It’s been a soft re-entry back into the semester.  While our colleges have only short breaks from clinics or hospital duties, everyone slows down a little. Adding that everyone is past getting through last semester’s finals or, for my D2 students, through their first round of boards, and stress levels are much lower than they were.

As we’re not directly responsible for patient care, the library shuts down from just before Christmas until New Years Day. We have a couple of mandated you-will-take-vacation days, but as we know about those in advance, they are a little easier to schedule for and, I won’t lie, 11 days away was very refreshing. Last week I had some emails, some initial meetings, and a full day faculty retreat with Dentistry.

It was interesting to attend a faculty retreat that wasn’t a library focused one. I got to see some of the concerns that were foremost for my liaison faculty, find out about some potential changes that are in the works, and, we got to hear about resources for students from the counseling center. I hadn’t known that each college (the Library included) had a Counseling Center Liaison.

This week, while we’re still down student workers, before the new clinical librarian starts, and while my students and faculty are just getting started on filling up my email again, I’m trying to continue some of the introspective that I was capturing over break.  I’ve been throwing away a lot of stuff out of my cube (yes, I should have done that before break–I was tired); filing like a highly organized woman; and pruning the plants that are trying to take over.* I’m also trying to work on master lists so that perhaps I can start keeping things somewhere other than my incredibly cluttered brain.

My second year of tenure track is coming quickly to a close, we’re already midway into the second week of January, and there are lots of things to do. I’m shooting to have a more coherent status update for you next week, once the lists are a little better sorted.

*Does anyone local want a clipping from an extremely healthy spiderwort plant (aka a Wandering Jew)?