On an unusually snowy March night I ventured out to take Laurie Foley’s free workshop called “Blogging- Who, What, Where & How?” at the brand new Toco Hill-Avis G. Williams library. The audience was small due to the weather and mostly women. (Two-thirds of bloggers are men.) We all wanted to know the same thing — how do I start a blog and more importantly how do I get readers?

Laurie Foley is an award-winning blogger and business coach.  She presented us with the history of blogging. Did you know that 133,000,000 blogs have been indexed since 2002 but ninety-five percent are abandoned within four months? 72% are hobbyists, 15% are part-times, 9% are self employed and 4% are professionals.  A great professional blog is Huffington Post and a good local one to check out (besides DCPLive) is Decatur Metro.

Then she recommended some good books: The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott; Wordpress for Dummies, 2nd Edition by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (you can find all of these titles at DCPL).  Then she wowed us with the fact that 900,000 blog entries are posted every twenty-four hours. I must say I feel a little daunted but determined.

If you missed this class, don’t worry.  Every month the Library has many other computer classes which you can check out in our events calendar.

I don’t understand how my shelves at the library can be in perfect Dewey Decimal and Alpha order but my house is an unorganized mess.

I’ve read the best of the best—Peter Walsh’s How to Organize Just About Everything at 501 pages.  It covers just about every organizing situation from planning a wedding to organizing a filing system. I got a workout just carrying it around but due to its extra large size, I never lost it under a pile of clutter.

Walsh also wrote Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Big?. It explores the connection between being overweight and clutter. He recommends ways to clean out your house and your refrigerator.

I skimmed “Organizing solutions for people with attention deficit disorder : tips and tools to help you take charge of your life and get organized.” This would be good with a prescription for Ritalin.

I took the fun test in Organizing for your brain type: finding your own solution to managing time, paper and stuff by Lanna Nakone. Her system was foolproof except in my case.

And I own Organizing from the Inside Out: the foolproof system for organizing your home, your office and your life by Julie Morgenstern.

All in all, I’ve tried and grudgingly accepted that I am one of the few, the not proud, the disorganized. But there is a bright side. I took an informal poll of my co-workers and most of them have great looking shelves but messy homes. It’s a good thing you can only come to the library instead of our homes, right?

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” Such was the wisdom of American industrialist Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company and father of the modern assembly line. I agree with the sentiment and attempt to make every day a learning experience (working in a library is a big help in this endeavor). If you feel like I do, then you may be interested in checking out one of the many OpenCourseWare offerings available online.

OpenCourseWare can be defined as the free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. Such courses typically do not offer certification, or access to instructors, but are excellent resources for furthering your own knowledge in a given area. The first OpenCourseWare selections were offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 and since then a large and growing number of institutions (including many highly regarded universities such as Stanford, Yale, and Harvard Medical School, among others) have published their own OpenCourseWare projects. As of 2009, MIT had over 1900 courses available online, with reading lists and discussion topics, homework problems and exams (often with solutions) and lecture notes. Some courses also include interactive web demonstrations in Java or MATLAB, complete textbooks written by MIT professors, and streaming video lectures. Other institutions boast similar offerings.

For a list of institutions offering OpenCourseWare resources, click here. The listings are divided into nine categories, including Academic Behemoths (MIT), Ivy League (Yale), and International (University of Tokyo). Or, if you prefer, you can utilize the OCW Finder, which, as its name suggests, helps people find OpenCourseWare.

Of course, if you are interested in autodidacticism you needn’t venture farther than your neighborhood library. The DCPL catalog contains two excellent educational series (Great Courses and Modern Scholar) available for checkout in both CD and DVD format.

So take advantage of these resources and keep your mind young for life!

I often have questions come to me about information concerning a variety of people. The Library has a wonderful resource called Biography Resource Center. I have found that if the person is even remotely famous, you can find information about him/her in this resource.

The type of information available ranges from short biographical entries to very detailed biographical information.  Biography Resource Center often provides links to magazine articles. If you have a library card with us, you can access this resource 24/7 using your library card and PIN number.  It is located on our Reference Database page under the History and Biography section.

To answer my original question, Brett Favre is a quarterback who has been playing professional football since 1991. He has played for the Atlanta Falcons (drafted),  Green Bay Packers,  New York Jets and the Minnesota Vikings. Want to know more about Brett Favre? Check out the Biography Resource Center. Of course, we also have a few biographies about him if you want a more detailed account about his life.

