March 12, 2018

Last night I got eight hours of sleep and it was pretty nice. And when I woke up I read in bed for awhile, which was also pretty nice. The rest of my morning kind of disappeared. While eating lunch I watched videos, catching up on YouTube videos from last week. During the afternoon I did laundry, finished a book, and listened to several random podcasts, because I ran out of videos and there weren't any livestreams, movies, or TV shows that sounded appealing. And the podcasts weren't that appealing either, which is why I kept switching to different ones. After dinner I ran on the elliptical, took a shower, and played CoD: WW2.

And that was my day. I feel good about finishing the book and my laundry, but that's about it. I'm in a bit of a rut in terms of life. Going to work, coming home, watching videos and playing games, sleep, and repeat. I need to do more things outside of work to make me feel better. I could also use a win at work, because it really feels like I'm just kind of spinning my tires and not really achieving anything. The adulting series has been a fail, the workshops have been a fail, and the drop-ins have been a fail. It's kind of demoralizing. Some success would be nice.

Tomorrow I go in at noon. I imagine shortly after that I will find out that no one has signed up for the adulting class and we'll have to call and cancel our presenters. The teen librarian has been in contact with them so hopefully she will handle that. But we'll see, no one had signed up as of Sunday but maybe they were all waiting until today to register. I doubt it, but you never know.

March 11, 2018

Well, this morning could have gone better. My alarm went off at ten o'clock and I decided not to run on the elliptical because my left knee was bothering me yesterday. Instead, I went to my computer and watched a little bit of a livestream. And then I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen and it said 11:03AM. It was then that I remembered that Daylight Savings had happened. The adrenaline kicked in and I quickly hopped in the shower, ironed my pants, ate lunch, and was in my car by 11:40AM. I'm glad I decided not to run on the elliptical because if I had I probably wouldn't have noticed the time until it was far too late.

I ended up getting to work five minutes before noon, so I met my goal of getting there a half hour early. I then did all of the opening stuff upstairs and downstairs, including the magazine count, which is a thing we do once a year (maybe), where we have people put the magazines they read in a basket so we can get a better idea of what people are actually reading. People do game the system, however, and this morning we were obviously being trolled. There are usually five magazines at most because we check it once an hour so there isn't time for it to get too out of hand. When I checked it this morning to see what had been left last night, the basket was completely full. There were twenty-nine magazines. I'm going to say not all of those were legit, but as my boss pointed out, if they are willing to do that, they are going to be equally willing to complain if we get rid of one of those magazines, so we might as well go along with it. I was working with my boss today so after I counted the magazines, we counted the money. It's still a bit of a hassle doing it with two people. I get why they want us to do it, but it's still annoying.

I had two walkthroughs to start the day, a half hour after we opened, and then an hour after that. When I wasn't doing that, I started working on a personalized reading list that has been waiting to be done for nearly two weeks, and the deadline for it was this coming Tuesday. I needed to feel productive, and I didn't want the librarian in charge of readers' advisory (which PRLs fall under) to have to do it because she's done the last three or four I think, so I picked it up.

And working on the PRL was pretty much my whole day, along with helping the occasional patron over the phone or at the desk. Oh, and I just remembered, I tracked down a few articles from an obscure (at least to me) Turkish news website. A patron sent us an email saying he was looking for these articles but couldn't seem to track them down. I found three out of the five, so not bad. I did a Google search and found an article that cited the three articles with URLs. The URLs were broken, however, and just lead to the news site's homepage. So, I copied the link and put it into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As it turned out, they had grabbed each of those pages and I was able to send those links to the patron. The other two articles had only been referenced in a single paper and the citation didn't include URLs, so I was out of luck there. I emailed the patron what I found, told him how I did it in case he wanted to try it in the future, and hopefully he will find that useful.

Right before my last walkthrough I finished the PRL, then I did the walkthrough and went up to the staff break room to clean it a little bit, because apparently one of the assistants and I were supposed to be doing that this week. Whoops. I cleaned off the counter and the table, but other than that it looked pretty good. I did learn that cleaning up spilled soap under an automatic soap dispenser is a bit tricky, but I got it figured out and now it is extra clean. And when I got done with that I sent off the PRL to the patron who requested it, and then printed out a new request that came in today.

I closed downstairs, which doesn't happen often. I like closing upstairs because I can work on things longer. When I close downstairs it's mostly just me walking around trying to kill time. Tonight I added more audiobooks to my display, so I at least accomplished something.

