Vacation time

I get to go on a vacation this Friday. I'll be in Florida for one whole week. No library, no cold weather. Good times ahead. There's only one problem about going on vacation--all the stuff you have to do beforehand.

Now I'm not talking about the packing I have to do at home. That's just normal, going-on-vacation stuff. I'm talking about work stuff. I'm close to the point where I think I should skip the whole stupid vacation just to cut down on the number of emails and instructions I have to write.

I know I shouldn't be whining. I mean, I get a whole lovely week off in a warm, hopefully sunny place. But this vacation comes at a kind of bad time. My department has 3 new practicum students, one of whom will start while I'm off. I'm the one who coordinates the training of these students, so that means I need to make sure there's a schedule of who's training whom when and have a backup person to revise the original schedule when staff members call in sick. I'm also supposed to do the payroll on Monday, so I need to send out the reminder "turn-in-your-time-sheet" email as well as get the master check off list ready and hand off the old schedules for checking. Then there are the weeded books that need to be looked at for possible reordering and the Hunger Games readalike booklist that needs to be finished (but I don't think it will be) and the proposal I need to prepare in order to justify a cool new eBook idea I had and the updating I really should do for the library's Facebook accounts and website and ...

You get the picture. There's a lot to do. Basically, I need a vacation from getting ready to take my vacation. And don't even get me started on what I'll be greeted with when I come back. But, like Scarlet, I don't want to go crazy, so I'll think about that tomorrow.

No new blog post next week because I will be walking on a beach somewhere, not worrying about things in Champaign. I'll check back in, tanned and relaxed, Feb. 8.