Another Day in the Apocalypse

Today has been a real mixed bag.

I went to the library and was only mildly anxious, just a little lightheaded getting out of my car, walking to the doors, and using my key to get in. It felt slightly surreal, I definitely found myself with my head on a swivel watching for anyone who might suddenly round a corner and be too close. That felt a bit like a zombie movie to some small corner of my brain, made me feel more anxious, but I got inside, found my boss, and had my performance review. It was, overall, pretty excellent, so that helps. I have things to work on but that will be true until I’m in my coffin pounding on the lid in frustration at all I did not get to finish. Unless I become a vampire, then I’ll just nap and get up and get back to it. Oh yes, I have a plan ready for if I become a vampire, just like I have a plan in case of zombie apocalypse. You gotta be ready.

So, the procedures in place at work look good, reassuring, lots of masks, lots of cleaning, lots of precautions in place. Lots of distance, and no rush to let patrons back into the building. The town is determined to go slowly and safely and if we can’t be open to the public safely we won’t be open. My incredible boss also said that if I need to take a sick day I can take a sick day. Everything as usual, just inform her with as much notice as possible and no need to tell her what I am sick with. She said too stressed to come in counts. Gods, she makes me want to be my best lbrarian-self. Permission to rest makes me want to try harder.

Good news/Bad news: On top of my locker I found a bunch of paystubs. I arranged for direct deposit before the shutdown so it’s just a bunch of papers for my records… or so I thought. It seems my direct deposit didn’t go through, they are all actual checks! So, neato, we have more money than we thought we did because we can deposit all these, but bummer because totalling them up has revealed to me how little I actually bring home every quarter. Yeah, I am not contributing as much as it felt like I was, not monetarily anyway. *sigh*

I went to hang out in my art studio/hippie fort and finally made the call that I am wildly uncomfortable with the height of the huge inflatable mattress in the loft so now I have to return it. It’s so high it’s made the loft claustrophobic for me and the cord doesn’t reach the outlet once it’s inflated. Highly inconvenient and makes me not want to hang about out there and write/paint/etc. Very sad. Now we can’t sleep out there until we can get a replacement…. again. I’m finding less mice in the traps, yay, but the one’s I’m finding have been partially eaten by ants and other mice: Disgusting. So so icky. Also, I didn’t know there were ants out there so bummer on that. On a happier note I brought some audiobooks and more music out there so when it feels more hospitable again I am going to be loving it out there. ^_^ Another plus is that a replacement inflatable mattress will be cheaper than the crazy-sized one we have now. YAY! I love spending less on what I actually want!

It’s cooler now, I should make dinner.

I am dreading going back to work.

Before I angst about this, I need to say: I love my job. Being a teen librarian is amazing. I feel overwhelmed most of the time, of course, keeping track of so very many things is insane, but I love that I get to work with teens & books and I get to create and run programming for them. I get to pick books for the collection, create displays, show movies, run craft programs like making Galaxy T-shirts, Harry Potter holiday tree ornaments, mug painting, etc. It really is a perfect job for me. But I am not ready to go back.

I don’t trust every member of the public to comply with health and safety protocols. I try to stay away from the news because it’s awful but I have still heard about all the protesters without masks screaming to get back to normal, the customers in stores who spit on or assault workers who ask them to please use a mask, and the people who get screamed at in public for wearing masks. It makes me wonder what will happen when we start allowing patrons in to use the computers by appointment, it makes me wonder even more how patrons will take being told they need to wait because there are already 20 people in the building and we’re only allowing that many in at a time. It makes me nervous. People can be so entitled sometimes. “I just need to….”

A long time ago, before the sickness came, people would sometimes pop in at about 5 minutes to closing and turn on one of the computers we’d shut down 10 minutes before, and tell us they just needed to print out a few pages. The problem of course is that it takes time to get the computer running, online, etc, and the printer takes time to wake back up etc, and we shut them down 15 minutes ahead of closing so we can leave at closing time. Of course when we explain that, and inform them of our hours etc, most people are apologetic, they were just in a rush. Sometimes they have rushed to us straight after work and absolutely need what they are printing for their employer, the courts, to submit for a benefit or some other important reason, and they are crestfallen at both not being able to do what they need to and for bothering us. I tend to find it in my heart to print those documents and go home a little late and happily I have my boss’s support on that. Then there are the people who are outraged that library policies have become inconvenient to them. They are rare, and maybe they are having a really bad day, I don’t know, but they decide in that moment to take it out on us. So far this has been muttering, storming out, little things.