On my way home I stopped at Target to pick up a few things. One of those things was sandwich bread. I once again picked a horrible register line and it took forever waiting for my turn, but I've learned to just accept my poor assessment of register lines. To add to it though, when I got out to my car I checked my bags and realized I didn't have the bread. The woman at the register had made a point to not put it in one of the bags with something else because she didn't want to smoosh it. She ended up putting it in its own bag but then forgot to put that bag with the rest of my stuff. And I didn't think to look through all the bags before leaving. So I walked back in, and the lady wasn't at the register anymore, but I looked and the bag with the bread was still on the little bag station, so I pulled it off and walked out with it. I had the receipt with me to explain what was happening, but no one stopped me or even looked at me, so I just left.

When I got home I put my groceries away, made dinner, watched videos, and played CoD: WW2. A very regular evening, including the part where I got really distracted while writing this and it is now one o'clock in the morning.

March 10, 2018

Last night I got six hours of sleep, woke up at six o'clock, ran on the elliptical, got ready, and went to work.

I got to work at 8:00AM, which was thirty minutes early, to make up for not getting paid for lunch today. Or at least to make up for half of that. I'll go in thirty minutes early tomorrow as well to finish it off. Anyway, when I got to the library I did all the upstairs stuff and then I went downstairs and counted the drawer with the other librarian. Then I refilled the audiobooks, DVDs, and my green books before we opened.

I was on desk for the first two hours after we opened. I caught up on the news, typed and printed the letters for my homebound patrons to let them know we'll be out a day early this month, and helped the occasional patron. Right before lunch we got a patron with a zoning question about a house in town. That was a fun excuse to play on the local GIS website, which I haven't done since I bought my house. There's so much information on all their different map layers.

I could have left the library for lunch but I went up to the cubicle so I could have more time, instead of spending half of my lunch break driving. I thought about only taking a thirty minute lunch but decided I wanted to watch videos and just relax. I don't take my regular breaks throughout the day so it probably wouldn't be the best idea to skip out on the one break I do take. Although I could have taken a thirty minute lunch, immediately followed by one of my fifteen minute breaks (or both of them), and called it good. But I'm fine with going in early tomorrow.

I read an interesting article today about archiving information so it doesn't disappear. They mentioned microfilm and how newspapers are transferred onto it because you can store more newspapers in a smaller form, and microfilm is more robust that paper. They also talked about archiving digital content, especially content that is born digital, and I learned that one gigabyte is apparently the equivalent of thirty feet of books. Interesting.

I was back on desk for two hours after lunch and it was pretty quiet. I helped patrons here and there but most of my time was spent messing around with the website, which I did for the rest of the day when I wasn't helping patrons or refilling displays. I liked the idea of the default hover box thing to display upcoming classes on the tech page, but they weren't quite right, and they had a tendency to spaz out during the animation. So I tracked down the code for a hover overlay thing I liked better, figured out how to add CSS to the website, and spent a lot of time tweaking things to make it look how I wanted it to, and to get the text to resize correctly.

And then I started to wonder how the hover thing would work on a mobile device. My phone has a thing where I can hover my finger just above the screen and it will act like a mouse cursor is hovering over the screen, but I don't know how common that is. So even though it looks pretty sweet, I think I might need to figure out how to make it so clicking will set off the animation and show the class information. Or maybe add in the code (which I think is a thing) that can detect if the site is loading on a mobile device, and have the click event happen instead of the hover event. I don't know. But I do know I'm spending way too much time on this, and probably going beyond what I'm supposed to be doing. But it's fun, and I don't want to do other things, so there's that.

I have previously helped an older gentleman a few different times to scan things for a book he is supposedly writing. It seems that he used to be a big deal college athlete back in the 1950s. He came back in today looking for help and circulation called me down. I scanned a few pages from his yearbook, emailed them to myself, went upstairs to move them to a Publisher document, printed them and didn't like the quality, reprinted them using the admin copier, and when I got back downstairs he had found another page he wanted scanned. So I did all of that stuff again. He was very thankful, though, so it was worth all the running around. Not too much later I was back upstairs and we got another call from circulation, this time saying they had something for me. I went downstairs and the lady at the desk handed me a handful of change. The older gentleman had given it to her to give to me, and he wanted me to buy a Coca Cola with it. Not just a Coke, but a Coca Cola. I thought that was pretty cool. I ended up adding it to our change stash upstairs for when we have to give someone change for printing.

When I got home I ate dinner, watched some videos, and then played CoD: WW2 for awhile. A few games in I was able to prestige again, so that was pretty cool. I then did some daily orders and contracts before ending on a bit of War. Nothing extraordinary, other than losing a lot but still coming out as the top player a few times. It would be nice if they could perfect evenly matched teams.

After that I got completely sucked into a rabbit hole on YouTube and it is now well after 1:00AM. Somehow I got onto bowling trick shot videos, which are fascinating, and then ended up watching a match of crokinhole, which is a circular board game with little discs that you try to flick into the center hole.

And now it is way too late and I want to go to bed, so I'm going to stop typing.

