The Now: March 23, 2022

While it is raining and gray today, we've had glorious weather to start the week. Plus! The cherry blossoms hit peak bloom. Our campus has some trees but I would rather be jaunting about the Tidal Basin, frolicking amongst the blooms. I am so ready for winter to be fully over.

Here's what has my attention at the moment.

WORK

• Today, I wrapped up my transcription work for our research project. Later this week, we meet to discuss next steps. We're looking at how faculty design research assignments for their classes. The survey and interviews were informative. Now we need to figure out A) what we do with the information we have and B) what goes our on list of further things to investigate. My colleague share this XKCD cartoon and it's exactly right.
• Submitted my tenure review portfolio for 2021-2022. Huzzah! According to my tracking, it took just over 8 solid hours of work to write my narrative, gather my evidence, and format/upload everything into our system. I wish I could say I was done, but I am on the review panel for our unit. That work is happening right now. My colleagues are doing some awesome things.
• I'm chairing a committee of our faculty senate focused on research and development. I'm using my power for good to work on a project that will lead to a faculty research index. I've spent some time developing a submission form and I just received feedback from the committee on it.
• Making my slides for the Computers in Libraries conference next week. I always get so nit-picky about how things look. The first draft is done. Now I need to tweak, finalize my resource list, and add my notes. Should probably practice my presentation too...
• I submitted a proposal to speak at this year's Internet Librarian conference. I want to talk about providing remote customer service.
• Our University is trying to do a better job of creating a central webinar/event calendar. We met as a cross-functional group to discuss plans for 2022-2023. I just finalized the list of webinars coming out of our unit and will be submitting the details soon. I got to have fun writing snappy titles which I always enjoy.
• Wrote out an editorial calendar for the blog posts I want to write between now and August.
• The University Research Week is coming up and, for the second year in a row, I'm designing the program. Luckily, I can use last year's as the template, but it's still a lot of working inputting the information and tweaking it to make it look good. I'm just happy I'm on the planning team and get more time to work with it than I did last year.

PERSONAL

• I booked the first of my two hotel nights off of parenting for the year. I am already making mental plans about what I want to do with my time off. None of it will be remotely productive and I CAN'T WAIT.
• I designed and sent out my condo's green committee newsletter. This month focused on spring cleaning.
• Speaking of being green, our building's adopt-a-block clean up was this past weekend. I took the kiddo with me. She was confused by the grabber tool at first, but really got into things as we worked. Her eyes find the small trash better than mine do.
• Our big home frustration of the week came when our new fridge (that we ordered in December) arrived. We paid for full installation and haul away. While the delivery team did haul away, they just left the new unit in our living room. (Much anger was experienced.) Luckily, our go to handyman was on site and he helped the husband get the unit in place while I bought lots of ice to keep our stuff cold.  Once the fridge and freezer came down to temp, I did my usual organization to get everything where it would work for us. I also used this as a chance to take stock of what we own. We need to eat a few things...

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