Letdowns and Strange People

Letdowns and Strange People

03.10.04 (1:06 pm)   [edit]
Last night I just finished Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I really loved this book as well as the last one of his books that I read, Quicksilver. But now, I'm feeling a bit like one of the main characters of his book, Lawrence Waterhouse. Waterhouse is a mathematician and cryptanalyst in WWII and he loves the intoxicating drive of actually breaking a code and solving a puzzle, but then hates the "mundane" details of actually reading the messages. He's more about the problem-solving than the actual tedious work of applying the solution and that's how I am. Reading these two books were a long and drawn out pleasure, but now they're done and I'm feeling a bit of a void.

Anyway, until Stephenson's next volume of his Baroque series comes out in April, I'm reading more light stuff, like Brian Keene's The Rising. and probably more than one Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms novel. After Stephenson, these ought to be going down about 1 every day or so.

Currently, for my music I'm hooked on The New Pornographers.

The library has been fairly quiet lately, except for the chaos of the Dr. Seuss program on Saturday. I have noticed a lot more religion-based questions lately, which are probably the result of Mel Gibson's film. In fact yesterday I had a man who wanted help finding passages in the bible using a concordance. Then he proceeded to give me an impromptu lecture on crucifixion techniques. Several other patrons have wanted books of paintings depicting the crucifixion.

The scariest information request I've had lately came last night though. It wasn't about religion. A man came up to the desk and asked for technical manuals on biometric identification systems. He told me he loved to keep up on this stuff. Of course here in a small branch library we don't have materials like that. I gave him the URL of a government website that deals with that stuff and he seemed pretty satisfied. There was something not right about this guy, but we have a lot of weird patrons. The funniest thing was that this guy wanted all of these heavy duty technical journals, but couldn't master our fairly simple Internet sign-up software. :roll:

Tonight I'm being sent out for emergency help to one of my old haunts in the library system. I used to work at that branch as the circulation supervisor before being transferred into my current position of reference assistant. It'll be strange to go back there, but familiar at the same time. I know I'll be busier there than I would have been here tonight. Guess I'll just have to surf the net between patrons, since I've got all of my "portable" projects finished at the moment. :wink: It's Murphy's Law though that I'm being sent back across town to work when I've made plans on the side of town I'm currently on for after work. :roll:

On a personal note, things have been getting better between me and my wife. We're more than likely going to get back together, but we're still going to be in therapy for a while. We both have a lot to work on, but I think both of us want to give the marriage a chance again. :)