James LaRue - myliblog

On Sunday, June 14, at 5 p.m., please join us at the Rifle Branch Library, 207 East Avenue, Rifle, Colorado 81650. There we will live stream a concert organized by the Committee for the First Amendment. Originally formed to fight the McCarthy era, it has been reconstituted to respond to an alarming rise of threats to free speech in the US. The concert starts at 5:30 p.m. At 5 p.m., we encourage you to bring a dessert to share. Nothing builds community like dessert! You'll also hear some local updates from the event sponsors: Mountain Action Indivisible and Protect Our GarCo Libraries . The event is free, you don't have to register, and it's open to all. The event ends at 7 p.m. Come show your support for the First Amendment!

Last week I did a full upgrade and something about the kernel crashed my elementaryOS 8.1 installation. That's a problem; I don't want an unreliable computer. So I had a CD from a recent Linux magazine with Linux Mint. It installed well, found the broadcom wifi, and all was well. Then I got to dinking around  with making it look more Maclike. Installed the White Sur theme with icons. So now I have the rounded corners, the red yellow and blue dots on the left of a window, and a Maclike logo for the program launcher. I installed Plank (a Maclike dock), and fiddled with it. Then for no reason I can discover, Plank just disappeared. I uninstalled and reinstalled it and no dice. It's there, it has preferences, but I couldn't make it show up on the screen. But it's ok. Linux Mint on a Mac is pretty easy to use. Firefox, Emacs, pandoc, Upnote all work fine. Without the dock, I can run everything from a minimal panel in a way that's a little calmer. I don't need thi...

A famous Wyoming bumper sticker reads: “Lord, Please Give Me One More Boom — This Time I Promise Not To P*ss It Away.” Boom and bust defines the West. Some of us get caught on the wrong side of each end of the cycle. The smarter ones learn from it. They hedge their bets. They invest their money in things they can sustain. I’ve been a library administrator for almost 45 years. This is the first time I’ve worked in a district that got 50% or more of its revenue from the natural gas sector. It makes you cautious. It encourages you to save. In 2026, library revenues fell by over $830,000, all due to a decrease in natural gas valuation. In 2006, Garfield County voters approved a 1.0 mill levy for libraries. Its purpose was to build or renovate branches in each of the county’s six municipalities. The money also provided some operational support. That’s why we have six beautiful libraries, one in every town in the county. We keep them up, too. In 2027, those bonds (basically mortgages for pub...

In my last job I took a required workshop on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. One of the exercises paired me up with a young woman whose parents were born in India, although she’d been born and raised in the States. We were supposed to talk about where we’d grown up. Who did we feel comfortable around? And who not so much? She grew up in Dallas, Texas. At first, she lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of other brown children. She liked it. Then her parents moved her to a “better school.” She was the only kid with brown skin there. So she said she felt most comfortable with people who looked like her. She felt least comfortable with (looking at me) old white guys. I said I totally got that. I’d grown up north of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. My mother was consistently kind and competent. My father was often mean and drunk. I was raised on the dividing line between the Black and white parts of town so was definitely aware of race. I’m comfortable with people who are kind. I’m ...

Before I came to Garfield County, I lived in two big cities: Chicago and Denver. I was surprised to learn that I did a lot more walking and biking there than I did in the more rural and suburban settings I’d lived in before. Cars are a hassle in the city. In the country, you have to have one. That means you spend more time sitting. Foolishly, I did a little too much biking in Denver despite the wildfire smoke trapped in the heat inversion. It led to adult onset asthma. Since starting my job here, too much driving and sitting behind a computer edged me over into Type 2 diabetes. (I’d been borderline most of my life but kept it under control through exercise. My siblings, all younger than me, slipped over years ago.) Let’s not even get into sleep apnea. Or dental issues. The story is old as time, because it IS time. I’m getting old. Last May, I started thinking about retirement. I’m just one year younger than my father when he died. Four of my six best friends have died in the last coupl...

Recently I took a train trip from Chicago to Glenwood Springs. I sprung for a roomette with a fold out bunk bed for the night. (And sleeping on a train was just as much fun as I hoped it would be!) As I left Chicago, there was a winter storm coming. But the train just shrugged that weather aside. During the over thousand mile trip, Amtrak passed right through the heart of many downtowns. I caught a glimpse of many libraries. That's not surprising, since there are more than 16,000 public libraries across the nation--more than there are McDonald's or Starbucks. Isn't that good news? In almost every town across the Great Plains, there are those earmarks of place. A library. A Post Office. A school. A town hall. These spaces represent something we don't think about too often: a public investment in knowledge and civic participation. These are the pillars upon which our nation stands. As I sat in my little room and watched the miles fly by, I also listened to an audiobook (B...