March 9, 2018

This will be quick because there really wasn't anything going on today.

I woke up after seven hours of sleep, so I ended up having a lot more day than I was expecting. I spent the morning catching up on YouTube videos and clicking around the internet. Then I ate lunch, which included eating popcorn with the new fiberglass chopsticks I got. Plain popcorn is a lot healthier than Cheetos but just as fun to eat with chopsticks. In general, chopsticks seem like the way to go with any finger food if you don't want your fingers to get messy.

After lunch I played CoD: WW2 for a little while before napping a little on the couch. Then I watched more videos and eventually it was dinner time. After dinner I ran on the elliptical, took a shower, and then played more CoD: WW2. I exclusively played War tonight, and there weren't a lot of wins, but my individual effort was pretty solid and I was the top player frequently, even when my team lost. And despite the losses, I still had fun, unlike my teammates, who frequently complained, even when they weren't even in the top three of our team. I'm also very close to prestiging again. I could have done it tonight but I have to work in the morning and I'm already up later than I should be.

And speaking of work, one of my fellow librarian's texted me today about the schedule, because she's really good at noticing things on the schedule. She pointed out that because I work with another librarian this weekend, not an assistant, I won't be getting paid for lunch, so I'm working eight and a half hours instead of nine and a half, or whatever the math is. But, I was schedule for the usual hour and a half off this week to make up for working an extra hour and a half on Saturday. So I have to make up that time. My plan is to just go in a half hour early tomorrow and Sunday, which won't be bad because for the longest time I was going in a half hour early on the weekends anyway because that's what was printed on the schedule. It was confusing because on the weekends, rather than going in an hour before we open, we only go in a half hour before. Anyway, I'll be going in early, and if it turns out the math is wrong, I'll just never tell anyone and we'll pretend it didn't happen.

And now I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed because it is late and tomorrow is going to be a long day thanks to a lack of sleep. Can't wait.

March 8, 2018

This morning I woke up at six o'clock and it kind of sucked, but I got up and ran on the elliptical anyway. And then I went to get my hair cut. It was needed. But it was also a tad chilly this morning, and I already struggle in the hair department, so having even less after the haircut didn't help.

When I got home I watched videos and played a little bit of Subnautica in creative mode. I started messing around with a fun base but I was distracted by my tiredness, so I didn't make much progress. Maybe tomorrow.

When I got to work I was on desk for two hours. I helped the occasional patron but most of that time was spent catching up on the news. Included in that was the local paper, because I haven't looked at that for awhile and I still have the goal of becoming more aware of local things, for obvious reasons.

I had a walkthrough after that, during which I refilled the audiobooks and spoke with some of the circulation people. And then I went up to the third floor so I could download a couple Twinery things I made the other day up there but hadn't saved to my drive so I could access them elsewhere.

During my dinner break I helped my Mom reset her internet because it had been down for a little while. But we got it sorted out and she should be able to handle it in the future.

I was back on desk for an hour when I got back and I finished catching up on local news things. And then I was basically on desk for the rest of the night because no one signed up for my workshop so I had nothing to do. I ended up spending the rest of the night messing a little bit with Twinery, read a bit of an early access Supergirl comic, and I wrote a post for the staff blog about the adulting class next week because no one has signed up yet and I want to try and drum up some interest. I did the same for the last class and it didn't really help, but maybe the second time is the charm. I included a little humor, two George Costanza GIFs, and a subtle reference to the ending song of The Mickey Mouse Club, because it popped into my head and it made me laugh. I am a little worried that at some point I will lose my privileges for posting to the staff blog for being too wacky.

When I got home I watched videos and wrote this. I'm tired, but I get to sleep in tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to that.

March 7, 2018

Last night I didn't get much sleep, once again, but I think I slept better. The sheets are still weird, but maybe I'll get used to them.

When I got to work I was off desk for an hour and a half (because I got to work half an hour later than usual to make up for working the upcoming weekend. Overall, it was a weird day. It's been a weird week. I have been feeling a bit listless at work lately. And possibly in life. But work is the annoying thing at the moment because I want to be doing things when I'm there but I feel like I'm just getting through the day. I need a win. Anyway, in that hour and a half off desk I watched usability videos and read a couple articles.

I watched more usability videos during my two hours on desk. I also answered phone calls. One guy who called was named Jay Blue, so on the caller ID it said Blue Jay. That made me chuckle. I also helped a lady with digital library things and recommended a nearby restaurant to a couple people meeting at the library today.

Halfway through the morning I discovered we were actually doing the birthday food thing today for the librarian whose birthday is tomorrow. I had told my sister I needed pretzels tomorrow, whoops. I texted her and she said she thought she would have time to make them, and she was right. She had to make them at my Mom's house because her oven had a bit of a meltdown, but that worked out well for me because she was still finishing them up when I got there for lunch and they were ready to go by the time I had to leave.

