This week at the library; or, OK rain, you have made your point. NOW STOP.

Programs

• Outreach
• Preschool Interactive
• Messy Art Club

Random Commentary

• This self-promotion thing looks cool - several librarians are putting together a month of librarians promoting their programs and stuff. I have to admit that I am not feeling remotely awesome right now. I am feeling sick, tired, depressed and unbelievably stressed, which is probably the cause of the first three. It has been a very stressful past few months but I am hoping things look up soon. Meanwhile, I have bought rice and chamomile tea in bulk, because that's pretty much what I'm living on now.
• This was my annual visit from all the preschool and 4K classes at a small preschool. Of course it rained, but we managed to work around that and I only had to reschedule one visit to next week (when I will link up to what we did).
• Staffing drama continues. I am now hiring an aide, a process which I detest since I am a horrible judge of character and have just fallen back on the "everyone is probably crazy so don't make friends with them until you've known them at least a year" theory, but this doesn't work in interviews! Plus the added bonus of teens who want to apply because they "love the library and love reading" but don't really get that the job is 3 parts shelving, 1 part moving furniture, and 1 part cutting things out (with the occasional vomit clean-up) and adults that think they will be doing storytime and helping me plan programs, not doing the grunt work and then I feel bad because these are our good patrons and they don't understand why I don't want them to work for me.
• There was no We Explore because we were closed on Friday for our annual staff development day. We had an all staff meeting, something we only do twice a year, the city manager came to explain the complicated changes in PTO, FMLA, and other interesting acronyms, our consortium IT guy came to show us the new Enterprise catalog (and I felt very guilty b/c he kept saying things like "you've seen this of course" and I didn't want to admit that I haven't looked at the catalog in months - never use it at all, just use the staff catalog!). We had pizza for lunch and did a Reader's Advisory exercise (conclusion: we read lots of romance and almost no thrillers and nobody but me reads graphic novels) and then the police came to talk about first shooter emergencies and other potential safety hazards. We took the new staff on a tour around the building's exits (and discovered one we'd forgotten about in the basement and a couple...um...security breaches and confirmed that we could indeed climb out of the upstairs windows (this was my contribution, having seen several kids successfully try the experiment)).