I am, of course, anticipating that this jump was just an aberration.

See that copy of Spiritual Midwifery up there? That's probably the book that's tickling my fancy the most at the moment. Oh, it's quite the fine example of sixties, "granola" literature. Some of the pictures of the hippy women giving birth in bus caravans make me giggle, and frequent usage of words such as "groovy" and "cosmic" cause Eric's eyebrows to ascend almost to his hairline, but for the most part it's a really great resource for homebirthing women, whose ranks I oh-so-desperately want to join in the near future. It was mostly written for a readership of midwives, so certain parts of it (how to stitch a perinneal tear, for one) will be of little use for me, but I love it anyway.

My growing collection of books about pregnancy and birth is actually quite amusing. Though I'm not usually a superstitious person, I have refused to let myself buy anything baby-related on the offhand chance that I would somehow "jinx" myself out of ever having a baby in the first place. I know many women who have spent much of their adult lives picking up baby outfits here and there, so that when their baby arrives, a wardrobe is already completed. Ditto for diapers and even baby furniture. My cousin and his wife had a whole nursery prepared for the baby - which never came. Therein lies my conundrum; I cannot fathom how painful it must have been to walk past that empty room with its empty crib every night. Now they've separated and are talking divorce, so it looks as if that crib will remain empty.

Books, on the other hand, don't create in me the same fear that a layette would. I can buy books whenever I want! (My groaning bookshelves are a testament to this; Eric and I have two ceiling-high bookshelves and one waist-high one in the living room, another tall one in the bedroom, another short one in our office, and we still have piles of books lying about that can't quite fit onto the shelves.) Whenever I have the opportunity to snatch up books for a bargain, I can't seem to help myself. The personal book order opportunity with the library was simply irresistible. It was well worth the risk that anybody would start rumors about my impending motherhood.

Oh, and lest you think that birth books were all I purchased, I also got two new O'Reilly books: Photoshop in a Nutshell and Photoshop for the Web. O'Reilly books are beginning to make up the bulk of the office-residing book collection.

The more irritating of our two male librarians is leaving us for another library. The atmosphere of the library for the rest of the day was something akin to a celebration. It sounds completely heartless, but I just couldn't bring myself to feel any sort of sympathy for him; I've learned that Boss-Zilla even talked him into taking his new position! Sadly, his reason for hesitating was that he liked it here and felt that he got along very well with all of us.

My own feelings would have been much more mixed had this happened a month ago. This librarian has been working on the web-version of the library's community calendar, and I had the misfortune of having to help oversee that. Everything was fine until I innocently decided to change the graphic on the page; the old one looked simply hideous, and two of the words in the graphic were misspelled.

When he updated next, the link to the graphic had been killed. I had no idea how it happened, so I simply fixed it, asked him not to touch anything he didn't understand, and thought I could leave it at that.

He updated again. He destroyed the link again. When I asked him what he was doing, launching Internet Explorer and showing him the dead link, he said, "Maybe it's because I'm not using Explorer." I sighed, gave up trying to explain, and informed him that Boss-Zilla had purchased FrontPage for this use, and to stop using Netscape Composer (thought I couldn't have cared less what he used).

That was the beginning of the end. He completely lost all capability to do the calendar. Every time I checked it, there were broken links and wrong information all over the place. The final straw came when he left me this cryptic note:

Please upload powerpoint to frontpage for me.

It turned out that "frontpage" was referring to the library webpage, "powerpoint" was what he had chosen to name the new HTML file for the calendar. I asked him, "Why did you name it 'powerpoint'? It has nothing to do with that piece of software!"

His response: "Because I have so many files."

You can see why I'm not entirely sorry to see him out of my hair. While I'm not actively rejoicing at his leave-taking like some of the other people here, this is probably because I've only had to work with him since October. These people have been dealing with him for years.