The Book Search

Living in South Florida certainly has it's perks.  While many of our northern family and friends have struggled through a record setting winter, winter in South Florida tends to be pretty consistent.  It's warm and sunny and fairly dry.  In fact, our winter has been much warmer than usual (not to brag) and we're running our air conditioning at a time when most people are running their heat. Someone told me the other day that they really missed living where there are seasons and I thought that was sort of funny because we DO have seasons in South Florida, but they are more subtle than seasons in more northern climates.  We don't get dramatic leaf turning displays or snow storms, but I always notice spring in South Florida, maybe even more than some of our other seasons.  Suddenly, the days are longer.  It's not dark at 5 any more, now it's still light at 6:30.  The mockingbirds are out and reminding everyone that they are here and why don't we notice ...

This morning I was out working in the yard. We have the day off for President's Day because we live in a place where we don't have snow days (although we do have the occasional hurricane day). I was out pulling weeds and throwing down mulch and sort of admiring how tidy it mostly looks (my mom was here for a long weekend and she LOVES to pull weeds, go figure). Anyway, as I was pulling weeds out there, I was thinking about the inventory I've been doing in the media center. I've been pretty heartless about weeding some of the books that are old and tired looking. I thought weeding in the yard isn't really that much different from weeding in the library. As you weed, you're pulling out things that are old and tired or don't belong. Although at school when I'm weeding, people tend to be a bit more alarmed than when I weed at home. "You're throwing that away? I love that book!" The good news is at school we have a bin where we can put...

We have been waging a losing battle with the weeds in our backyard. We live in South Florida and our yard is too small for a pool (we have power lines on our backyard line and regulations require that a pool be at least ten feet from the power lines so you don't electrocute yourself cleaning the pool. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me!) and while I like the look of grass, I apparently have not been offering the grass what it wants because the weeds have proliferated and the grass... not so much. We also had a problem with the rain running off the patio roof killing some of the grass. So my husband said, "Why don't we just pull up all the grass and plant bigger plants?" Ok, that seems like a good idea. So we drew some pictures of what we had in mind and laid out our garden hoses so that we could see what a path would look like and my vision was that we would start on this during our winter break (when it isn't 90+ degrees with a million percent humidity)...