Time and Repetition

How are we all doing today? As usual, my week has been pretty busy, but I’m having way too much fun working with the young adults and the younger kiddos at the library.

Time and repetition are funny things to me. You start your work day, and you have a list of things that need to get done. Then you end your work day, and you still have things on that list that didn’t get done. Time seems to fly faster the more of it you need. Doing things over and over again, such as a blog post, are also interesting. You get it done one week, and then before you know it, you have another one that needs to get done because a week has already passed. Sometimes those time pass you right by and you miss a blog post. Crazy stuff.

As I’m writing this blog post, our office is a little bit of a mess. Space is a precious commodity because we have so many materials and programs to keep track of, so we are getting some new shelving for our office. Even though it is only a few shelves, it will be a big help to us. Thanks to our director, John Hartung, for getting those up for us.

Also as I’m writing this, there have been a few changes to our summer programs. As I mentioned in my last blog post, we have been partnering with Lightning Comics over the summer. Whilce Portacio, one of the illustrators for none other than Marvel Comics, is flying over from Seattle during the second weekend in August. While he is in the area, he will be signing books at Lightning Comics, and doing a program for us at the Hayden Library. Should be pretty awesome.

The second change to our summer programs is moving the date of our Karaoke event. It was originally scheduled for the 16th of August, but that puts it awfully close to the Whilce Portacio visit. To make it easier to catch both programs, we are moving the Karaoke program to July 27th from 5:00 to 8:00pm. Todd Alexander, a local Karaoke Jockey, will still be coming over for the event.

Well that is all August stuff, so let’s talk about July stuff. We are having our monthly Rock the Boat program for the 14 to 18 year old group this Monday from 6 to 7pm. We’re calling it ReMix it Up, and we’ll be making some movies using our Flip camera and Windows Movie Maker. We are also having our Last Friday program on well the last Friday, which is the 30th of July. It is going to be a free concert with the Coeur d’ Alene Rock School. The concert is going to start at 7pm and go until 9pm. This program was originally going to be for only our 14 to 18 group, but people from every age group are interested in it, so we are opening it up to all ages.

Well here’s to another week of fun in the sun!

Awesome Library Partners!

How is this Independence Day Weekend finding you? For the library, it has been another busy week of great programs and fun.
Can you believe that it is one day away from the Fourth of July? I still can't believe how fast June has blown by. Before we know it, it'll be August, and we'll be prepping for our fall programs. Time flies when you are having fun, and when you are really, really busy.
This week at the library, we will be making Gak and a Diet Coke Mentos Geyser at our Monday Ka-Boom Science Experiments program. The program starts at 10:30am and goes to 11:30.
At our Tween Summer Reading program on Tuesday, we will be making Summer Beach Bags using sequence, glitter glue, petals, and all other kinds of awesomeness. This program starts at 11am and goes to noon.
Lastly, we will be having our Open Game Friday where the Wii will be set up, and I'm going to grab our board games and see if we want to play those this week.
I think I need to take this time to thank some of the people that have made some amazing programs happen for us. First of all, I want to thank Tim Boal down at Lightning Comics for partnering with the Hayden Library. He has helped us on three of our programs. The first was a Yu-Gi-Oh training, the next was letting us borrow some games for our Last Friday game night, and the third was for the younger kids and was a Readng with Superman.
The next person to mention is Mark Evans at the CDA School of Woodworking. He donated twenty five wooden boat bodies, and random boat pieces that made some amazing wooden boats. One of the ideas of the program was to see which boats floated and which didn't, and most of them did. The other part of the program was making some awesome boats, and that definitley happened as well.
Another partner is the North Idaho Fair & Rodeo. If anyone eighteen years or younger who is registered for summer reading reads fifteen hours, they will get a free pass to the fair on the opening day. Great stuff!
Lastly, the Texas Roadhouse is partnering with us as well. They are giving a free kids meal to anyone who reads ten hours and is under the age of twelve. Even though this doesn't apply to everyone in our Make Waves program, it is still really cool.
At our last Ka-Boom program, Mr. B (his last name is really hard to spell) programmed Lego NXT robots and brought them in for the tweens to play with. He put a lot of time programming the robots, and creating building instructions for the robots themselves. 
Although some of the programs didn't have a huge turnout, I'm hoping that these are the beginnings of some beautiful friendships. These are just a few of the people that are partnering with us, and I'll tell you about the others as they get closer.
See you on Wednesday for a Book Blurt on Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, and have a great Independence Day!