When I got back to work I had a walkthrough and then I watched more usability videos, because that was pretty much my day. I also talked to my coworker. And then I was on desk again and watched even more usability videos.

I didn't move anywhere but I was technically off desk for the next hour. A decent chunk of that was spent talking to the teen librarian who stopped by to talk to my boss about something, but my boss was busy, and the teen librarian had almost instantly forgotten what she wanted to talk to my boss about.

We celebrated the librarian's birthday after that and it was pretty fun. The pretzels went over really well, as usual. We don't do the food stuff for my birthday, because I wouldn't eat any of it, but if I remember I want to bring in the pretzels for everyone else.

I had another walkthrough, finished watching usability videos (I made it through two hundred videos today), talked to one of my coworkers about Black Mirror, and waited for time to slowly pass by.

I picked up Chipotle after work and headed to my Mom's house. My sister and her husband were around half an hour late, but they did eventually make it. We ate dinner, talked, and then watched videos.

I made it home a little after eight o'clock and now I'm going to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I have to wake up early for my much-needed haircut. I'm not looking forward to waking up but maybe I'll get to take a nap before work.

March 6, 2018

I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, and the night seemed to drag on forever, which sucked a little bit. I think part of it has to do with the new sheets. I have slept on flannel or fleece sheets for years now, and these new sheets just make it feel like I'm sleeping in a hotel. I also need to put the blanket back on my bed that I took off this weekend. Too many changes, too quickly.

When I got up I ran on the elliptical, but only for twelve minutes because my knees started to hurt and I wasn't going to push it.

The weather was pretty crazy this morning. It was super windy all day, so there's that. When I left my house there was a super light mix of snow and rain, it looked like the occasional snowflake but when it landed it was a rain drop. By the time I got to work the snow was more of a thing but because of the wind it was blowing completely horizontally. It wasn't cold enough for the snow to survive hitting the ground but it was still a bit of a pain.

I had two ours off desk when I got to work. I spent that time reading articles, talking to my coworkers, and recreating our phone extension list. Our old assistant made our current one but he didn't save it where we can get to it, and it needs to be updated. So I made a new one. And then my boss told me to hold off on printing it because apparently the administrative assistant is working on a similar project at the moment. Oh well.

I was on desk for two hours after that and it kind of disappeared. I answered phone calls, handled emails, and read articles. I imagine I did something more specific as well but it was so uneventful I almost immediately forgot all the details involved with those two hours.

When I got back from lunch we had a drop-in but I didn't participate outside of printing out the sign-in sheet, getting brochures, and making a sign on the white board. The one-on-one tech trainer was there as well as our volunteer, so my boss told me not to stick around (basically), which kind of sucked because it's fun talking to the volunteer about video games.

Instead of doing the drop-in, I ran around the building. I printed out the active shooter cards (after tracking down some cardstock), cut them out, and then went around the building to deliver them. That took me up to the third floor and ended in the basement, fifty phones later. It took awhile.

I had a walkthrough after that, because I hadn't had enough walking. I then wrote a post for the staff blog explaining the active shooter cards, so that everyone would be aware of what they were. They were shown during the managers' meeting but I wasn't sure how far down the chain they had gone, and in this case I decided too much information wasn't really possible. I want everyone in the building to be aware of the cards, and for no one to ever have to use them.

Right before getting on desk I did a bit more running around to grab books for the staff picks display. And then almost immediately after getting on desk for the last hour of my shift, I had a bit of an altercation with a drunk patron. He came up to the desk with a handmade poster advertising puppies he was trying to sell. I let him know that we only post non-profit information on our bulletin board and he told me to give him a marker and he would get rid of the $50 charge. I told him that even with that change, it still wasn't the type of information we post. That's when he raised his voice a bit and started walking away. And when he got to the stairs he turned back to me and basically shouted about the library charging late fees but still calling ourselves a non-profit. And then he saw himself out. It took several minutes for the smell of alcohol to dissipate after he left. It was so strong. Once he left I wrote up a behavior report for the staff blog, just in case it becomes a thing. And then I spent the last however long at work talking to my coworker's sister about the tech classes and workshops, and her own area of study involving art and technology.

When I got home I ate dinner, watched videos, and played CoD: WW2. It was not the best night of gameplay. I spent a lot of time shooting right next to guys. There were also some connection issues because I had guys shooting at me before I could see them, and at least once or twice I had bad guys appearing out of nowhere in front of me. So that was annoying, but I knocked out several daily orders and contracts. I'm also very close to level fifty-two. Progress.

Now I'm going to record my audio journal and go to bed. I'm tired, and I have to wake up for work. Fingers crossed I can sleep through the night tonight.