Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Back in January I talked about my goals to reduce our household waste. So I thought I would do a little recap and see where we are at.

We have been doing okay with this in general, though there are some areas we could improve in:

• We have not been as good on plastic bags as I would like, but we are recycling them instead of throwing them out as we used to do. It’s mostly an issue because I ensure I go for a walk at lunchtimes and often do some household shopping then and I don’t always remember to go to my car to get the eco bag first. Definitely something I need to work on habit wise.
  
• Meal planning has also gone out the window for us for the most part just due to different crazy life things going on. I try to do it in my head a bit, obviously this is nowhere near as good as if I were doing it properly though so I really need to make an effort with this. Not only is it better for reducing waste, but it is also kinder on our wallets and better for our health because when I plan we end up with healthy well rounded meals.

Things we have done include:

• I have done research into some of the things we buy and try to only buy items that have recyclable packaging (harder than you might think – though the redcycle program at Coles has helped a lot).
• When it comes to items like egg cartons which are recyclable I will also look for opportunities for reuse. For instance our library storytime sometimes uses egg cartons for craft. In fact I found a flower craft recently for Mother’s Day that I sent through as a suggestion that uses egg cartons. This will mean that all staff’s egg cartons will be donated for the next few weeks to be used to create Mother’s Day gifts rather than being thrown out or recycled.
  
  There are so many fun crafts you can do with egg cartons that I am actually going to save that for another post I think 🙂
• Though we do not want junk mail it seems to keep magically appearing so I use the elastic bands from them on my frozen veggie bags once open to reduce the chance of freezer burn and recycle the junk mail. It’s only a little thing I know, but I also feel that that thought and little effort if magnified by many certainly counts.
  I also found out that my girlfriend who lives 30 minutes further bush than me doesn’t get junk mail at all so I now keep them for her and she recycles them after use.
• When we next needed rice I bought a 5kg bag. Every one that sees it thinks I am crazy and it does take up a lot of room, but I used to buy the 500gram packet so I am literally saving 10 plastic packages and it saved me a BUNCH of money!
  We may not have sugar in our house, but if you need a cup of rice I am definitely your girl
  
• At work I have noticed that I have naturally become a lot more conscious of recycling and providing opportunities for people to learn more sustainable habits. No matter how small the scraps are now (from cutting out or whatever) I will put them in the paper recycling bin. I have also gotten into the habit of checking the staff paper recycling next to the internal printer for scrap paper as this is always in high demand at the library.
  Our Council has business card sized laminated signs with a cute cartoon of a light bulb reminding people to turn off switches. I have ordered some of these to place above the switches in our study areas as people often leave these on. I have also convinced Council to add recycling bins into all the libraries and centres (gyms and pools) which is amazing!!!
  I also had a chat with the guy from Council who runs eco programs like creating sustainable gardens, building terrariums and composting at home. It started with me offering to promote his programs in the library particularly on our social media sites. He was super excited about this and we are now talking about him possibly running some programs at the libraries which is amazing because we get a whole new slew of programs whilst our resource output would be minimal and we would be collaborating and networking with a whole new area of Council so I am pretty excited about this possibility 🙂

It was great for me to discover that I was able to make a difference at work as well as at home.

What changes have you made or do you suggest I make?

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Star Wars display

We had been pushing for a Star Wars display at work, one of the ladies husbands is a huge fan and she populated 3 cases with items from the past movies. Unfortunately we do not seem to have many Star Wars fans at my work because the ladies that do social media were like, ‘oh I never thought of promoting that’. I was kind of shocked, firstly because we should be promoting absolutely everything we do. Secondly we are the only people in the region doing any kind of Star Wars display… the people need to know!

I think it is a great display. I kind of wish we could have done even more, but space is an issue 🙂

Here are some pics of our Star Wars display:

Have you guys seen any great Star Wars displays leading up to the release of “The Force Awakens”?

Christmas Book Critters

You might remember the Halloween Book Critters I created back in October. Well, due to popular demand I was asked to create some Christmas Book Critters for our Christmas display. Woohoo! I was so excited and got straight to it and I am very happy with the results (although I think my Elf needs a hat, I will have to find some time to work on that or take some stuff home and work on it lol).

Introducing our Christmas Book Critters.

