My van listened to Christmas carols performed by cats on the drive up, and we were so thoroughly engrossed in the music we overshot the Swan Valley Public Library, located in Condon, by about 10 minutes. Luckily, we turned ourselves around, got directions, and quickly found the library in question.
Fern showed us around the one room library and I chatted with her about computers and such as I worked on replacing one of her monitors and changing the homepage of her Internet Explorer page on one of the Public PCs. Since Swan Valley has a paid staff of one we set up all of the computers for them, but rarely make it up there to do maintenence. Nonetheless, the computers seemed to be holding up well, and they are a 24/7 WiFi hotspot (unless the power goes out, which is a frequent occurrence up in that part of the state). We all milled around for a bit, then decided to head to the Hungry Bear Restaurant to grab lunch. They were ready for us.
No one had any soup. At least as far as I could see. But we did get to kick back and smoke a couple of stogies (or what appeared to be stogies) and enjoy what looks like some sort of killer anecdote courtesy of yours truly.
Then it was off to Seeley Lake, whose public library is located inside their high school. The library was very nice. I was a little bit surprised, and a bit intimidated to work on computers in front of a room full of high schoolers, but I knuckled down and did some quick and dirty registry editing to get one PC back in good graces with Sue, the branch librarian.
The library was laid out really well, and I particularly liked the sheer number of displays they had, ranging from books made into movies to girlie girl books.
Then came the ride home. We ate some chocolate, engaged in a little library gossip and then got back to work here at home. It's nice to know that we've got such great branches serving the patrons in an extremely rural area.
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