Thing 4.. I think

I am on holiday from work. So far this has involved:

- visiting lovely university friends in Sheffield
- quite a bit of sleeping in, watching daytime TV and eating cheese
- spending a tenner in Amnesty bookshop on some wonderful-looking books
- discovering that I actually love swimming, but then being sad that I'm not really meant to do it with contact lenses in
- doing an awful lot of very boring admin (hello BT, HMRC, Barclays etc)
- trying to organise my RSS feedreader

See! My musings are relevant to the topic. So far I have organised folders into:

- Culture
- Digital
- Museums
- Libraries
- Lifestyle
- People
- Politics
- Self-improvement
- Funny

Digital is what I call things that aren't specifically museums/libraries but are still relevant to areas I work, especially freelance projects I sometimes do. One of these may be coming up, so I am trying to keep up with developments here.

I like RSS a lot. It is much better than the alternative of horribly-organised bookmarks (which is where I am currently transferring things from), and it makes reading blogs feel like work (which, of course, it is). I do get frustrated with blogs that aren't very RSS-friendly and which force you to 'Open in browser' to actually see the content.

Twitter

I love Twitter. I really love Twitter an awful lot, and get rather annoyed by people who are dismissive of it, because it is so brilliant and useful for keeping up with what is going on in the world, as well as being a good distraction on my horribly long commute (except for in the signal blackspots of rural Northumberland). I follow a wide range of folk, from funny famous people (mainly columnists) to museum and library geeks (I include myself in this) and a few people I actually know.

I am yet to try Pushnote, but it doesn't seem immediately useful to me from reading about it. I wil endeavour to try though.

Today was a good day at work

When I'm not working as Education Assistant, I'm also a Visitor Assistant at weekends. Today was awesome because:

- when I was working at the outside visitor entrance I got to hang out with a teenage red squirrel and some birds
- there was an amazing mother, who was doing the best job ever of showing her kids around. She was asking them really interesting questions, getting them to link their experiences to the exhibits, sharing family history, being really encouraging of their colouring in. But she wasn't some super-pushy yummy mumm, she was just a lovely ordinary mum on a day out with her family.
- I was on the front desk being smiley and lovely (as I always am!) and on the way out, one man thanked me for my help in describing where everything was in the museum, and said he wished he knew my name so he could have written it on his very positive comment form. Then he left. Then he came back in and asked my name so he could write another comment.
- it was beautifuly sunny and everyone was really happy and there were lots of adorable families.

And now it's time for a glass of wine, some pizza and Sister Act.