This past week

The past week, or two, has been CRAZY busy in the absolute best way.

Except for Monday.

Monday was the day we had a flood in one of the conference rooms (it technically belongs to technology, but we also use it occasionally). There was a devilish, little white hose spewing water, along with the knocking around the contents of the cabinet it had lived in, which had been going on for perhaps a couple of days. Things in our work room were soaked!

We lost some cardboard boxes and some paper, which wasn't necessarily bad, but the water was standing in our work room! It had soaked through the carpet, a little into the library and an adjacent conference room, and a tiny bit in the Lower School Learning Commons. After the strain of that day, things were much better!

Carrie and I helped 4th grade with a really cool data research project. Well, she worked with them a lot--I helped when they were in the new Lower School Learning Commons. It was fun to help them search for things, or even encourage them to think of creative ways to search...even sometimes to the point of just telling them to maybe find something new. That was perhaps the most difficult part.

We also got a new book order in, found out we had a bunch of books randomly donated to us, and another stashed of books that had been donated who-knows-when that we are fortunate to have! Getting books ready is always a challenge. Now that I'm posted at the circulation desk, it's an ever exciting challenge to get everything covered while checking little ones out. I don't mind; it's kind of fun to make it a challenge against myself.

This following week will be a little lighter in some ways. We're preparing for our next book order, and next Monday, I get to go to Region 10 for a professional development course with Peggy Sharp! She is a very dedicated educator, who absolutely knows everything about books. Seriously. I'm pretty sure you could name any title at all, and she could give you a lesson plan or fun song to go with it.

I'm also working on the promotional video for the library. So far, I've taken about an hour or two of footage and need to set up times to interview people. This is a creative challenge for me and that is something I dearly love. Fingers crossed it will be awesome!

Libraryland Update

This week in some ways has gone by fast--the amount of classes we've seen some days, the Founder's Day rally (which is always fun!), and our book order's arrival have all helped us to push through our first 5 day week.

The beginning of this week was slower-paced. The letter days we started out with had large gaps in them, leaving us with lots of space to read about books, and sneak in some Insurgent reading time.

I'm trying to become more active in reading, and have started using GoodReads to log my books. It's so helpful! Though I think I created it a long time ago and pretty much had just one friend on it, I've found a bunch of people in my circle and love seeing what they're up to. It's exciting to find people excited about reading :)

Seriously, I feel sometimes that I am a bit slow at reading; I hate the stories to end, and the characters to go away. I know the Divergent trilogy will be ending this October, but I still am reading Insurgent soooo slooowwwly. That's okay, I guess. Just delaying the inevitable.

Another thing I've been reading, is one of the lesser-known subreddits on the social networking site Reddit. Granted, there are a lot of, how shall we say, weirdos on Reddit, but I've found the people on /r/libraries to be educated, excited, and passionate about their jobs. I kind of stumbled upon them on accident, through looking for craft resources online.

I may post a real live book review this weekend! Fingers crossed.

Quick update!

It's the end of the week. Phew. It hasn't been as crazy as the first week of school, but the second is a bit more fun. The new lessons start, kids are getting familiar with the idea of checking out books again (and our faces). I've made a goal for myself to get to know what they're reading, and try to get them interested in similar books. It's been working fairly well so far.

I've gotten the hang of processing and sorting the mail and periodicals. It's not really bad, just the initial summer load that's a tad overwhelming. I enjoy being in a flexible position, too. It frees me up to do research for our promotional video that we'll start working on pretty soon. That's a plus!

Overall, great second week. Finished covering last year's books, had a birthday celebration (along with too much cake), and fiance got a new job. Pretty memorable week in my book.

Staring

From John Green's A Fault in Our Stars:

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all.

 Oh, how I love this book. On page 12 and I cannot stop.

First Week

The first week of school is always hardest. Maybe it's the getting up early (or not staying up late), doing laundry in a timely fashion, or not wearing myself out with all-day Sims marathons.

Anyway, this year, our first week was a success! Not that last year's wasn't, but I believe this year we were both more prepared than our first (hopefully obvious, but I was nervous with all our changes). The new schedule we are on (fixed checkout time, schedule on an as-needed basis for lessons/research) is quite refreshing. It helps enable us to focus on library tasks, as well as creating lessons and displays.

It's been fun for me, to be honest. I've been given more clerical tasks than I had previously, and I also am going to be directing (sort of) and editing (definitely) an introductory film about our library. I feel comfortable in my new position, as well as challenged. I always like to have new challenges. That's when creativity can show up at it's finest.

The kids are very sweet, and I think this 4th grade class will be so great. They're strong learners, and were a joy to be around last year as 3rd graders. I hope I can help with some of the research projects, even though I'm not 100% sure about most of the research methods. It's always exciting, though.

This second week is pretty short and light for me. I'm hoping to get some more storyboarding done. I've never had to do it for a 3-5 minute feature, just a short news clip which did NOT turn out that well. Ah, well, that's learning. I'm going to try to read a couple book review journals to keep up my knowledge of what's coming out, and maybe glance over the stuff that's new.

Oh! And finish covering those darn books. Heh.