The Library Day in the Life Project couldn't have fallen on a crazier week for me. Typical week for my job? Hardly! But it was fun to keep track of what I did and to share what was going on in our library. I mostly participated via Twitter (you can read my posts here) because it was waaaay easier to shoot off a 140 character thought than to try to formulate actual paragraphs and sentences. You know, in English.
Monday is my late day at work - I'm there 12:30-9pm. This particular Monday also happened to by my Teen Book Club so, before work, I baked a batch of cookies (dropping some on the floor to share with the cats. I'm so kind!). Once at work I went directly to our Staff Room/Meeting Room/Storage Space/Cave to get back to work on our building grant. I've been working on the grant for about two weeks and it's taken up ALL of my time. Mostly because oh, I only had two weeks to write it and we had three and a half snow days in all that...but that's a different post.
(The way I got to be the lucky one to write the grant is also a different story...but let's just say it had to do with the succes of our Facebook page/Social Media campaign and being the the Right Place at the Right Time or, depending on your perspective, the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time)
Before the book club meeting at 7pm I met with one of our members to talk about her curent project. She decided that she was fed up with the way City Council was treating the building project, and how they seemed to completely ignore teens in their dismissal of the library's need. So, she created a survey about the library and then polled 100 students at the high school about whether or not they supported the building project (they do!). Then she wrote an article for the city's newspaper. I am so, so proud of her! I can't wait for the article to get printed.
Book Club was a blast, as usual. I have a regular crowd of 15 students, grades 6 through 12 and they're so energetic and excited about reading. This week we discussed Savvy by Ingrid Law. The younger teens loved it, the older ones thought it was too young for them. That's been a big challenge...finding books that are good for such a wide range of maturity levels. We mainly got it right with When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead and The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, but a couple other titles have been divided right down the 8th grade line. I've been toying with the idea of dividing the group back into a Middle School group and a High School group, like they were once-upon-a-time, but I'm just not sure how that will work with staffing schedules. Plus, I kind of like the idea of my older teens mentoring the younger ones.
The rest of the week paled in comparison to Monday. I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday finalizing the Big Grant (and I mean BIG...if we get it we could get nearly $10 million). Thankfully the deadline was extended to Friday at 4pm due to the snowstorm. I'm not sure we would have made it by Thursday! We had to have eight copies of the application binder and each binder was tipping the scales at around 200 pages. I don't think I've ever worked on something so big in my life. Even my master's portfolio wasn't nearly that long.
Before I ever knew that I would be working on the grant (or, rather, that we'd have to apply for it) I had scheduled a four-day weekend for myself using comp. time. So, Wednesday night I organized all the appendices and sections and handed a To Do list to my boss. Then I said "good bye and good luck" and headed home in another snowstorm.
That was my week! Short, insane, and not nearly what a typical week is like for me. In between all the grant work there were glimmers of my regular job: facebook status updates, website changes, reference questions, tax inquiries, book clubs and computer problems. All the stuff I'll be happy to get back to next week. As I start to apply for Grant #3.
(wait...did I mention that I got Grant #1? I found out on Wednesday. Here's hoping the Good Grant Vibes continue!)
