On Your Marks, Get Set, ... Bake!

Librarian April Cushing is head of Adult and Information Services at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column published in the November 1, 2018 issue of the Norwood Transcript Bulletin.

Or at the Brits say, bike. And we’re not talking cycling. I just finished drooling over the first four seasons of the Great British Baking Show, for the second time, and can’t wait for Season 5. My latest TV addition, GBBS is thoroughly entertaining without being treacly. Judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood preside over brigades of British bakers who go “dough to dough” over the course of ten weeks to try to bring home the blue ribbon. Once I tuned it, it was love at first bite. In an enormous white tent set in the English countryside, 12 amateur bakers chosen from thousands compete in three weekly challenges—the signature bake, the technical, and the showstopper. With one unlucky soul voted off each week, it’s like Survivor but with spatulas.

My Nuclear Vacation

Lydia Sampson is the Technical Services department head at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read her column in the October 25, 2018 issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

I recently returned from the trip of a lifetime and checked one of the top items off of my “bucket list.” London? Paris? Venice? No. At long last, I traveled to the Ukraine, to Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.

 

In 1986, during the Cold War when the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, launching radioactive material far and wide, contaminating most of the Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, and extending throughout Europe and the USSR, and beyond. In the immediate aftermath, finger-pointing, political agendas, and secrecy delayed evacuation, exposing local residents to severe radiation. Finally, buses carried thousands of residents off, assuring them they’d come home in a few days. They never returned, and the town of Chernobyl and neighboring city of Pripyat, constructed specifically for the power plant builders and employees, became ghost towns.

The Ukraine designated an exclusion zone surrounding the entire region with barbed wire fences, checkpoints and armed guards. This forbidden territory became my dream destination. As an avid adventure traveler and “urban explorer,” ghost towns, abandoned buildings, and post-disaster locales fascinate me. For years I knew of Pripyat, a city frozen in time, full of empty schools and homes, and even an amusement park set up for a May Day celebration that never happened.

You Are NOT Getting Sleepy ...

Kirstie David is a Literacy and Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the October 18, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

I am a librarian, and like many in my profession I am innately curious. If you are in the business of ferreting out information, being naturally curious comes in handy. When I’m not at the library putting my curiosity to work for others, I like to learn about learning and behavior – or why we do what we do, and how we can do things better. As such, I am an avid watcher of TED talks, those treasure troves of “ideas worth spreading,” and the related TEDx events organized in communities around the globe.

Make it Sous Vide!

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the October 18, 2018 edition of the Norwood 
Transcript and Bulletin.

Believe it or not, I’ve sometimes afraid of new technology. My ex-husband worked for one of Microsoft’s competitors in the late 1970s and 1980s and his company created one of the first word processing programs for the PC. Yet, in the early 1990s I still insisted on writing my graduate school papers on a word-processing typewriter. Because we had several computers in the house, my inability to embrace the PC drove him crazy – among a zillion other things, of course!

It’s not that I am distrustful of technology – I’ve actually been an early-adopter of many gadgets and devices but I must fully understand them first. I hate reading boring instruction manuals and that often trips me up. I’m a hands-on learner and my confidence level often has wild rides of highs and lows when learning how to use a new appliance or gadget.

That said, once I am a firm-believer, I drive everyone a bit looney when I insist on singing, and re-singing, the praises of each of my new gadgets and appliances.  Gerry and I bore our friends with wondrous tales of inventions like the steam cleaner, vacuum sealer, spiralizer, espresso maker and milk frother.

This is especially true in the kitchen where I spend much of my time on the weekends. In my early marriage years, I heartily adopted the Cuisinart food processor, the KitchenAid stand mixer, and the automatic bread and pasta machines. Sometimes these machines hum in the kitchen for weeks, and other times they lie silent for months or years. Still some are part of my everyday repertoire.

Audio Failure

Nicole Guerra-Coon is the Assistant Children’s Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her column in the October 4, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript.

Though I have always loved stories, I never listened to audio books growing up. It wasn’t that I disliked them, it just never occurred to me to listen to them. My parents didn’t listen to them, and although I sort of knew that there was “talk radio” out there, I thought it was something on “AM” and that they only talked about news, sports or traffic. I suppose my grandparents had listened to “stories” on the radio, but it was not something anyone ever talked about that I can remember. The only real reference I had from that era was when my mother referred to my grandparents as ‘The Bickersons,” and I had to ask her what she meant.

I loved reading books and watching television and movies. The first movie I ever saw in a theater, Snow White, was a revelation to me. I was only about three, and my parents were unsure if I was too young to bring to the theater, or if I would be scared by the witch. But I sat, wide-eyed, and absorbed every detail. When it ended, I burst into tears and was inconsolable. My parents apologized and told me the witch wasn’t real. But all I could get out was, “I…never…wanted it…to end!”