Santa:

Elf:

I really do think this guy needs a hat. Will have to work on it 🙂

Rudolph:

And last, but certainly not least… Olaf 🙂 :

Unfortunately you cannot see his arms and hair too well in this photo, but I swear he has them 🙂

Halloween Book Critters

So I found a picture similar to the critters we made somewhere a while ago. I can’t remember when I saw it, but the idea stuck with me and so I convinced my Youth Librarian friend that we totally had to make some Halloween Book Critters (payback for all the YA books I have read this year hahaha kidding).

So we were going to make 5 initially, but decided to go with four because of the space we had to put them in and honestly creating them took longer than we thought. I’m sure initially people thought we were silly spending so much time on a couple of decorations, but we were proud. Here they are…

This is Franky

Our witch

Our spooky ghost

and little Master Jack

Here they are on display

Remember how I said people probably thought it was a waste of time? Well the public love them and have been taking photos. A staff member uploaded them to our Instagram page and we got 200 likes overnight and a bunch of libraries are now doing the same and tagging our library as the inspiration. How cool is that?!!!

A little fun can be great promotion 🙂

Happy Halloween everybody!

The results… what do libraries mean to you (Part II)

Yesterday I asked you all to contribute some words that you felt described what libraries meant to you, or even words that came to you when you thought about libraries. I want to thank all of the people who provided me with some amazing words!

With the help of tagul I created the below word cloud. The bigger words mean more than one person chose that word. So with no further delay I give you…

What libraries mean to us 🙂

Yes I made a heart 🙂

Love it! 🙂

Thanks again to everyone who put in submissions 🙂

What do Libraries mean to you?

I thought I would try something really different today. I would love it if in the comments you guys would put a word or a few words that describe what libraries mean to you or words that remind you of libraries and what you can do there.

Once I have a few words I am going to use them to create a word cloud that will represent what libraries mean to us 🙂

I’ll get us started with a couple of words that represent what libraries mean (or are about) to me:

Community, adventures, fun, literacy, inspiring

Sound good?

Okay…. go 🙂

Librarian Rhapsody

I have a rather short post for you today, but that doesn’t mean it is lacking in quality.

Someone I know was involved in making the below film clip. It started as a way of showing what they had accomplished and morphed into something much, much more. This video was even shared by Brian May (lead guitarist for Queen) on his Twitter feed which sent the views into a frenzy.

Ladies and gentleman I give you… Librarian Rhapsody…

Shoalhaven Library service is not overly large, but it covers quite a large area and obviously their staff work incredibly hard and are extremely talented 🙂 If you want more information on them you can visit their webpage http://www.shoalhavenlibraries.com.au/

I hope you enjoy it and feel free to share on your social media pages 🙂

Books, Book Buying and Life in General

I have been on a little hiatus, between work, house stuff, baby stuff and being sick I have not been spending a lot of time on here. I have been keeping up with my reader though so do not fear I did not completely abandon you.

I went to a seminar last week and whilst on the train I was amazed to notice that I was the only person in the train carriage reading a print item. Halfway to the city another lady got on the train and I saw her pull out a book. I have no clue why I was so happy to find a comrade in print reading, but I was. I was reading My Booky Wook by Russell Brand where he talks about his time trying to cure his sex addiction, it is very well written, that man has a great way with words. Then I saw what she was reading and started giggling, she was reading 50 Shades of Grey hahaha could two books be more opposite?!

The seminar was at the State Library and was awesome, whilst there I visited the bookshop and low and behold because I was attending the seminar I got a discount – woohoo. Then I discovered the range of books they had redone the covers for and had to buy this, a) I wanted to read the book and b) It was too funny not too.

Then this week I went book buying, all day. Which sounds like so much fun until you realise that you are basically standing for a minimum of 8 hours and reading/looking at books that aren’t always that interesting and aren’t for you hahaha. Imagine my surprise when I discovered this gem:

That made my day, I laughed so much. Why does this exist? Actually, you know what? I am not going to question it, I am just going to be really happy about it.

Then I was looking for a general information book on STDs… don’t worry guys it was for the reference collection 🙂 Whilst looking I came across this:

Really not what I was looking for, but completely amusing non the less 🙂

So I asked for some help finding a more appropriate book and they sent me to the “Relationships” section. Well wasn’t that an interesting journey… apparently the kind of books that reside in this section include titles such as, “50 ways to spice up your sex life”, “How to add kink to your relationship” and “The encyclopedia of sex toys”. This last book was big, I couldn’t believe it could possibly all be about sex toys so me and the lady I was buying with opened it to a random page where I made the mistake of saying out loud, “What the hell is that? It looks like a coffee pot with a dildo on top!” closely followed by, “Is this so you can have your coffee and your orgasm too?” We both cracked up.

