Category Archives: Pandemic

Cats Dogs Plants Animals, Graduate School, Pandemic

It’s been a while…

I had this grand plan that once I finished my graduate school work I’d post regularly on this blog again. I finished my school work on December 16, 2022…and then I realized how very tired I was, and, of course, didn’t end writing many posts. So I decided that I’d post regularly again once I walked through my graduation ceremony in mid May. But guess what: the day after graduation I crashed – I was ridiculously tired. I even stayed home from work that day (a Saturday) and spent the whole day in bed – which is totally NOT like me.

And so it’s gone. I think that the craziness of my life since March of 2020 really took a toll on me, and these last few months have been about processing all that happened and also catching up on downtime. Think about it: I was going to graduate school while working at least 60 hours a week (paid for 40, no worries about overtime, people! 🙂 ), and my work was all about pivoting and constantly reinventing processes and procedures while being concerned about not catching Covid because I work in a public service job and Jim works in healthcare. Plus we were trying to have a happy homelife, so I would try to shuffle off my school and work stuff to times when Jim wasn’t home; not a moment of my days were unscheduled. And, because I’m a perfectionist, it wasn’t enough for me to do the coursework and earn my MLIS – I needed to graduate with a 4.0 GPA and honors.

So, yeah, I’m tired. And while life seems to be “normal” again, it really isn’t, is it? Covid is still lurking in the background, reminding us that our lives won’t ever quite be the same as they were before March of 2020. My brother has written a couple of posts for his blog that resonant with me on Covid burnout and lingering effects of stress from the pandemic: this one from June 2023 and a second post from September 2023.

In addition to the post-graduation exhaustion I’ve been feeling, we’ve also been dealing with a very sick little kitty cat and an elderly dog who won’t let himself heal from a surgery in August. Tuffy will, hopefully, be fine, but he has persistently been worrying at the surgical site on his tush from which a benign lump was removed in August. We have to dress him in a shirt every day to keep him from licking it, but he still insists on rolling around on his back and working at the spot. Last week I took him to the vet to have the site checked, and sure enough it was infected. Time for more antibiotics, and then we went back on Tuesday so the vet could put in a couple of stitches and three staples. This is the second time the vet has had to re-close the site, so all my fingers and toes are crossed that this time it heals.

And then there’s sweet Millie. On July 2 she had a tremendous nosebleed, which began multiple trips to the animal hospital. She got a CT scan and a rhinoscopy, and was diagnosed with Feline Herpes Virus, which causes flares of sneezing and terrible congestion and rhinitis. By August she was doing pretty well and it looked like we could get by with daily Zyrtec and L-lysine and probiotics, but then a few weeks ago she was really struggling to breathe again. We’ve been to the vet (or the vet has come to us) four or five times in the last couple of weeks, and our awesome house call vet has kept in constant contact by text (until this week, when the poor woman got Covid and has been laid up herself). Millie won’t eat or drink water at this point – when cats can’t smell they won’t eat – so the days are consumed by dosing her with antibiotics and a prescription nose drop, then two visits each day to a steamy bathroom, plus keeping a humidifier going in her favorite room, plus I’m feeding her by syringe, and Jim and I are giving her subcutaneous fluids each day. Plus our vet has given us a transdermal appetite stimulant to put on her ear as needed – I’m not sure it works, but maybe it does? Plus today I decided to dose her with catnip to see if that would help (not really, alas).

It’s deeply sad to see our little girl wasting away because her nasal passage is blocked so she doesn’t want to eat. I’m very concerned about her, but hoping that all of our ministrations will help her round the bend and get her appetite back. Please keep our sweet Millie in your thoughts.

Long story short, I’m pooped, and this blog probably isn’t going to see another post for a while…

Librarianship, Library events, Pandemic

Whew

I don’t know about anyone else out there, but I’m feeling pretty darn exhausted right now. Happily, as of this minute I’m on vacation (yay!), so I have big plans for doing a whole lot of nothing this coming week. By necessity this will be mixed in with a whole lot of studying for grad school – I have a big research project due on April 27 (presentation) and May 3 (paper) – but it feels like a gift to be able to focus my mental energy on One Big Thing for a week rather than the crazy mental multi-tasking that I’ve been doing regularly for two years.

