Friday, January 29, 2010

‘News Girl’ by Liza Ketchum

Book cover: News Girl by Liza Ketchum. A pair of children look over the edge of the basket of a hot air balloon above an 1800s cityscape
News Girl by Liza Ketchum is the story of a 12-year-old girl during the San Francisco gold rush.

Newsboys would hawk East Coast newspapers that had arrived by steamer ship. People would pay six times the printed cost of a three-month-old newspaper to get news from “back home.”

By selling these papers, at a dollar apiece, the newsboys could earn more money than their parents could earn in a day’s work: running a store or panning for gold. The heroine of Ketchum’s novel dresses up like a boy so that she can sell papers.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Lake County Library on Facebook

What a welcome surprise, when I moved to Lake County from the Santa Rosa Bay Area, to find that I was already a part of the Lake County Library system thanks to its shared network with Sonoma and Mendocino counties. I am a lifelong user of libraries and am glad to see the Lake County Library on Facebook.

Originally posted to the Lake County Library’s Facebook page

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Support for animals means a lot

Sasha

Sasha looked so fragile in her cage at the Middletown Animal Hospital. Our tiny long-haired tortoiseshell cat was suffering from kidney failure and the veterinarians were working with us to give Sasha a fighting chance.