The Black Cat

The Black Cat by Martha Grimes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Richard Jury is back and crossing mental swords with his nemesis, Harry, over the murder of woman at THE BLACK CAT pub. Once again, Melrose Plant is enlisted to help Jury in the investigation and the interplay of these old friends provide a touch of irony and humor amid the murder investigation.

No spoilers here . . . Grimes fans will welcome the Chief Inspector's return along with other familiar characters. I especially enjoy the return of Mungo, Harry's dog, who has his own caper in this book . . . engineering the return of a kidnapped cat to THE BLACK CAT pub.

View all my reviews >>

Handmade Journal Giveaways

Click on this: Fire and Ice is offering a giveaway of handmade journals, many inspired by favorite books.

A new season

As the leaves change and the weather cools, it is also a new season within the library.  Mr. Johnston's retirement means staff will certainly miss his steady leadership, dry humor and amusing ties, but this is also an exciting time as we welcome John Spears, a new Director who will challenge us in new directions.

In anticipation of meeting with the new Director, I am writing up a precis of the Department's programming and services.  What a pain ... and yet, it is exactly what I should be doing every few years in order to focus on where we are putting our energy!  The monthly reports or annual summary too often look at a our progress as small chunks.  It's satisfying to step back from this pointillism and take a look at the whole picture.

Discovery Wrap Up

This has been a lot of fun and I hope we can continue this process for other learning opportunities.  Although I had been using some of the elements we looked at (i.e. del.ici.ous, flickr), I discovered other tools that I will continue to use, such as pageflakes, Google Docs / Zoho, and RSS feeds. I think it would be nice to produce some podcasts that could be posted to the library website, but that is a new goal on the learning curve!

Thanks for putting this web discovery together.

Exploring Web2.0 Tools

[[I thougtht I had already posted on these last few assignments!]]
I chose the 'page starter' category and tried both Pageflakes and iGoogle.  On Pageflakes I like that you can create a series of start pages: a general start page; a news page to view headlines from various sources; a web 2.0 page that displays flickr, twitter, facebook or other apps you can choose.  On iGoogle many of the sasme widgets are available but it is a single start page.  I like the look of iGoogle and how you can pick from several colorful headers.  The LabPixies 'notes' and 'to do' lists are very useful on the iGoogle site.

Office Productivity

Applications like Zoho and Google Docs certainly simplify committee work or just sharing files with yourself.  I saved a few files on Zoho that I work on in my office, on the YS service floor, at home, and when I am at the Black Road branch.  This really helps because [1] I don't have Office 2007 at home and [2] my profile doesn't come up easily when I am at the branch.  I do wonder about the security of having files floating in cyberspace, so I'm not sure I would trust really private files to these applications.

Online Book Communities

I have an account with Goodreads and I enjoy participating in several reading groups; currently the Newbery 2010 reading group is my favorite.  Youth Services also uses LibraryThing to organize booklists accessible from our Kids Stuff tab on the library's website.

I find sites such as del.icio.us, Goodreads, and LibraryThing very useful.  Rather than compiling bookmarks on a single machine, with these sites you can access the lists and tags from any computer and easily share suggestions created by others.