Decorating... At Work

I can't put up my holiday decorations yet because if I did, I'd have to turn right around and take them down to move them, so I was very happy that we decorated at the library this weekend.

Peanut Butter is on the tree; do you see him?

And after work yesterday, I went to an all you can eat sushi place with my friend Amy!

Peanut Butter and Amy got along famously

Fun weekend! The coming week will be hectic and stressful with all the packing, and wait until you hear about the weekend...

Reading and Writing

It's NaNoWriMo, so Peanut Butter has been watching me type... a lot. Here he is with my USB drive!

And I'm re-reading The Night Circus to review it for my book review blog next Friday, so he's been helping me out with that, too!

We've also been crafting, but the only photos I have of him doing that are with things I haven't sent out for swaps yet, so I can't post yet!

Not the most exciting stuff, but I promise there are some interesting things coming up!

VLA Conference and CNU visit

Today was an exciting day! I went to my first professional conference. It was the Virginia Library Association's annual conference, in Williamsburg. (That means we had to get up at 5 am to be sure to get there on time.) I didn't take photos there, but here is Peanut Butter with my conference badge:

He would fit inside!!! The green ribbon at the bottom says I'm a first-time attendee. I went to sessions and learned things, saw coworkers and the only two librarians I know outside my institution, and got some free swag from the vendors. (Best swag? It's a tie between the USB drive from Encyclopedia Virginia and the advance copy of a book that won't be published until next May. That may change, depending on how good the book turns out to be.)

We had lots of options of fun things to do in Williamsburg before we came home, but I was so exhausted after a long day of conferencing, we decided against going to Busch Gardens (we'll go for Christmas Town instead!) or doing a haunted walking tour of Colonial Williamsburg, but our alma mater, Christopher Newport University, was on the way home. So we stopped there and got dinner at our favorite on-campus place for old time's sake, and took some photos around campus.

This one is outside the Freeman Center, which is mostly gym and fitness center, but there is a theater in there now, and a juice/smoothie/sandwich place.

Me and Peanut Butter in front of "the fountain." The fountain has also been a planter (the powers that be got sick of students soaping it up and clogging the drains). But it's back to being a fountain, for now. The building in the background is the Trible Library.

We stop by campus whenever we can, because the place has been constantly under construction since I started there in 2004, so it's constantly changing and you never know what building will come down or go up before you get back there. On the bright side, it's a really beautiful campus now.

Bonus photo of the PB in front of the library:

More Library Fun

Benefit of getting to work a half hour before we open and before anyone else: I can take silly pictures!

I had a class to teach first thing when we opened,
so I showed Peanut Butter the projector station thingy.

Here he is, peeking through the stairs in the middle of the library.

Hanging out in the (never-used-anymore) microfilm

Peanut Butter wants to reshelve more books! Sorry, we shelved everything!

We have a good time in the dark, empty library where there's nobody to ask what on earth I'm doing taking funny photos of a little elephant dude.

Library & Dinner

Today I caught Peanut Butter hanging out in the section of the library that I get to order for and weed from: the Ms (music).

For dinner, Fiance and I took him to a new Indian-Asian restaurant that just opened a few weeks ago. It was so delicious and we all ate way too much.

Yum! Tomorrow we'll be going to the other library I work at (and also my non-library job).

Libraries, Old & New (Plus Gas Prices)

Today I got to work early enough to take a photo of Peanut Butter on my desk (which is woefully undecorated, even though I've had it for weeks).

On the way out this evening, we stopped at the construction site. Our school is building a new library. It's an interesting thing: the first floor will be a city public library, and the second floor is us (the community college library). It should be finished next spring, so Peanut Butter probably won't get to see the inside before he goes back home. But here he is with the outside:

On a fairly less interesting note, we stopped and got some gas, and I got the idea to take a photo of PB with the price at the pump, since it varies so widely across the country. (I felt a little clever for that idea.)

So it's $3.49 for now. (That's one of the lowest I could find on my regular route through the city. But they're all pretty close.)

We also went out with some friends but I forgot to take pictures all night (booo).