The week so far - to the library! to the farm!

Monday - Was feeling a bit under the weather. I'm blaming it on the rapid temperature change between Sunday and Monday, causing a bit of Foehnkrankheit. Most interesting--one of my colleagues called out on Monday due to the same. I preferred to muddle through with an Advil.

Tuesday - Very exciting, I went my local branch of the Essex Library System and picked up a library card. I had already signed up online. Most interesting to me-they did not ask for proof of residence in Essex, or any identification for that matter.

For the record--I love the library! I am strongly entrenched in the American ideal that education is the great equalizer. It's something that I missed while living in Germany. (Yes, there are libraries in Germany.) But in Germany:
A) You need to pay to join. That one goes against the very core of a library's purpose to me.
B) The dollhouse-sized library in Tiny town of B had only 20 books in English--classics and Grisham.
C) For me to read a book in German, I need to be able to note things in the margin, so that knocked out the rest of the library.

But I digress...so my new Essex local library is a little on the small size considering it's a town of over 100k people, or maybe it's reflecting the local reading style demographics.

I always check out a few sections to be able to compare bookshops or libraries, and one of them is the foreign language section. A little disappointing on this point--they have a lot of audio language learning sets--basically from 1950-1980--on cassettes. Who still has a cassette player anymore?? In particular, I had looked at the Polish and Czech sections--nary a single cd. Big German and French language sections, and a handful of Esperanto books in addition.

What did I end up checking out? Only four books to start, including The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. Yeah, it overlaps into the WW2 genre. The past few weeks, someone has had the history channel on at night and someone else has gotten sucked into watching way too many WW2 documententaries. We've watched Rommel in North Africa, Gurnsey being evacuated, Warsaw uprising and at least a dozen more including two hours on Churchill's wartime strategy.

Wednesday - the great weather returned and I was back at the farm for another three hours after work. Current sunrise/sunset times are 05.21/20.20, so I'm in early at the office, out at a decent time to be able to fit in a few more hours at the farm which is 11 minutes away from the office. Today I trimmed chopped and trimmed bushes and hacked away at brambles.

What else? A very long to do list of small details which I won't bore you with any further. :-)