who was handing out surveys. She really doesn't like it so I was telling her my technique of just handing it to people and giving as little explanation as possible so they don't have a chance to refuse. We ended up talking about a bunch of different things while we waited for patrons to come in, and most of our conversation was library related.

I sent in our request for tax forms today, because apparently tax season is fast approaching. It seems like we just did that.

I spent my last hour at work back upstairs working on my presentation. I need to finish up the history of fake news and then go into fact checking. And then I need to come up with what I actually want to say. Right now I'm just creating slides of things that I think I should talk about without any real idea of what I'm going to say. I'm just hoping I'm in the ballpark so I don't have to redo too much. My goal is to be done with the slides by Friday so I have plenty of time to work on a script.

When I got to my car after work I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw our kid-kicking patron walking in the direction of the library. I waited until he got closer before turning on my car and turning my car toward the library. I waited in the parking lot until he actually crossed over and started toward the library's parking lot before I pulled out of the parking lot I was in and slowly started driving toward the library. Once it was clear he was headed to the entrance and was going to enter the library I decided I was going to call the library. The other librarian getting off at six, along with two of the circulation workers, were walking along the sidewalk so I stopped to let them know I had seen the patron and that I was going to call to let the librarian working know he was around.

I pulled into the next parking lot and called to let the librarian know that I had seen the patron near the entrance and that she should call the police if she saw him in the building. I also let her know where the letter was, that stated he was banned, and that she was supposed to wait until the police showed up and then walk over with them to give him the letter. The librarian I talked to on the sidewalk ended up staying on the sidewalk with the circulation people until the cops showed up and said that after a while they came back out without the patron so we don't know if he ended up leaving before they could talk to him or if it just went perfectly smoothly and he left out another exit. I'll find out tomorrow.

After that I picked up Qdoba and headed to my Mom's house for dinner. We ate, talked, and watched YouTube videos. I left a little before 8:30PM so I could get home and slowly get around to writing this. And it's now after ten o'clock, so it did take me awhile to get started, but I did the smart thing and turned on music and stopped watching videos so I wouldn't be overly distracted. It kinda worked.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed. I've had a headache most of the day and at the moment I'm really tired. And I have to open tomorrow. Yay.

October 31, 2017

 I forgot to mention yesterday that my first hour at work was spent doing the yearly survey. Well, I wasn't doing the survey, I was trying to get people to take the survey. Rather than asking them to take the survey, I went with the tactic of just handing them the survey and then mentioning that they could bring it back whenever. I only had one refusal and several people brought the survey back before leaving the library.

This morning I woke up at 7:55AM, five minutes before my alarm. I wanted to play Wolfenstein 2 but first there was a game update. And then I had to update my video drivers. That doesn't sound very bad but it was a really long thirty minutes. But then I got to play the game. And it was difficult stopping for work.

When I got to work I once again spent my first hour handing out surveys. And once again I only had one refusal. Several people also told me the library was great as I handed them the survey. So that was pretty cool.

It started snowing tonight shortly after noon and continued for at least four hours, occasionally with some really big snowflakes. Thankfully none of it stuck to the ground. I'm not ready for dealing with snow yet.

While doing the survey thing the one-on-one tech lady stopped by and gave me a Kindle that she had in her office and wasn't using. When things slow down a little bit for me I can use it to pilot the idea I had for taking Kindles to homebound patrons. That's pretty cool.

After the survey I spent about an hour helping the teen librarian set up and organize the four new Spheros the youth services department got. We made sure they all connected to iPads and we labeled them, and organized the drawer they are going to be kept in. I'll also be able to use them next week for my workshop, which will be nice because for the last one I had to use my phone because our iPad is old and the new Spheros won't connect to it. It will be nice not having to hand my phone over to strangers.

I then went up to the cubicle for an hour and a half. I used that time to catch up on email and staff blog posts and eventually got around to working on my presentation. The other librarian that was involved with the incident yesterday with the kid getting kicked ended up writing the report for it this morning, so I didn't have to worry about that. She had our perspective, the perspective of the tech center staff who were there when things started heating up, and one of our pages, who was coming into work at the time and took a picture of the two gentleman as they were walking away from the library. The next time the patron, who has had so many incidents recently, is in the building we are supposed to call the police and when they arrive we're supposed to go over with them and give the patron a letter letting him know that he is banned for a year from the library. In a year he will be able to write a letter stating why he should be allowed back in the library.

And on the subject, there is one of the siblings that we have been dealing with since the summer that has also been acting up a lot recently. He got asked to leave on Friday after I told him to stop rough-housing with his friend near the computers and throwing stuff, and on Monday he pretty much blew off and was disrespectful to two other librarians when they asked him to stop rough-housing. So we also have a letter to give him saying that he is banned for a week. My boss called the person he is staying with to let her know and there is a chance she told him and he'll just stay away for a week. Fingers crossed for that. It's a shame that these people who really need the library as a place to go can't meet the very low bar we set for our patrons. We just want them to be respectful of the space, the staff, and their fellow patrons, but that is too much to ask of some people.

I spent the evening continuing to work on my presentation and occasionally getting sidetracked by reading articles about fake news. It was a really quiet evening, most likely due to Halloween. I'm just glad it didn't bring out the crazies, because that's always a possibility.

When I got home I ate some cold spaghetti because a four o'clock dinner doesn't always get me to the end of the day. I then clicked around the internet, watched videos, and did a little more Halloween goodie bag farming in Terraria before the event ends. I've got forty-five unopened bags at the moment and I'm hoping I'll get at least one new costume out of them. If not, there's always next year.

My tweed cover for my new planner arrived today and my initial reaction is that I like it. The color is good and overall it is what I was expecting. Now I need to get in the habit of using the planner. It technically doesn't start until next year but I already know a lot of things that are scheduled for next semester so I can start filling things in while they're still fresh in my mind.

It's now midnight and I need to get this show in the road because I haven't gotten a full night of sleep since Saturday. And that trend will continue, unfortunately.