Never Enough Time is there Asa, eh?

My biggest quandary as a librarian is much the same as that facing a chef in an upscale restaurant. So much good stuff to sample and never enough time to do so. For example I have 10 books by Charles De lint I'm dying to read, I've just started Tammy Pierce's 2nd Beka Cooper book, I'm almost done with a great book I'm reviewing with three more waiting behind that and then I got "The Glass Harmonica" by Louise Marley as a paperbackswap item today. Forget the half dozen new ones on the library shelves by other favorite authors. All this and I'm back in the thick of writing my fifth book in the Wizard of Simonton Pond series to boot. I need a 36 hour dai, yes indeedy, I do.

If you can survive your children's adolescence there are surprising rewards.

Beth and I consider ourselves doubly blessed. Both of our daughters, Sara Beth and Lisa Ruby, now ages 27 and 25 respectively, are wonderful loving adults. There were numerous times we wondered if we/they would survive adolescence. Lisa was especially prickly in junior high and high school. When she went off to Fordham University, I expected her to drop out or do in a roommate. She amazed and pleased me by not only surviving three consecutive roommates from hell, but getting into the accelerated master's program during her senior year. She even taught at a parochial school in the Bronx while an undergraduate.
That prickly kid is now 'mom' to 4 cats, is pursuing a 2nd master's degree in early childhood literacy and is working as a teacher's aide with special ed. kids. Her compassion and insight into student strengths and teacher weaknesses continually amazes me. Both Sara and Lisa love coming home, love sharing books they really liked and get me the absolute best Christmas and birthday presents. If you are a parent of a teen or two and wonder if it's worth the hassle, take heart and remember my experience. It's worth every moment of contention and histrionics when they turn out this good.

Entering Cabin Fever Country

Native Mainers recognize the inevitability of that mid to late winter phenomenon known as cabin fever. It's brought on by limited daylight, favorite teams either out of contention or not playing at the moment, snow, more snow, too damn much snow and a mix of salt and slippery conditions everywhere, depressing news, cold and a general limitation on outdoor activity unless you're a skier, snowboarder or like running naked from the sauna to a hole chopped through the ice where you jump into water cold enough to provoke immediate cardiac trauma.
Symptoms include buying strange food or really useless things on eBay, depression, familial homicide, rudeness to close friends, embarrassing behavior at town meeting and a recurring thought that maybe moving to Florida and taking up shuffleboard might not be such a bad idea.
Fortunately we have a built in series of cures. First, the Red Sox start spring training and 98% of the population starts getting wicked hyped over the thought of kicking the crap out of the Yankees all summer. Snow starts melting and seed catalogs clog the mailbox.

My other realities

As a writer/librarian/wizard, blogging is a natural outlet and is generally a barometer of my internal well-being. Most of my entries can be found on livejournal http://sennebec.livejournal.com/ because that's where I was introduced to the concept. However, there's no reason why i can't drop other bits of my reality here. Today, for example, I am processing a very interesting trip to Massachusetts two of us made yesterday. As background, consider that for 4 years, I was one of two librarians responsible for maintaining/troubleshooting/setting up/training most of the libraries in Maine running Innovative Interface's Millennium software. What started out in 2002 as 11 Solar libraries an 36 Minerva libraries grew to 31 Solar and 56 Minerva libraries by the time i burned out because there were still just 2 of us keeping the dam from breaching.
I'm a glutton for punishment as last summer three of us sat down and in less than 2 hours whipped out a grant application to create an open source based library consortium in the Tri-County area here in Maine. The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation funded it and we were off to the races. In the intervening months, we've experienced some growing pains. One library dropped out, the original server location stopped being an option and various other things happened. On the plus side, we hired a retired consultant who moved to Maine from the Washington, DC area as our project manager. He and I spent yesterday driving to central Massachusetts where we talked turkey with the folks at NELINET. I can't go into detail, but we came away very intrigued with the possibilities of working with them. Above and beyond the possible benefits to the budding consortium is the scalability potential for what we going to build. Not only might it accommodate a heck of a lot of Maine libraries down the road, but it has the capability of communicating with Milennium, thus preserving and even expanding the potential for dynamic interlibrary loan all over Maine.

overkill perhaps?

Not sure I need another blog, but what the heck. In addition to running one of the best small libraries in Maine, I write--a lot. I'm the internet columnist for Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian, write regularly for Wolf Moon Journal, review books for www.tcm_ca.com write a weekly library column for the Sebasticook Valley Weekly newspaper, am working on book 5 in my Wizard of Simonton Pond series and have a short story coming out in an anthology called Deadfall this November by Level Best Books.
I also blog regularly on Livejournal and am the last innkeeper of Middle Earth on Myspace. When I'm not writing or running the library, I garden, cook, and support library software for other Maine libraries as well as enter sweepstakes. Contrary to popular opinion, I DO sleep occasionally.