Showing posts with label sleep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sleep. Show all posts

Friday, April 13, 2012

Day 100: Officially Half A Librarian!

Happy Friday the 13th! And happy Day 100 and End of Year 1 as well! I'm half way there!

As a grand summary lesson for my 100th numbered day in Library School, let me share the most overarching lesson I've taken away from this year.

Lesson 100: You can do anything. Anything at all. You just have to ignore all doubts about whether you can, and just go go go.

This week has been quite the interesting experience, and very much proving the lesson, so let me spell it out.

Our final research proposal was due Tuesday. Luckily someone in my group was in Montreal and willing to hand it in because I was still in Ontario, just preparing to head back to Montreal. I was taking the midnight bus that night, so I did some shopping in Toronto (five-fingers shoes and fancy Sephora hair-ties) and met up with my friend Elissa for dinner (lobster grilled cheese and a raspberry mojito) before catching the bus.

After a fitful sleep full of interruptions, I was finally back in Montreal, and went home to catch some ZZZs before waking up (at 11) to go to work and complete the last of my final assignments.

On Thursday, our project management final and our collection development final were both due, four hours apart.

I did not sleep Wednesday night. A bottle of NOS kept me company while I stayed up to finish my collection development paper. Although at one point the bottle of NOS convinced me that rather than continue the futile quest to get WebCT to cooperate and allow me to download the PowerPoints I needed, what I really needed to do was read some fan fiction instead.

Despite the distractions borne of no sleep and too much caffeine, I finished the collection development paper and handed it in just under the wire thanks to Aimee being awesome and printing it off for me while I ran to SIS. Then we put the finishing touches on our project management paper, handed it in, and got some celebratory lunch as a group.

Then I had my first training shift in my new job at the Neuro-Patient Resource Centre... on ~6hrs sleep in the past 48-72hrs. Needless to say that afterwards I went straight home and got a proper night's sleep.

Today, I had another training shift at the Neuro followed immediately by a regular shift at the Life Sci. My new boss told me that she was very impressed with how high-functioning I was yesterday on less than no sleep. I still got it! ^.^

And to mark the official end of the semester, we had a party with wine and tasty food, mingling, and superlatives! There were many categories to be won; best dressed, info-retrieval wizard, most likely to be the first to become library director, most stereotypical, most likely to become a prof...

In a three-way tie, I won Most Stereotypical Librarian.

... Maybe I shouldn't buy those cateye frames I've been eyeing... It might cause a singularity of librarianship...

Librarian blackhole; Nothing can escape its gravity. Cats, knitting and baking supplies are pulled in with no chance of release. Knowledge is devoured and it is not known whether it escapes again in some form, but scientists presume that it must, due to the principle of the conservation of mass...

Full results of the vote as compiled by Alex Amar on the Library School facebook group are copypastad for your viewing pleasure here.


Thursday, October 27, 2011

Day 36: Exhaustion

I set a ridiculous number of alarms to make sure I wake up in the morning. I set two on my iPad, 3 on my computer, and at least 2 on my cellphone, all to make sure that when the time comes that I wanted to wake up at the night before, I have no choice but to wake up.

The different alarms coming from different sources all sound at different times and must be found and shut off separately. That makes one so awake, there's no sleeping past your alarm. And that is what I count on.

Lesson 36: Sometimes, no matter how many alarms you set, exhaustion will win out and you will sleep through every one of them without even realizing it.

After the past three days of stress and minimal, low-quality sleep, that is just what happened to me this morning.

So now, I'll study the slides from the class I missed until I have to go to work.

But for the first time this week, I'm starting to feel human again.