Don't Read That!

Liz Reed is an Adult and Information Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Liz’s column in the September 27, 2018 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

As Americans, we take a lot of our freedoms for granted. Other than yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, we don’t even think twice about our right to say what we want when we want. We trust that law enforcement cannot enter our homes without a warrant, and we know that the freedom of religion is an ideal on which our country was founded.

But imagine a reality in which we couldn’t read what we wanted. The freedom to write books of varying opinions and subject matter is protected by the First Amendment, under the freedom of speech. Have you considered that this extends to protect your freedom to read? Protecting everyone’s freedom to read what they want is a bedrock of librarianship, and it’s more of a constant concern than you might expect. There are frequent calls to censor books people don’t agree with or find objectionable in some way. If the move to censor a book is successful, it may be pulled from the shelves of schools, public libraries, and even booksellers.

Fall Flavors ... Sans Pumpkin Spice

Alli Palmgren is the Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Alli’s column in the September 20, 2018 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin. This is Alli's last column as she leaves to become Assistant Director at the Weston Public Library on September 21, 2018. Good luck, Alli! Watch for Brian DeFelice's first column this fall as he takes over the reins as Techology and Information Librarian on October 9.

Last fall, I was unpacking the groceries from a trip to the market. My husband popped into the kitchen to “help” put the food away, a.k.a. survey my selections so he can plan what I refer to as his “snack-tivities” for the week.

After a few minutes of cupboards opening, I heard him exclaim, “Ugh! Why would anyone buy this?!” I turned around, expecting him to be holding one of the weird veggies I buy without knowing what I’ll do with them, but nope, he’s holding a box of pumpkin spice Cheerios. I thought they looked good, but my husband thought I was trying to poison him. This was the moment that I learned that my husband hates almost all pumpkin spice flavored things.

He always ate my squash pie at Thanksgiving dinner, which has the same flavoring as pumpkin spice, so why this sudden hatred for this popular fall flavor? Apparently, the problem is over-exposure. Dunkin’s introduced a pumpkin muffin a few years ago, which I thought was a good fit. New Englanders have been eating spiced pumpkin bread for centuries, so why not make it muffin shaped? But the pumpkin spicing didn’t stop there. Now there are pumpkin spice Oreos, pumpkin spice tea, and pumpkin spice Peeps. Even I draw the line at pumpkin-y marshmallow chicks.

Influenza and Inequality

The Black Death (or Bubonic or Great Plague) was a four-year epidemic that affected 30-60% of the European population. It was critical to the history of the Middle Ages that we studied.  The Great Plague is believed to have begun in Central Asia in the early 1330s where it was carried by rats on ships across and throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. It is believed to have killed up to 200 million people across Europe from 1347-1351 and it may have taken 200 years before the world’s population recovered from the loss of life from the epidemic.

Many of us remember studying the Middle Ages and its Black Death in school. What we might not have learned was that there were many plagues throughout history.

The Podcast - Not the Same Old Radio Show

Charlotte Canelli is the Director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte’s column in the September 6, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Audio blogging, or podcasting, began in the 1980s. It wasn’t until the advent of broadband, mobile applications, and wide use of the Internet, though, that audiobloggers found a niche. Today there are 250,000 podcasts with one billion subscribers on iTunes. In 2004 the word podcast was invented – the word is a blend of the words iPod and broadcast. Podcast is both a noun and a verb. Defined, it is a digital audio file uploaded to the Internet.

I became a podcaster in 2006 after taking a class and uploading my first podcast to Podbean, a free podcast hosting site. My first podcast was a simply a one-episode thing and it was merely an assignment for a workshop I took through our regional library system. A few years later, I began reading and uploading audio versions of our library columns to another hosting service, SoundCloud. It became far too time-consuming and I abandoned the practice, leaving the digital files somewhere in the digital heavens.

Cook the Book: Falling Back in Love with Cookbooks

Kate Tigue is the Head of Youth Services at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Read Kate’s column in the August 30, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Once upon a time, I was an organized home cook. I planned our weekly menus for our meals at home, shopped for only fresh ingredients weekly, and did all my prep work in the mornings before work. Then I had a baby and all of my careful, well-honed organization went out the window. Gone were the days when I had time to flip through my cookbooks at a leisurely pace. I tried to make meal plans but then a baby wouldn’t stop crying and something would burn or a toddler interrupted me a thousand times before I could dice a shallot. Food shopping became a marathon exercise of half-remembered lists and saying “No, put that down; we don’t need that!”

Binging in British Baking and Russian Pastry

Charlotte Canelli is the Director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte’s column in the August 23, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Gerry and I binge-watched at least four seasons of the Great British Baking Show this summer. It had been recommended and once I started binging and proselytizing about my new-found crush, I realized that, as with most other hit series, I was years late to the party. Especially this British one.

