Have you ever heard the term book desert? Do you know what it means? A book desert is a place that essentially doesn’t have books. It’s heartbreaking, for me, to imagine a place without books. I grew up surrounded by books. We had them in our home, and we visited the library regularly. If you…
The politics surrounding immigration and refugees are complicated. But the effect this issue has on humanity is very real. The power of books is that they allow you to glimpse inside the experiences of other people and experience things you might otherwise never know anything about. I just finished reading North to Paradise by Ousman…
“Magetsi a mphepo,” he whispered. I will build electric wind. I live a life of comfort in my upper middle class American home. I don’t worry about things like famines or poor sanitation. When I’m hungry I go to the store to buy whatever I want from the thousands of options. I eat,…
This one should go without saying and yet, it still needs to be said. Pick up after your dog!!! As you may remember, I love dogs and I spend a lot of time walking them. In the many miles that I cover each week, I sadly come across piles left by dog owners who haven’t…
One of the many jobs of a parent is to teach our children good manners. Manners in general seem to be in decline but elevator manners in particular don’t seem to be commonly taught anymore. Or maybe I’m just jaded because most of my elevator use comes in hotels with vacationing families and children running…
To this day I can still sing the opening song to Mister Rogers’ Neighbohood. Along with Sesame Street and Electric Company, Mister Rogers was a childhood favorite. A new movie is coming out later this year (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) so I wanted to freshen my Mister Rogers memories and learn a little…
Funny story… I read this article in the New Yorker titled, “Growing Up In the Library” and was instantly intrigued. The author, Susan Orlean, has written about the Central Library fire in Los Angeles in 1986 in a book called, The Library Book. Hearing about a library fire made me think of the Librarian of Basra…
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Return to Civility post. This one seems particularly appropriate to the season… We’ve all seen it… the rude customer giving the clerk a hard time or being impatient when something goes wrong at the register or just plain ignoring the clerk, too busy talking on their cell…
The #OptOutside campaign was started by REI in 2015 when the store closed all locations on Black Friday and encouraged its employees to go outside instead. Employees now enjoy a paid day off to spend with their family outdoors. In the years since, the movement has been adopted by many other companies and groups and…
I have been feeling very down lately, very hopeless at the general state of affairs in our world. This is not my natural tendency, to feel sad and hopeless, and I needed to do something about it. It’s time to pick myself up and focus on myself, on my own small piece of the world…
This journey started when I first learned about the packhorse librarians of the Great Depression. Research for that story led me to Luis Soriano’s biblioburro and Amy Baqer’s library rescue in Basra. What I also discovered along the way is there are many different types of bookmobiles in use around the world – camels, swamp…
Who’s your favorite Care Bear? At our house, it’s Cheer Bear. Of course, to us, she will always be “Care Bear” because she’s the only one who matters. Care Bear came to live with us, and specifically, to live with Bella, in May 2004. We had discovered at Bella’s two-year-old well-child check that she had…