It's Thanksgiving!

It's almost Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving is definitely one of my favorite holidays. All the wonderful aspects of getting together as friends and family without all the pressure of giving gifts. But Thanksgiving is also wonderful because you get to really think about what you are thankful for. This year my list is numerous. I am thankful for...

• My parents for all they do for me and for generously allowing me to come home after graduation since I don't have a job.
• My amazing friends for not giving up on me whenever I disappear or whine about not having a job.
• The opportunities I've had this semester to gain valuable library experience.
• A career path that will provide me with lots of personal and job satisfaction (once I actually get a job :) )
• My professors for being so willing to write recommendations for me and to give me advice whenever I ask for it.
• My readers! Those of you who are out there (lurkers or not), I'm grateful that you find me interesting enough to read!
  

I am also thankful for the little things, like the fact that I have some place to live, something to eat, and people to love. I know this year, especially with as bad as the economy has been, there are a lot of people who don't have that. I'm very fortunate, I think.

What are you thankful for this year?

Why I've Fallen Off the Face of the Earth

If you are a regular reader of my blog (I know there are so many of you out there! :) ), you've probably been wondering why I haven't been blogging lately. Not to sound like a whiner, but it mostly has to do with me being super tired all the time. My crazy schedule of 2 grad classes, 1 undergrad French class (that's everyday!!), my internship, my GTA, and my job in the reading room is finally catching up with me. I leave my house before 8 and only get to come home before 9 one day a week. So naturally, I'm exhausted. Not to mention the fact that I have a twenty to twenty-five page research paper due the Monday after Thanksgiving hanging over my head...but that's another story.

The other big thing in my life is trying to find a job. I'm applying to 2-3 jobs a week, but have yet to get more than a "thanks for your application, we'll let you know something some time soon" letter/email. I've started having trouble sleeping and often find myself panicking in the middle of the day about being unemployed. My mother lovingly added to that stress by informing me that my insurance expires January 1, when I'm out of the country. How fantastic is that?

So school and job hunting are overwhelming my life right now. Graduation is officially 29 days from today (yay!! and glup!!), and turning in this paper is my last school project (maybe forever? scary thought), so hopefully, things will flow fairly smoothly over the next few weeks and I'll actually get stuff done. Highly doubtful as I do love to procrastinate; however, I have high hopes on being productive.

I'm going to a grant writing workshop next week, and planning on posting something about that. I also have completed a project for my public libraries class that I would love to share. So look for those two things in the near future. Have a great day!

Motivation (Or Lack Thereof)

So I realized last night that I haven't blogged in over a week. There are a few things to blame for that. Thursday and Friday I went home for fall break; Saturday I spent all day watching football with my dad (Roll Tide!); I've been working on a paper; I don't have anything to say; the excuses go on and on. The truth is I'm not blogging that frequently because I seem to being living a life that lacks motivation.

I get up in the morning full of energy and plans for the day, but by the time I've driven around campus for 15 minutes looking for a parking space, most of that energy has been wasted on frustration and that inability of UA to provide students with adequate parking. And my plans for the day? Suddenly my to-do list that seemed so exciting looks like the longest, most terrible list in the world. I'm filled with dread just thinking about it.

Work is piling up as my procrastination stretches on. I'm way behind on the LibGuides project for Rodgers, the things I need to be doing for my GTA keep getting bumped aside for other, probably not as important, things, and school work just seems like such a chore. Maybe I've got "senioritis" or maybe I'm just stuck in a bad place right now, but either way, I need some encouragement in all aspects of my life.

A Day in the Life of a Library Student

This summer I blogged about the trend of blogging about your day. I even posted one of my mornings in the reading room. I'm not sure if it's still a trend, but I thought I would bring back the concept here and share with y'all what my Tuesdays are like. Note: Because this was accreditation week, my day was not as typical as some.

