One of the last tasks I complete before leaving on vacation is setting my Out of Office message. In the past, I always worried about missing something.

Setting my out of office time was easy; everything else gave me anxiety. Did I give a reason why? Did I set expectations for how often I would check my email? Would I let people know what types of messages would get responses? How many places should I redirect people?

My second guessing of these questions always depended on the duration of my leave and the point of the semester we were in. I wanted to be helpful but I also wanted a real break.

Then I went on maternity leave. I had zero qualms about staying offline then. My automatic reply essentially said: I will be gone these dates on maternity leave. Contact this main email or schedule an appointment with another librarian here.

That was it. 

It's a recipe that still works. Now, I just say what dates I will be away, give an alternative email, and link to our appointment scheduler. I don't say why I'm gone. I don't say I'm going to check email. If I do check (and reply) to email, it's a bonus.

I've been using this system for three years now and it's never been an issue. People don't complain. Nothing gets missed. More importantly, I don't feel the need to justify why I am on leave or working while I'm away.


All of this is a nice introduction to say that I will be out of office next week. There will be no posts on the blog. I will resume my regular posting schedule on Monday, August 15, 2022. 

I'm on my last day of work before vacation. What's different is that I spent the whole week working from my in laws. Instead of having to race home to pack and prep things, I can just log off and declare myself done. That is very exciting.

Here's what else was good in my week:

• Clear skies and light traffic for our long drive
• The kiddo's tablet loaded with movies and apps making for almost zero issues in the car
• Playing a new card game
• Getting a little extra sleep on a work day
• Walking barefoot on really soft carpet
• Walking barefoot on really soft grass
• Citrus fizzy water
• Snacking on a delicious cocoa oatmeal bar
• Delighting in watching my in laws quaint murder mystery shows
• Perfectly timed toddler nap leading to easy evening professional family pictures

I'm working from home this week. But "home" is actually my in laws place in South Carolina. They set me up with a desk in the guest room and I have more space here than I do in my actual home. It's nice. Plus, they have super soft carpet that feels great on my bare feet. 

While I'm working, our kiddo starts her mornings with swim lessons and then gets all day grandparent daycare. I'm fairly certain she will not want to leave.

Also, another slight change to the format of the post this week. I want it to reflect more of how my job is structured.

Here's what I'm working on:
​
WORK

• Research Assignment Design: I finished all my coding. (No thanks to a Dedoose breakdown that gave be a heart attack. Always back up your data!) Then I reviewed my colleagues codebooks. Tomorrow, we are meeting to collaboratively design a codebook to complete our research from. I am very excited for this process because we all did the same stuff just differently. I can honestly say that my one colleague's codebook is far superior to mine and will provide a great basis to start. Also, it is fascinating what we each read in the data.
• Presentations and Publications: Brain dumped some ideas for my photography webinar. I also chatted about it with the husband.
• Instruction: We kicked off the new request form! I am thrilled because our old one was clunky and difficult. I shared the form with a faculty member to test and updated all of the links on our website. Hopefully, this new process works better for everyone. I'm also doing some maintenance on our Library 101 tutorial course. I'm checking in with professors and updating announcements in the course management system.
• Reference: We've received several chat questions about "religion in politics." That's a broad topic and difficult to provide effective reference for. It's stuff like this which informed our desire to look at how faculty design their research assignments. Also, I threw together a Roving Reference plan. Since we are in a not great temporary space, we want to go where the students are. Assuming the Director gives the all clear, we will start this sometime in early September as an added service.
  
• Outreach: I drafted a blog post and am working on ways to increase our newsletter subscribers. I want to add at least 25 more this semester. It doesn't sound like much, but that would be over a 25% increase. Also, I drafted and shared a website usability testing plan with the team. We want to see if the new format is working and what we still need to improve. Finally, I made new one sheets that we can use as handouts. I directed one towards students about our new space and the other for student support staff and offices about what the library can do for students and faculty.
  
• Administration: Not much movement here. I'm checking things off the list I made for myself.

PERSONAL

• Estate Planning: Nothing. 
• Email Newsletter: More subscribers are still rolling in and I'm bouncing. I'll be on vacation  next week, so I am going to announce that in the two issues going out this week.
• Home Projects: We left the table still flattening while we're gone for two weeks. Turns out, our in laws have a rubber mallet. If the heavy object flattening doesn't work, we'll try popping it out with the mallet when we get back.
• Hobbies: I set up my bullet journal for August. I forgot to bring my wider nibbed pen with me, so I will need to go back and bold some of my monthly pages.

Keywords are important terms, concepts, or phrases you can use to help you search for  information. If your keywords aren’t right, you’ll have trouble finding what what you need.

When developing keywords, try the following:

• Underline Your Thesis: Look at your thesis or research statement and underline the most important words, ideas, and topics. These are your starter keywords. 
• Find Synonyms: Don’t get tunnel vision and only focus on the keywords in your thesis. Look for synonyms to those words. You can use a website like Thesaurus.com or a print thesaurus to help you find related terms. The reason you should look for synonyms is that the keywords you use might not be the keywords an author/creator uses even though you're both looking at the same thing.
• Expand Your Idea: Expand your topic a bit. What are the overarching ideas or topics that cover your topic? If you want to research gentrification in a local neighborhood, it’s worth looking for articles on gentrification in a specific city or gentrification trends overall. 
• Narrow Your Idea: Find an example you can use. If you’re researching social media, pick a specific platform like Twitter.
• Specific Examples: If you are writing about a general idea, it can be useful to include specific examples of that idea as keywords. For instance, if you're looking at Black authors, you could include Octavia E. Butler as a specific example.
• Related Ideas: You can also look for keywords that are related to but not directly about your topic. If you’re looking up healthy eating techniques, you might want to find articles on other healthy habits like exercise or sleep. Information you need may be included in an article on another topic.

