Meeting the neighbors

Found out this morning when is the best time for meeting the neighbors. 6:00 AM. I met two folks I hadn't met before because they were out walking their enormous dogs. It was beautiful out at that hour--I am getting acclimated, I didn't even wear a sweater. It's now 3:35 PM and it's still only up to 77 degrees.

Today I took books back to the Back Mountain library. This is a really cool place. They converted their old high school into a public library. I decided to put Eclipse on hold as I had read the second in the Twilight series (by Stephenie Meyer) at Georgia's house. I was surprised to be first on the hold list. So I ought to be able to read it soon.

They have two cool ideas. One is a club you pay money once a year to join. This gives you first crack at the latest new books which they buy for the use of the club members. They also have a set of books which are checked out for one week only. This allows them to circulate new and popular books more readily. Their big deal is an antique auction in July. It's evidently quite amazing and involves much more than antiques. It sounds more like a community fair than anything. My library card isn't just good here in Back Mountain. It can also used in all the libraries in the county including the big Osterhout library in Wilkes-Barre. It's on my list of places to visit because it was built with the consultation of Melvil Dewey and is a renovation of a Presbyterian church from the mid-1900s. I am pretty sure my dad has been there, probably to do his research papers for high school. It's been around so long, they opened a children's section in 1904! They unfortunately lost 69,000 books and all their newspapers and magazines in the Hurricane Agnes flooding in the 70s. (See a previous post about the tendency for natural disaster around here.) We were so pleased that the University of Iowa library that we love so well was saved recently with the help of many volunteers.

It's a good thing they have such great libraries around here since they have no stores like Denton's Recycled Books and Records. That store was amazing. Almost every time I was in there, someone from out of town was in there stocking up because their community didn't have anything like it. My daughter and son-in-law who live in the Czech Republic used to buy books by the sackful when they visited us. Alas, they won't be able to do that here. I tried to find a used book store when we first moved here. I finally found one of the used book stores listed in the phone book. I was careful to do so during its wacky and random opening hours. But alas, it still wasn't open. And judging from the size of it, there wasn't much in it.