Wherein I Add To My Already Overlarge Collection Of Books

WHAT KIND OF LIBRARY CLOSES AT 5 P.M.??!

I'm just a little put-out here. Just a smidgen. I pull into the parking garage and get my ticket and start going through the gate when I catch the sign: C. Burr Artz Public Library Closed at 5 on Fridays. So, I was trapped in a parking garage and unable to complete the mission I had set out on. I swung around (sort of -- "swinging around" is hard in a Suburban) and headed out, and gave the lady in the booth my ticket and, grudgingly, a dollar. A dollar for nothin'. I am too poor to be distributing dollar bills to the City. The good thing is, the nice lady handed back my dollar, probably because I had only been in the place for two minutes.

Well, but I still needed something to read. Trust me, after finishing A Little Princess last night and poring over my mostly-empty bookshelves for SOMETHING that appealed to me (even the best book gets old if you've JUST READ IT for the fourteenth time, and yes, I am serious) and finding nothing. NOTHING. What am I supposed to do with myself during these interminable hours of sleeplessness, if not read?? Because the internet certainly gets boring after hours and hours of sitting on a hard chair with no one interesting to talk to because they've all gone to bed and your brain not really capable of producing witticisms anyway because you're absolutely spent but cannot sleep (and I don't want to hear a single word about this, Parents, we all have our periods of insomnia), and you start to realize how many truly, truly useless trash is out there, and I just need someone to give me some sort of project or something I can work on, okay? I need focus. Purpose. Organized, coherent writing.

I digress.

I went to the library but had been thwarted by some vile thing, so I headed to a used bookstore instead. Shouldn't be too expensive, right? Except they didn't have the book I wanted. So it was off to Border's where I found two books I wanted, but not a third. The third would be coming in three days, could I please call Border's back and have them reserve me a copy? the nice man at Customer Service asked me. Um, no. I do not wait to read things, and I especially do not make phone calls to make reservations to read things. I read things NOW. So I went to another bookstore. I walked in with the purpose of snatching the book I wanted and leaving, except they were having a sale, and the other books I had just purchased at Border's were included in this sale, along with the book I wanted, and it was too perfect, so I got them all at a low, low cost and came home happy.

Apparently, the devil wears Prada. Who knew?