I’m nearing the end of five whole days off in a row, and I feel fabulous.  Rested, refreshed, intellectually reinvigorated.  And we’ve even had TWO social engagements in the last five days – huge for us homebodies.  (I don’t count Jim’s band rehearsals as social engagements, since I’m not part of that, but he did have about three band meetings/rehearsals.)

The best part of the last five days is that I had time and space and energy to read.  A lot.  I read Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer and The Calder Game (I’ll get to The Wright Three when I find it at the used book store like the others), Joan Bauer’s Peeled, various magazine articles, and am starting The Prophet of Yonwood by Jeanne DuPrau.  [I’m a slow reader, folks, as I’ve stated before, so this is a lot of books for me to have gotten through while housecleaning and doing laundry and shoveling 10 inches of snow and partying with friends…]  Only one of these books is for a book group (Peeled), and I’ve actually been wanting to read it, anyway, so it didn’t feel like an assignment.

One of the oddities of my job as a children’s librarian is that I need to have read a lot of books, yet that reading can’t really happen in my work hours.  And let’s face it, often our off-work hours are filled with mundanities like laundry and scooping litter boxes, and don’t leave much time for wonderful things like reading.  So, in an odd way, though I read these books for pleasure, I also feel like all of this reading was for work, too.  Now when a child or parent asks me about Chasing Vermeer, I can actually speak with some authority on the topic, not the usual “It’s gotten great reviews.”  I’ll never be able to read all of the books that I order for the library, but I’d like to aim for a higher percentage than I’ve had time for recently.

So it’s been a truly lovely five days.  And tomorrow I’m back to my usual crazy schedule, working full time and tutoring two nights a week, though the Italian class is over now, which gains me a bit more reading time.  But I’ll be going back to that schedule with renewed energy and vitality, and I’m psyched.