@Q%$@#$

So our new library cards were available yesterday at the library for a short while. But instead of calling me, and me picking them up two minutes later, they mailed them to me. We live six small-town blocks away from the @#$!@ library, and they mail them to me. We get mail from Champaign the day after it's mailed, but not from the local library - it spends a day being sent to Champaign for sorting or what the #%^$ ever, then spends another day coming back here for delivery. The cards weren't in the mail today, so now my first chance to check stuff out from the Champaign library will next Wednesday rather than today. *%$%#.

That's a reputation

So I was over at stackoverflow, where my "reputation" is rated at 146, answering an emacs question, but I wasn't logged in. It took my a few minutes to find my blasted OpenID login info, and by the time I finally logged in to answer the guy's question, Charlie Martin had already answered. His stackoverflow reputation is 10.6k, and his answer is correct.

My library list

Here's what I'll be looking for Wednesday, though I won't check them all out at once like I used to do back in my mid-70s bookmobile days, like Sarah did Saturday; now I'll settle for one or two at a time that I'll have a reasonable chance to finish.

• Fred Kaplan
  • Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
• Mary J. Carruthers
  • The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
  • The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200
• Frances A. Yates
  • The Art of Memory
• Elizabeth George
  • Careless in Red
• Dorothy Sayers - Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries
  • Whose Body?
  • Clouds of Witness
  • Unnatural Death
  • The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
  • Strong Poison

Libraries!

What better way for a booklover to prepare for the coming Obamapocalypse than to obtain a library card? We'll save a bundle! So ten-year-old Sarah and I went to our small town's public library Saturday to sign up for cards and see what was available. After filling out the forms (the cards should be available there next week) we looked around. She hit the motherlode and came away with Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, L. M. Montgomery and a healthy dose of Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children. I found nothing by Dorothy Sayers or Elizabeth George among their thousands of mysteries and romance novels, and the friendly lady behind the counter couldn't find anything in the system by Fred Kaplan - either no library in central Illinois has a copy of his Lincoln book, or she didn't quite know what she was doing.

So the local library is a bust for me, but with their card I'll be able to check out books from the Champaign library when I'm in town for office hours Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll just need to be careful not to visit when the Bedlam across the street from the library releases its lunatic inmates for the day.