Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Wednesday Wherefores

Wednesday already? How'd that happen?

Work is going well. After an initial sharp learning curve, I think I've settled into a good understanding of the tasks involved. I am clicking past user searches and evaluating the relevance of the results that came up. Sounds fairly simple, until you see the intricacies of it. A small percentage of my work is reviewed by another annotator and the overlap rate has to be pretty close. I picked up three extra hours this week, so that's serendipity.

Spanish class has been a little frustrating lately. It seems the expectation is that the students can learn the language in the one 80 minute class we have each week, spending the least possible amount of time on homework. Obviously many traditionally-schooled students have 5 hours of foreign language weekly and still don't manage to come out with any fluency, so I don't think too many of my students can manage it on one class per week and no effort. I guess I need to reiterate the concept of spending time OUTSIDE of class on Spanish in order to achieve mastery.

Monday night I could have gone to the movies with friends, but I didn't. Worked instead.

Last night read some of Wuthering Heights - nearly done. Probably could finish it tonight, although I don't know if I will make the effort. Did finish the Trigiani book last night. Pretty good.

Last Monday was the long long day where I had to drop Bob at work and pick him up. So I took advantage of dropping some materials from other libraries in my local library's drop box. The library courier takes them back to the proper libraries. I've been told it usually takes a day or two. Well, on FRIDAY, several DVD's still had not made it back to the home libraries, and therefore they were QUITE overdue by that point. I don't make a habit of keeping library materials past their due dates, so I was pretty annoyed. Saturday they were still not showing up as returned, but it was past library hours when I checked the computer. So on Monday, I was determined to call and track them down, wondering by this point if they'd been stolen from the drop box or something. However, they checked in as returned on Monday morning - A WEEK LATE. Argh. So now I have huge fines at one library where I had 3 DVDs out. I need to go beg mercy from them. I could have returned them myself on Tuesday or Wednesday and owed less money. Plus one of my children has a terrible habit of keeping books under the bed or in piles around the room and has had a number of items out late recently, racking up some fines. So I am taking a moratorium from library materials for a little bit. We still have lots to read around the house, and the kids will just have to deal with no movies out for a while. I don't really have TIME to watch anything right now anyway.

Wanted to run yesterday, but I had a meeting that went for about 4 hours instead of the two I'd imagined. So since something had to give, it was running. The weather was gorgeous and I was actually REALLY looking forward to running at a path in Lapeer. Ah well, I will go running in a little while today. It's overcast but it's 50 degrees!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just cannot imagine how you keep track of your library materials from your multiple sources and days! Yikes!! Library fines are like speeding ticket fines.....avoidable, so it hurts twice as much when they occur!! Love, Mom

Debbie Schlarb said...

I inter-loan books on CD's from all sorts of libraries and always return them to my local library. I never thought about a late charge as I always thought they'd be considered returned as soon as I return them to a library. Hmm...better be more careful I guess!!

Christy said...

Are the libraries part of the same cooperative? Or maybe they don't share a catalog. My new library in Hartland is part of Milford's cooperative but has a standalone catalog so I think it would be the same situation.