Dammit dammit dammit! I promised myself I wasn’t going to check out a book from the library yesterday. I’m only a hundred fifty pages from the end of the Roosevelt biography, I can’t start another book now. When My Darling B asked me to drop her off so she could pick up her hold requests, I told myself, Self, don’t you even go into that library, because you know what’ll happen!

Aw, shut up, I snapped back at myself, it’s not like I have zero self-control. I can walk past a book without picking it up, you know.

So I went inside with B and then, because I was feeling so supremely self-confident about having truckloads of self-control, I mosied over to the new releases bookshelf to see what the library had just acquired. There was the usual pop-culture drek, a few interesting-looking biographies, another history of baseball (is it possible there’s someone or something baseball-related that hasn’t been given five-hundred pages of exposure by now?), and so on. Nothing I couldn’t glance at and walk away from.

But then there was … COLOSSUS! What a BIG book! And what a BIG title! And there’s a photo of a GREAT BIG DAM on the cover! The HOOVER dam! One of the biggest, coolest gadgets on the planet! What kind of self-respecting gadget guy wouldn’t take it home to look it over and possibly spend every spare moment during breaks and lunch and waiting for a ride hom, reading it obsessively from cover to cover? I MUST HAVE IT! AAAAAAAGGGGGHHH!

Dammit.