This week is the closest I will come to a true summer vacation – I have 2 half-days of internship, one full day of paid library work, and 4 days of honest-to-goodness Vacation, complete with a plane trip and visits with old friends and going somewhere I’ve never been.

I need to time my reading carefully so that I finish Ahab’s Wife before the trip – I’m close to the end and I hate to have a nearly-read book take up precious carry-on space.  Hopefully I’ll have a barely-started book to take along with me.  I was looking up airline luggage restrictions today, and discovered that as a “personal item” I might carry on such things as a handbag, pocketbook, briefcase, coat (since when does a coat count as a carry on??), or “a reasonable quantity of reading material.”  Now they’re just asking for it!  I picture myself with one of those old-fashioned book satchels, only enormous and stuffed with dozens of books.  Now that’s reasonable.  Although for this trip I’ll actually have company for the flight – most unusual – so we’ll probably spend most of the time chatting away.

I’m sort of easing into my internship, which is nice.  I get to do a storytime in the park once a week – this week I observed, and next week I take over.  Eek!  I had a lot of fun going through their shelves of storytime books getting ideas, though, and the kids today were pretty easy to please.  I just need to memorize a few little rhymes/fingerplays to break up the stories.  I’m only mildly terrified, and mostly excited.  I’ve also done a boatload of summer reading sign-ups, and let me tell you – this place is SO much busier than my library, and it makes me realize how WHITE my library is.  And I always thought of the city where my internship is as being equally white – your classic suburban white-bread neighborhood – but it’s really incredibly diverse.  So goodbye stereotypes about the city named after the state animal.  Also, there’s a huge Saturday farmer’s market across from the library, and since I’ll be there most every Saturday, I will definitely be taking advantage of it.

I’m also going to take advantage of having an evening off and go see a $3 movie and eat pizza for dinner.  Yay for summer vacation!

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