Where have I been?

Well, how is this Friday evening finding you? As any of you who have looked at my blog before have realized, I haven't posted anything this past week. For that I apologize. Since my start of this job in February, I haven't had programs to speak of. I've assisted in children's programs, and I've been preparing for my tween/teen summer reading programs. But, I haven't had programs throughout the week. Now I do, and boy do I! I barely have enough time to get everything done. This makes it a little bit difficult to have time to do all of my social media stuff that I've been doing. But, enough of the excuses. I'm going to be more consistant with this blog and with my twitter and Facebook posts even though my schedule is busy.

I'm really liking having programs. Every day I go to work, and I get to work with the younger kids, or I get to work with the tween/teen audience. I'm having too much fun with it! I've already had several summer programs for the tweens, and I've had one of my teen programs.

For the tweens, I've done Ka-Boom science experiments for the past two Mondays. There are quite a few tweens coming to them, and we are having fun with things like cornstarch goo and water bottle lava lamps. This Monday, we are going to have a chance to play with the Lego NXT robot. My brothers were doing an NXT class through their homeschool co-op, and I asked their teacher where he got the robots. He is borrowing them from a company in Post Falls, and the company said we could use them at the library. Ka-Boom runs from 10:30 to 11:30 every Monday, and is for tweens ages 10-14. Every Tuesday we also have a tween summer reading program. Last week we had Boatmaking which was made possible through the donation of The Coeur d' Alene School of Woodworking. The week before that, we had some guys from Lighning Comics teaching Yu-Gi-Oh. This Tuesday, we are going to have our Animoto Day, so we will be making movies using Animoto and Flixtime. Tween summer reading is every Tuesday from 11 to noon and is also for ages 10-14. Our last tween program is Open Game Friday. I set up the library's Wii, and we have had fun playing Guitar Hero. If we ever get board playing the Wii, we can always grab our board and card games.

Our teen programs for ages 14-18 have also got going. We had our first Rock the Boat teen summer reading program last Monday. We did jewelry making. Our next Rock the Boat is going to be ReMix it Up where we will be making videos. This will be on the third Monday of July, the 19, from 6-7. We are also having a special event for teens at the end of every month. This month it is a game night where we will be playing video games, board games, and anything else we want to play. Our special events are going to be the last Friday of every month, which happens to be tonight. The event will be from 7 to 9.

That pretty much wraps up this week, and gives us some things to look forward to. I'll see you on Wednesday for a Book Blurt on "The Great Wide Sea" by H.M. Herlong. This time I promise I'll do it. :)

Sponge or a duck?

Well, how did this week find you? Busy, excited, a little under the weather, upset, annoyed? A few months back, the Hayden Library had a customer service workshop taught by Kate Laughlin, who also taught the Intellectual Freedom workshop that I told you about. She talked about how we had a choice to be a sponge, or a duck. We could either let all of the problems and complications really get to us, or we could let them roll off of our back. I like this reminder to have a positive attitude even when things don’t go the way you want them to, or when it isn’t the best week.

Speaking of having a positive attitude, something that could either be annoying or hilarious happened yesterday. Karen Yother and I took the library van to get some stuff from storage. The Hayden Library has two vans that it owns, and our director, John Hartung, had the newer one. Not a huge problem; the old one still runs. The problem was that the old van is used for recycling, and the entire storage space was filled to the top with cardboard boxes. Needless to say, we needed to take a trip to the dump to free up some van space. Once we headed through the dump, we drove over to our storage unit. Like most storage places, you need a code to get in, and it turns out that our code didn’t work. You could normally go up to the office and they could get you in, but the storage people were out for lunch. Turns out that the bill hadn’t gone through yet, and the system automatically starts locking people out of their accounts if the bill doesn’t go through. Obviously, it could be a very sponge or duck kind of choice. This situation could either be seen as a huge waste of time, or we could look at the bright side and think how this could very easily be used in a slapstick skit.

