Never a Boring Moment at the Library

Okay, this isn't one of my better life lessons. But it will teach you all to be leery of the library and to certainly bring a Glade scented spray can with you. I wonder if that would be flammable around a fireplace?

As many of you know, I took a much needed break for part of the week from work. Since my sister is watching Olivia (my daughter), Stephane (my husband) and I decided to go to the library for the first time since Olivia was born. We went to sit in the quiet room, an ultra modern enclosed room with plenty of seats and four fireplaces, all to create the perfect ambiance for reading a great book. I was ready for a long hour of silence: no baby crying, no dogs barking, no dishes to be done. The perfect atmosphere.

As we sat down in two vacant chairs, Stephane announced that he had to go to the bathroom.

"But I don't have a book yet to read," I told him. I didn't want to just sit there looking at the two other people in the room on a Sunday afternoon.

"There is a book on one of those fireplaces," he said and turned around and left.

"Well at least there is something to read," I told myself, never liking to be without a book if I have nothing to do.

I went to pick the book up and was able to get to the second sentence until I realized I had no idea what I was reading. It was called Exercises in Electrical and Magnetic Measurement. I put that book down faster than I found it. I looked around and found Stephane's work notebook near his coat. Maybe I could find something illicit and not for me to see in it. For the next fifteen minutes, I read notes and entries regarding computer programs. I've never been so bored in my life.

After Stephane came back twenty minutes later I went to get some books and came back. The fireplace was going full blast, which made it extremely hot. I pushed my chair back, further back, and then further back again, until I was sitting right next to a man who I presumed was homeless based on his fashion sense and well, he was sleeping.

Now I first encountered snoring from our dog Emmy, then Stephane when he's tired, then Olivia when she has a cold. It's a regular musical production at night in our bedroom and now I went all the way to the library to hear the homeless man snore. Not the quiet, even tempered snoring that could possibly go with the crackling of the fireplace and the slow cascade of water from the Zen fountain in the corner, but the deep guttural snoring where occasionally one gets tripped up in their breathing, coughs something up, looks up for a moment wondering where they are and then hunkers down in their chair again, dead asleep and snoring once more.

I look around to see if anyone else found it funny that this man is snoring in the "quiet room" where the silence is deafening. Stephane looks at me, notices it for a brief moment and then goes back to reading his book. Finally, I'm into the whole rhythm of the snoring, the Zen fountain and the fireplace, combining them until they all cancel each other out, until suddenly a bang erupts and I look at Stephane to ask him what it was. Stephane looks at me and whispers, "I think he just tooted."

Oh the joys of communal places.

Everything else went well. There were only two other incidents that happened. I went to walk three dogs in the freezing weather and they ended up all getting wrapped around a telephone pole. It took 15 minutes weaving three leashes in and out until finally the dogs (and me) weren't all attached to the pole anymore. The other thing that happened was that we heard this loud boom one night. We had thought one of our pets knocked something over until around midnight, I yelled from the bathroom, "Stephane, the bathroom ceiling fell in!" (And yes, it really did.) So besides those three things, everything else went quite well.