March Already!

I can't believe how quickly the time has flown by since I first started here in the library. All the changes have been keeping me quite busy and very pleased with how we are moving along with the times. February saw us add a completely new service to the library and its patrons. Disc repair is something we needed long before I got here and although we had a machine meant to do just that it did not work well at all. We were pleased to receive a very generous donation of $1,000.00 from a patron who shared with us her story of how the library made a real difference in her life at a tough time. Her donation allowed us to start the purchase on a machine that has already restored over 200 discs that were not working, and we have begun the process of a complete cleaning of the thousands of discs we have available. We also offer this service to the public for the low price of $2.00 a disc.

In order to serve you better the staff has added more notaries to the staff so that we hope to have a notary in house during all business hours. There is no charge for notary services.

As we move into Spring we are preparing the budget for next year and are cautiously optimistic that we can do all the services we had before and maybe a few more. We look forward to hosting some of the Park District's programs and we are investigating the possibility that we can expand our space sooner rather than later. In the emantime we are doing everything we can do make the best use of the space we have.

Look for our new Local History Department to be opening soon on the second floor. Thanks to the generous donation of his services, Warren at Wilmington Collision had graciously offered to paint some of our old shelving so we move the collection to its own space. We hope this new area creates a welcoming environment for all our history buffs.

As always my staff and I welcome you to the library and want to assist you with your needs in any way we can. Come see us soon and enjoy the Spring.

Maria Meachum

This is very scary stuff. Please read!

In August 2008 the 110th Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) to protect children under 12 from exposure to lead following widespread reports about the dangers of children’s toys coming in the U.S. from China and other places. This new law is administered by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and will likely start to take effect in February 2009 (although even this latter date appears to be changing.)

Within the last few days, ALA and others in the “book” community (other librarians, publishers, teachers, booksellers, etc.) became extremely concerned after seeing that the CPSC intended to include books in the definition of “products to children” that would need to be certified as safe. This concern was heightened by a letter from the General Counsel of the CPSC – a letter that states that books are not exempt from the law.

However, ALA has been in discussion with attorneys, other associations and the sponsors of the original bill. Our analysis is that neither the law nor the legislative history indicates any Congressional intention to include books and even textbooks in the law.

Please stand by – there is no need to take action at this time. The situation is extremely fluid and every day this week ALA has received new and sometimes contradictory information. The ALA Washington Office is taking measures to ensure this ruling (CPSIA) will not affect libraries and has sent a letter to all Congressional offices alerting them to the fact that we believe CPSC General Counsel has erroneously interpreted the CPSIA to include books. ALA is also monitoring the potential impact on other types of library materials as well.

Several key Hill offices have contacted the CPSC Commissioners and the General Counsel. We believe that the misunderstanding may be cleared up, so the Commission can focus on children’s products that are truly dangerous.

If we can’t get this resolved, we will need everyone who wants children to continue to have access to safe children’s books to contact the Commission and Capitol Hill – but, for now, we can stand by until we hear more from our Congressional supporters.

Obama IS an American.

So today I had a patron call in what was either panic or hopefulness and she asked me to explain to her what constitutes a "natural born citizen." Mind you we played twenty questions before her real question was revealed but in the end she was trying to verify that Senator Obama was indeed actually qualified to run for president. She had apparently been watching some expose television or listening to talk radio.

The truth is there are lawsuits trying to prove Obama is not eligible to be president. Mind you Senator McCain had some issues himself, being born in the Panama Canal Naval Hospital, but Obama's life is more complex than being born on foreign soil to U.S. Citizens. He has the distinction of having only 1 parent who was a U.S. Citizen, his mother who was 18 at the time of his birth. Normally that is all it takes. One U.S. parent and you are in. As long as that parent had spent at least 10 years in the U.S. and five of those years after the age of 16. Since his mother was 18 when he was born it was not enough to make him a natural born citizen IF he was born on foreign soil. For the record Senator Obama states he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Two years after it became a state. That should be he end of it. But there are other factors. His paternal grandmother has made claims he was born in Kenya, and was taken to Hawaii and issued a certificate.

