Strange Cheesefellows. Or Something.

 I'm getting worse and worse at posts that AREN'T just random. 

My husband was away for multiple weeks again, and it's been a bit of an adjustment for him to get home and try to supplant my new bedmates.

I guess this gives me official book slut status? My husband and I are working through it.

I guess I realized that different libraries would have different borrowing and hold limits, but some of them WOW. Like Maya - THREE HOLD LIMIT? WHAT? Like do the people who run that library not understand reading? 

So to sum up, at my library you can have: Ten ebooks or audiobooks out on Libby, for three weeks each. You can technically renew them if no one is waiting, although sometimes it still doesn't let you, and only once (I think); Two books out on Cloud Library (express ebooks), for one week, no renewals (but there's a workaround where you can return it and immediately borrow it again, and I'm not sure why they haven't closed that loophole); Unlimited paper books (I just looked this up), three week loan period, renewable up to FIVE TIMES if no one is waiting. If people are waiting, you have a three week grace period with escalating email requests for return, and past that you get charged for the book and your account gets suspended until you pay the charge or return the book and they take the fine away like it never happened (I know this gives some of you the vapours, but I just cheerfully bring it back and say "walk of shame!" when I hand it to the employee, who is always very grateful to receive it; There's more but those are the ones I care about. Oh, I can't find a limit on paper books you can put on hold. I'm up to about 80, so I'm guessing there isn't one unless it's 100. Should I test this? 

This was exhilarating:

Eve's library, in a different city but the same province, has a limit of ten items on hold overall, which seems RIDICULOUSLY low. But they also have a 'skip the line' feature for ebooks, which I don't quite understand but she showed it to me so it does exist. 

Pat and Engie - I LOVE hearing that I'm not the only person who plays Libby ebook jenga - 'wait, if I move this up I can finish it and then borrow this one, oops, I have to marathon this one before it disappears, should I pause this hold or just read it?' Except the turning off the wi-fi or airplane mode thing that some people use to delay returning library ebooks has never worked for me. 

I'm really enjoying the current rhythm of reading my stack of paper books. I sit down with three or four and read thirty to fifty pages a time of each one. At some point if one is narratively energetic I will finish it and keep incrementally progressing on the others until it's time to add in another one again. I do have Jennifer Egan's The Manhattan Beach Project as an ebook and I was considering returning it and waiting, but then I started it and it's really good, but due tomorrow, so there's going to be some power reading in between turkey cooking and biscuit baking. 

Suzanne - no shame on that comment, in my experience kids are incredibly bloodthirsty little motherfuckers, and I was really ready for anything when I cracked open Vivant ou non-vivant. 

It's Easter weekend but I don't do church anymore and my kids aren't home so aside from dinner with my parents tomorrow we are having a chill few days, which is welcome. Eve went to the dentist in her university town for the first time last week and found out she had to get two little fillings and a bigger one this week. They had a lot of trouble getting the plates in her mouth for x-rays and she said "yeah, my mom has a clinically small palate, so that tracks" which is funny. Then when she was there getting her fillings she said she felt like she could bring out the flex that 'yeah, I had my wisdom teeth out awake' and they were like 'whoa, all four?' so she felt like a dental badass. They also had voting stations on campus, so she got three fillings and did her civic duty. 

I made mac and cheese tonight because I recently found out that my husband's colleagues gently mock him for always ordering mac and cheese if it's on the menu on business trips. But since I haven't made it often - at all, maybe - I didn't account for the fact that now we have a sort of ridiculous amount of mac and cheese right before we are due to have a sizeable amount of Easter leftovers. 

If you need me I'll just be over here with a shovel for my books AND my cheesy noodles.