I think that the challenge has been that I’ve not been able to settle down and run in auto-pilot at all since the pandemic began. There has been constant rejiggering of everything to do with my job over the last two years, from policy decisions (when to start indoor storytimes?) to publicity reboots (time to write a new description for storytime logistics again!) to how to handle patron interactions (can we be up-close-and-personal today, or do we need to keep our distance?), to which programs to offer and when. Usually in my job there are certain aspects that can counted on, and for those aspects it’s been about maintenance. For instance, for years I’ve had a weekly Game Hour program on Thursday afternoons. The only challenge with that program was making sure that I had enough teen volunteers to run it, but honestly I’ve always had so many awesome teen volunteers that it was easy to run Game Hour week after week with minimal mental effort on my part. The program description stayed the same from one week to the next, it was easy to maintain communication with the volunteers, and occasional blurbs to the elementary school newsletter guaranteed that we always had the right number of attendees. Game Hour was a great high yield, low effort program which served the community in multiple ways.

So the usual way of doing things, pre-pandemic, was to have the ongoing programs that were well-established and only required maintenance, and then my creative energies could be spent on innovation and expansion of programs and services. It’s a great model for providing continuing services that are successful while always looking ahead to the next great thing that we can provide to our patrons. And it’s incredibly energizing and exciting for me to be able to always innovate and be creative.

During the pandemic, though, there hasn’t been anything that can be taken for granted: I’ve had to constantly reevaluate how our programming is provided and also which programming is provided. And with that constant reevaluation is constant rewriting of the language used to describe programs in our calendar, newsletter, website, social media, and emails sent to patrons. Frankly, this is exhausting and also emotionally draining. I’m so sick of not being able to provide programming in the way we used to, and I really really really miss being able to push our service provision in new and interesting directions. Additionally, all of this constant rejiggering has left little mental energy for me to devote to graduate school, which just makes me very sad. I love being in school, and I love studying and expanding my educational horizons, but it’s really hard to take full advantage of these (very expensive) classes at Simmons when I arrive home completely pooped at the end of each day. Ugh.

I know I’m not the only LIS professional who is feeling this way, and from the number of new jobs being posted daily on the MBLC website it feels like a lot of LIS professionals are burnt out and leaving the profession. I also know that it’s not just LIS professionals who are reaching their limit – clearly other professions are experiencing the same kind of employee burnout and exodus. Maybe the solution is for all of us to take a nice long vacation? Or to give each other and ourselves a big helping of grace and understanding? I have faith that we can all get through this, but I also think that we need to acknowledge the reality of how tough these two years have been and to support each other unequivocally.

Meanwhile, it’s time for the first nap of my vacation…

Book groups, Pandemic, Storytime

And another anniversary

As we inch back towards “normal” (or the closest equivalent to normal that is possible), I’m marking another anniversary. Two years ago today I ran my last indoor in person storytime at 10:30 in the morning. By the mid afternoon, I was worrying about whether I should hold storytime the next day. By early evening, I had cancelled the storytime that was scheduled for March 12, 2020, and had put out publicity saying something along the lines of: “Out of an abundance of caution, we have decided to cancel all children’s programs at the library for the next few weeks. Thank you for your understanding!” On the morning of March 12 there were a couple of families who hadn’t read their email and showed up for storytime – families who were puzzled and perhaps a bit annoyed by the “abundance of caution” decree.

We all know what happened next: that the situation was far more serious than any of us had thought, and the world shut down. As I discussed in last year’s anniversary post, in late March of 2020 I switched to all virtual programming, which was a Herculean effort requiring 80 hours a week of work to adapt to the world of virtual programming (for any who wonder: no, children’s librarians don’t get paid overtime – at least this one doesn’t – and those extra 40 hours a week were unpaid and came from a place of me wanting to provide the best services possible to my beloved library peeps). Last summer I switched again, this time to outdoor programming, which I really love. I’ve continued with outdoor programming through the winter (yesterday 21 people attended my outdoor Mother Goose on the Loose storytime on a chilly morning with fresh snow on the ground!) and had planned to add in indoor programming starting in January…but then Omicron hit and put a huge wrinkle in those plans. Back came the virtual programming (blech) for half of my storytimes and all of my book groups. Though a great option to keep us all safe, it’s not really the programming option of choice anymore, and I can’t wait to pack up the lovely camcorder, tripod, microphone, and lights that I bought.

So what’s next? With very cautious optimism, I’m planning a return to indoor in person programming on April 4. All programs that have been virtual in the last few months will move to limited enrollment, pre-registration required indoor programs, with masks required for all participants over the age of two per vote of the library Trustees. (The outdoor storytimes will continue for those who feel safer outdoors.)

In late November and early December I allowed myself to get really excited about the planned return to indoor programs in January, and it was a real gut-punch and morale destroyer when I had to go back to virtual, so I’m not allowing myself to get excited this time around. I’m hopeful, I really am, but…but…but… what can I say? I’ll believe it when I see it? It will be great if it happens this time? Hopefully we’re headed on the right track? Only time will tell?

