Be Nimble
My best friend, whose daughter is also my son’s best friend (friblings, friend siblings, we call them), has been warning me for the last three months that her family will…
Tethers
This Halloween, my son decided to be the solar system, so my husband and I decided to be NASA astronauts. Surely this family costume, one of our best, is a…
Mayor Flaherty Addresses FoPHL Annual Meeting Crowd
The teen area of the library was the setting for the May 19 Friends of the Pleasant Hill Library (FoPHL) Annual Meeting. Guests included Mayor Tim Flaherty, Vice-Mayor Ken Carlson,…
Aspirations
My son’s PreK class at Creative Play Center recently celebrated Career Week. During one of my co-oping shifts, his teacher read to the class from a book about different careers….
It all started with…
I’ve been thinking about pursuing my MLIS for a good eight years. It all started with a conversation after a library research workshop that my English 101 class at John…
The rise of the e-bookworm?
I’ve always proclaimed my loyalty towards the traditional printed word. I used to be that person who would turn up their nose and scoff whenever someone said they preferred reading…
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the “Transformed Nonconformist”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is such an icon of the American civil rights movement that it is easy to overlook that he was a highly educated man and profound…
City seeks comments / suggestions on new Pleasant Hill Library
The City and BCJ architects held a very successful Library Town Hall meeting on November 27th. The design team received excellent feedback, comments and suggestions from the floor and from…
Adjectives and Verbs
THERE IS SO MUCH TO SAY! Where do I start? Maybe with: When I ran into Patrick Remer at the Light Up the Night tree lighting, the first thing he…
The Lifeguards at your Library
Today, I’ve tamed a jammed printer, united a toddler with his hysterical mother, located the nearest clambake, and explained why it’s not appropriate to watch pornography in public places –…
Apple stores architect to design new Pleasant Hill library
The award-winning architectural firm behind the flagship glass cube Apple store in New York City will design Pleasant Hill’s long-awaited new library. The City Council selected the San Francisco office…
Student design contest for new Pleasant Hill library
In conjunction with the October citywide read project, young budding interior designers are invited to participate in the Student Design Challenge for the planned new library. Now that the City…
My Favorite Ghost Stories
I have never been much of a fan of horror fiction. So much of it always seemed overdone with graphic images and plot devices and I always suspected the…
Perfectly
Pleasant Hill, we have an architect!! The announcement arrived in my inbox days ago that the City of Pleasant Hill has selected architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ)–whose team includes…
Rereading “The Things They Carried”
Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” which was inspired by the author’s experiences in the infantry during the Vietnam War, has become a classic work of modern American…
An Open Letter to our College Libraries
It’s finally the start of the collegiate school year, and you know what that means? The start of another four months of late night cramming, endless amounts of black coffee,…