libbyelf, posts by tag: work - LiveJournal

I'm at work today, but just for the morning. I tried to get here by 7:30 so I could leave (with a good conscience) at 11:30 instead of 12:00 - stupid train blocked my way. I did get here by 7:45, though...

It has been a very, very slow week at work. I really need to learn to use that time to my advantage, but I have a hard time getting motivated.

I have one more holiday shopping stop to make, which I will do this afternoon. It's not Christmas for me without at least one trip to World Market. Also plan to take my (now) oldest kitty to the vet for a check-up, but that might not happen until next week, since I find it likely that the vet won't be in today.

We called in a claim to our home warranty company about our flickering lights. The first electrician they assigned us to was in either Humble or Tomball and when Jimmy called him he said he couldn't walk so we'd have to call someone else. So J called them back. I got an e-mail this morning with our new claim information. The electrician they assigned us to this time is in Austin. WTF???

I have an overwhelming urge to cook. I just wish I had more people to cook for. Looks like this Christmas is going to be very laid back. We're having friends over tonight, but nothing big. I'm 99% sure our traditional (for the last 9 years) Christmas Eve plans aren't going to materialize this year, since we haven't heard anything from the family we usually celebrate with - this is ok and to be expected as their family is completely scattered now, but now we need to make our own traditions. I wish we had family (or friends with no family in town) to share Christmas Eve with at our house.

I loves the holidays. :-)

Don't wear a mini skirt with no tights to work when you work in a meatlocker. I am SO COLD! Look cute...but that doesn't outweigh the whole "cold" bit. Brrrrr

Second day back at work, and second to come in to find my computer in an endless "trying to boot Windows" cycle. Luckily there are two other networked computers in here that I can use...but I want to be at my desk! And I don't feel good...dratted cold... I just wanna go back to bed!

I've been shuffling bound journals all day, and I feel like my arms are gonna fall off! I feel so accomplished, though. I have a severe lack of shelf space, and I've been procrastinating about shifting shelves for probably a year (it's hard work!). Right now I have an entire shelf cleared, which amounts to quite a bit of growing space, considering that I only process bound journals twice a year (a total of probably 30ish new volumes added per year). I delegated a couple of rarely used journals to my attached study room, and have at least one more title that I'm going to move into there, which will give me close to one more full shelf of space. I also have one title that has multiple duplicates (each issue is hardbound instead of the typical magazine-type binding), and I'm going to weed those out, which will give me some more useful space. This definitely is not a permanent solution, since it will only give me a couple of years' growth room, at the most, but it's a start. I'll probably be moved to another space within the next few years anyway, at least I hope I will be.

Ok, people. I'm on vacation. 2 days of personal time plus Monday. So, what do I get when I come home from my kids' last-day-of-school activities? A message from some secretary (couldn't ever actually figure out who exactly it was) trying to find a book I ordered for a dr. I ordered this book on my credit card in exchange for immediate cash from said doctor. I had it shipped to home so I could do it quickly without having to change address information. This was on, I think, Monday! It's just now Thursday! I told her calmly that I had ordered it Monday or Tuesday, that it had shipped, but it wasn't here yet, and that if it did happen to get here today or tomorrow I would run it up there. But geez! I swear, this guy thinks the world, including, apparently, Amazon.com, revolves around him!

I find myself in a good but stressful situation. I seriously overbudgeted for this year and need to spend some money. See, I started in November and had to turn in my budget in May. There were things that had been budgeted for FY '05 that I wasn't sure about, but didn't want to cut them in case they appeared out of nowhere before the year was up. So I kept them in my budget figuring I could find a way to spend the money if I didn't need it for those particular items (it's not a line item budget, so I can spend it as necessary). Well, those items never came up and one item I had budgeted ended up being picked up by the institution's research library. So now, here it is May, and I've got basically 2 months to spend multiple thousands of dollars! And I keep getting thwarted. I offered to pay for a service that I use and a couple of librarians in other libraries also use sporadically, but the librarian in the research library insisted on covering it. Then I thought "Hey, I'll buy myself a new color printer, scanner and CD-R!" And was told that our informatics department will probably provide me with a printer and maybe a CD-R, so there goes that idea (or the bulk of that idea, anyway). So now I have to come up with a way to spend this money, keeping in mind that I don't have the shelf space for more print journals, and without weeding a lot, I don't have much shelf space for additional books, either. What a problem to have! Actually, it's a real problem, because I have to turn in my budget for next year, and I'm having a hard time justifying asking for nearly as much as I had this year...but I don't want to cut my own budget!

So I'm doing good at staying on task today. The problem is, the things I'm doing are BO-RING. So far: read my e-mail, cleaned my desk area, added books to the catalog and started putting labels on them, retrieved a couple of articles. Other things on my to-do list: read the Onfolio user guide, complete another section of the online HTML training, process journals, scan tables of contents. Zzzzzz.... Other need-to-do items: finish labeling books, process books that aren't in the catalog, work on Captivate movies... The Captivate work should interest me, but it just doesn't right now. I really need some motivation.

I want to be home reading/cross stitching/knitting/crocheting. Anything but working. Blah.

Next official vacation day: Memorial Day.

Next anticipated day off: February 24. I really need to register for the SWUUW conference... Why can't I motivate myself to do that?

Here's one of my pet peeves.

When I'm retrieving an article for someone and when I go to save it in their folder I realize that I've already gotten this article for them sometime in the past. If it were print, I could understand not keeping the article. But this is a PDF - surely you file these away somewhere???

I look down and see the word I had jotted down on a pad while talking to someone on the phone: cancer. Now, how helpful is that when I work in a friggin' cancer center??? That would be like writing down the word "book" in a public library...

So I'm editing a paper and formatting the references with EndNote. I get to reference #16 which only says "regional lymph node spread." Nothing else. No author, journal, date, anything. So I e-mail the prof and ask if he has the rest of the citation. He replies, "I have no idea. Can you find me such a reference?" Can you imagine how many articles out there have that phrase in them? I did a Scopus search and found 10 with that exact phrase (but without quotes there were over 900) and then did a Google Scholar search and got 79 links. Don't you think if you're writing a paper and including a reference, that you should have the full citation saved somewhere??? Duh.