changes

    A friend had a baby this morning. A girl. Although I knew she was pregnant and due in early April, it came as a surprise. She has two sons from a previous marriage, but her husband hadn't had any children, so they were very happy when she found out she was going to have a baby. And now there are five. I was startled by the tears in my eyes as I read the email message: good news, for the first time in a while.
    T.O.'s under the weather. Fluffy's had a cold for more than a week, although she seems to feel much better now than she has lately. I wrenched my back last Thursday night, so I spent the majority of the weekend sitting in the one comfortable position that I could find (pushed up on my elbows a bit, on the Ikea chair) reading. I raced through five books in four days. Not sure I got very much out of four of them. Mind in other places and on other things.
    The weather has been more spring-like, more consistently. Good thing and not-so-good, when it comes to running around outside in the rain. But the flowers are happy about it, and the flowers (tulips and narcissus, I think) make everything look cleaner and alive again. The grass in the yards on my route to work looks almost blue, it's so green - as if it's been spray-painted overnight. The air even smells different. Springy.
    I haven't been back to the law library since that first day. Good intentions, but I'm not sure what to do with them. I don't know if the addition of six extra boxes is going to "blow the deal", or at least change things so significantly that something else will need to be done and so my efforts will be for naught anyway. Besides, I have a million things to do in my office, so there's no desire to leave the building and cross the street to find more to do. Terrible attitude, I know. Especially since I'll be facing the judge (so to speak) about it sooner rather than later. Yargh. Why did I ever agree to do this? I should've pawned it off on the Reference Staff! It is, or should be, under their umbrella of duties anyway.
    So while I've been deliberately not going over there, I've instead: weeded adult nonfiction (I made it all the way to 920 today!); sorted donations; compiled orders for the end of the fiscal year (including one yesterday for $102.32 in romance novels - sweet!); selected books from journals; processed (until the cows come home, leave, and come home again); repaired videos; withdrawn; filed cards; cleaned; sorted files and filed files; submitted an amendment of my LSTA grant budget; and oh, yeah, cataloged a little bit, too. Not so much of that last one, though.
    The Chief Clown returns tomorrow from two and a half weeks (?) in Hawaii. I'm not looking forward to the results of her conversations with the staff. She has a hard time understanding that for most of us, two and a half weeks in Hawaii is a once in a lifetime vacation opportunity. For her, it's a once a year thing. She just doesn't see that there's both jealousy and a sense of unreality to our perceptions. It's not that each person begrudges her a vacation, but when people are making around $7/hr., it's hard to react positively to postcards about surf lessons in March. I hope that she had a good time, and that for some reason she wants to keep her happy memories to herself.
    I've "spent up" my second 15-minute break. (That's how I'm using my hour lunch this week. Thirty minutes for lunch and two 15-minute breaks to completely avoid work. So far, so good.) Time to process used juvenile video donations.