So what kind of management skills do you regularly rely on?

I mean, there's a lot.

So I've been working in libraries over 20 years.

So I would say I haven't always been good at all of these things.

A lot of them are things I've had to really learn over time.

Some of them are things we, maybe the skills have come more naturally to me, but some of them are definitely things I've had to learn the hard way.

So I really appreciate it.

So what do you think are two or three main issues in libraries today?

... for our listeners just take us back to that time? What, what, what was that actually like on a day-to-day basis for you?

Oh, it was, it was Groundhog Day.

I was dragging myself through every day, and this was not the kind of fatigue where, you know, I need a nap and I'll feel a bit better.

This was the kind of full body fatigue, body and brain, and it's the kind of fatigue where you drop something on the ground, and you have a good long, hard think about how important that thing is before you go all the way down there and all the way back up to pick that thing up.

And, um, well, there was a m- a moment when my son asked me to jump like a kangaroo with him, and I just said, "Buddy, can I be a, a horse? Because there's absolutely no way I can get two feet off the ground at the same time." So, you know, it was that level of fatigue, and I, I was miserable.

I remember one day my husband went fishing on a weekend, and I just cried because it was like the weekend is the same as all the weekdays.

And when he got home from fishing, I gave him a hug, and he smelt like a combination of fish and sunscreen, and I said to him, "You smell like fun," and I just burst into tears.

[laughs]

She says her politics used to lean progressive until she and her family relocated from Los Angeles to Montana, where she says she saw a lot of white people struggling.

What I noticed when I came to Montana is that, in the era of Trump and in the era of this depolarization, there was a real alienation, a real hostility towards people who are white, people who are conservative, people who weren't, quote-unquote, uh, "disenfranchised."

She acknowledges racial disparities exist, but she doesn't think discrimination is the reason why not everybody turns out to be successful and wealthy.

Not everyone can be a Bill Gates.

Not everyone can be a Michelle Obama.

And I think it's important that we just accept that and stop trying to assume that simply because we see disparities, there's definitely, um, an inherent inequity.