An update.

Howdy.
I hadn't posted in a while so I thought I would take the time to do so while I was waiting to stop feeling nasty (I always do in the morning. It's weird.)

I almost have all the save-the-date cards finished for our side of the family. Honestly I was hoping to have them done last week, but it just didn't work out that way. Then I am taking the leftovers (more than half) to Brandon's for his family to send off to whomever they wish.

We started our first week of marriage classes at church this past Sunday. It was very quiet. It looks like things will be ok. There are maybe eight or nine other couples in the class, and oddly enough, one couple is comprised of library employees (one of whom used to work at my branch- I got his job when he left!) We got a binder with worksheets to do for "homework" and a copy of a book called Marriage God's Way. The chapter titles of this book are the titles of each week's classes. I actually bought the book at Half Price Books a while back on a whim- it was on the clearance shelf for $1. Not bad. Anyway, we will see how next week goes, since the guy who normally teaches the class wasn't there this past week and someone filled in for him.

Brandon checked out the website for a company that offered him an internship thing during the school year, and applied for two of their open positions. Apparently they called him yesterday but he didn't answer because he was at work. When they offered him the internship last fall, I was under the impression that this was actuarial work, but apparently I was mistaken. It's just office work. But if it's full time, it's still better than what he has now, and it's still a start. He's going to call them back today. Hopefully he will get some good news. We need a little more money, since we need to start looking at apartments soon!

I didn't do a post about it, but my mom did. Our city was hit by flash floods last Tuesday and the downtown area got most of the damage- particularly the Main branch of the library. The damage estimate is now up to $5 million. We have lost an estimated 50,00 books (the processing center for new books was underwater, as was the sorting area- Main is the central hub for books passing between branches. Everything is sorted out there, then sent on to where it belongs, or wherever someone has something reserved. In addition, all the branches sent down all their graphic novels the week before in preparation for an Anime convention, and those were all lost.) All three Bookmobiles were destroyed, as was a brand new work truck, and more than 200 computers (many of which were brand new and awaiting delivery to the new branch we are opening, and extras for when ours break down.) The structural damage is pretty bad, too. The heating and air conditioning units were ruined, as was this chiller thing which prevents mold (which as I'm sure you can imagine, isn't very good for books.) The Main branch is one of the historic Carnegie libraries, and it's been around for more than a century. Now some of the walls are starting to buckle. But probably the biggest inconvenience is the loss of our computer systems. All the servers were housed at Main. They were under at least four feet of water when we heard from Computer Services early Tuesday morning. This means that our common hard drive is lost, we don't know the state of our entire card catalog (literally millions of items, housed in sixteen branches throughout the city) and none of the branches is able to log onto either the library program, or the patron program which allows people to come in and use our computers. What does this mean? Well, hardly anyone is coming into the library, for one thing, and for another, we are only able to check out by typing the patrons' library card numbers and the barcodes from the back of their items into Microsoft Word. We can't print their ticket with their due dates on it. We can't place anything on hold. We can't take money for late fees, and we can't check anything in. What are we doing with the items people are turning in, you ask? Putting them in boxes. Our workroom in the back of our library has two individual offices: one for the manager, one for the full-time reference librarian and the full-time clerk to share. Neither rooms are very big. My manager's office is full of about forty cardboard boxes from the stuff people returned on Tuesday. The other office is full of about thirty five boxes of items from Wednesday. After that, we moved on to filling up the meeting room. I didn't work on Thursday or Friday, and when I came in on Saturday, I discovered we were almost out of boxes- someone had gone down to the liquor store in the shopping center and got their extras. So we are storing books in boxes for rum and tequila and who knows what else. We don't know when the computers will be back up- when they are, it will be crazy. We will have to type into the system everything that people returned, and everything people checked out. We will have to find a place for all the items that belong to our branch, and we will have to send off the items that are going back to other branches. I don't know how long it will take for them to pick them up, though, because the sorting area at main is still heavily damaged, and we lost a work truck. Then when our stuff comes back, we will have to put it all away- after checking it in. When things are backed up at Main, we might get a big delivery of items- 8-12 bins of stuff coming back to us, plus items people have reserved (the Tuesday of the flood, we got 11 bins of those). I can only imagine what it will look like when we get a week's plus worth of delivery. Thankfully we will have two employees from Main helping us out through the rest of the month, as they can't go back to their library right now. Though at the moment, there isn't a whole lot for them to do.
In short, things are bad. Things MIGHT be back to normal by the end of 2009 or early 2010. And by normal, I include some people sifting through all the ruined books (many of which are unrecognizable), finding out to which branches they belonged, getting them out of the system, and ordering replacements. It's going to be horrible work. And that's all I have to say on the matter right now.