Sam, working as a reference librarian at the public library, gets off at 5:00. On a certain Thursday last May, she would have been gone a few minutes earlier if not for a certain woman with a persistent and time-consuming question. Both she and I are very grateful for this woman now ( Read more... )

Last summer (2008), I had just finished the semester and I needed a summer job. I stopped by the public library one afternoon, as I frequently did, and mentioned this to the red-headed girl working at the reference desk. She mentioned that the library would be hiring a few people and thought I should apply. She also said that it would be great to ( Read more... )

I finally made the lemon creme bruleé. The cooking is nearly identical to a standard, vanilla creme brulee, which I've done a couple of times before, and so I wasn't terribly worried about it ( Read more... )

So as I've mentioned once or twice, I'm currently reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as an audiobook. For anyone interested in what America is really about and how we got here, this is required reading. Tocqueville is an amazingly insightful (I'm )tempted to use the word prescient) writer who meticulously prepared his account of ( Read more... )

My most recent cooking adventure is chicken tortilla soup, which Sam and I shared with her friends Jeff and Elaina. The actual cooking wasn't tough, but the prep time was a bit long. I was surprised just how filling this soup was. I don't think anyone needed more than the serving size suggested in the book, which was very good, because the recipe ( Read more... )

For any of you who have seen Stranger Than Fiction, I feel quite a bit like Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal's character). For those who haven't seen the movie, Pascal owns and runs a bakery. She originally went to law school, but ended up dropping out and becoming a baker instead. She said that whenever they were having study nights (which I'm sure ( Read more... )

As a graduate student in English, I have two characteristics which were important to my getting to know Sam: I had little money and I loved to read. This meant I was an ideal candidate to visit the public library frequently. I didn't think much about it, but I did say hello to Sam whenever she was there, and we would sometimes talk a little bit, ( Read more... )

7. The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald - I actually "read" this as an audiobook. I downloaded the audiobook from LibriVox, which I will describe further at the end of this post ( Read more... )

Once there was a lonely grad student living in a city over a thousand miles from home. Since this grad student did not have wireless internet at home (and his laptop kind of sucked anyways), he would frequent the local public library ( Read more... )

4.
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