books! they exist!

I was grousing... yesterday? yesterday. about my library having SEDUCED ME with promises of having digital copies of ALL THREE books, only to find (upon finishing the first) that while I could place a hold on the second, which showed up as available to do this with!!! ... It Would Only Get Fulfilled If My Library Acquired More Copies.

I spent some time checking whether any of the local bookshops had copies and deciding that this was silly and I should just buy the EBOOK if I were going to buy it AT ALL (because while I would have to faff with deDRM I at least would not need to faff with going to WALTHAM CROSS), but was balking somewhat (for some reason) at the concept of buying book #2 and only book #2 of a trilogy.

... this morning. I remembered. that libraries also, frequently, contain physical books.

So I checked the catalogue.

AND LO MY CLOSEST BRANCH HAD A COPY. ON THE SHELF. RIGHT THERE.

So I finished doing All Of The Cooking Faff and I ate a slightly questionable lunch (yog! persimmon! hazelnuts!) aaand then I betook myself Out Of The House to acquire A Book and also A Charity Shop Object I did not buy yesterday but had managed to talk myself into over the course of the evening, and which happily had not gone home with someone else in the intervening 24 or so hours.

I followed this up by sitting down and going Steadfastly through a bookshelf at my parents', extremely carefully, for like the third time (both parents having also been through it at least once in addition to having sorted through various other bookshelves) AND SUCCESSFULLY LOCATED THE ENORMOUS CROCODILE. Which is extremely exciting because -- okay, so, for Animals Week (2023) I wound up explaining to Adam that I had Secret Plans and Clever Tricks for (some) of the proceedings, and he was not familiar with this phrase, so I have spent almost two years failing to dig it out and also failing to buy a copy. BUT THIS EVENING I FOUND IT, and Adam spent a bit of time doing a Dramatic Reading of about half of it before we got distracted by Scrabble, and we have both discovered phrases in our idiolects that did in fact originate from this book that we'd both wholly forgotten the origins of, and I have also experienced some PRIMAL EMOTIONS upon observing, for the first time in quite possibly actual decades plural, illustrations I apparently imprinted on much harder than I'd realised.

Books! Physical books! They exist!