On Saturday, we had our big, big mural celebration event. It was wonderful, if I say so myself. We had a really good classical guitar player, Cruz Rodriguez, we had platters of fruit and cookies, punch, balloons, and a mural activity sheet for the kids. Best of all, we had lots of kids, a few teens, lots of parents and grandparents. We had lots of nonchild-affiliated adults, seniors. We had members of our Friends of the Library board. We had "our" artist, Mona Mills, ebullient as only Mona ebullients. We had
Joan Embry, a local resident. We had indigenous people, Latinos, mixed race folk. We had everybody who was anybody. We had lots of fun.
The picture above is a celebration of dogs. The big black dog is Cimi. Cimi recently retired as a therapy dog. For the last few years, young people had been able to come into our library and read to Cimi, who provided a wonderful, nonjudgmental set of ears. Wen we were first discussing what to put on the mural, we thought it would be nice to include Cimi's contribution to the branch. Then Mona said, we need more dogs! There is a constant parade of people walking their dogs past our windows on their way around our lake. So Mona asked the staff to bring in pictures of our dogs. I think we had seven dogs added to the mural. One was my beloved Ladybug, who died while Mona was painting the mural. So that's her, up on the right, with the incredibly omnidirectional ears, and her purple heart dog tag. I usually go to visit her every couple of days, and ask her how immortality is.
Oh, I don't know if you could see them on the other pictures, but you can definitely see them in this shot. There are book titles woven into the mural all over. Added wonderfulness. Some from us staffers, some suggestions from our readers. We did a book display of some of the books along the window sill for the event--of course, some checked out immediately! All to the good.
Speaking of immortality, today's biblio is
Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury. I have to admit up front that I never read the prequel
Dandelion Wine. When I did my intense scifi reading internship (age 12-16?), I read
Fahrenheit 451, of course, and loved it. But then I read some other Bradbury title and didn't like it, so I didn't read any more. Same thing happened with Isaac Asimov, so my depth of knowledge there is quite shallow. At least I am
deep on William Gibson and Sheri S. Tepper! (New Gibson coming in August! I read some on his
blog as it came along--looks good!).
OK, I read Farewell Summer a while ago, but it in a pile to blog about, then went south mentally for a bit. Then it came up as overdue in my library account, and I said, "I still have that?" Came home, found it, said, "I didn't blog this!" So I am putting it in here because I did read it. I enjoyed it. I thought it did try to be very deep a little too much at the end, but who better? I liked the Civil War imagery. I liked the getting into the minds of the young people and the old people. I really liked that the hero/leader of the kids, Doug, doesn't usually have the big ideas for his group, but he still leads. Scifi bildungsromans will always be my favorite flavor. Hey, anyone know why it is bildungsromans (plural?) in the WorldCat tracings? Is it something from the German? It seems quite odd to me, but using fiction subject tracings as a learning tool does endlessly intrigue me.
Hey! I volunteered to
blog for Lita again at ALA Annual. I will not say bad things about techies, not even inadvertently. I should type that about 25 times, but you know I'd use copy & paste...I will do another post with my ALA plans soon!
I also volunteered to be do something undefined regarding
Library 2.0 for MPOW. Yeah! More to come.
