Brothers

So, on to my brothers.  One is two years younger and the other is nearly eight years younger.  My sister and youngest brother are twins.  That will be another day, another story. 

I fought with my two years younger brother all the time but never, that I can recall, with my youngest brother.  I could not tell you why we fought or what it was about.  I always felt so responsible for him when we were at school or even at church.  Older sister has to take care of younger brother.  Because obviously he could not take care of himself.  That was my thinking.  My mother never said to watch him or check on him or anything like that.  So it was my own brain telling me I was responsible for him.  No doubt that there were times I was responsible for him, like the day I picked him up from junior high in my car.  There were a couple of other kids from the neighborhood hitching a ride with me that day.  One was our preacher's daughter, same age as my brother.  And, of course, with brother and friends in the car, I get pulled over for speeding and get my first ticket.  I was so upset.  I am sure I picked he and his friends up many times but that is the only time I remember.  He is now an accomplished piano tuner with his own business.  He can do anything with a piano.  Repair, tune, refinish, fix anything on it kind of guy.  This job suits him very well.  He is a perfectionist.  He is also the builder of his own computers.  I don't think he has ever bought a computer from a company.  He has put all his personal computers together himself.

Youngest brother was how do I describe it?  He was like my baby doll.  I think I carried him around all over the house.  I don't remember ever fighting with him.  The only things that make sense for this are that he was not a sister and he was not just two years younger than me.  I think that is why we never fought.  He didn't come to my room and pester me like the other two.  Anyway, he is married now and father of two sons.  His eldest is in the Navy serving our country.  His youngest recently graduated high school.  His wife works for the school district.  They live a little farther away than the rest of us but we get to see them a few times each year.  He works for a financial company and is a manager.

In a day or two, I will talk about our folks and probably the twins and chicken pox.  Good, clean fun for the whole family!

Starting Over

Inspired by my son, I have decided to begin posting to this blog again. I changed the color scheme from green to watermelon. I will eventually change the name of the blog. It started as posts for a library reason. Now it will be geared toward family maybe or personal, not quite sure yet.

So here goes.

Starting with my sister. She is a school teacher with two girls and a wonderful hubby. Her oldest just turned 15 and her youngest is 10. Both lovely girls, my nieces. My sister and I have become very close over the last 2 years. Pretty much due to my daughter and an ex-boyfriend that my sister and brother-in-law introduced to my daughter.

We stay close because we communicate, no longer about my daughter's love life, but about everything. We are nearly 8 years apart. Some of my memories of growing up revolve around my sister. She and I, being the girls in the family, were allowed to have our own bedrooms. But that did not mean that we slept in our own bedrooms. She would, invariably, on stormy nights in North Texas find her way to my bed. Our parents' made her ask permission, of course. She usually had to wait on me to return from a date to ask. When I married at 20, she was 12 so as my husband and I got to the serious stage, she had to stay up later and later to get "permission" and eventually she just got in my bed anyway. She will tell you something entirely different to be sure as neither of us recall anything 100% correctly anymore.

Amazingly, as adults, we never fight. Pretty sure I fought with all my siblings growing up except my youngest brother. A story for another day. We do tend to call each other for advice or just to have someone hear what we are saying . Don't get me wrong, our husbands are both great guys ready to listen to our woes. But there is something about telling your sister what's going on that is a comfort.

Last night I was in bed late and couldn't sleep. She texted me about something and I told her I was in bed but not sleeping. She said the same was true for her last night. We said a couple silly things and ended with LOL!!

Last Post for North Texas 23

This challenge was enjoyable. I enjoyed learning about "things" I had never tried before. My favorite thing has to be Facebook. It is an enjoyable way to share pictures of my loved ones with family and friends, to reconnect with old friends, and play a game or two. For use at home, this is my most visited site. My least favorite thing was image generators, and truthfully, it is because I could not do it well. I had trouble with it and don't enjoy a struggle with technology. For work, I learned that I don't have to visit all the blogs and newspapers I follow one site at a time! I now use Google Reader to access all of my subscriptions, one stop shopping so to speak. For me, this was the most useful "thing". This challenge has changed my daily routine somewhat, for the better.

