Programming towards the end (hopefully) of a pandemic

So here we are, coming out of Omicron and trying very hard to believe that everything won’t be shut down by a new variant.

So what’s happening in my library-land? Well, not much. Our province, Ontario, is announcing major changes to restrictions starting ASAP, but we’ve just passed the program submission deadline for Spring, and almost everything that was submitted was virtual (my 2 outdoor programs for school-age kids and one in-person, in-library storytime are the only exceptions). We could still manage to change that, if we wanted, but then we’ve got the renovation still going on, and we really have no indoor program space, except the middle of the main part of the library (where storytime happens, when it happens), which is a fine place for a short and/or not-to-noisy program, but otherwise pretty useless, since it’s literally the middle of the library. We might be able to clear one very small room, but that will hold maybe three people if distancing is still a thing, and even the next biggest room (which will not be cleared soon) is only big enough for maybe five-seven people with distancing (that’s the nice thing about the middle of the library, it can hold about 15 small family groups with distancing).

So we’re kind of stuck. If everything goes back to normal-ish, we’re going to be left behind (we find ourselves strangely grateful to COVID-19, since we would have been in the same state with construction without the pandemic, and would have lost everyone to other libraries will we sat around empty), but we can’t be normal-ish because we literally have nowhere to go.

It’s going to be an interesting few months, for sure.