• I had a gentleman call from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who needed to know the names of all the factories in our area. He was a college student, working on a class project, who happened to randomly select the name of our little suburban area for his topic.
• A woman called, needing to know how to measure a dog for a doghouse.
• We had a little boy dragged up to the reference desk by his mother for attempting to hijack a Lego piece. The mother clearly wanted the librarian to scold him for it, and I almost swallowed my tongue when the other librarian told him that he could go to jail for doing things like that.
• The telephone is acting strangely; if we pick it up before the second ring, the caller automatically is put into our voicemail.
• The very strange gentleman who brings with him his extensive collection of hand lotions, miniature salt packets, and Band-Aids to write up various law papers has returned. (Not that this is particularly unusual, as he comes fairly frequently.)
• All of our books by Sylvia Brown have disappeared.

There are only two of us on staff today, since three people went to a conference, two are on vacations, and a couple of others managed to finagle the day off. I rather enjoy it this way, though. When there's always something waiting to be done, the time tends to pass much more quickly. Additionally, I've rather been on fire this morning, if I do say so myself; I've been whipping out answers like I wrote the books myself. The feeling of being Super Librarian is quite the head rush, let me tell you, and after the fog-headed feeling through which I've been suffering for the past weeks, I'm enjoying my newly recovered wits in the utmost.

The sleepiness is beginning to abate a bit, finally. Last night I actually managed to stay awake all the way through ER, something I haven't accomplished in a month. I'm finally starting to feel like myself again! Just in time, too; Thanksgiving is swiftly approaching, and I was really hoping to be able to stay awake in the car to keep Eric company.

The laptops are rather self-explanatory, though I do have several issues that I'll mention in a moment. The "listening station" is actually a small FM transmitter that we would keep at the circulation desk. It would have several "stations" that would play CDs; we would select the CDs (to be changed a few times a week), buy several sets of headphone radios for circulation, and let the kids decide which CD they wanted to hear. The CD would play on a specific frequency to be heard only in the library.

The vendor had already been selected for this little project; all I had to do was call him for pricing, which he'll be mailing to me by next week. Add in the headphone radios (BestBuy, you're my hero), and the proposal has written itself.

As for the laptops, I'm in a bit of a quandary. My instinct is to write the proposal for ten new iBooks; they're gorgeous, and I think the teens would get a big kick out of them. The main intended purpose for the computers is to play games and web surf, so the only requirements would be a decent-looking video display and compatibility with our wireless network.

The problem: there are few people in the library who are supportive of the Mac OS. I'm going to have to come up with an extremely persuasive argument in order to sway Boss-Zilla, for one, and Tech Girl doesn't care much for Macs, either. Boss-Lady was all for the idea, but she's still bitter over the fact that the library took her old beloved Performa away and replaced it with a generic PC tower.

The alternatives would be to either write a proposal for five iBooks and five Dell laptops of some kind (I'm really not sure which configurations or models I'd choose; any suggestions?), or (my least favorite option) ten Dells. Tech Girl is inordinately fond of Dell machines, so my choice of PC brand is a concession to her.

The other fun part about these proposals is the target audience; the Foundation is planning to take them to the wealthy aristocrats of the town to beg for donations. The gentry, almost all of them senior citizens, will sort through the proposals and choose to back the ones that most appeal to them. Laptop computers and FM transmitters don't stand a chance against Local History department's needs unless I can find a way to make them sound less...technical. Ha!

All this fuss, and I'll be gone before I ever get to see the end results. Oh, well, at least a smashing job on the proposals will put Boss-Lady in a favorable mood towards me before she learns about the Bit.

I just want to thank whomever it was who nominated my September 13th entry for Best Romantic entry. I was quite shocked to get the notification in my email; what a nice surprise! You know, I still find it utterly amazing that when I wrote that entry, so doped up on cold medicine and feeling so defeated over the whole baby issue, my child had been growing inside of me for a single day.

Anyway, there are quite a few really marvelous entries up for awards this time (mind you, I'm not saying that my own is "marvelous;" quite a few of the other nominees had me alternately in stitches and tears). So go vote, or at least read through the entries. Enjoy!