How I Spent My First Furlough Day

The library I work for, in the face of budget cuts from the state, has implemented rolling furlough days, which means that half of the branches in the system are closed one Thursday, and the other half are closed on the next Thursday, for ten weeks through November. That means that everybody who works in the system gets five unpaid Thursdays off. This is not an ideal situation, and it will put a bit of strain on most people's finances, but while the time off is not paid, it is still time off, and I intend to make the most of this situation. The branch I work at had our first furlough day last week, and the week since has been crazy busy. This is Banned Books Week, so preparing for that, dealing with the additional workload after the day off, and dealing with Banned Books Week, training and meetings this week have kept me pretty busy at work and at home. In any case, here now is a partial list of things that I did on my first furlough day:

-Stayed up until four o'clock in the morning the night before, practicing the keyboard.
-Slept until around eleven o'clock, which was later than I'd wanted to get up, but, you know, I'd been up until four AM.
-Did several loads of laundry.
-Removed a stain from a suit jacket.
-Did a great deal of cleaning.
-Made rice milk.
-Started a batch of sauerkraut.
-Made soup.
-Shot video for that week's episode of Miscellanea as well as some for a future episode.
-Watched the pilot episode of Freaks and Geeks, the complete boxed set of which I got for my birthday a few years ago and hadn't gotten around to watching yet. I'm enjoying it.
-Practiced the keyboard.

There were a few things I didn't get around to, like making bread, but sometimes overplanning your day can lead to being pretty productive. I got a lot of things done. Next week I might take more time to relax on my furlough day. I haven't been taking the time to read very many books lately, and I'd like to make some significant progress on my TBR list.

Two Kinds of Pretzel, Two Videos

I was going to make a post about each video I made as I uploaded them, but hey, I haven't made a post on this blog in over a month! I've got some catching up to do. I've made seven episodes at this point, and I'd like to have a record of the production of my projects to refer back to, so I'm going to gradually post about the episodes I've made in the meantime. These posts might only be interesting to me, but I'm going to post them anyway, so there!

This episode was the first, and the only so far, to be split into two parts. I had wanted to show the versatility of baked goods such as soft pretzels by making two different kinds, one savory, the other sweet. YouTube places a ten minute limit on user-uploaded videos. During the editing process, after I'd shot everything but before I'd done the voiceovers, I realized that this episode was going to surpass that limit by several minutes. There wasn't enough excess footage to make up the difference by making cuts, so I decided to make it a two-parter and insert an intermission as a transition from one to the other. Coincidentally, I'd already downloaded several public domain drive-thru theater intermission reels from archive.org, so I cut the beginning and end off of one and used that.



I finished the first part, then exported and uploaded it before I finished the second part.



It's not the most work I've ever done on a video, even in such a short amount of time, but I think it's been the most labor-intensive episode of Miscellanea I've made so far, and I felt justified in taking the next week off from the series, as I'd made the equivalent of two episodes in one weekend. This is the only episode I've put a teaser at the end of so far, but I'd like to do that more often.

Jeez, this post is wordy.