When my grandfather died, I inherited his collection of “The Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant. This 11-volume series, 50 years in the making, stretches from “Our Oriental Heritage” (volume 1) to “The Age of Napoleon.” The prose is magisterial. The Durants were shrewd, probing, superbly balanced in diction and idea. They did more than sum up the past. They sought wisdom. I confess I have not read the whole thing. But I have flipped through the thousands of pages to consider what my grandfather underlined or commented on. And I did read the companion volume: “The Lessons of History.” (It only has 118 pages.) Two big lessons stick with me. One of them is the wry observation that human beings are reliably violent and crazy. To try to rein in our more destructive influences, we create institutions. The family. Religion. Work. Nations. But institutions, founded by human beings, take on human flaws. One in three women and one in four men have been physically abused by an intima...

 I think very highly of the publisher of my On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US.  They just sent out this link  to put together a little holiday bundle of books. Support your Colorado publishers!

The Garfield County Public Library District is seeking trustees (our word for library board members) to fill three vacancies. (For more information, visit www.bit.ly/GCPLD-wanted ). Applicants do have to live in Rifle, New Castle or Parachute. By the end of the year, the Rifle position will have been vacant for six months, due to delays in the county’s management of the appointment process. In New Castle, Brit McLin will be up for reappointment after his first year, as he completes the term of Crystal Mariscal. The Board of County Commissioners are requiring even the trustees they interviewed and appointed themselves to reapply. Michelle Foster is termed out in Parachute. Her great depth of community insight and experience will be sorely missed. Thank you, Michelle. Congratulations, you lucky folks at the western edge of the county for the gift of her time. The Commissioners have never really said what they’re looking for in trustees. Nor have they said how the commissioners evaluate t...

On Jan. 4, 2026, The Garfield County Public Library District (GCPLD) will be making some changes to the operating hours of our six branches. All our libraries will open earlier. Larger branches will be open a bit longer, and smaller ones will focus on their busiest, core service times. While it’s true that we anticipate an over $830,000 drop in revenue due to declining oil and gas receipts, this isn’t a budgetary issue. It’s about the focused allocation of staff. Our goal is to better match our staffing to local community demand. The total hours of operation remains the same. And to be clear: No staff are losing their jobs. How did we get here? Over the past year, the library district analyzed door counter data to understand when and how often our libraries are used. We found that visits are highest mid-morning and early afternoon, and lowest after 6 p.m. Not all branches have the same level of traffic—larger libraries like Glenwood, Carbondale, and Rifle serve more patrons (have a hig...

My personal laptop is a Chromebook. I've been using it for 5 years. I throw it in my backpack and rarely turn it off. It has terrific battery life and does most of what I need it to. But it's begun to show its age. First the internal mic went out. OK, I could plug in my phone's headphones. Then the camera went out. OK, I could buy a camera--but this starts to look like a trend.  I realized I might need to have a backup computer, so dug up my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was running elementary OS 5.1, Hera, based on Ubuntu. (See my earlier post on this combo.) elementary is a good match for a Mac. Its use of the Pantheon desktop environment gives it a sleek, light, colorful look.  But Hera has been superseded, meaning it no longer has security updates. I didn't want to mess around on the internet with a vulnerable machine. And unlike some operating systems, upgrading meant more than issuing some commands. I would have to reinstall it. So I downloaded the latest elementary--versi...

The past week, Oct. 5-11, was Banned Books Week. This event, the offshoot of a book expo in 1982, celebrates the Freedom to Read. It does so, paradoxically, by recounting the many ways people try to remove or restrict access to books, movies, magazines, databases, exhibits, programs and virtually anything else a library provides. The point of the First Amendment, and the deep purpose of the public library, is based on a simple idea. We have the right to speak and the right to access the speech of others. It used to be that these attempts to censor (by hiding or removing) ideas and books was just a small fraction of library use. Most of them were one-offs, usually parents upset that their children (often between the ages of 4-6 or 14-16) were growing up a little faster than the parents wanted them to. But since about 2021, book challenges tend to be coordinated by a few recurrent groups and cluster around a pre-identified set of books. Most of those books feature LGBTQ+ or people of col...

  In this 2025 documentary, "librarians emerge as first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment Rights." Come join us for this free and incisive look at what's really happening in America's libraries, and to  America's librarians.

At the recent annual gathering of the Colorado Association of Libraries (CAL) in Breckenridge two of our people won awards. The Distinction in Library Services award went to Nancy Barnes, our Director of Branches. Nancy helped build the powerful and accomplished team that operates our six libraries. The Unsung Hero Award went to Jon Medrano, our Facilities Manager. Both of them are extraordinary people, the kind who just step in to help and are fun to hang out with (Jon, despite being Unsung, just released an original song I found on Spotify: “On A Wednesday”). Branch Managers Amaranda Fregoso and Ana Gaytan teamed up with Kim Owens, our HR Director, to present on the creation of a stipend for Spanish-speaking skills. A lot of other Colorado libraries are trying to crack the code: an intersection of community need and recruitment strategies. Our folks are ahead of the pack. Alex Garcia-Bernal spoke about our Danish-borne but hyper local program the Human Library. We’ve hosted it 3 time...

