January 18, 2001
Today Keith made my lunch for me, and when I got to work and opened it, there alongside my turkey sandwich and yogurt and carrot sticks was a little candy heart that said "Forever". It just about made my day.
Which was good, because my day has otherwise been pretty much awful. I've felt achy and fatigued ever since I woke up, and two cups of echinacea tea have not done much to help. (They were pretty yummy, though.) Also, I haven't had enough to do at work today so I've been furtively switching back and forth between telnet windows and browser windows and Microsoft Word windows. I hate doing this. It makes me feel like a criminal. But what am I supposed to do, sit here and stare at a blank screen? I guess I could just go home. Or request a crappy-ass make-work job to do in the meantime. But I don't feel good, and I hate crappy-ass make-work jobs even when I'm feeling fine. Which I'm not.
One good thing that happened this week was that I finally returned the library books that were checked out in October. We checked these books out and promptly forgot about them. One of them was in the trunk of the car for awhile; another one was jammed underneath my desk. At some point, Keith went and rounded them all up and put them in one place, but it didn't really motivate us to actually take them back. And so they sat, balefully glaring at us from a dark corner of the living room.
Overdue library books are one of those things that are harder to take care of the longer you let them go. If they're just a week overdue, that's not a big problem. Just take them back, pay your 50 cents in fines, and go on with your business. But when they're a month and a half overdue, you feel obligated to somehow explain yourself, make up an excuse, anything so that you don't feel like the librarian is thinking to herself, "My God, what a miserable excuse for a human being. 45 days overdue. Get out of my library, you scum."
And so the books sat. And sat and sat and sat. They sat until this week, when finally I realized that it's simply impractical to go buy all the books I want to read, if I want to buy a new computer anytime this year. So I stuffed them all into my backpack and grimly trudged the block and a half to the library. I took a deep breath, mounted the steps...and discovered that the library was closed, due to Martin Luther King Day.
(A brief sidenote here: I worked on Martin Luther King Day. So did everyone else in Redmond, WA that I know of. Nobody even mentioned it. It was like it never happened. If I were a black person working in Redmond -- not that there are, in fact, any black people working in Redmond -- I'd be a little pissed off.)
So the next day, somewhat anticlimactically, I headed off to the library again, fully expecting to have to pay some astronomical three-digit fine. But the very nice librarian explained that there's a maximum $4 overdue charge on books, and so I only owed them $44.00.
Phew. I checked out Martin Gardner's new book and two gardening books in celebration.
And now it's time for me to go brew some more echinacea.