• 8.00am Help staff member with Internet services
• 8.30am Meet with other 2 branch librarians to discuss stock selection and operational issues
• 9.15am Move into the office and meet with the Manager of Library Services to discuss managerial issues
• 10.00am Make enquiries with HR and IT about some processes and procedures
• 10.10am Make slight amendment to event listings on the website
• 10.15am Finalise ANF selections for the week
• 10.20am Help new staff member with ILLs
• 10.30am Draft next weeks desk roster, and commence organising relief staff for the following week
• 12.00noon Lunch. Head out of library, buy lunch, head back into library to eat. Start drafting blog post. Finish lunch and decide I need chocolate. Leave library again and buy chocolate brownie. Inhale half of said brownie on way back to library
• 1.00pm Desk roster; review and make available new nonfiction stock
• 3.30pm Check emails
• 3.45pm Records management – register required emails and amend documents in our records management system so they are suitable for use from the intranet4.00pm Review ANF donations – we received some great Donna Hay cookbooks so those will be added to the collection.
• 4.15pm Procedures – continue working on first procedure in new template, email it to manager (I’ll be very glad when our procedure review is over, but by that time it will be time to start again!)
• 5.00pm Start writing next weeks to do list
• 5.15pm Shut down PC, and join staff in locking up library at 5.30pm

Just another typical day…..

You plan, prepare, implement, fail, review, try again and succeed.  Sound like project management to you?

(As a complete aside, how skillful and strong must this guy be?!)

• 8.00am Emails
• 8.10am ILLs – again attending to incoming requests as staff member rostered for this was training our new staff member in another ILL component
• 8.30am Discussion with Manager
• 8.45am Liaise with volunteer homebound delivery staff
• 8.55am Discuss quotes received for 12/13 budget as we are currently doing budget preparations
• 9.00am Call impromptu staff meeting
• 9.30am Commence incredibly busy desk shift while listening to “Der glumph went the little green frog” during Rhyme Time and Storytime.  We had a lot of new members join today
• 11.45am Finally off desk (desk shift finished at 11.15am); add 3 events for February to the website (only 44 more book club entries to add in the next week!!)
• 12.00pm Review financials from last week
• 12.45pm Homebound volunteers return and discuss suggestions for amendment
• 1.00pm Lunch
• 1.45pm ILLs
• 2.00pm Review minutes from the mornings staff meeting.  Realise some things I forgot to mention and email those out with the minutes (and am still trying to remember what the one other thing I wanted to mention was…..)
• 2.15pm Commence working through weekly stock order list
• 4.00pm Review procedure template and content with manager
• 4.30pm Resume working through weekly stock selection list
• 5.00pm Realise my PC hasn’t been disconnected from network or turned off in 32.5hrs so reboot to enable staff to run nightly LMS processes
• 5.15pm Enable out of office for Wednesday

Go home exhausted, again….

I thought I’d use the same concept for libday8.  But by the time I got to midday using this concept was almost out the window – you tend not to fill out the form for an hour and you forget what you’ve done!

So today (I think) went something like this:

• 8am Check emails
• 8.10am Finalise the weekly desk roster
• 8.15am Rework the weekly desk roster to accomodate someone who has just called in sick
• 8.30am Generate holds & overdues notices, and those dreaded things called tax invoices
• 8.45am “Information exchange” with colleague.  I took a flex on Friday for my wedding anniversary, and I missed the 2nd day for a new staff member. So we spent a bit of time discussing staff training and discussing things which happened at work on Friday and Saturday
• 9.15am ILLs – the staff member who was off sick today is responsible for incoming ILL requests from other public libraries, so I quickly worked my way through the new list
• 9.30am Desk roster – boy was it busy today!
• 11.15am Emails, finalise stock selection from last weeks order list and stock selection meeting, and assist at the desk when buzzed as the customer to staff ratio was exceeded, public printing issues etc….
• 1.00pm Lunch (for those who met me at the Perth Unconference in 2011 – you’ll be pleased to know I am now taking more than 15- 20mins for lunch)
• 2.00pm Reviewing a new format for our procedures.  We are currently revising all our procedures and rewriting them into a new format.  Today was ‘Procedure format – take 3′
• 3.15pm Desk roster – again extremely busy – and am now completely exhausted
• 5.30pm Processing of invoices
• 5.45pm Review content for events to be placed on the council website tomorrow
• 6.00pm Finally leave to go home

In addition to this, I am on the ALIAWest committee for 2012.  Emails for this group and its associated tasks were flying thick and fast – both today and tonight.

A librarian’s work is never done

What I didn’t mention, is that Simon runs ultramarathons, and is blind.  Simon’s Adapting to Going Blind blog talks about some of the challenges he faces, both in his running life and his daily life.

