Met a Vet student today

At coffee today I asked the young man seated near me at the fireplace what he was studying, and it turned out it was large animal veterinary medicine! And he was a farm boy. When I was a librarian at OSU vet library, my best student employees were the ones raised on farms. Great work ethic, and rarely ever called in with crazy made-up excuses for not showing up. My favorite student type. He had graduated from the University of Finlay, so we chatted a bit about Marathon. That segued to the book we'd read for bookclub, The mighty queens of Freeville, and the story of butchering "Shirley," one of the cows. He told us that on his farm they had bottle fed and raised two cows which eventually his father slaughtered and put in the freezer, but his mom didn't want to eat them. One day when his dad was gone his mother had the children dig a large hole in the pasture but didn't tell them why. She then had them carry the packaged meat from the freezer and bury it.

Coffee shop book groups

On Monday morning I meet with four other women from my church at Panera's. I regularly visit two different Panera's and they are popular spots for Bible study and book groups. There's a group of men from St. Tim's that meets at the same time my group does. Today I asked if I could take their photo for my blog.



We're taking a brief pause from reading "A faith and culture devotional; daily readings in art, science and life" by Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington (Zondervan, 2009) to use "Messiah" by John Gugel (Creative Communications for the Parish, 2003) during Advent.

Getting children to read

I had breakfast with another retired librarian from a different metropolitan area today. She told me that their local PBS station was doing a reading campaign for children. So many poor families, she said, had no books at all in the home. So the station was contributing DVDs about reading to the families because they all had the latest in viewing equipment.

Hmmm. Books in the hands of children. What an interesting concept, just when libraries are giving up on them and encouraging everyone to use e-content.