This was a rush of a week.

I had a bunch of things to wrap up for work while preparing to leave town for two weeks. No matter how many lists we have to keep us on track, that last night at home and the few hours before we leave are always chaos. I love going places, but I hate the anxiety that comes with preparation and the actual travel. 

Now that we are settled, I can breathe. Yes, I will be working remotely for the next week, but the grandparents are providing daycare services and I can sneak out with my laptop to work on their screened in porch if I want. (Or even sit on there lawn. Their grass is that suspiciously soft kind that feels really nice on the toes.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to be more productive than usual this week. First, there's no worry about daycare drop-off and pick up. Second, a new workspace always comes with productivity vibes. Third, I saved a bunch of work I know can be done in smaller bursts. Finally, the following week is vacation time and I always have the urge to clear out my task lists before logging off.

Dare I say, I am excited about this work week? I love my job and rare is the day I grumble about work. But there is something about this week that has me hopping.  I'm eager to get a bunch of things done.

Now I get why my brother is enjoying the digital nomad life so much.

We are on the road to visit my in-laws. This is a split trip where one week we are working remotely and the second week we are on vacation. Our kiddo gets two solid weeks with grandparents and I know she is going to love every moment. I am looking forward to getting to work outside with my feet on their very soft grass.

Here's what else has been good lately:

• Mass market paperback sized books. So easy to hold.
• Citrus fizzy water
• Kiddo decided to eat her veggies when I called them "twirly bites." 
• Our daycare parenting text group
• Being able to grab COVID rapid tests from DCPL
• Making lists
• Crossing the 500 newsletter subscriber threshold!
• Better than expected movies
• An empty laundry room when I need it
• Raisin bran for breakfast

We were supposed to be joining friends to celebrate a birthday in Asheville, NC this weekend. That was relocated to New Orleans and we're not ready to take the kiddo on a plane. Since I already had remote work approved for next week, we decided to venture to my in laws a week early. Now, we'll be at their place for two weeks. We're both going to WFH one week and then take leave the next. The grandparents are kindly providing their own version of daycare. Kiddo is going to love it!

I am in the midst of menu planning and packing list checking. Long gone are the days of packing in an hour. Now I've got to make sure we've got everything for the kiddo (and enough snacks and battery power for a 7+ hour car trip). Thank goodness the Husband had the foresight to maintain a constant packing list. Makes things a little easier.

Here's what else I've got going on:

WORK

• Research Assignment Design: I am on my last round of individual coding. I'm also getting my code book in shape to share with the team. Then, we're going to meet and decide how we want to do our collaborative coding.
• Presentations and Publications: I am making notes for my webinar on how to improve your photography skills. I'll just brain dump everything into a document and organize it later.
• LibGuides: These are on pause for now. I can only do so many at one time. That said, I am promoting all of the new ones.
• Instruction: We are in the lull before the Fall semester overload starts.
• Administration: I made a list of things I want to tackle while I'm WFH next week. Hopefully, I can plow through some things while catching up on webinars.

PERSONAL

• Estate Planning: Nothing. 
• Email Newsletter: I decided to start using Substack's automated posting to Twitter. I also broke the 500 subscriber threshold today. I am very happy about that. I decided to use this as a promotional opportunity and shared the news in a few places.
• Home Projects: I built our new sofa table. It's very nice, but one shelf arrived with a bit of a dent in it. We're trying to flatten it out with heavy books. It's not bad enough to send back to Wayfair, but we figured this was worth a shot.
• Hobbies: I wanted to spend at least an hour of my short birthday vacation coloring, but I never did. Probably not going to get any time on this until we're back from our trip.

Death by Dumpling
Vivien Chien
 
I'm not normally a mystery reader, but I saw this on the shelf at the library years ago and the cover stuck with me. I’ve decided I’m going to read her whole Noodle Shop Mystery series. It was easy to spot who the murder victim would be, the suspects are lining up, and we've entered the whodunit pages. 

This falls under the "cozy mystery" subgenre and I'm finding it quite enjoyable so far.

The lovely recommendations from Wowbrary strike again!

Somehow, our daughter managed to make it through three exposures and a week of test-to-stay without testing positive for COVID. We are, understandably, relieved to have dodged the virus again. While we know this is more luck than anything else, an article I read in the Washington Post [gift link] about those who haven't gotten COVID yet got me thinking.

While constantly testing negative could be immunological mixed with luck (lots of luck), I would posit that it is because some these folks (us included) are still taking the pandemic seriously. 

Our family has no known pre-existing conditions. We are fortunate to have jobs we can do from home. We are privileged to be able to send our child to a daycare that had a more conservative response then most. This all helps a lot.

More importantly, I think it's because we don't really go anywhere or do anything. We do not dine indoors. We do not go to large outdoor gatherings. We are careful with who we see and how. Crucially, we still wear masks everywhere. I'm in a cubicle in the office. I wear a mask all day. Our daughter still wears a mask at school - even when they went mask optional. Every time we step foot inside a public place, we wear our N95 masks. 

When we know we are going to see friends indoors, we ask about symptoms, vaccinations, and the like. We ensure that others are rapid testing before they visit. We test ourselves.

Essentially, we never changed our behavior. 

I don't fault anyone who tests positive at this point. You can do everything right and the BA5 variant can still get you. We know that, eventually, we will test positive for COVID. But I think the difference is, we have not yet given the pandemic the shrug.

Our kiddo got her second dose of Moderna this week. That Garfield Band-Aid on her arm is a measure of relief and gives us a touch more flexibility. We might start doing more things, but we're still going to mask. We may be the only ones doing so, but we don't care.

At this point, it's going to feel weird when the masks finally come off for good.