The library isn’t just for checking out books.  If you haven’t checked out a class at your library, I urge you to do so soon. Not only are they interesting — they’re free! I recently took a class on the art of memoir writing presented by Wayne South Smith. (www.thewritersprocess.com).

First, he explained the difference between an autobiography (usually written by someone famous and covers the person’s entire life span) vs. a memoir which covers a certain finite period or event in a person’s life.

Then, he gave the packed class exercises in writing, a list of memory prompts and a reading list of books available for checkout at DCPL. For example, there’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (813.54 KIN), Old Friend from Far Away, the Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg (808.66 GOL) or Living to Tell the Tale: a Guide to Writing Memoir by Jane Taylor McDonnell (808.0669 McD).

I walked away from the two and a half hour class having learned a little about myself and the other participants and ready to crank up the computer (also free for using at the library). I figured if I lived through it, I could tell the tale.

Every year, like so many others, I half-heartedly attempt a New Year’s resolution. Gone are the days where I try to guilt myself into going to the gym, being more organized, and wasting less time on Facebook. As I get older, I realize I’m just setting myself up for failure. But last year in an attempt to save more money and eat healthier (hopefully eliminating the gym altogether), I resolved to stop eating out so much and start cooking at home. While my resolution wasn’t a complete success—I still like to eat out a lot—I did learn that I actually can cook. Well, I can follow a recipe. This year I plan on getting more serious, which isn’t that hard to do since the Library has tons of great cookbooks with cuisines from all over the world. It’s fun to bring a new one home and try out the recipes rather than commit to buying one. A few of my favorites include:

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten

Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source by Terry Walters

How to Cook Everything: 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food  by Mark Bittman

There are also some great websites and cooking blogs worth checking out:

Fine Cooking

Their slogan is “We bring out the cook in you” and I couldn’t agree more. Thousands of free top-notch recipes that make me look like I am a better cook than I really am.

The Pioneer Woman

Ree Drummon, a.k.a. Pioneer Woman, shows how to cook delicious homemade fare with step-by-step photos.

Supercook

Life is about to get much easier since I discovered this site. You simply type in the ingredients you have at home and Supercook finds you a recipe. You can also start an account and keep a running list of ingredients.

The Library has plenty of cookbooks for children and teens. These books can help children learn their way around the kitchen and teach them the importance of eating right; international cuisines can serve as an introduction to a new culture.

Grow It Cook edited by Deborah Lock

Holy Guacamole!: and Other Scrumptious Snacks by Nick Fauchald

The Spatulatta Cookbook by Isabella and Olivia Gerasole

Cookbooks can be found in your Library under the Call Number 641. Books about food and culture can be found under 394.

One of the things I like to do on January 1st (besides eating collard greens for money and black eyed peas for luck) is make a list of New Year’s Aspirations. I know most people make a list of things they want to quit like smoking and being in debt but I like to write down what I want to do in the coming year. It just sounds so much more positive—to aspire vs. to resolve.

When I’m done I seal the paper in an envelope and give it to a friend to mail to me at the end of the year. It’s amazing how many things come true and it’s always fun to get the proverbial” self addressed stamped envelope” around December 31st.

However, if you still want to make a list of resolutions the most popular ones include quitting smoking, quitting drinking, losing weight, getting in shape, getting out of debt, spending more time with family, helping others and learning something new, etc.

You’ll find plenty of material from How to Books to Instructional DVD’s in our catalog to get you where you want to be. Happy New Year!

A lot of seniors aren’t comfortable with their computers. They’d love to get email and photos from their families but struggle with the mouse and keyboard. They see the grandkids whizzing around on the screen and think it’s too late for them to learn the trick. Well, it’s never too late to learn something new. I often tell seniors in our computer classes to think back to when they were learning to write and had to figure out how to grip a pencil. Were they writing in cursive right off the bat? They just need to practice. A DeKalb County Public Library card gets you 2 hours of time on a library computer and our page for New Computer Users is a good place to start. From there I usually recommend the Palm Beach County Library System’s Mousercise. This website guides a beginning mouser all around the screen, then through the dreaded double-click, scroll bars, radio buttons and drop-down menus. The exercises aren’t timed and there are no ads or confusing links.

