Bibliomama

Monday mornings are always a little painful because I stay up way too late and never sleep well and Monday is my early work day. It's a bit of a pleasant surprise, though, that they're only a little painful. I don't love dragging myself out of bed, but by the time I'm in the library booting up my computer I am perfectly happy to be there. I don't have any classes I don't like, but my favourite on Monday is the last of the day, which is nice because I always go out on a good note. The kids are engaged and ask about books a lot and are very sweet and grateful. Everyone has trouble pronouncing my name, which is both weird and not when I look at it, and this teacher has made her students practice it until they say thank-you perfectly. Also, if you want to feel powerful and work in a kids' library? Choose books to face out at the end of the shelves. It's like they can't resist anything with a full cover showing. Almost every single book I face out will

I meant to have this up sooner, but I got it ninety-five percent done and then stalled. My daughter is having anxiety-related insomnia and stomach issues and I'm having perimenopause-related insomnia, and sometimes they overlap, but even if they don't I don't feel good going to bed when she's awake, so I... am tired. I actually forgot the dog in the car for an uncomfortable number of minutes after picking her up at my mom and dad's after work today - happily she's not holding a grudge.  My husband was due to leave for San Diego on Saturday, just as our twenty centimetres of snow started falling, which is par for the freaking course most of the time. Fate intervened on my behalf and delayed his flight until Sunday - he left for the airport just after the plow finally went by and he shoveled the plow ridge. Looks like my sacrifices to the snow gods paid off - *furtively hides chicken guts under pizza box*.  Monday the elementary teachers were on strike, so the

Fiction Middlemarch  by George Eliot. Synopsis from Goodreads:   Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's rich comic vein.  I had only read The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, in school. I didn't love it, exactly, but I liked it. I had resolved to tackle a couple of dense classics last year, and this one, widely regarded as one of the best novels in English, was