I've been out of the country for a few days, and taken up with grading my students' assignments and planning class, so I haven't seen much active reference desk duty. Things keep happening in my absence, though. For one thing, we got a departmental blog for our reference questions (http://knightref.blogspot.com). Cool.

Things are quiet tonight, which is good. I'm behind in my indexing for ABELL, and in my trade and university press approval plan spending for a couple of funds. Amazing how a four-credit class can suction time out of your regular working life.

This evening's fare:

• Where can I find soil tables detailing the composition of the soil beneath the University of Oregon?
• Where can I find information about Brazil?
• Why is my computer frozen?
• Where can I find articles about Jackson Browne? I have a disability and can't use the computer.
• Where can I find a list of all Nobel Prize winners (any category) who were lawyers? (Agh!)

On the night table (because I haven't mentioned what I'm reading for a long while now): The Religions of India, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, the new Gourmet cookbook, Monty Don's The Complete Gardener, The Invention of Heterosexuality, Home Work, recent issues of Blind Spot, Found Magazine, and something my sweetie picked up yesterday at the bookstore magazine rack: a literary magazine doing a special issue on stories of the sea, which is amazing. Includes a photograph of an eighty-storey rogue wave breaking over the bow of a cargo ship. !!!!!

She also just finished Ghostwritten, and loved it. I am told I must read it next. Will do.

Also of note: the new book Eyes, Lies, and Illusions (crazy expensive, packed with beautiful optical illusions, comes with cool shiny folding telescope illusion device inside), the movie Turtles Can Fly (Kurdish refugees, 2003: dark, wrenching), the movie 2046 (Hong Kong boarding house romance, needs to be released in USA), and the BBC DVD Chased by Dinosaurs, which uses amazingly good CGI and creature effects to pit a Crocodile Hunter-style narrator against Jurassic reptiles. The underwater scenes are incredible. (Megalodon!)