As I write this I am in a foul mood, which many of you will understand when you hear what’s going on.

I was driving home last night, talking to my mom, when she shared the news that the town council in my hometown is thinking of closing the library to cut their budget deficit. Note: They are not thinking of cutting back hours at the library; they are considering closing it. In the local paper, a councilman is quoted as saying, "Our funding for the library is almost $900,000 this year. That’s a lot of money. When more than 50 percent of the funding goes toward salaries, we have to start looking at other options." He said out of about 13,000 residents in town, only 4,700 hold library cards. And he goes on to say, "I’m not against the library, but you have five libraries within the immediate vicinity that could be used by local residents and they provide very similar services.” Those were fighting words to me, and I spent the rest of the drive home outlining to my mom how they need to mobilize to keep this from happening.

The past two weeks have been a bit of a blur. They began with a lunch meeting with Rachel Renée Russell, author of Dork Diaries, and continued with a special screening of the Wimpy Kid movie (which Russell happily admits helped inspire her work). Having felt like a wimpy kid and a dork at many times in my childhood, I could relate to both sides. And my lunch with Russell was quite a bit of fun (I'll be putting the interview online soon). We met at New York’s famous Dean and Deluca outside of the "Today Show" studios and proceeded to talk about everything under the sun (both of us being native Midwesterners transplanted to the East Coast, we had a lot of things to talk about). I wrote a review of the Wimpy Kid movie and blogged about it, so you can check that out to see what I thought (the short version: I loved it, much more than I had expected to). Carol saw it this week and admits to laughing out loud, and, as she had read the books in advance, she felt it was a very strong adaptation.

I'm writing this opener from the Outer Banks in North Carolina after two jampacked weeks in the Pacific Northwest that were wonderfully bookish and enlightening. Our family retreats to the Outer Banks a couple times each year, and it has become a real reflex place for me. After a day of horrific rain, the skies are beautiful and I'm getting lots of reading and knitting done (I brought boxes of both with me!) --- and am enjoying the company of my family and our neighbors along the beach. We're looking forward to celebrating Easter together.

March had me traveling to Portland and Seattle, which was one busy but great trip. It was fun visiting bookstores in these cities and meeting readers and some of our reviewers. I am now in the Outer Banks for Spring Break and look forward to catching up on my reading.