Note to self: Krinos brand canned squid does not make for very good bait. That and it makes your hands stink for about a day and a half afterwards. No offense intended to Krinos, of course, who offer many fine and otherwise unavailable Greek food items to schlubs like me in America.

Back to work, although I never really went anywhere. The boss did, though, for three weeks, so there was much slackage. Too much. For some reason I absolutely love to wallow in free time, whenever it crops up, so much so that absent a deadline or authority figure who will be very disappointed in me if I goof off, I will keep eating my freedom like a goldfish until I'm floating belly up in my bowl. Or cubicle. It's good to be happy on the job again, even if I know the feeling is only good until the next power vaccuum. Ah, but in less than a month, my wife and I will be in glorious Bar Harbor for a week, so maybe that will keep me going when today's euphoria inevitably melts away.

The funny thing is that I don't even hate my job - Library Assistant (Library Ass for short) at the Countway Library of Medicine's Document Delivery Department, if you're just joining us - for real. It's a nice job, and in fact it offers me one thing that I know virtually no other job on the planet could offer me - unfettered access to Widener Library and, in the rare instance that Harvard's stacks can't deliver, all the other great libraries of the world. Even when I'm not ordering wheelbarrows full of books for myself, it's just a lot of fun sometimes to play library sleuth and find rare and unusual items for grateful patrons. For instance, today I received a photocopy of an extremely rare book in French from 1917 about military medicine from a library in Marseilles, France. Since the request fell outside of my normal powers to locate and fetch things electronically, via OCLC, I had to make a handwritten request in French - employing Altavista's universally-translating Babel Fish, since the closest I come to a knowledge of French is a decade of Latin, and I'm pretty sure there's been some linguistic drift over the past two thousand years - as a last-ditch attempt. And it worked, without even one snide comment about my canned French!