The joys of libraries, and other simple pleasures

I think I'm finally beginning to realize the full wonderfulness of libraries. I used to feel like an underachiever of sorts when it came to libraries and bookstores, compared with some of my nearest and dearest book-loving relations (you know who you are). But now I have an entire shelf of my bookcase devoted to library books, one side from the PSU library, the other from the public library. I have a sticky note on my computer desktop listing all the due-dates of the various lots of books (I currently have 6 lots of books checked out). Granted, a bunch of them are for my research paper and a bunch of them are things like visual French dictionaries, but I've also started gathering an arsenal of "pleasure reading" books, including a couple Peter Mayle novels and "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax." I'm finally getting comfortable just wandering around libraries and seeing what I find. It's pretty cool. Anyway, this is probably fairly boring to read about, but it's been sort of a revelation to me, so I thought I'd share my new appreciation. :)

It's been raining for most of the day, with a relatively sunny spell in the afternoon. I spent half an hour getting up every few minutes to check for a rainbow, because it was grey and rainy on one side of my apartment and clear and sunny on the other side. I finally found my rainbow in the grey skies, which was very nice.

Hugo and I have decided to have an adventure next month, and go to New York for Greg's birthday party. Hooray! I'm very excited. I've never been to New York, and never really felt the need to go "because it's New York" like some people do, but family and birthday parties are very good reasons to travel, so I'm going. And Hugo is coming with me, so he gets to meet more of my wonderful crazy boisterous happy family! (Can you tell I'm excited?) Now I just have to find plane tickets.