6:15 - wake up to the construction crews outside my building making way too much noise for 6:15 in the morning.
6:50 - actually get out of bed and get ready for the day.
8:00 - arrive at Rogers after a battle to find a decent parking spot. I won, at least for today.
8:05-9:00 - check email, facebook, twitter, TFLN, MLIA, and my blogs. Gchat with some friends.
9:00-9:40 - look at various schools' use of the LibGuides system and take notes. Contemplate the best way to present it and play around with a PowerPoint.
9:45 - walk to Gorgas for a meeting.
10:00-10:40 - meet with the accreditation team about being a student leader. Meeting goes well, but not as many student leaders showed up as I had hoped.
10:45 - quick stop for tea on my way back to Rogers.
11:00-12:30 - continue working on the LibGuides project and decide to scratch the PowerPoint idea; decide that a word document is fine. Make a decision to create my own template after looking at too many different features that I like.
12:30-12:50 - eat lunch at my desk while surfing the internet.
1:00-1:50 - French class, better known as the hour where I'm completely bored out of my mind.
2:00 - make an executive decision that getting a second masters/Ph.D. in history is not what I want to do right now, instead I really want to get a job and have a real life. This also results in me not going to the history class I was auditing.
2:15-3:15 - leave campus (yay!) and head to the drug store to pick up some things I desperately needed and run them home.
3:30-7:00 - work in the Reading Room. And by work I mean sit at my station and play on the internet, do homework, and occasionally refill the copier, or solve a technical problem. It was a very quiet evening.
7:30 - head to a friend's house for girls night!

Tuesday is my short day, which is kind of scary, but it is. And now that I'm not going to history anymore, I get a chance to leave campus and go home or go run some errands for an hour or so. Thursdays are even better because I have 3 hours of free time. I'm learning to value these little bits of time; they are my saving grace right now.

This is definitely been my busiest semester ever. Some days I get to campus at 8:00 and don't leave until after 9:00. I'm sure it will only get worse when I start having major assignments due. But this is also my last semester, so I'm just thrilled that I get to graduate and move on with life.

So how was your day? Was it as busy as mine? Please share!

Changes Coming...

Now that school has started my life is suddenly a million times busier. I'm still working in the reading room, but only 10 hours a week. I'm a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for an online DE class and I help out a few professors a few times a week. I'm taking two SLIS classes, Public Libraries and History of Libraries, as well as a French class to help me prepare just in case I decide to go after my Ph.D. I'm also auditing a history class just for fun. Wow, I sound busy, don't I? While being this busy is definitely a change, the biggest change is that I've also started an internship. I work 10 hours a week at Rogers Science and Engineering Library. It's mainly a reference internship, but I'm hoping to learn a lot about working in a branch library on a major university campus. At UA, Rogers houses all the science and engineering texts, as well as books on nursing, mathematics, and computer science. Its a good size space and has lots of nifty features.

With life changes, come changes to the blog. I've been posting pretty frequently, and I hope to try and blog at least twice a week. However, due to my ridiculous schedule, I might blog less (or I might even blog more! We'll see...). My internship requires me to keep a log of my daily activities at my internship site, so I've decided to do that here. I will have a weekly feature, probably posted on Fridays, about what I've done during the past week. If you would like to only read posts about my internship, click the "internship" tag at the bottom of this post and that will bring up everything I've written about working at Rogers.

Other changes...I've noticed that all the good blogs (or at least the blogs I read) have pictures, so I'm thinking of adding pictures (like I did today!) to try and spice things up. Let me know if you like the pictures and/or there is anything you would like to see more/less of.

If you've started back to school, I hope things are going well for you. If you're not in school, I hope life is treating you well!

A Day in the Life of a Librarian

It seems I actually have something in common with the Annoyed Librarian (I know, I'm shocked too). We both picked up on the trend about blogging about daily lives and we both wrote a blog about it. Check out mine here and hers here. While her day (and everyone else's) is infinitely more interesting than mine, it's still nice to know that people find sharing the mundane so fascinating.

I haven't blogged in a few days because my job has been very mundane over the past few weeks. I'm still working on that barcoding project, but expect to finish today or tomorrow. I imagine I will have another project dealing with the Media Archives as soon as a finish this one. It's been pretty quiet around here; in fact the library world has been really quiet. I guess now that ALA is over, things have calmed down or a lot of people are on vacation. (I'm going to go with the latter.) So I have very little to share.

