Happy Thursday, dear readers! I hope you are having a lovely week and have a wonderful weekend planned. I feel like I’m still recovering from ALA Annual, which was wonderful and exhausting. (Thanks to everyone who stopped by my poster presentation and had a chat. It was a lot of fun!). Today, I just want to share a few thoughts and links before I head off into the 3-day weekend. Summer is a great time for reflection and hopefully some of this post will be useful to you.

Can you believe half the year has gone by already? I can’t. Time is just going too fast, even when I’m bored! I’m going to take some time this weekend to check in with the progress I’ve made this year and what I still want to do with the coming 6 months of the year. Because as we all know, time can just get away from us whether we’re at work or at home. So I think this article was very timely and had some good advice on how to prioritize your life before your manager does it for you. No one (or at least very few) wants to be all work and absolutely no time for anything else. So take some time to think about what you have control over and how you can make your job work for you. It’s worth it.

On the flip side, I know that I’m often drained mentally after work and feel like curling up with a cup of tea and not doing much else the rest of the evening. But I know I should work on my projects and the things that I love to do outside of work, even if it can be hard. So I liked this idea to set aside 20 minutes for personal projects to avoid crashing as written about on Lifehacker. It’s kind of a different take on having an after-work ritual to separate work from home. I need to implement this.

And, of course, we can’t have a post without a little bit of fun. At ALA, I was reminded how many librarians are also cat lovers so thought I’d share this post from The Well-Appointed Desk, Fashionable Friday: Feline Fur-vor. Adorable, especially the copy cat mug.

Also, 3D printing is both interesting and confusing to me, but I can totally get behind this use of a 3D printer: duck waddles and swims with 3D-printed foot. Adorable!

I hope you have a lovely day and weekend filled with all good things. Allons-y!