6 - 7:15 p.m.

What I'm doing between questions:

6:00 in the kids' room

• I tidy up the DVDs which are always a mess by this point every day
• A cute little 5-year-old Harry Potter lookalike walks in with dad (who rather resembles Hagrid, actually), and asks if he can please have a book...OMG, so adorable, his first card...
• Dad/Hagrid wants to reserve some books, so I show him where the catalog computers are
• Headphones...and she brings 'em back in like 3 minutes [she's got a black eye which worries me]
• No storytime tonight--Val's out of town--so it's a little quieter, but there are still a lot of Hispanic families here
• [phone] Woman wants to know if we have calculators for people to use, specifically a Casio FX-260 [uh, no, we have basic arithmetic calculators, but anything more than that would get stolen...it's for her son]
• My husband is having ten cat fits (one of my mom's favorite expressions) about hotmail not working today; he can SEE his inbox, but he can't OPEN anything in it; this has been going on for weeks, and he's p.o.'d today and asking ME for help [hah]
• "I'm tutoring a mom; can we sit in here so her daughter can look for books and read near us?" [of course!] What is unusual about this, in our little city, is not that the student is Hispanic, but that the teacher is African....
• Bathroom key
• I got show the tutor where the beginner readers are...picture books are took hard to riffle through to find easy enough words....
• Junie B. Jones books [I show her]
• Ugh, some twerp stuck their peach-colored gum on one of the shelf-markers by the easy books...ick ick ick
• Peeps project has moved to another display case
• Bathroom key
• Picture books about cars [there have to be dozens, but I can't find ONE--so I finally raid the easy 629s for her...]
• Keys returned
• Bathroom key
• I spend some time talking with the student's daughter, and she asks about books for her mom to learn English [I show her the Spanish collection]
• Key returned
• Finally have a second to wash the gum germs off my hands
• Solar system in Spanish [got 'em]
• Why am I still in here? Who's supposed to relieve me??