Vermont is so beautiful I can hardly believe I’m allowed to live here! Even though I started work today, I still feel like I’m on vacation, and I’ll probably feel that way until we move into our house on Friday. Our first house. It’s too many changes to process all at once.

Today is also Adam’s and my first wedding anniversary. Exactly one year ago we were standing on top of a mountain in Rutherford, California promising to spend the rest of our lives together. I am married to the most amazing man who supports me in everything I do. I can’t imagine my life without him.

My first day of work went well. I’ve gotten out of the habit of doing the 8-hour workday thing, so it really tired me out, but unlike most first days of work, I wasn’t bored. I’m so full of enthusiasm for this job that I wanted to take in everything I could learn. My work laptop is not here yet and my office is not quite ready, but there’s a lot of human resources and meet-and-greet stuff to do so it probably won’t be a big deal. My colleagues are really great people — very friendly and open to learning new things. I think they will be supportive of my ideas for improving services to distance learners. Not that I don’t expect to encounter problems. In my position, the things I want to do depend not only on the approval of the library, but of IT and the folks who run the distance learning programs. Sometimes it will also depend on the affected academic departments too. And trying to get all of these players to communicate, agree that changes are needed and what those changes need to be is an ambitious goal. But that’s my job. Already, after my first day, I’m seeing how little my library school education prepared me for what I’m going to need to do and how valuable my social work background is. So much of my job is going to be about developing relationships, building bridges between different groups, understanding the needs of the different stakeholders, and being persuasive. Obviously my library training and technological knowledge are useful too, but I won’t be using them as much if I can’t sell my ideas.

I’d love to write more, and I plan to share what I learned from the survey last week, but I’ve got to get some sleep. All these “firsts” are wearing me out (in a good way).