I hope to be able to challenge my coworkers with my new knowledge. I also hope that if new "things" pop up on the horizon, I will not be afraid to check them out!

Thing 22

I had not thought about adapting North Texas 23 to our library. I was not the only one participating but I may be the only one to finish from our library. Being the computer guru that I am, I would love to see all staff at our library participate in some form of this type of learning. There are so many different levels of technology knowledge here. If I were in charge of adapting this learning to our library, I would probably use the blogging for tracking as we did. Then I would pick maybe the top five things that I know our patrons use. Among them would be Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube.

YouTube

YouTube is not allowed here in the library from staff computers so I had to get on a laptop on our wireless network. I watched five videos. The first was from Berkeley Public Library. It was comical but informative about the library's services but was created to promote fine amnesty for patrons during February last year.

The second was Steilacoom Library in Pierce County, Washington. I found this one to be interesting since I lived there for a year back when Mt. St. Helens blew! This one was strictly a brief history lesson on the library, the first in Washington. Columbus, Nebraska's public library created a very well done video with a child as the star along with pop-ups. He told of the services offered at his library. St. Joseph County Public Library did a staff day in 2003. Lasting about 7 minutes, it fast forwarded through the library day focusing on staff. It was set to music, no spoken word on this one.

By this time, I found that a lot of library produced videos are of poor audio quality and are very slow to load. I searched on library event and found a promotional video for Yan Can Cook at Monterey Library. Yan was going to be doing a show at the convention center, however, all ticket proceeds were to go to the library for purchasing books. Tickets could be purchased at the circulation desk at the library. This one was strictly informational about the event.

I think a library could promote programs and events with YouTube. I think there could be a way to introduce staff and services to the public. What about a tour of the library? Show patrons the procedure for obtaining a library card and where to return materials. You would be surpised how many patrons cannot find the book drops. Maybe you would not be surprised... There are a lot of things you could promote and a variety of ways to do it. I think we have enough creative talent here to do it! Now we just need a video camera!

Podcasts

Podcasts are completely new to me. About all I have known of them is that my daughter downloads and listens to them via iTunes. I did catch several podcasts that libraries had created. One library did book reviews by a single staff member. Three or four I listened to were done by teen patrons and of course, were produced for other teens to promote the library. I noticed that one had a YA author recorded and had posted that as a podcast. Others just had links to podcasts about libraries in the news, that sort of thing.

The single staff member doing book reviews had the poorest audio quality of those I listened to. It sounded like a skipping record (that dates me) in a couple of places. The teen produced podcasts were sometimes too loud or the music drowned out the spoken word. The links to podcasts on news sites had the best audio quality, but overall none were so bad that I could not understand them. None of them required me to download an aggregator. I was able to listen to all of them from my computer. I liked that because we are not allowed to download anything without permission on our staff computers.

One site actually had a list of aggregators to choose from and I found that helpful. I am subscribed to so many things now, I did not feel anything cry out to me enough that I would subscribe.

I certainly think podcasts could be useful to our patrons. We could tell of upcoming events, programming, meeting times and our book talks could be recorded. Even the storytimes could be recorded, I suppose. I enjoyed this thing because I learned something.

Google Docs

I was already familiar with Google docs as an invitee. Our ILS enhancement process brought us together with some other Texas libraries and we coordinated our submissions and voting together on a Google docs spreadsheet. It was very cool!

Now, I see how the spreadsheet writer invited the rest of us to work on the spreadsheet. I love the different formats in which you can save a document. I also uploaded an existing Excel spreadsheet to see what that looked like. It was not much different to my eyes. The upload went smoothly and I could navigate it as I could in Excel.

Presentations were different. I am not super familiar with Power Point but I tried to create a presentation with Google docs. So, not sure how much is different and how much is the same between the two programs, but I could never get my presentation to save so I was unable to watch the presentation. I am fairly certain the user was at fault here. I may visit again and try to figure out what I missed.

I think this is a very useful tool in the library world. It has already helped my library connect with other libraries in a joint effort. Thing 19 is complete!