OK, I know how weird this may well sound...but I spent all of this morning in the university research library, and I am still giddy from it! I love working in the library. The tall windows by my study desk, the ceiling-high rows of books everywhere, with their faint smell of...what do they smell of, exactly? It's not dust, but there's a very light but distinctive smell, and I find it intensely comforting. I brought my laptop along, plugged it into the socket by the desk, and stayed for hours, happily chugging away through eleven (!) books for my thesis research (with some nice serendipitous tidbits for the next Vienna novel!). When I finally decided I had to leave, I just floated out of there, still feeling high, and carrying a just-for-fun book with me, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance, by Sam Abel. (My favorite line so far: "Anything so embarrassingly overdone must be a threat to the soul.")

I love libraries so, so much. Some of my earliest memories are set in libraries--my very earliest memory is of running with my mom to catch the Bookmobile (the library-on-wheels) that came every so often to our neighborhood when I was a toddler. Doing my work in a library makes me feel plugged in to a warm, humming energy circuit made up of all the books and authors I love and all the ones I haven't discovered yet, and oodles and oodles of fascinating, mind-boggling information just waiting to be discovered.

And then I stopped for half an hour at the cafe in Borders to drink hot tea (it was raining outside) while reading a Jeeves & Wooster short story, "Jeeves and the Impending Doom".

What a perfect morning!

To top it all off, I finally finished this round of rewrites on Masks & Shadows, thank God. Now I get to forget about it for a week...

...And now I'm heading over to subscribe to Say... magazine as part of their subscription drive, which lasts until June 30th. Great magazines! Cheap prices! A possible book-win! And all for a really worthy cause. (Read the last line of the description. Fellow dog-owners, how can you not want to help?)

After that, it's off to the park with Nika again, who had a wonderful birthday of playing with other dogs, defending me bravely against perceived threats, and licking us as often as we would let her.