mistletoe!

This is a great year for mistletoe. It's all over the place (well all over the trees, anyway.) It's also a pretty good year for holly berries. Merry Christmas from the plants! 

post-election special

As commenting on the recent election and forecasting its effect for the next four years seems to be obligatory these days, here are a few thoughts:

Whether you voted for him or not, his administration is going to do something you don't like -- lots and lots of somethings as far as progressives are concerned, but even for most conservatives, there will undoubtedly be things that go too far or cause unexpected difficulties in your everyday life.

The coming administration is shaping up to have a level of cronyism far beyond the norm. It's going to be even harder than usual for the grassroots to influence change at the national level. The bright spot is all those ballot initiatives. The votes on these didn't necessarily follow the "conservative" or "liberal" inclinations of the state. People pay closer attention to, and vote on more carefully and with more independent thought, issues that clearly and directly affect their everyday life, and which they feel they can directly affect.

So get involved locally. Run for office if you can stomach it. Know who your local politicians are, know the local issues, follow the news, and when things veer off in unhealthy directions put pressure on the powers that be -- from the state legislature down to community members with no elected office but with wealth or other local influence.

Form a social safety net and be a useful part of that net. Again, get to know the issues -- the practical, day-to-day issues. Learn useful skills: gardening, carpentry, computer technology, mechanical repair, first aid, the intricacies of filling out forms and negotiating the system for financial aid for college and for daily survival, for immigration, for employment. Above all, learn the second language most common in your area, and/or learn to sign. Take meals to the hungry, fix up a house, mentor a child, mentor an adult, clean a vacant lot, volunteer at a firehouse or a hospital or the local social services, at a public library or a public park. Use your skills to teach others and to help, physically and materially, wherever you can.

We're all gonna need all the help we can get.

summer reading program 2016

This year's Summer Reading Program is turning out to be a big, popular success. Last year's experiment in online-only registration kinda fizzled, but this summer, from the beginning, the enthusiasm of previous years is back in full force -- and then some. 

 

Some possible reasons for the upsurge: 

• Paper sign-up sheets and reading logs. This option hit people's happy buttons in several ways. The forms are simple -- just put pen to paper and write, no signing in,  no passwords, no clicking around. They work even for people who are generally uncomfortable with computers, and with their colorful format they seem less like a form-filling chore (at one time doing it online might have seemed like play, but now there are too many online business forms for that view). And then there is the ever-important aspect of human contact. A human librarian takes your filled-in list of books -- an acknowledgement of your achievement -- maybe even notices the titles you've read, and hands you your prize. For a moment, the reader is center stage. 


• Pre-registration. Especially useful in a large city with more than one school district, and therefore more than one ending date for the school year. There was a bit of confusion because this just applied to the online registration option, with the program "officially" beginning later, but it did ease the hectic crowding of the opening day. 


• Having the adult program concurrent with the children's and teens'. This proved to be a real boost for the Adult Reading Program, usually held in midwinter. It benefited from the high publicity of the kids' programs, and in many families summer reading became a multi-generational activity. 

of challenges and limits

So. The main thing I learned from this is that I don't have the sort of personality for keeping up with an extra, regular, obligatory (even if freely chosen at the beginning) activity over a long period of time.

(Also that I react to the guilt of not doing something in time by avoiding the whatever or whoever completely.)