My worry is that 2-3 months of being restricted to their homes and essential trips has probably not sweetened anyone’s temper. They are frustrated, they want things to be the way they were, they need what they need. Maybe they have somehow been lucky enough not to be close to anyone who has become seriously ill from this virus and they think it’s no big deal, maybe they think their robust immune system would kick its ass, maybe they believe we just need to accept thousands of deaths a day from this horror as the price of doing business. I don’t know where their hostility springs from but I do know there is a subset of the population that views any inconvenience to them to be a violation of some imagined civil right and I am not excited about having to ask those people to wait for the health and safety of their neighbors, or to wear a mask and maintain social distance, I worry that it won’t go well.

My director is back to work full time as of today. The rest of us will be asked to resume a slightly altered schedule as soon as next week. The library will be locked at first, for some indeterminate time, and we will be doing curbside pickup and possibly drop off as well. The next phase we will allow patrons to make appointments to come inside to use the computers. The library doors will still be locked and we will be cleaning everything like maniacs. We have phases after that, none with any time frame yet, of 25%, 50%, 75%, and finally back to normal levels, unlocked doors, etc. Not that I think we’ll get there. I think we are going to see the infection rate start climbing before we get to the phase of letting patrons in for computer use. I think we’re all going to be forced to rush back into isolation with more of us sick, and people will continue to die of this thing. I am not going to bring this virus home to my family. Everyone else here is off the hook about making a call on getting back out there until fall. I’m scrambling to make a decision possibly within this very week.

Having a couple of my friends infected is not making this easy. I hope they will be ok. They seem to be improving a bit so I’m hopeful. My husband’s auntie seems to be recovering really well so far, so that’s good. I’m just nervous for them and for us. We have been so careful. We isolated early and completely. We haven’t had in person contact with anyone since early March so we should be clear of this thing. But the number of infected is still rising in this country, in my state, and we should not be heading back yet. I’m scared I may have to quit the job I love. It seems insane, I’ll never be able to replace it, I know this, but I am considering quitting. I’m ok with going back to a locked building with no contact with the public, masks and social distancing with my coworkers, etc. Maybe the numbers will spike before we open the doors and I can run home and hide again, I don’t know. It seems like a horrible thing to hope for but if we as a state/country/world are really going to go ahead and start reopening, well, it’s the only realistic thing I can hope for to keep my family safe. I’d rather everything stayed shut and that the government would help those who need help in every way they truly should until it is actually safe to go back out there. I wish that no new infections would happen at all, and that those infected would all recover and be ok again, but apparently it doesn’t matter what I wish, alas.

Games and Goals @ the Library

I spent yesterday at the library with my husband. He runs a Pathfinder RPG for the tweens and teens once a month, usually while I’m working, I fetch snacks and print things for them because I’m almost always on the clock. Yesterday we reset the game to level one in the new Pathfinder 2.0 and started the new one shot module designed to teach players the new rules. It’s the same module we ran at home and the kids at the library jumped right in and did a better job sorting it out than the we did. ^_^

Progress is going slowing on all fronts around here. I’m not tending to my goals very well, except my reading goal which I’m still ahead in, I haven’t had time or money yet to get it together to work on things like soap or lotion making and it’s not exactly gardening season here in the North East. I’m also spending more time working on the upcoming Summer Reading Program than I’d have thought I would at this point in the year. The Cultural Council grants came through and it looks like I will get to offer both the stained glass and teen paint night workshops I wanted to. Yay! I thought I hadn’t gotten the painting grant but it was just late because of a typo or something in the council’s answer. For those 2 things I’ve just dashed off some emails to the instructors. What I’ve really been working on are my plans for other activities. I plan to run a Fairy Tale Writing Contest, plant some sort of fairy garden, offer a workshop on Wee Folk house-making, and hopefully a few other things as well. Last summer’s Book Cover Contest was a complete and utter bust and I am going to do my best to make sure the writing contest is a success. I definitely made some mistakes! (it was my first time running an SRP and my first time running a contest so it was inevitable I would mess it up pretty big time) How I will improve this year’s contest:

RULES: I will NOT leave things wide-open. It turns out that saying “do whatever you want!” is not the best way to inspire creativity. I will make sure there are clear guidelines for what I want submitted.
Examples: I will absolutely make sure I have at least 2-3 examples of what submitted tales could be like. Last year I had no examples whatsoever because I was swamped and kept putting off working on it.
Publicize the contest outside the library with flyers in the local middle schools and high schools, with a press release and with a very nice flyer I have been working on for ages already.
Prizes: I will tailor the prizes to the contest and not offer the generic one-size-fits-all prize I attached to last year’s book cover contest.

Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming learning this job as I go but I think I’m really starting to get the hang of it after a whole year. The collection is coming along. I’m starting to find areas of nonfiction to focus on that I think will interest local teens and be of help to them, I’m still working on getting more clear direction from them on what sorts of fiction they want in the collection. I put out surveys and got a far number of responses that were pretty diverse so I can only make sure I try to order a wide selection of books across all the genres at this point. The budget is such that I can’t really order more than 1 or 2 of any genre each month but I am able to supplement that with donated books sometimes. People who love books are so generous to the library, I often get books that have just come out within a few months in perfect condition, it really helps. I’m making progress in the programming I offer too. After each one I sit down and sort out what worked and what didn’t and why. I think about what I could change to make it more successful or about why it failed.

I love this job and I want to make sure my boss feels like I am worth the chance she took hiring me. In my job description it states that I am to run at least 2 programs per month, one being the Teen Advisory Board and one other of my own devising, and that attendance should ideally be 3, 4 or more teens (we are a small, rural library, larger libraries probably get a lot more participants). Starting this month, with the new year and all, I am offering every month:

Teen Advisory Board: pizza, small projects, and talking about what interests those who show up. I usually get 4-8 teens for this.
Pathfinder Role Playing game: 4 hour session, snacks provided, usually attended by 3-4 players.
Monthly Movie: tied to the summer reading theme, this year fairy tales, with free popcorn. My first and only screening so far had 7 attendees.
Book Boot Camp: a book club where we each read whatever we want within a certain genre and discuss them over cocoa and baked goods. (I’ll switch that up if I’m still running it once it gets warm out) This month will be Mystery and it happens next weekend. I believe I have 5 sign ups but we’ll see if anyone shows up.

Last year at this time I was running TAB and attempting to continue the Young Writer’s group started by my predecessor. Unfortunately the writing group fell apart in short order and it took me a few months to begin to offer my own programs. So, progress! I am definitely doing better than I was a year ago and I’m still working on it so I have to be happy with that.

Events, Food, Etc.

Bad news: I’m ill. Good news: I finished the house scarves for Saturday’s Harry Potter party at the Library. ^_^ I’m really looking forward to it. The Festivities:

Watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Drinking home-made Butterbeer
Doing word-jumbles, word-searches, and Crossword puzzles
4 teens winning a house scarf by random drawing!
Happy Holidays, Teens! ^_^

My ornament workshop was cancelled due to snow so it’s the only thing on this month, pretty much.

In other news I stumbled across a book and then 3 videos by my high school art teacher. I was just browsing the gardening section and found her book on foraging and wild foods. I checked to see if there was anything else by her and found we had 3 videos in our library! It’s lovely watching her after so many years and her recipes look delicious so I will be trying them out in the Spring. I took a class on wild foods a few years ago but these videos seem more comprehensive and being able to watch the foods being harvested and processed it helpful too.

We got our latest credit card bill and it is, as is somewhat usual this time of year, High. Ugh. It’s so hard to stick to a budget when buying gift for people I love. I want to do so much and sometimes I do too much. So I am now clamping down on spending to make up for this extravagance. I only have a couple more things to get and holiday shopping will be done. That leaves the feast shopping and some of that has been done already so we should be good. When I clamp down on spending I rely on my pantry more than usual. I lean on my supplies of pasta, rice, and dried beans etc. I cut back on using meat and focus on using up winter squashes and whatever else is on hand. I recently found that I can make a killer mac & cheese with about 1/2 the cheese by adding in mashed winter squash. My husband LOVED it. I added a few new spices to it too. My son wasn’t as big a fan of it but he needs to eat more veg anyway… and he did eat it. I’ll dig down in the freezer too and use any meat we have on hand. Casseroles will make more of an appearance too as I go through all the frozen veg, pasta and so on.

I’ve been working on not wasting food anyway. It’s such a problem and it’s ridiculous with the prices we pay for the stuff that any should be wasted. I’m thinking of putting together a big entry on eliminating food waste sometime soon.