He was a Kenyan citizen at birth because his father was Kenyan. That citizenship expired at age 21, because he did not swear an Oath of Allegiance to Kenya. And at the time dual citizenship was allowed with Kenya. But there are other factors that muddy the picture. He was adopted by his step-father in Indonesia and was issued an Indonesian passport. There was no-dual citizenship allowed between the US and Indonesia at that time, so the naysayers are claiming he actually dissolved his US citizenship, and when he came back he would have had to be "Naturalized" and take the oath to be a citizen again. They claim he never did.

All this is still in court, but for my part I find it ludicrous to suggest that with the media and the political digging going on today that we could ever believe a man could be this close to the White House without all this stuff being vetted is crazy. There will always be conspiracy theories. Even when Obama's campaign posted his birth certificate on his website, claims of forgery were immediately made. It will all come out in court eventually. My question is this. If a Harvard educated lawyer decided to run for president do you really think he'd try it if he couldn't win his case?

Saving fish from drowning...not just an Amy Tan novel

So today was another day when I thanked Steve Jobs for creating the ITouch, I am too cheap to get the IPhone but allowed my husband his grand gesture and accepted the ITouch. Today it saved many lives (of the fish variety!) I was working in the Nature Center at my children's school and was trying to do a basic fall cleanup. I went in and realized the nifty net we stretched over the pond to catch leaves had sunk in under all the weight and had also trapped many innocent fish. After pulling out the net and tossing a dozen or so fish back in I noticed the water was also pitch black. Very bad. So I was online in a flash thanks to the free Wi Fi in the building and getting great instructions on pond care. Restarting the pump and exposure to sunshine will do the trick.

So I have a trick for Halloween...

As I went visiting this weekend I saw that many of my friends were already carving pumpkins (too early people!)and already they we being eaten by squirrels. Allow me share with you a nice tip I learned a few years ago and I swear it works very well... Dish soap. You know like Joy or Sunlight. Squirt some of that on and rub the pumpkin down with the undiluted soap. No more squirrels (it won't hurt them), and it makes your pumpkins look shiny as well!

So today the layoffs hit home..

My apologies for delaying the last post, but I just found out that my husband got laid off from the job that pays all the bills and provides us with health coverage. While aware of the possibility it might happen, nothing quite describes the feeling when it actually does. So my next few blogs will probably be about how to cope with the financial and emotional aspects of unemployment.

So the first thing to do is investigate your Unemployment Insurance Benefits. In Illinois the website is http://www.ides.state.il.us/ . There you will enjoy trying to decipher the instructions on how to apply and get the benefits you have been paying for all these years. The trick is to be persistant and to do it immediately. They need time to process it and you will need these benefits to get you through the next step...job hunting. Chin up you have more support than you think!

So my faucet is leaking...

For the past several months we have had a problem with our kitchen faucet not working properly and the main problem is a faulty "diverter" which is stripped and lodged in too tight to remove. So in order to make it all work well I 'd have to basically remove the whole faucet, possibly having to buy a new one. (Shopping is fun, but times are tough you know.) I have let it be and ignored the dripping that occurs if you are not careful to push hard on the handles but someone I know tried to convince me I was wasting more money by not get it repaired. True? or false? I wondered.

So I sat down to figure it out. Where I live they charge me a whopping $4.09 for every thousand gallons of water. How much water was I wasting? Not as much as I first thought. I decided to count the drips and see. I counted 120 drips in a minute. After checking with a drip calculator online(they really have a calculator for everything now!) I found out I am wasting close to 4,200 gallons a year, or a little over $16.00. Not really a valid argument for fixing the sink but I will anyway because it seems like a green thing to do. And the drip is annoying too!