I wish "Book Wizard" was an actual job title…

A couple weeks ago something interesting happened. It was Friday, April 26th and I was doing outreach at the Last Friday event in downtown Henderson, where there are art vendors, a farmer’s market, live music, food trucks, etc. The event is well attended, and the library has been participating for over a year. We give out library swag, sign people up for library cards, show people how to use our online streaming services, and tell them about upcoming programs. Early in the evening I saw a dog running around across the street, but it looked like someone was stopping their car[…]

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have started writing this post in the past couple weeks and I ended up deleting it because I was so distraught that I couldn’t think straight let alone see straight. This is not going to be a cheery post but hopefully it will teach you something. Something that I didn’t even realize that I needed to learn until it was too late. A couple weeks ago one of my friends was out of town and I was babysitting his pup, Twister, for a few days. This dog has been to[…]

Right now, I’m reading a book called Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey by A.J. Jacobs and let me just say that this is the book that I have been looking for as I try to be a more grateful person! I mentioned in an earlier post that I am in a leadership book club at work and that we are reading Dear to Lead by Brene Brown. While I got quite a bit out of that book and I enjoyed it, it did seem a little preachy, which I didn’t like. Thanks a Thousand is not preachy in the[…]

Since March is Women’s History Month, I figured that reading a book called Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females would be an appropriate way to celebrate the month. In the acknowledgements of the book the author, Serenity Young, thanks almost every librarian she has ever known, or at least that she met while writing this book. As a librarian, let me just say, that I am truly grateful that people in my profession could do so much. (Look! I have more gratitude, like I said I would try to do in an earlier post!) What I have gotten from the[…]

I haven’t written in a little while. My excuse is “I had a lot going on” but really the truth is that I wasn’t sure how to express myself. Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to the California School Library Association conference. It was a fantastic event and I learned quite a bit. I don’t know very much about libraries in schools even though early on in my library career I was a school librarian, but it was for a very small private nonprofit Montessori school, so it wasn’t governed by the Clark County School District. I started[…]

One thing that I’ve been pondering lately is why when I am at my job as an academic librarian do, I feel so much motivation to write, to read, and to learn? Within moments of getting home all of the motivation tends to leave me. More than likely it is because it is past 11pm by the time that I get home, but I usually don’t get the surge again until I am back at the college library. Even when I am at my day job at the public library I usually don’t feel quite as motivated as I do[…]

This post is not to make anyone guilty. It is just things that I have noticed about myself even though I, mostly, say “you” when I’m speaking about myself. As I get older time seems to be less and less plentiful, but why is that? There are some people that look like they have it all figured out because they find the time to do so many things and I wonder when they find the time to sleep! I am reading several leadership books right now and it amazes me that these people not only find the time to be[…]

As I was starting to jot down ideas for the following post something interesting happened to me while at work. This woman came in with her child who needed to do a report. He was about 10 years old and his report was about sea creatures. I got him several books and let him know that if he needed anything else to come and ask and I would help him find it. He was sitting at a table with his mother and she starts to get upset with him and tells him that he can’t just copy out of the[…]

I hope everyone had amazing holidays! Now that regular life has resumed, I feel like I can get back to blogging more frequently.  Let’s face it, we use the holidays as an excuse to not do things just like I am using them now as a reason as to why I didn’t write. Don’t get me wrong, I thought about it quite a bit. I thought about all of the things that I should be writing about and posting, but I was lazy, and I didn’t do it. Sometimes we are totally grateful for the things that we didn’t do,[…]

Everyone that knows me knows that I’m a pretty creative person and when I tell them that I used to be a scenic artist for Cirque du Soleil they always ask why I would ever leave a job like that. Here’s the story: I had been working at the MGM Grand since I was 16 years old, first in the arcade and then when I turned 18, I transferred to The Grand Garden Arena to be a stage hand. I had been studying theater for years and I had that job my senior year of high school and all through[…]