Caveat Lector

I was feeling more than slightly stressed by that to-do list, despite making an appointment for Monday with my search client (yay!) and knocking off a page and a half of the associated project paper just on noodling in my head about how to figure out what my client actually wants.

(Reference librarians will be familiar with this process, of course. All I have from my client at this point is less than a sentence of topic description, and if I took that literally, I could bring an entire research library’s worth of material crashing down on the client’s shoulders in two seconds flat. So I was thinking about the right questions to ask to narrow the topic to something workable.)

So I trundled myself over to the public library to de-stress a little. My gosh, I love my public library branch. It rocketh most mightily.

I found a municipal map of Rohan that I photocopied to take with me to this week’s job interview. (No phone book, unfortunately, but one can’t have everything.) I found some new and interesting graphic novels (dunno who does the graphic-novel collection development, but whoever you are: you rock!), and some new feminist sci-fi. I found a movie in Sanskrit (!) for David, and a couple of Bollywood movies for me. And I saw that David’s book has two local holds already despite not having hit the shelves yet, which is pretty darn cool.

And I walked out feeling a lot better. It’s all just work, after all. I can do work.