Goals check-in: January

Here's my end-of-the-month wrap-up regarding my 2013 goals:

Library Policy on Unattended Children

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the school libraries and at the public library. I wasn't always directly supervised, although my mother was usually in the building. (When we visited the public library, I was with her and often my younger sister, because we were too young to travel there by ourselves.)

I have no idea whether there was a formal policy on unattended children for our small town library, or what ages were considered mature enough to visit without adult supervision. I spent plenty of hours in the children's room and the juvenile/YA stacks, though, and I never got into trouble. Usually I'd browse the shelves long enough to fill a plastic bucket with books, then check them out, and sit down to read while waiting for my mom and sister. Happy reader!

So I've been surprised recently to find out that many public libraries have concerns about children who are unsupervised and/or disruptive -- not always both. Sometimes it's just that school-aged children are in the library "alone" that's enough to call for stricter policies about age, and that doesn't make sense to me. If the kids are well-behaved and using the library for its intended purpose (education, entertainment, community gathering space... not daycare), why bar their access?

My job, as written for a kindergarten show and tell.

(Or a lower reading level, or as/to an alien... or just by using the "ten hundred" most commonly-used words.)

Project Work/Life Balance: Negotiating a 4-day Work Week

A new semester started today! I think it's time for the big reveal.

(Catch up on the backstory here, here, here, and here. And re-read this for good measure.)

Read Aloud Roundup: January 2013

This month was a bit of a mishmash as I put together some of the books leftover from previous themes. I'll be touching on specific themes later -- Black History Month, Women's History Month, Earth Day/Environmentalism/Spring, etc. Some of the books for the older grades were poetry or non-fiction, so I recommended selections to be read and discussed during the session. I also got a lot of feedback this month, so I held off on publishing this post until I could add those notes.

Spring Semester Courses

After Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I'll start my final semester of graduate school. Here's the lineup!

Project Work/Life Balance: Do Your Homework

Once I came to the conclusion that something had to change, and brainstormed a bit about how that could look, I didn't just go charging into the boss's office waving a pitchfork or a timecard.

Don't let's be silly.

Kitchen Storage for Small Spaces

As I've mentioned before, I live in a very small apartment. Thankfully, the largest room is the kitchen, and it has a fair amount of wall space (once we got rid of the sofa and moved the bookshelf into the new office) as well as a large closet. We've had to get creative with storage, especially working in a rented space where we can't make structural changes. (I indulge in fantasies of built-in storage shelves.) I'm so pleased with the recent additions of secondhand kitchen furniture!

Reducto! Decluttering resumes.

Thankfully, the stuff in our apartment isn't stacked that high. Quite.

Project Work/Life Balance: Working a Shorter Week

When we last saw our heroine, she'd established that an 80-hour workweek was NOT SUSTAINABLE.

After crunching the numbers, it looked like my best bet was to graduate in May as planned. And I had to take those courses to graduate. So it came down to decreasing my working hours. And that required meeting with my employer to negotiate whether and how that would happen.

Project Work/Life Balance: Working From Home Is the Best

Today the morning weather was miserable, and I felt pretty lousy myself, so instead of heading into the office, I chose to work from home. (We can do this occasionally, but until recently I hadn't had a suitable computer setup to use all of my work tools.) Over the break, during which I worked from home on a computer loaned by my employer, I confirmed that working from home is an excellent setup for me.

(not my keyboard, but much like my cat)

Be Kind to Yourself (a good reminder)

For the past year and a half, I have been working full-time (40 hours/week) while also taking a full courseload of grad school each semester. At times, I feel like Supergirl (and maybe like I need to be this busy or else what would I *DO*??). And at other times, that's made for a very busy, stressed-out librarian-in-training. And the effects seems to be cumulative, or at least increasing over time. I need a certain amount of sleep to function and a bit more than that to feel well (more than most folks, for various reasons). As an introvert, I need time to myself (usually in the form of curling up with a book) to feel calm and healthy. As a newlywed, it would be lovely to be able to spend quality time with my wife -- and while that occasionally looks like the two of us reading our own books in the same room or folding laundry together, it doesn't extend to me frantically writing a term paper on my laptop while she brings me ice cream. Some sunlight would be nice. But I've shunted most of that aside while I work and study, and it's hurting me!

The approach of a new year prompted me to get some of this stuff in order.

2013 Goals

Happy New Year! 

I reframed my annual goals and made them perhaps less SMART, but more like guidelines or pillars for living life in a positive way.