Yesterday also included driving to Hayden Meadows and Dalton Elementary, so I got to spend a lot of quality time with our Library Van. At the beginning of every summer, we always have some free giveaway stuff that we get from the Collaborative Summer Library Program. Although we didn’t do summer reading promotion at these schools like we did with Fernan or Bryan, we got them the free stuff and some information on when programs were going to be held.

Going back to the beginning of the week, I heard about a resource that I haven’t been utilizing. It’s called Bookletters. Bookletters is an online service with thousands of pages of information on books, films, and authors. You can also set up a customized subscription email, or choose from the long list of subscriptions that come out through Bookletters. You can also set up an event calendar. Basically it’s a database on new and old books, which include synopsizes, author and book information and a lot more. Bookletters can be accessed from our ksalibraries website. Although I don’t have a YA specific newsletter and event calendar set up, I’ll be working on it, and getting back to you in a few weeks.

A few more things to mention. I have my first Book Blurt book review, which I posted on Wednesday. This week’s was about Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, and next week’s is going to be on Ingrid Lee’s Dog Lost.

In other news, this week is going to be the start of our summer programs. Our older teen programs aren’t until the third week of the month, but we have plenty going on for tweens (basically our middle schoolers, so around grades 6-8 even though we won’t be too precise) this week. On Monday, we have Ka-Boom science experiments. On Tuesday, we have Lightning Comics teaching us how to play Yu-Gi-Oh, and on Friday, we have our Open Game Friday where we’ll set up our Wii and have some fun.

Well that about wraps up this week, so I’ll see you on Wednesday, and always remember to be a duck.

No Pain, No Gain

Here’s to our first week, and my first blog post, in May 2010. I always like to cycle through my week on Friday, and ask myself, what did I accomplish this week? Was I effective? Was I successful? Obviously, these questions are very subjective and self-analyzing, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe if we took a look at what we did each week, we might realize there was so much more we could have done, and be motivated to complete so much more the next week. Maybe we could also appreciate the work that we did accomplish, and be encouraged by what we have accomplished.

Another thing on my mind is how easy it is to spend a couple hours watching a movie, and how hard it is to spend a couple hours reading a book. As young adult librarian, I’m trying to familiarize myself with young adult literature. Toward this end, I’m reading Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl and next week I’m planning on reading Pete Hautman’s Rash. I’ve found an hour or so already to read the book, but I find that there is always something else I could be doing. Why is that? I went and saw Iron Man 2 last night. Great movie! But, why was I so fast to spend two hours watching a movie, and so slow at reading a novel? Not that I’m not enjoying Stargirl, but maybe it’s just easier to watch something than it is to read something. The answer could have something to do with whether or not we are passive or active consumers. If we are passive consumers, we don’t have to do anything to our media. Iron Man 2 is an example. I just have to sit there and watch it. For Stargirl, I have to be an active consumer. I have to imagine what Stargirl looks like. I have to think about whether or not I enjoy Spinell’s writing style. I have to imagine based on what Spinelli is trying to get at, instead of just watching Iron Man stomp on the latest bad guy.

I find that sometimes the hardest thing to do is start something. Something that is sitting still doesn’t want to get up. Something that is moving doesn’t want to stop. There is absolutely nothing wrong with spending two hours having fun with friends and watching a good movie. But there are also a lot of benefits to reading, and we often don’t tap into those benefits because it takes effort to get at them. As the saying goes, “No pain, no gain.” Reading isn’t pain for me, but it is work. Like most work, the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. Iron Man 2 and Stargirl are very different, and there are different reasons for doing both. But it seems like we spend a whole lot of time watching movies, and not so much time reading books, myself included. I’m going to work on getting both in so I can reap the benefits of both mediums.

In addition to a lot of thinking this week, I’ve also had a meeting with a statewide committee on Teen Read Week, a national event sponsored by the American Library Association’s (ALA) Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). Teen Read Week isn’t until October, but we’re getting some good ideas flowing already. I also had a chance to meet with Tim Boal from Lighting Comics. Tim is going to donate the use of some of his video games for our game night, and he’s also going to do two programs for us. One is a comic book read-along for the younger kids, and the other is a Yu-Gi-Oh training for our tweens. Although there is always something else to do, or read, here’s to what was accomplished this week, and here’s to what we will accomplish in this following week.