Friday, November 12, 2010

A Long Post on Science, Happiness, and All Staff Training Days

Well, well, well, well there is once again, so much to talk about. Blogs are funny things. I figure that I want each blog post to be between 300-500 words (closer to the 300 so I don’t get too wordy). That doesn’t sound like too many words…if you have something to talk about. There have been weeks where I sit for fifteen minutes staring at a blank screen, wondering what I did that week that would be interesting. But, then there are weeks like this week (where I’m still playing catch up) where that number of words won’t be near enough.

Anyways, let’s talk a little about what I did this week, and if we have enough space, I’ll back track to something I did in the past, but didn’t have time to talk about. This Monday, I had a chance to do my Ka-Boom Science Experiments program again. I just have to say, SCIENCE IS AWESOME! Of course, my kind of science is putting Dawn in some warm water and adding dry ice (just so you know, that particular experiment was awesome!), but science is just way too much fun to do, and talk about. I find that I’m getting a whole new crowd in the library for Ka-Boom, and they are critically thinking about why something happened in the experiment. Some of it they have just heard in school or at home. But some of it is legit curiosity and wonderings, and I’m glad I’m allowed to have this kind of program at my library! (If you think about it, Play-do here, and Dry Ice there tends to add up. But my boss, and my boss’ bosses are supportive of this program, and that also makes me excited. Also, for those keeping track, we didn’t have a special quest last week. Miss Emily, one of my colleagues, wasn’t quite able to join us, even though it would have been great to have her).

Also this week, I got a little bit of time to catch up on my email and social media postings which was nice. But, the other big event was the Community Library Network (more about what that means next week) All Staff Training Day. Each Veteran’s Day, my library network gets all of the staff from our seven (now eight) libraries into one building and does a conference. Lunch is provided (which is always nice), and the topics this year were marketing and happiness. The last couple of months, there has been a large marketing grant going on at my library, and the marketing topic was an update for the staff on what has been going on with their research.

The happiness workshop was put on by Anne Abrams from the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICfL). She discussed research on happiness, and had us do some role playing activities which wound up being quite hilarious. The thing that stuck out to me about the topic of happiness is that your response to the topic of happiness comes down to your outlook on things (how much happiness or lack thereof that you already have). Having someone discuss happiness when you aren’t very happy doesn’t work too well, but discussing happiness with someone that is happy is sort of redundant. But, I think Anne did a good job finding research and some things to laugh at, and it can’t be a bad thing to be reminded of the benefits of having a positive outlook. I think myself and some of my colleauges were also quite ridiculous and tired during the afternoon, so there was plenty to laugh and be happy about.

Anyways, it looks like I’m already over my word limit, so I’ll sign off for today and see you on Wednesday for an uber-epic-awesome book blurt (not like all the rest of them haven’t been uber-epic-awesome, but I felt like closing the blog that way today).

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