During one particular B-A-A-A-A-K-E which happened to be pastries, I thought of the favorite savory pastry that had captured my fancy over 25 years ago. It was the kulebiaka (or coulibiac) – a time-consuming Russian first course. The kulebiaka boasts a flaky, buttery pastry that envelopes a filling of either cabbage and chopped hardboiled eggs or salmon, rice and dill. My finished kulebiaka’s crust is garnished with leaves and a rope closure and rises and bakes to golden perfection.

Once sliced and served with sour cream, it is always met with ooohs and aaaahs across the room. Anton Chekhov wrote in his short story The Siren that “the kulebiaka must make your mouth water; it must lie there before you, a shameless temptation! You cut off a sizable slice and let your fingers play over it. When you bite into it, the butter drips from it like tears.”

I fantasized, recently of course, that Paul Hollywood would have swooned over one of my masterpieces, the kulebiaka. I might have had a handshake.

Anne of Green Gables: A Short Bit about Adopting an Older Child

Carla Howard is the Senior Circulation Assistant/Marketing and Media Assistant at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Read Carla’s column in the August 16th issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

I fell in love with Anne of Green Gables while in college. I never read the books in high school, dismissing them because of the romance-y looking covers. I quickly realized my mistake and have read the series several times. I have visited Anne’s beloved Prince Edward Island, Canada.  I attended the Anne play in Charlottetown, and was in heaven as I sat with my fellow Anne-fans, finishing up with a raspberry cordial at a nearby restaurant.

A mother and daughter were seated next to us, and the girl, probably about 14, was making it quite obvious that she didn’t want to be there and that the whole thing was “stupid.” Her poor mother finally had her moment when Anne’s beloved adopted guardian Matthew died suddenly of a heart attack. Soon, there were sniffles all around, and the young girl, ready to roast her mother, looked around, and sat back, quietly. I think she must have finally realized that hey, my mom’s not crazy. This is a thing; this Anne of Green Gables.

It Takes a Stretch

Nancy Ling is the Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Nancy’s column in the August 9th issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

You must have a favorite author. Someone you turn to when the rest of the world seems in chaos. Someone who is as comfortable to be with as your warm fuzzy slippers and a chair beside the fireplace. Perhaps it is Jamie Ford or Susan Meissner (two of my favorites) whose lyrical stories carry you back in time and make you fall in love with their characters. Or maybe you are addicted to Mary Higgins Clark or Louise Penny, and you cannot wait to settle down with their latest creations in your hands. 

While there is something magical and wonderful about those treasured authors, there is also something to be said for those books that you never ever thought you would read, and suddenly you do. Perhaps you’ve been astonished when your world expands after being stretched by a story or concept that greeted you when you dared to open a book that wasn’t part of your regular repertoire.

Polos, Picnics and People Watching

April Cushing is the Adult and Information Services Supervisor at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Mass. Read April’s column in the August 2nd edition of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

Pop quiz: Where can you show off your favorite sundress–or shorts, sip champagne–or soda, and stroll around an enormous field tamping down divots while kids cavort alongside canines, just over an hour away? (Hint: horses are involved.) Answer… at the Newport International Polo grounds in Portsmouth, RI. When friends invited us to join their party for an evening of polo this past Saturday I was all in, especially when I found out my four-footed companion was also welcome.

For over 130 years, polo matches have been among Newport’s grandest and most popular traditions–a legacy from the Gilded Age. I’m not the only Morrill Memorial Library staff member, it appears, to experience its charms. Hearing that I was going to watch USA take on Ireland the following day, Lydia, who oversees the excellent Technical Services Dept. in the fourth floor “stucco tower,” said “You’ll love it!” and suggested I bring along the library’s brand new picnic basket.

Among the Norwood Library’s circulating collection

Chill Out, New England

Liz Reed is the Adult and Information Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the June 26, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

We all know that one of the great benefits of living in New England is that we get to experience all the seasons. Our iconic foliage draws busloads of tourists every Autumn, we usually get to have a white winter holiday season, and our landscape becomes furiously and gloriously alive every Spring. As a result, our New England summers can feel all too brief, and many residents look forward to summer all the rest of the year.

 While we’re busy bundling up for the other seasons though, we can sometimes forget just how hot and humid our New England summers can be. Heat waves seem to surprise us because they don’t happen very often in the course of a year - remember that stretch of 90+ degree heat a few weeks ago? Brutal, right? And no wonder we feel this way: in the course of June 2018 we went from chilly Spring temperatures in the 40s to blazing 92F, according to AccuWeather.com. That’s a pretty big difference, especially after what seemed like a prolonged winter.