Mixed feelings!

I'm beginning to experience the sadness of saying goodbye! What a difficult thing to do...

I established special relationships and made wonderful friends and even though I'm looking forward to finally go home, I also don't want to say goodbye. To a large extend the situation here has become my ideal world. Just taking today as an example:

GIS - the specialist who is from Mexico, tells me how she enjoys working in America because it's so easy to obtain information from government: telephone messages get followed up and returned, government officials are willing and eager to share information and keen to deliver service.

EndNote - a specialist arrived at my office, promptly, and gave me a one hour quick instruction course on the use of EndNote (I'm familiar with RefWorks, wanted to compare) and answers all my questions knowledgeable and efficiently.

Diversity - I attended a lunch hour workshop on 'cultural filtering', and what fun it was, being able to laugh at ourselves and to share! Such a workshop takes place once a month.

Research Interviews - three researchers shared their research experiences with me in three different sessions today: i A tenure track researcher who applied for the position because he wanted to do research; ii a well established bibliographer, author and publisher of extensive bibliographic volumes of science fiction, covering science fiction over a one hundred+ year period; iii another well established author of several history books on terrorism and extremism, including several encyclopedias.

Yesterday I spoke to another researcher and author-librarian who commented: How do you prevent burnout in your Librarian-job? Write another book or publish another article, she says...

Positive attitude, I would say!