After forcing myself to attend book buying and some other training when I wasn’t feeling so hot I felt like I hit the wall, my head was smashing. It was like being on the edge of a migraine permanently, I went to see the doctor to discover I have infected sinuses… YAY! So now here I am writing to you from my sick bed hahaha apparently to find time to write I needed to get ill.

I have been making great use of my new toy Netflix (thanks Mr. T.) when not in bed I can currently be found nursing my sinuses on the couch and binge watching Arrow or the Vampire Diaries 🙂

Stories from the shelves – Strange book titles

Sometimes you see a book title and you do a double take, no, you think to yourself, it couldn’t have said that. So you look again, you look at the spine, you take the book off the shelf and check the front cover and maybe even the title page to ensure that you are not hallucinating. Yup, that book exists and even better… it is available for loan at your place of work.

Yesterday I came across one of these gems. I was innocently tidying the shelves when it’s title jumped out and slapped me in the eyeballs.

Uhh… What?!

I am not sure what disturbs me more; that my pee has a social life and apparently a lot of baggage it is bringing to our relationship or the fact that someone wrote an biography about its escapades.

What am I supposed to do when someone asks my pee for an autograph?

Umm just for the record (yes you can quote me), my pee does not get (or go) “everywhere”. Glad we cleared that up.

This discovery sent me down the rabbit hole of the web looking for the strangest and craziest book names. There are tonnes. Some are funny, some scary, some are disgusting. Here is a sample of what was found:

This was my personal favourite:

I don’t understand many things about this book. But my biggest questions are… why is the hospital outside? And how does the dog know Jack and Jill?

“What shat that?: A pocketguide to Poop Identity”
“Am I ready for chest hair?” – I didn’t realise people got a choice in this
“Eating children: Population control and the food crisis”
“Eating people is wrong” – apparently Hannibal never got given this tome

I’m concerned that this book needed to be created

“Everything I want to do is illegal”
“Zombie Racoons & Killer Bunnies” – They’re real ya’all… real as drop bears!
“The great Singapore penis panic: and the Future of American Mass Hysteria” – WTF? What does this title even mean? Is it about Singapore? Or America? Is this real life?
“Natural bust enlargement with total mind power: How to use the other 90% of your mind to increase the size of your breasts” – well that seems legit.

Then there is this jewel:

How and more importantly WHY is this a best selling book? I am not surprised it was recorded by the author… alone in a recording booth? Apparently he is into talking to himself so whatevs 🙂

 

Have you got any interesting book titles? Which one of the above is your favourite?

 

Friday was my day!

So Friday turned out to be a very good day for me for two reasons;

a) Our house evaluation passed and therefore our loan was approved which means that next year our house will start being built woohoo.

b) I was offered my first full time permanent position as a Librarian! Oh my gosh you guys this was amazing news!!! Job security in a position I love, in a company I love, within 30mins of my home? Hells to the yes!!! This is a seriously great dream! Librarian positions rarely come up in our area because people who get in those positions sit in them until well after they should retire. This year I was lucky enough to score a contract for 11 months to fill someone going on long service leave to use it all up before they retire. As of the 31st December I would have been unemployed again except that the gentleman who was Reference and Information Services Librarian at the Council Library decided to relocate to another area and he found a position there. I applied along with apparently a number of other people and interviewed with 10 others (okay so it’s no ‘The Librarian’ line, but usually places only interview 5).

Finally, finally after 2 weeks of nail biting and obsessing over what I had done wrong in the interview and totally losing hope I get a phone call offering me the job. ARE YOU KIDDING?! Hells yes I will take the job! Best Christmas present ever!!! I have been on one contract or the other for over 5 years now. I have been lucky in that I have never been out of work for long, but those times I am out of work I have never been able to enjoy the time off because I have been stressed to the eyeballs trying to find a new position. I can not even begin to describe for you the sweet relief I felt as the realisation came that this frantic annual part of my life was over.

I start in the New Year and all I have to do is pass 3 months probation and that is it guys. So, so happy right now!!! Everything’s shiny!