When Mousercise gets dull, what to do next? Any familiar game like Solitaire is a good choice. There are lots of places to play online and many computers have a version already installed. Knowing how to play the game makes it easier for seniors to understand where to move the cursor. WebSudoku offers several skill levels and a timer if you want to increase the challenge. A woman in one of our computer classes enjoyed playing Wheel of Fortune online. Other good choices for a beginning mouser: Bookworm, an addictive word search game with no timer so you don’t have to rush and Thisissand, an unusual website that lets you make sand art (click the gray box to get started). Once a senior gets used to the mouse, there’s no stopping them online. Next click, email or maybe – Facebook?

I’m a sometime potter.  There’s something about getting my hands in the mud that satisfies my soul and some days slapping a few pounds of clay around is better therapy than anyone could ever guess.  There are few things that make me happier than when something beautiful and useful spins into being under my hands.  My first piece happened mostly by accident and was astoundingly ugly.  It took a lot of work to get to the point where I could say, “I want to make a bowl” and I would actually make a bowl.  By then I had set the movements required to do that firmly in the muscles of my hands, arms, even my hips because I use them all when I throw a pot.

According to my instructor at the time, the first pot anyone ever makes always looks like a dog food can.  It will be ugly but it is precious.   She was right of course, nearly everyone in that class turned out something similar to a dog food can and we all treated them as if they were Rookwood.  I had no idea how her comment had stuck with me until many years later when I was standing in a ceramics museum in Toronto.  In front of me, encased in glass, protected from the environment and miscreants and no doubt heavily insured, was a pottery dog food can.   I was staggered.  I knew in my heart that I was looking at a young potter’s first piece.  This pot, made 800 years before my visit to a museum, was made almost exactly the same way my own dog food can had been created.  I knew in my muscles how that potter had shaped her piece and this connection to a long dead person left me breathless.  I stared at that little pot so long the guard peeked over my shoulder to see, I suppose, what was keeping my attention.  I doubt he realized it was the dumpy little piece off to one side.

A curator at the Michael C. Carlos Museum told me this is called the long echo–that visceral connection to long ago though an artifact or text.  It’s an astounding experience and I highly recommend it.  If you want to go the mud route check out our collection–we’ve got lots of great titles, not just on making pots but decorating as well.  Take a class at either Spruill or Callenwolde and after you’ve got your own precious dog food can, make a visit to the Carlos ( I am particularly attracted to the Ancient American collection) and see if you too can hear the echo.

With the recently proposed $894 billion heath care legislation working its way through Congress (to date it has been passed by the House and is working its way through the Senate; for more information, go here to read a recent article detailing the progress of the legislation) and the national debate over universal health care, rising insurance costs, and the possibility of a public insurance option heating up, what is needed is high-quality, incisive, and in-depth reporting on the facts of the situation. Luckily for those interested in teasing out the true nature of the health care related problems facing the nation, journalists from both National Public Radio and the public radio program This American Life have worked jointly to produce several articles and programs examining many aspects of the health care debate, all of which are available for free online.

This American Life (which, as mentioned earlier, is a radio program and therefore is in audio format) has produced the following episodes on the topic of health care:

• More is Less is an examination of why it is that medical costs keep rising. One story looks at the doctors, one at the patients and one at the insurance industry.
• Someone else’s money is a deeper look inside the health insurance industry, including stories examining industry jargon, the origins of the employer health care system, and the inside scoop on drug coupons and how they affect drug prices.
• The third act of the episode Fine Print reports on a House subcommittee hearing addressing the insurance industry’s practice of rescission.
• Additionally the TAL website also features a page of links to other health care articles and information, which can be found here.

If you’d prefer to read your news rather than listen to it (though you can listen to these stories as well), take a look at the health care related content produced by NPR:

• How the Modern Patient Drives Up Health Care Costs is an explanation of rising health care costs focusing on the role of patients, in a similar vein to Act 2 of the TAL episode More is Less.
• How Drug Ads Changed Health Care discusses the shift in pharmaceutical marketing over the past 25 years from attempts to influence doctors to advertising campaigns targeting patients, and the consequences of that shift.

And finally, for those still eager for more coverage on this subject, check out a couple of titles available from the DCPL catalog:

• Health Care Half-Truths: Too Many Myths, Not Enough Reality
• Health Care Meltdown: Confronting the Myths And Fixing Our Failing System