Last night Simon tweeted out a link to a video clip that Asics have released on him.  I hope it’s as inspiring for you as it is for me

Our request ended up with us being able to buy:

As we have booked a camping trip this month, for the first time camping on our own (gasp!), we decided to camp in the backyard last night.

To help us not look like idiots when we go away,  we thought we’d take step by step photos to make sure we could unpack and put up our tent, and the follow the photo’s in reverse to pack it away.

and that was as far as we got with taking photos.

We managed to get the tent up:

Then my brother, who is home from London for the holidays SMS’d and asked if we were “camping at home” or still using the creature comforts of home.  The response was:

(please note the TV we were watching through the security door).

After a yummy BBQ dinner, complemented by opening a 12 year single malt (something I am yet able to drink but I WILL acquire the taste by the end of the year), we survived the night in the tent, and woke up listening to birds flitting through the bushes and trees in our yard, and to Zoe wondering if this was her new home:

We managed to take the tent down, and had a BBQ brekkie to celebrate.

Roll on our camping trip in January!

So with that in mind, here are mine:

1. Exercise more than 2011.
   I got a bit sidetracked in 2011 with a few holidays and conferences, so my running suffered and my gym attendance was poor (I still can’t believe I took 4 months off!).  My running event schedule is almost decided so I shall be setting up a training plan soon.  I’m back into the gym routine.  I’m walking regularly with friends.  I also want to try a few new sports I’ve not done before.  I want to get the longest #exercisestreak I can
2. Be more organised with food and cooking
   Following on from last year, I really do need to expand my cooking repertoire and start using the recipes I’ve collected from magazines and ipad apps like Big Oven.  Hubby has also been asking for more organised meals (fish one night, beef one night, chicken another, etc; I’m pushing for a meat free Monday dinner), and my hip pocket dictates that I need to stop buying excess food only to end up throwing it out.
3. Be realistic with my reading goals.
   As a librarian I have access to way more books than I am ever going to read.  I need to be more discerning with the number of books I bring home from work, and only purchase those that I will get around to reading.  I’ve just set my goodreads goal to 40 books for 2012.
4. Left brain vs right brain
   I need to do something which will help develop my right brain – I don’t believe I am a creative person.  Thanks to Ghylene I will be completing a small longstitch activity, and thanks to the crowdsourcing on Twitter I shall be doing #fp2012.  I shall also try and find some time to pick up drawing which I wanted to do a few years ago.
   Left brain development will include completing a 1000 piece photomosiac jigsaw puzzle - on my own without help.

I have deliberately left my goals broad to some extent, so that I can be a little whimsical with them.  Things don’t have to be as defined as they appear.

1. Blog more than I have in the past.  Maybe event start posting to my old book blog again…..
2. Exercise more.  This is twofold.
   I started running in March 2010 and since then have clocked up 462kms.  The 2011 aim is 750kms.
   Run a half marathon.  The furthest I’ve done so far without stopping is 15kms, and that almost killed me.  The Perth Half Marathon is on in August 2011, so I’ve got until then to get prepared.
3. Cook a new dish each week.  Hubby and I stick to the same meals every week… and admittedly they’re not fantastic.  My style of cooking is something along the lines of “what I can throw in the oven and forget about and just have salad with”.  I really need to take advantage of some of those food/cooking magazines I subscribe too….

So let’s review how well I did. (It’s interesting writing a report card for yourself!)

1. Blog more than I have in the past.
   I managed to write 44 blog post.  Got to say, even though it was sporadic, I did enjoy it.
   Grade: A
2. Exercise more.
   Well, I didn’t manage to run 750kms – big fail there.  But I did manage 388km (even less than 2010!), but 21kms of that was the Perth Half Marathon! Go me!  This was a major achievement
   Grade: C (The F from failing to do the kms is cancelled by the A for the half marathon)
3. Cook a new dish each week. 
   Ummmmm.  This didn’t happen so much.  I certainly did cook a few new dishes – roast pork, crispy skinned salmon, blueberry crumble slice to name a few – but certainly not 52 of them.
   Grade: C

Hmmmm.  Turns out I’m an average student.  But that gives me room for improvement in 2012

Life is not dull for me at the moment – in between approving purchase orders, going through the recruitment process, calming irate customers, stock ordering, stock taking, catching up on projects, starting the budget process and storytime – I don’t seem to have much time.

In saying that though, it is the variety which makes our jobs interesting, hones our time and project management skills, and challenges us in our thinking.

I hope that the variety continues into the future (so long as I don’t drown in it!).

@moochoo is aiming for 100 days.  @haikugirlOz and I have taken a slightly different approach; because we have numerous different fitness interests and goals we have decided to do an #exercisestreak – as many consecutive days of exercise as we can.

Anyone else want to join us?

BTW, the longest #runstreak I saw on Twitter tonight was 449 days!