Story Time with Ms. Bombshell

A few weeks ago, I developed a lovely case of the flu with some sinus infection thrown in for taste. It was a most excellent week where I felt like my brain was simultaneously being smushed by rocks and broiling in an oven. I felt fantastic......ok, I'm totally lying. I felt like padoodles. I also sounded like Satan thanks to the drainage making my throat totally inflamed. It was the best week ever. Anyhoo, cut to the next week when I finally was cleared to go back to work. I was better but I still had some fatigue issues. (I had to stop halfway up any set of stairs because I would get tired. Yeah, that's fatigue!) Hence, that whole week, I wore nothing but dresses because they are low maintenance and ballet flats because they require the least effort when it comes to walking around. Evidently, I've become the Queen of High Heels because I received several comments from people that ranged from "Oh, look, you have your comfy shoes on," to "Wow, you're actually wearing flats two days in a row!" and my favorite, "Whoa, you must still feel bad if you're wearing those shoes!" I had no idea that my footwear was noticed that much! Granted, there are those that I would make sure saw my shoes. There are also those people that would comment because they liked to say "I don't know how you can walk around all day in those heels." I just had no idea so many people had seen and noted what I put on my feet every day!

This week I have been wearing a higher heeled boot (although I'm still not up to my usual 4 inch heels). There was a comment made about it, "That's the smallest heel I think I've ever seen you wear, other than flats." I just said "I'm getting better! Once you see me back in heels, you'll know I'm completely recovered!"

The whole thing actually just made me feel quite special, and not in the helmet kind of way! I think that I will go get a new pair of heels to celebrate!

And the lights fade out (Thing 23)

Like all fun things, this has come to an end. I am so glad I signed up to participate in this experience. I've learned so much and am super excited about several of the things I got to do. The thing I liked the most is still the blog reader (I heart you Google Reader!). That one thing (granted I did like a lot of the others) made this all so worth doing! The thing I liked the least was Ning.com. I don't have any kind of agenda and so it was totally worthless to me. One of the aspects that I learned during this exercise is just how many websites can be linked (like Flickr and Yahoo or Digg and Facebook). That was most excellent! I had a wonderful time doing all the tasks and got some insight into things that I had heard about but never got to play with. I really hope that either this program runs again or that we can bring it to our library system. And so, I take a bow and exit stage left!

Adaptation (Thing 22)

I do know of several people in this particular library system that participated in the 23 Things exercise. When it comes to the 23 Things, I would love for everyone in the system to get to experience it. Granted, they wouldn't all do it at the same time (that would be chaotic and probably cause a few people to lose it) but it would be nice if they could all experience it. If I were to adapt it for the system here, I'd change only a couple of the things. I would take out Ning and replace it with shelfari, mainly because I think the people involved would use it more than they'd use ning. (Pretty much everyone I talked to wasn't very thrilled with ning) I would also probably take out the more facebook thing (oh it would pain me to do so!) and put in myspace simply because we still have a lot of people (public) that use it and still ask questions about it. That one is still pretty optional though. Otherwise, I would keep the tasks in the same order and just have everyone go at it. Either that or have a 23 things thrown in your face kind of thing where we go over it all in one big hit. Doing that with a fun, exciting person instructing it might make it something people would want to participate in. (It could also be broken up into a two part session but again, that would something that would have to be discussed and, of course, dissected, torn apart, then put back together. gotta love planning!) And that concludes my thoughts on adapting the 23 Things for the library system where I work!

Invasion of the Podcasts! (Thing 21)

Thanks to this thing, I actually listened to my first podcast. I had seen them popping up on the LIS-Librarian and Information Science news rss feed that I had subscibed to in Thing 7. I finally took the time to listen to one and although there were a couple of times that my mind wandered (I think it was less to do with content than the man's voice. It was so soothing!) but it did have some good information. The audio did have a small glitch, in that, it sometimes would sound like the person stuttered but other than that, it had great audio quality. Some of the topics covered were technology in the library, a small note about a funny article (Children's Books that will never be published) and also, some discussion about the podcasts and where they are headed. I enjoyed it. When I get more time, I'm going to go listen to some podcasts from the National Library of Medicine. They had some great ones about new information about diseases and things like that!

As far as what patrons might listen to, I'm thinking that the subjects that would interest them would be business and money, entertainment, and technology. Those tend to be the subjects I get asked about the most right now. I think if we could make some entertaining ones about our library services and other things, we might be able to get patrons to listen to them. Or that's just my own little hope.