Probably the hardest thing about leaving UM, oddly enough, has been my losing my access to the library collections. I can't search Medline any more; I can't look things up in the OED just for the heck of it; I can't get access to dozens of publications at which, even as a staff member, I used to glance - Written Communication, say, or CCCC.

I felt the loss tonight. I just got a notice for a very nifty-sounding game conference in Wisconsin this summer, so I was thinking about my current Game Obsession (a grammar tutor, of all things), and trying to think of how I'd fit the idea, and its linguistic and theoretical underpinnings, into a 250-word abstract. I wanted to scan the literature - but of course, that's not really possible . . . so I tried Google Scholar for the first time. Searched on "second language acquisition and grammar," and got full-text hits like this one:

"Below is the unedited preprint (not a quotable final draft) of:
Epstein, S.D., Flynn, S., & Martohardjono, G. (1996). Second language acquisition: Theoretical and experimental issues in contemporary research. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (4): 677-758.
The final published draft of the target article, commentaries and Author's Response are currently available only in paper."

OK, it's not the final article, but it's a start. And for someone with very little scholarly access to anything, it's a downright windfall . . .