Day 16: Working, working all the live long day...

Today was a day of calm, relaxing work. I also caved and got myself a deviantART profile where I'm going to catalogue my attempt to teach myself to draw. Tangential but fun!

Work today brought up a very important (to University library users) PSA that has to happen, so I offer it in lieu of the usual lesson.

Course Reserves PSA: A lot of schools allow professors to pull books vital to their classes from normal circulation, and offer them instead as reserves, where you can only borrow them for 2-3 hours at a time. This way, all the students have access to the text books without shelling out the huge amount of money to buy them. Overdue fines for course reserves are BY THE MINUTE. This is something people don't seem to understand. If you are told it is due at 3:30PM, but keep it overnight and return it at 10AM, that is an entire night of minutes you are paying (5cents per minute) for.

So please, for your own pocketbook's sake, return reserve books early when at all possible. And if you return them late, don't take it out on the poor library workers who are merely the bearers of bad news, and have probably spent the entire evening previous apologizing to all your classmates who tried to borrow the book but couldn't because you kept it.

(Also, reserves are different from holds. Please be clear.)

Special Weekend Edition!: Fibrefest, bran not included

Ottawa is a weird and wonderful place, and since my trip here was school inspired, I felt that it warranted a special weekend post!

In Ottawa, radio stations have contests to win babies, and they have a little thing called Fibrefest. Fibrefest is all about fibers and the textile arts. And librarians love their knitting, so doubly appropriate!

Special Weekend Lesson: Button collecting is apparently a huge and serious hobby in southern Ontario. People came all the way from St. Catherine's and even lovely ol' Guelph just for Button Mania.

Given my penchant for accumulating buttons, this may just be a great new hobby for me... I found some great buttons in the poke box. Including a gorgeous button with the McGill crest on it! I'll post a picture of that one here when I can.

EDIT: I was just joking about the winning a baby thing because I saw some pretty ridiculous ads, but it turns out, the ads were 100% serious and you can currently actually win a baby for real on the radio in Ottawa... There's another lesson in this: never assume the ridiculous is a joke, sometimes it actually is disturbingly real.