Know anything new in the library world? Have something to share? Post a comment below or email me!

A Typical Morning

Wow! Two posts in one day! :) I'm really starting to like this blogging thing. Anyway, I felt the need to share this awesome newspaper column that came through my American Libraries Direct newsletter. I love humorous little takes on the everyday life of a librarian, and found this one particularly amusing since it so resembles mine. So as a treat I decided to chronicle my morning in the Reading Room for you.

8:00 Arrive on time (yay!) and use code to get in. Turn first two sets of lights on and lobby printer/copier on. Put stuff down and turn on computer. Grab keys and open computer lab. Note that there are still copies of the CW on the floor; recycle them and turn on printer/copier. Head to the back to turn on last set of lights. Sign into the computer and check in the newspapers.
8:15-9:30 Really quiet. Check email, facebook, twitter, and blogs. Search for new blogs to read. Write a new blog post. G-chat with friends.
9:30 Request to borrow a pen. Followed quickly by requests to borrow a ruler, replace the staples, and fix a jam in the copier. Suddenly the computer lab is full.
9:52 Answer the phone then hang up on a solicitor.
10:00 Head to the back to put some barcodes on tapes. Listen to my ipod while mentally complaining to myself about how much I hate doing this.
10:45 Eat my snack and go pick up the mail. Rejoice because there aren't that many newspapers. Then sulk upon remembering they all come in on Thursdays. Check in the newspapers and put them on the shelves. Make mental note to recycle the old ones on Friday.
11:15 Briefly consider going back to barcoding, but the lure of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is too strong. Answer a question about the copier and then return to reading.
11:45 Eat lunch at desk while reading. Check email, facebook, twitter, and blogs. G-chat some more.
11:50 Put more paper in the computer lab printer/copier being careful not to overfill this time; that's why it kept jamming up.
12:30 Leave work to go home.

Not all that exciting. Sometimes I actually get good questions, but mostly I fulfill the role as copier refiller and pen hander-outer. Sometimes I wonder why they pay me to do this; then I stop thinking that and accept my lovely paycheck. :)

How was your day?

Getting Back on Track

This post really doesn't have all that much to do with librarianship, but as this is a personal blog, I thought that this would be a good time to blog about other things.

My summer has been incredibly busy. I haven't had a weekend at home, alone in my apartment, since school ended at the beginning of May. It's not like I've been traveling the entire summer or been on the go every day, but something has come up that has required me to go home even on the weekends when I haven't really had anything specific to do. I've been to two weddings, one of which I was a bridesmaid in, and to five wedding-related parties, traveled to Arkansas, the beach, Chicago, and Athens, GA. And in between all of that somehow managed to find the time to spend Father's Day with my dad and grandfather, celebrate the Fourth of July with my parents, book a flight to England, work four days a week, and see a bunch of movies. Whew!

This has really been a crazy summer; probably the busiest I've ever had. Usually my summers are comprised of going to work and hanging out with friends, with the occasional trip somewhere, but not much else. This summer has just blown my mind with all the stuff going on. It's no wonder that I'm beginning to feel slightly run down. But I'm very excited because this weekend I actually don't have anything to do! I'm going to work on Friday which I don't usually do, but I need the money to pay that tuition bill that just came, and Saturday I'm going to the local farmers market to pick up some fresh fruits and veggies. Sunday I'm driving home to see the Harry Potter movie (for the third time!) with my dad, but none of this is cause for stress.

I've devoted the next two weeks to getting back on track. With ALA and a spontaneous trip to see my best friend, the last three weeks have been really hectic and I feel like life is spinning out of control. I'm focusing on eating better this week (no fast food or eating out!), getting back in the gym, spending time with a few local friends, and just generally relaxing. My new roommate will be moving in soon and I want to get some cleaning and organizing done, but without putting pressure on myself. I hope that these two weeks give me some much-needed downtime and help me to get refocused on life before school starts up again.