I took a quick picture yesterday of the research library at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where I’m currently volunteering.
My supervisor made a nice little reading room area at the front of the library, but there are still tons of books in boxes like the ones in the back corner of the picture…
Japanese lesson for the day: お疲れ様でした (otsukare sama deshita)
It means “thanks for your hard work,” or literally something along the lines of “you must be tired” (I’m not entirely making that last one up–“tired” is 疲れた or tsukareta).
It’s what Japanese people say to each other at the end of the work day, or when they complete a big project. I loved saying this at the end of the day when I worked in Japan (and when I worked for a Japanese company in the States). It was so nice to have that acknowledgement of the work you did that day. For me, it was a nice separation of work and home, but I’m sure that wasn’t the case for most of my Japanese coworkers.
Still, this is how I feel right now. I’m in the last 15 minutes or so of my first semester into my MLIS (although I was pretty much done with my last assignment by the end of the weekend), and I’ve been telling myself otsukare at the end of every big project I’ve done so far. I still have work, and freelance work, and I have stuff scheduled in for pretty much every day of my break between semesters, but I am definitely ready for a break from school. I may even get some reading done! 😀
A quick note for A to Z: Thanks for all of your comments and congrats on the reflections post! I’m already preparing for next year!
I know it’s a bit early, but I’m in the middle of finishing up my final paper for one class and a final project for another, so I know I”ll forget about adding it to the linky list if I don’t do it now…
I had a great time with A to Z, and I will definitely be returning next year. I was able to schedule all of my posts for all of them, so I finished a few days early towards the end. It was my first time using scheduled posts, but I think I will definitely be using them again in the future. I liked choosing the time they would be published (you can’t tell from the posts themselves, but I scheduled it so that on April 1, it posted at 12:01, April 2 at 12:02 and so on).
I tried really hard to visit at least five blogs every day towards the beginning of the challenge, but I had a hard time finding five blogs to comment on every day. About halfway through, though, school kicked in, and I started running out of buffer, so I switched my focus to writing the posts instead of visiting blogs. I was happy that there were daily visitors to my blog, since I had just started it in January and didn’t have a chance to post many entries yet. My main goal for doing this challenge was to get a good number of reviews up on the site so that I could fill out some of the links for my booklists (which I will be doing as I finish up finals).
Next year, since I’ll have more advanced notice, I hope to schedule all my posts ahead of time so I can focus on visiting blogs throughout the month. I haven’t decided what to blog on yet, but it will definitely be something book-related. Thanks for a great April, A to Z!
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