Blame It On The Super Moon

R. hurt her back pretty badly a couple of weeks ago.  I have been taking care of her:  driving her to the chiropractor, coaxing her to take ibuprofen.  It will be a slow and painful recovery.  I had to work last weekend, and it was hard to leave her alone for so long.  She has been working half-days this week.

The rain came on Sunday, and every day since.  Last night it was so comforting to hear the rolling thunder, as though God were muttering to himself

The library's in-house materials request database broke over the weekend.  By the time it was fixed, when I came back on Tuesday, over two hundred requests were waiting to be processed, perhaps two-thirds of them for books, (my responsibility).  I was just about cross-eyed by the end of the day, but I handled almost all of them.

A woman called, asking about a perpetual calendar.  This is a calendar that shows you what day of the week a date fell on in past years.  I mailed her a photocopy of the one in The World Almanac.

It's been a week for lonely old men to come around, wanting just to talk.  One man called many times on Tuesday.  I got him twice.  He would have pretend questions, about liquid measurement conversions, or where a street was located, but these were an excuse for him to go on endlessly about any old thing, having a steak at the Golden Corral, and so on.  Another man was a walk-up, smelling pretty ripe, with bruises on his arms like old people get when their skin becomes fragile.  He seemed to think that he was a victim of harmful radio waves, and wanted to know about a transmission tower in California, something I couldn't help him with.  Today he was trying to remember the name of a "syndrome" that was named after a Scandinavian location.  We looked at an atlas, and he was sure it was the Stockholm Syndrome.  He then wanted to talk about the film, The Manchurian Candidate, recommending that I watch the original version.  How sad, I thought.  Oddly, he had a remarkable, sonorous voice.  D. said that he thought his dog had been killed by radio waves.

D. told me this morning that a young man might be viewing porn.  He had his screen tilted away from his neighbor, and was looking around warily.  I sneaked up on him, and he was looking at a page of photos of naked women kissing.  I decided that was close enough, and told him he was done for the day, (a pretty mild punishment).  He whined a bit, but I did not relent.