It’s been a pretty chill week, if by chill you mean, dealing with meanies on the forum you admin, chemical burns, spilled paint thinner, potential allergies, two teething babies, job searching, and other dramas, major and minor. You could say I’ve been stressed out this week. It’s okay because I went to karate tonight, hurt my knuckles, and punched it out. But I still have been thinking the past two days about what the heck I was going to write today. I broke out my laptop and just stared at the blank word document. I haven’t done anything geeky! I’ve been too stressed out to be geeky!

Wait! That can’t be right! I thought. I had to have done something geeky. Otherwise how could I possibly be functioning right now?

And quickly I realized that my source of comfort and solace this week has been none other than my local library.

Which is almost surprising to me because I was so hesitant to try this library out! We’re living in my old stomping grounds. But to my shame, in the 11 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never been in my hometown library. To be fair, the library didn’t even exist for half of those years. When we moved back last June, I wasn’t interested in getting here after hearing that the library was teeny tiny. Plus I still had an active library card in the city we’d just moved from, which was an old library with a huge collection and only a 35 minute drive away.

But I got desperate the other day. I was tired of having to drive around the lake to check out books and felt like I had been spending too much buying books using Amazon or my B&N membership. So many books, so little money, what’s a girl to do? So we sucked it up, drive down to the city buildings, and checked out the library.

As it happens, new, small town libraries are the best thing ever!

At our old library, it was so big that I often got overwhelmed and couldn’t find what I was looking for unless I got online first and put a hold on it. Usually, I would have to wait at least a week too before it became available, and I couldn’t renew it because someone else had a hold after me.

But this library, small as it may be, was perfect. Stocked, but not too stocked. It was easy to find everything I could possibly want. It had all the latest books, but with so few patrons, amazingly enough, they are all still sitting on the shelves. For example, Brandon Sanderson, a famous writer in Utah, just released his much anticipated, Calamity, and there it was sitting on the shelf, waiting for us to snatch it up!

It was magical! Pure gold! Jackpot! I can’t come up with enough phrases to express its excellence.

I learned a valuable lesson. Just as we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, we can’t judge a library by its size.