11.6% Success Rate - February 20, 2020

When my boss retired suddenly and I got to be in charge, I allowed myself to ship online purchases directly to my work address. It makes so much more sense in terms of security, but - more importantly - I GET MY STUFF FASTER!!! (the old boss didn't like people sending personal things to the library - it was unprofessional) (pbbbbbt) (I now encourage my coworkers to send their purchases to the library, too)

I'm a librarian for the Kern County Library system in Bakersfield, California. I do what's called collection development - it's a fancy name for buying stuff (just call me Hook'em Up Heather!). There used to be several people who ordered materials for the library but now I'm the only one buying both the print & digital books. Another person orders the AV materials (DVDs, CDs & BOCDs). It feels important to point that out.

I love my job - honestly, I'm the luckiest person in the library. When I first became a librarian in 2000, I worked for the Stanislaus County Library system in Modesto (3 hours north). The day I learned about "acquisitions" and how the librarian ordered the books, I knew where I wanted to end up in my career. It took about 15 years and a lot of luck to make it where I am today.

I have a lot of time "hurrying up and waiting" - for some reason, it can take forever for some of the ordering processes to do their thing. While I wait, I think. If I had time to blog during the day, this space would be filled with many more musings and philosophical thoughts. At this time of night, I'm not good for much.

Today's waiting time was filled with thoughts about family drama (DNA testing can lead to some interesting finds... like unknown relatives - CLOSE relatives), what really is happening when I get angry with someone (I read an article that says you judge others on those things you are most afraid of happening in yourself), a fire that burned down a library in our consortium (Porterville) and the absolute heartbreak I feel for the teens who were responsible for it (my son is their age), and, lastly, how narrow-minded I can be when dealing with coworkers. (sorry coworkers)

As you can see from the pictures above, I found more colored graphite. One can never have enough art supplies, right? (insert eye-roll here)

I've been avoiding my art desk because I thought it was a good idea to gather up all the heart paintings I've done over the past few months and then the OTHER heart paintings I did a couple of years ago. It's a running theme with me - hearts hearts hearts.

The desk was messy, though, and totally stopped me in my tracks. Tonight I gathered everything up and looked at the 5x5" hearts. I divided them up into ones that I felt could stand alone as paintings and others that ended up not being good enough to stay as they were.

Out of the 116 paintings I've done (I originally thought I'd only cut 100 pieces of paper - oops, someone needs to practice math-ing!), 14 were good enough to be frame-able - that's a(n) 11.6% success rate. The other 102 are going to be part of another project - I used to do gorgeous (if I do say so myself) collage once upon a time. I'm going to revisit that in the future!