It’s been an exhausting two years, and when you couple pandemic programming and librarianship with me being in graduate school, let’s just say that I am pooped (and it also explains why I rarely post on my blog these days). Fingers crossed that we’re moving on to better times!

Librarianship, Library events, Pandemic, Storytime

A Strange Anniversary

March 11, 2020 was the date of my last in-person storytime, which means that we are heading towards the one year anniversary of when library services as we knew them ceased, and library services as they are now began to evolve. Though it would seem like it’s a sad anniversary, I’m actually feeling – dare I say it? – hopeful these days. The air has that lovely damp springy feel, even on bitter cold days like yesterday, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets make everything seem better. I’m still double-masking, and I’m still trying my best to keep far apart from coworkers and library patrons, and I haven’t been into a store in months (Jim has been vaccinated for his job, so he handles the shopping), and I’ll continue to be vigilant about keeping safe, but…things are looking up? I hope?

At this point I’ve done so many Zoom storytimes that they almost feel natural (almost, sort of…), but now that spring is coming I’m contemplating how to handle outdoor storytimes at my library. It seems like a simple thing: just move the storytime outside and keep people socially distanced. But then I start thinking about the details, and I realize how complicated this endeavor will be. My library is on a large area of land, and those grounds are well used by everyone in town. People walk their dogs there, students from the middle and high schools practice sports there, students walk through the library grounds to the library parking lot to get picked up at the end of the school day, the elementary school will probably have outdoor classrooms there again once the weather is warmer – you get the idea. I need to figure out a way to mark out a space that is just for storytimes. No dogs, no sports teams, no classes, no walkers. And that space needs to be near the electrical outlet on the historic front of the building, because I’ll need to amplify my voice. So problem one is: how do I mark out that space and keep it for storytimes only? (Note that there isn’t the possibility of having a second staff member help me with crowd control, since we are short-staffed and extremely busy with filling curbside requests.)

Next problem is how to adequately amplify my voice. I have a small amp that I use for storytimes in our large program room, but I doubt that it will be loud enough for an outdoor storytime. The Friends of the Library are short of cash at this point, since they couldn’t have their annual book sale last year, and most likely won’t have one this year. I’ve already spent a lot of my own money to purchase the camcorder setup for Zoom storytimes, so I can’t spend more of my own money. I applied twice for Cares Act Grants, but was denied both times. Surely there must be another grant that I could apply for?

Along those same lines is that I can’t hand out scarves and musical instruments during the infant storytime. In normal times, I go around the room passing out instruments to everyone, and then collect them, and then later in the storytime I do the same with scarves. Other “regular” storytime highlights are the throwing of the pig stuffed animal – where I go around the room and give each child a chance to throw the pig – and pulling the felt Humpty Dumpty off of the felt board, where children line up and take turns pulling Humpty down (a great way for young children to practice turn-taking, patience, and also supporting other by cheering them on). Clearly these things are not options right now! I had hoped to get the Cares Act Grant to purchase enough instruments, scarves, small stuffed pigs, and felt Humptys for all attendees, so that each family could have their own storytime kit that they would bring with them each time. Libraries are free to all, so I can’t really ask people to purchase a kit from me at cost. I also can’t assume that all families have these items in their homes; though it’s likely that most people could cobble together something to use, what about the families who can’t?

And then there’s the biggest issue of all – the one that I don’t have a solution for at all. I won’t be able to accommodate all my regular storytime families at these outdoor storytimes, so I’m going to have to ask people to rotate and take turns attending in person. I had thought that I could just set up my camcorder and laptop and livestream via Zoom to the families who aren’t in person on any given day…but then I started thinking about how impossible that would be to manage. I can’t moderate the Zoom waiting room and attendees while I present to and pay attention to the in person crowd while I make sure that no one walking by accidentally dumps my very expensive camcorder to the ground (I picture a happy running dog doing this!). In other words, a single staff member can’t possibly run all these things at once (see above for why another staff member can’t be spared to assist). One solution might be to run more storytimes – to do the outdoor storytime, pack everything up and then go inside to run an indoor virtual storytime for everyone else – but I literally can’t fit that into my day. I’m having a hard enough time keeping up with all of the curbside requests that need to be filled, and rarely have time to work on the essential task of collection development. Adding additional storytimes would cut into curbside fulfillment, and also pretty much eliminate my ability to do collection development (which is not only essential, but also just about my favorite part of my job).

Of course, there are other issues, too, which I won’t discuss here, including what to do if it rains, whether the group of attendees will be allowed to sing (I’ll need to talk to the local board of health), and how on earth will I be able to project my voice while wearing a mask (will my voice be too muffled for the microphone to pick it up?). And will my young patrons be upset to see me wearing a mask? And the list goes on.

