Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
A thunderstorm rolled through at 3AM this morning, continuous lightening illuminating the bedroom, thunder rattling the windows. I got up and sat in front of the window watching the storm until it stopped. And since I was up anyway, I stayed up to work on the RDF book. With this early start, I had such a productive day that I decided to take the afternoon off and go down to my favorite river spot, this time taking my camera and grabbing some pictures (at the end of the posting).
At the river a group of young men were sitting and chatting, enjoying the cool breeze and late afternoon sunshine. With them was a dog that took one look at me, and immediately tore across the grass to plant its front paws on me, much to the chagrin of his owner. The dog’s name was Cairo, and for some reason, this very big pup was mightily taken with yours truly. What a delight — for a moment, I was transported back to my favorite Dog beach in San Francisco. Except with dragonflies instead of pelicans.
After the river walk, I indulged myself in my favorite activity when I move to a new home — I went to the local library to get a library card.
My closest library is the Buder branch of the St. Louis public library system. As I filled out the simple application, the librarian explained that all of the libraries in the St. Louis area have reciprocal arrangements with each other, which means I can borrow books from any library within any town for over 50 miles around. When told this I felt a rush of gluttonous anticipation; I came close to rubbing my hands together in glee, accompanied by obscenely fat little chuckles.
A brief exploration and I found that the St. Louis library system is well organized, with one of the best computer systems I’ve used at a public library. My branch is four stories, with meeting rooms in the basement; fiction, new releases, and movies and music on the first floor; research on the second; and non-fiction and the childrens area on the 3rd. Also on the second floor, in the midst of a surprisingly extensive research area, were glassed in rooms containing computers that people can use to access the Internet in complete privacy.
(There was a woman in one of them. I wonder if she was weblogging?)
After my explorative foray, I hit the fiction shelves. I contained my greed (unlike one gentleman who had what looked like 30 music CDs in his arms), and only checked out three books in addition to putting in an order for two others to be sent from the main library. First consumable is Whitney Otto’s A Collection of Beauties at the Height of their Popularity.
I can almost taste it now.
