OMG UPDATES TWO DAYS IN A ROW!

I'm sure you're just wetting yourself from ecstasy.

Anyway, today I went on a magical library adventure. I hope you listen to this story better than my mother did, she rushed me by impatiently saying, "Uh huh, yeah, uh huh," every few seconds.

So today after work, I thought, "Hey! I have these two SUPER overdue books to return and one book to get from the library! Since it's on the way, I'll stop in for a few minutes and take care of it!" As it turned out, a few minutes equals about an hour and a half.

The first thing that my brother and I do is to drop my SUPER overdue books into the book drop. SQUEAK, THUMP, the action that will haunt us for the rest of the night is done. So we go to the computer catalogs and look up this book I have to get for my summer work, A Summer Life by Gary Soto. The computer informs me that there is one copy in the library. Cool! Let's go get it!

Five minutes of looking later and we determine that we can't find it. So we go the reference desk where this nice but a little spacey woman repeats the looking process and determines that somebody must have crammed it on the wrong shelf or stolen it. But hey, the library in a nearby town might have it! So she goes back to her desk, calls them up, and yes, they have a copy! But wait...have I incurred any late fees on my card?

Errr......

Okay, well, I'll just have to go to the main desk and pay them. No big deal. It's just that the other library doesn't like to give books to people who have late fees. So we go to the main desk.

Hi, I'm just here to pay some of my late fees.

Okay, it looks like I have $1.75 for returned books from years ago, but also $2.50 for two books that haven't been returned yet.

Oh, I just returned those.

Okay, but they haven't gone through yet, so I can't pay the fee yet.

But I need to pay the fee now so that the other library will allow me to take their book.

Did I use the drop box? Yes. *sigh*

So the other desk lady bumbles off downstairs to search out the books I dropped in the drop box. Twenty minutes later, she returns with an armful of books that are irrelevant to my situation.

Well, the whole floor was covered in books from the book drop and she was NOT going to paw through them to find my books.

But I need to pay this fee and go to the other library!

Luckily, the nice but a little spacey woman from the Reference desk is there.

Oh, she'll go get the books so that we can check them in. We'll just go with her to help her look.

She opens the door, and the annoyed Circulation Desk lady was right: the floor of the maybe three by three foot room is covered in books. After a minute and a half of searching, my brother and I locate the proper books and bring them upstairs, where, after several more minutes of, "Fees over two dollars need a receipt," "Where are the receipts?" etc, I leave with a library card with a cleaned slate.

I turn to my brother and say, "This is exactly why I wanted to use our sister's library card to get this book."

Fifteen minutes of driving later, we arrive at the other library. We walk upstairs where we see a desk and ask if the woman there is holding a book for me. No, but she'll go check at the other desk, and, SUCCESS! The 150-page and otherwise generally insignificant book is sitting on the shelf with my name on it!

My brother and I return to the car discussing our dire need for War and Peace written in Czechoslovakian for our Czechoslovakian class in our Czechoslovakian school with our Czechoslovakian friends to prepare for a Czechoslovakian college and how we must get it from the library.

We are broken, tired, and hungry, but our mission was a success. Gary Soto, thank you for ruining what could have been a perfectly pleasant evening.