Eliot Lied: There is not enough time

I am having great difficulties in starting my enormous mound of work. When you have so much to do, the hardest part is usually getting started. I have to start though.

I think that I am now safe in making my announcement: I will be starting a new job in the next week and a half. I will still be at my current place of hire, but I will be working in the adult services department instead of the circulation department. I will be a "reference intern," so I will gain more reference experience and mostly work at the reference desk. I will miss some aspects of my current job, but I am getting excited about my new job. I will have opportunities to learn a lot and work on extra projects, which is exciting. I am also looking forward to working fewer hours. I am very grateful for my current job, but 25 hours a week is a lot.

I am really looking forward to the summer. I just want to be done with this semester. I have hit burnout, but I need to push through to the end. There will be a lot of changes this summer, but they will be good changes (I hope), and I am excited for the possibilities this summer holds. I will be starting my internship (for credit) with the puzzle collection and my new position at the library, as well as taking a 6 week long workshop on Electronic Archival Description for the first session of summer school. I also plan on working on my paper that I wrote for rare book librarianship on how objects fit into libraries. I received a good grad on it, but I really want to get it published, and I know it is not good enough yet. There are also other things I'd like to do, and what I really need to do is to just sit down sometime when I have a space of down time and plan out what I want to accomplish this summer. I am very bad at planning, and if I don't set goals for myself, I am in grave danger of wasting the summer. Or at least not accomplishing everything I would like to accomplish.

It won't be all work though. :-) I am going to the RBMS pre-conference, which won't be a vacation, but it will be fun to meet new people and see the city of Philadelphia. I am also going on a whitewater rafting trip in West Virginia with my church group the weekend of my birthday, and then meeting with my college friends for a reunion in July!

With so much planned for the summer, I am having a difficult time focusing on the present. And, as a dear friend says, "The best way to make God laugh is to tell Him your plans." I know that things can change, and they may not turn out as I envision them to, but I am looking forward, with hope, to the summer, and I pray that I will have the strength and diligence to accomplish my goals. (Topic for another day: how it is so easy to focus on temporal goals while excluding spiritual ones.)

I should stop procrastinating. Maybe I'll reward myself with video games with the neighbors tonight. :-)