Ten Random Things About Me

1) I own over 60 pairs of shoes, and have no plans on stopping the growth of my collection.

2) My best friend and I have been best friends since kindergarten. Except for high school we've always gone to the same school, including under-grad and grad. We graduated from OSU the same quarter, and we're both in graduate school to become librarians. Oh yeah, and she works for CML too.

3) When I was a freshman in college, I had a tumor on my back. It was a lypoma, or fatty tumor, so I could have never had it removed and still been fine. It was fairly large for a lypoma, so my mom still calls it my "big ass tumor" to this day.

4) I am an excercise freak. Have been for years. Most weeks I go to the gym 5 days a week, but 4 times is an absolute must. I do allow myself a break while I'm out of town, and around Christmas. You sleep better, feel better, have more energy, look better, and are less stressed. Everyone should do it, especially Judah.

5) I am also a Simpsons freak. Before the dawn of DVDs, I had an on-going project to tape every episode. I had legal sheets detailing which episodes were on which tapes. When I stopped I was on tape 26. I also have a pretty sizable collection of Simpsons figures that I display when I have the space.

6) I have a newspaper article from the 80s about a Martin Luther King program at Main Library, you know when the children's area was in the basement and still had that awesome tree. I am in the picture of kids at the program. Who knew I would end up working for the MLK branch.

7) My older sister, who lives in Seattle, is in school to be a librarian too.

8) I am a highly skilled parallel parker. Years of living on campus with no off street parking refined my skills.

9) My bachelor's is in Comparative Religions, with a minor in Classics. At one point I thought I wanted to be a professor and do my field work studying voodoo. The voodoo part was a short lived aspiration, and I eventually gave up the dream of being Dr. Adams when I reached my Junior year of college and felt that a life with that much more schooling is not one I wanted to live. And yet strangely here I am back in school.

10) I love to do puzzles. I haven't had time to do one since I've been in school, but I get totally obsessed with finishing them. When I was younger I would sometimes stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on them.

Thankful

So I just got back from my friends' house. They moved to Switzerland about 8 months ago and this was the first time I've seen them since then. It was absolutely wonderful to see them. As I was driving home, I got to thinking about Thanksgiving, and all of the things I have to be grateful for. So I figured I'd write my first non-Learn & Play post ever.

Things that I am thankful for this year:

That I was born to such wonderful parents, and all that that entails. I am the person that I am today because of them. Because they always let me know that they loved and supported me no matter what, no matter what mistakes I made. Because of what they taught me about love, what true love is, and how precious that is. For the family that comes with my parents. For my sister, who has been a partner to me in so many adventures. That she married a man who gave me the brother I always wanted. Many people do not have the type of family I do.

That I have such wonderful friends. People who always have my back, and who always attempt to understand me, and forgive me for all my stupid mistakes. That they know who I am truly, and better than anyone and love me anyways.

For the health of those I love.

That I can continue to support myself in these hard times

That Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States of America

That I work with people I truly enjoy everyday doing work I find satisfying and rewarding.

And last, but not least. I am so incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful, smart, caring, funny, and intelligent man. There are no words to explain how lucky I am to wake up next to him every day. To know that he is there, that he supports me, believes in me, and that I never have to worry about a man screwing me over ever again. He makes me a better person.

I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to whomever reads this. I am truly one of the luckiest people in the world.

This is the end.....

Here we are at the end of our journey. I have learned many a thing about technology, what's out there, what it can do, how it effects the library. Some of the things I really loved (twitter, flickr, flickr toys, you tube), and some of the things I didn't like too much (bloglines, delicious). I am glad to be "in the know" so to speak about these things so I don't look like an idiot if a customer asks me about them. I have enjoyed seeing the creativity of my co-workers as they work through these steps, and I've learned alot about people. I always appreciate something that pushes me outside of my comfort zone, and the things I normally would chose to learn about. So yes, if something like this was offered again I would participate. And this being my final Learn & Play post, here is a shoe finale!

eeewwww MOLDI!

So I took a look at the MOLDI site. Here's my opinion. I listen to audiobooks in my car, so this site would not be of much help to me personally as I do not have I-Pod capabilities in my car. I was also disappointed in the selection. There were no Harry Potter books, which is a series I've heard are great to listen to. I've also really wanted to listen to "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" unabridged, and we only own abridged in the system. Unfortunately MOLDI does not have this title at all. So yeah. The thing I found most interesting about MOLDI, is when I sorted the general fiction by popularity romance titles filled up the first five or six screens. So MOLDI is apparently very popular with romance readers. I would recommend this service to those who express interest, but I personally will not use it much. Here is something I have use for:

You Tube makes me sleepy......

not really me, but this puppy!




I chose this video, because, well, watch it! Golden retrievers are my favorite dog breed, and sleepy puppies are one of the cutest things in the world. And so darn cute, that I don't think shoes are necessary for this post.

But back to library related things......

You Tube has many options when it comes to libraries. We could use it to post instructions about how to use our self-check outs, give tours of main library, show snippets of programs as teaser advertisements, booktalks for the teen site, allow teens to create and post their own videos.......the possibilites are endless.

Podcasts

To be honest, I will probably never get into podcasts, no offense, they just don't appeal to me. However, I do see many uses for libraries. I found several libraries that are already doing regular podcasts, and the MSU libraries has a podcasts titled "This Week @ Your Library", which would obviously be a great way to advertise programs, the celebration of learning, SRC, and our oh-so-well attended community meetings. There were also podcasts that offered foreign language instruction. Who knows how helpful these podcasts are, but the idea is a good one. Another idea would be to do booktalks as podcasts, as a way of outreach programming and as readers advisory. They could be linked onto our teen page. For something I'm not that interested in I sure was able to come up with ideas.

Here is a picture of something I am interested in............shoes!

Google Docs

Well this is an easy one to see how it works in a library setting. For all those folks who don't have disks, or flash drives, setting up an account is another way to save and transfer documents. It will also help me work on stuff at the info desk. I can save my personal work documents there and have access to them at a task-oriented PC. And it will help me with my own dreaded homework assignments that I email to myself to transfer from home to work. I will probably create an account for the HHC, that way if a student needs to save something and doesn't have a disk, flash drive, or email address, I can save it to the Google documents.

Plus there were all these neat templates. I can create a runner's log, or print off a blank calendar.


And then I went on flickr and found these neat shoes.