When I was 12 I was talking with my mom at the dining table. Suddenly she looked up, stood up and said, “Mother?” She asked me, “Did you hear that?” I’d heard nothing. “I hear my mother calling my name!” she said. She walked around the house, upstairs, out front. My maternal grandparents lived about 300 miles away in Ohio. We didn’t think they were coming to see us. Mom called Ohio. There was no answer. A couple hours later we got a call: My grandmother had been in a car accident, knocked out but okay. When the ambulance came for her, she was whispering my mother’s name, over and over. Years later, I was studying martial arts, and we got a visit from a slender, slightly stooped Chinese man. He was 35 years old, but was introduced to us as a master. He was asked to demonstrate his skills and did three things. First, he asked a sword-wielding student to attack him, which the student did in a great leap. To me, it looked like the master just raised one hand; the student went flying straig...

For some 50 years or so, generations of college students participated in psychological testing. It was easy money for goofy tasks: sort silverware, look at images with your left eye, then your right. But then all that science, because that’s what it was, started to yield results. Here’s one of the experiments that stayed with me. First, you go to the park by yourself and have an ice cream. Second, you get a visit from someone who drops off a sandwich and stays to chat for a while. Third, you make a bunch of sandwiches, drop them off at a senior center, and stick around to chat with the folks there. After each of these, you are asked how you feel a half hour later, a day later, a week later, a month later. Here’s the surprising finding. All of these things make you feel a little happier. But the third task, where you do something for someone else, had enduring results, up to six months later. Science has confirmed that it is literally better to give than to receive. In a world where we ...

Back in March of this year, a Rifle library patron reported to our security guard that a man was apparently sleeping in the bathroom. The guard contacted our staff, and they went carefully to investigate. The man was not asleep. But he was unresponsive and drooling. There are people reading this that are already nodding. They’re thinking with despair, “This is my son.” Or, “My grandson.” Others are thinking, “This could be my wife.” Or, “Me.” Fortunately, library staff had received Narcan training just weeks before from High Rockies Harm Reduction. They called 911 then used the Narcan and by the time medics arrived, they had already prepared our defibrillator. The EMT told us, “If you hadn’t stepped in, the man would have died.” Libraries save lives. At the end of 2023, library staff interviewed almost 100 community leaders. The top issue in our county was housing. But the second issue was mental health, encompassing everything from anxiety to substance abuse. Since 2023, fentanyl has ...

Imagine that you drive north from Montrose, Colorado to Grand Junction. Air quality starts out pretty good, gets worse. You take I-70 east to Glenwood Springs, then angle southeast, but higher, to Aspen.    It looks like the smoke and ash of regional fires (Lee and Elk) flow up both Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers. Upvalley. I felt it in my lungs which is what got me interested. Here's the key to my slapped together chart.     0 to 50 = Good 51 to 100 = Moderate 101 to 150 = Unhealthy for sensitive groups 151 to 200 = Unhealthy 201 to 300 = Very unhealthy 301+ = Hazardous     I suspect this random bit of citizen science (data points from public resources) is no more than that. But wildfires move fast and fire isn't the only concern.

For over 25 years I was a weekly newspaper columnist. That doesn’t make me a journalist. Writing personal essays isn’t the same thing as reporting on the news. But I hung around with a lot of real newspaper professionals. I grew to respect them. I also saw what’s happened everywhere. Newspaper editions got thinner, not only in number of pages, but in the width and height, too. Mainly that’s because the business model for newspapers used to be based on advertising. Now most of that has shifted to the internet. Subscriptions don’t replace the lost revenue. Smaller papers are cheaper. Even big papers with international reputations were struggling. The Washington Post was one of them. In their case salvation came in the surprising form of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He bought the paper from the Graham family in 2013 for $250 million. At first, Bezos seemed content to mostly leave it alone. In 2017, the Washington Post adopted a new slogan: “democracy dies in darkness.” In February of this y...

One of the standard segments of our library board meetings is the Branch Manager Report. In July, our director of branches, Nancy Barnes, filled in for vacationing Abraham Korah. Their comments were so good I thought them worthy of wider dissemination. I have lightly edited them, adding my own intro and conclusions. Intro Our board meetings move around the district. The last board meeting at Glenwood happened in April of 2025. Concluding in May was the art show we held with the Glenwood Art Guild. We currently have some informative displays from the Glenwood Historic Preservation Society of notable buildings as well as information about how Glenwood residents can landmark their homes for preservation. We also have a “Join the Conversation” display and cards for community participation in conjunction with the One Small Step Storycorp grant that Adult Services Coordinator Trary LaMee secured earlier this year which aims to foster civil and civic community engagement. If you walk by the f...