All this is the long way of saying that I can’t wait to get back to some form of in-person storytimes, but there are a lot of obstacles to overcome before I can pull this off. Yikes!

Book groups, Librarianship, Library events, Pandemic, Storytime, Summer reading

Pivot

It’s been almost a year since my last post, and I can’t believe how different my work life is from one year ago. It’s not something I would ever have predicted, and, frankly, my mind is still reeling with the changes at almost nine months into pandemic restrictions.

At this time a year ago, I was just finishing my required class on technology for information professionals. The final project for that class was to create your own website on the Simmons server, which I then transferred over to my own domain. I loved having a website that actually had content and photos and that showed what I was doing in my job – it was pretty fantastic (even if my web skills are a bit amateurish). But today I had to face the fact that my website was a snapshot in time of how I did my job pre-pandemic, and that it no longer reflected the reality of my work life.

Under the “projects” page on my website, I talked about all the great things that I had as goals for myself for 2020: applying for an LSTA Mind in the Making grant to upgrade the children’s room playspaces; adding great new stations to the once-monthly sensory playtimes; and coming up with descriptive materials in multiple languages to better serve storytime attendees who are not native speakers of English.

And now? There are no children in the children’s room, not since March 13, and thus no need to upgrade playspaces. Indeed, when we reopen (and who knows when that will be) there won’t be any play materials out in order to limit surfaces that need cleaning and to help everyone maintain social distancing.

Sensory playtimes feel like a sweet memory of an innocent time when parents and children from multiple families could be in an enclosed space together (the story room), playing with shared materials like rice tubs and water tables and oobleck. Sensory playtimes were hip and happening a year ago, and there were so many awesome new stations that I looked forward to adding to that program; now, though, I don’t anticipate being able to run a sensory playtime again for a very long time, if ever.

And the goal of making in-person storytimes more accessible to all attendees also seems like something from a more innocent past. The sad fact of the virtual storytimes that I now offer is that they are actually more limiting and less accessible to all: children with hearing impairments, for instance, are not well-served by a storytime on video. Those young children can’t read captions, and I can’t wear the teacher microphone that connects to the child’s hearing aid or cochlear implant. Parents who are non-native speakers of English cannot be provided with handouts at the time of the storytime that explain the order of the lesson and the purpose of each lesson part. Nor, frankly, do I have the time right now to come up with such handouts, since my workload has at least doubled, if not tripled, with the addition of curbside service provision.

There have been so many pivots in my job in the last nine months that I feel a bit dizzy. There’s the technology I’ve had to master: Zoom, Facebook Premiere, YouTube, Screencast-o-Matic, Adobe, Canva, Beanstack, Google Forms, and I know there are others that I’m forgetting to list. I’ve had to first learn how to do storytime in a virtual format, and then how to use a camcorder and HDMI converter to live stream a higher quality of video (it took a surprisingly long time for me to figure out the camcorder dilemma). Summer reading had to become a completely virtual experience, with curbside pickup of the limited prizes that we could afford. To save money on prizes, I had to learn how to make giant lawn pinwheels, and then spent hours this summer assembling 114 of those pinwheels. Book groups have gone virtual, and have expanded to include 1st and 2nd graders and adults. Other programs have fallen by the wayside, like the weekly game hour, because those programs don’t translate well to a virtual format.

And almost all of my patron interactions now take place via email, rather than in person. Where I used to walk around the room with a child reader recommending books by putting the books into their hands for them to assess – now I fill paper curbside bags with books that I hope they’ll like, and then set the bags out for pickup. Some parents will send me photos or anecdotes about their children’s reactions to the books in the bags, which brightens my days but isn’t quite the same as talking to a child in person. The best parts of my days used to be interacting with kids and their caregivers; now I work in a very lonely isolation in an empty, joyless children’s room. Though I’m technically an introvert, I also thrive on human interactions (I think of myself as a workplace extrovert), and I’m finding that there is nothing sadder for me than a children’s room with no one in it but me. It’s just a room now, not a children’s room.

And this doesn’t even touch on the misery of wearing a mask forty hours a week, nor the stress of doing curbside duty each day when there is always at least one patron (usually more) who will come up to me without a mask on. Talk about feeling powerless and vulnerable.

I know I’m not alone in feeling blue right now, and I know that things are far, far worse for many people – for those who have lost a loved one, those who are suffering from long-term effects of COVID-19, those who have lost their jobs, their homes, their livelihood, those who have fallen into depression, those who are trying to juggle working from home and supporting their children who are doing remote learning…the list goes on and on and on.

All I can do for now is to continue to try to do my job as best I can, and to try to support others who are struggling as best I can. It’s not much, but it’s something.