Your Smile for Today:

"If you are going to throw a club, it is important to throw it ahead of you, down the fairway, so you don't waste energy going back to pick it up."

~ Tommy Bolt, American Professional Golfer (1916 - 2008)
A Round of Golf Jokes, Exley

Haldimand & Area Woodlot Owners Association

"In school they told a story about Johnny Appleseed walking across America planting apple trees." Well, he was doing more..."planting oaks, elm and maples, every kind of tree, aspens, deotars and chestnuts. Instead of making just fruit for the stomach, I am making oxygen for the lungs."

Ray Bradbury's Benjamin Driscoll in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950

Habitat Haldimand Inc. and Haldimand & Area Woodlot Owners Association are located next door to The Neat Little Bookshop. This spring our family planted fifty native trees on location of our farm and cottage on Lake Erie. Inquire about Haldimand's reforestation projects for next year. (SOLD OUT FOR 2010.)

http://www.hawoa.com/ also visit, http://www.habitathaldimand.ca/ ~ organizations partnering with the Haldimand Stewardship Council. http://www.ontariostewardship.org/

Modern Postal Service

Renovations are almost complete on the Cayuga Post Office. One now enters a neat, spotless dry-walled room. There is a splashy new door separating the business of mail from the public. (Presumably staff can tell if anyone is waiting in the outer room.)

The staff is the same ~ friendly, small-town, ready-to-assist. However, modern planning challenges the cordial, interactive atmosphere! Somehow, it feels like we have lost something.

Just a Passing Thought ~

How odd that modernization chisels away at the the human factor. Why is it that little by little, we seem to be losing the personal, friendly touch in so many ways? The interaction of individuals? In the past, the public could catch a glimpse of mail being sorted, staff shuffling bins full of letters and friendly carriers picking up their deliveries. A quick smile and a wave. Someone would stop and assist the visitor.

Renovations are almost complete on the current Cayuga Post Office. One now enters a neat, spotless dry-walled room. There is a splashy new door that separates the business of mail from the public. Presumably staff can tell if anyone is waiting in the outer room.

Photograph: The old 19th Century Post Office across the street from today's modern Post Office. Courtesy of Vavoom Photography.

A Couple Kids And a Storyhour

It takes only a couple kids to provide the sound effects for Walter the Farting Dog Trouble at the Yard Sale *

*Wm. Katzwinkle & Glenn Murray, Dutton Children's Books

Photo: Story Teller, Amy Grasley; Thank you, Eric and Christopher.

School is Out ~ Watch for Our Kids! Have a Safe and Happy Summer.

Happy Canada Day

July 1, 2010

~ Neat Little Bookshop

Closed for the Holiday

(Photo: Lighthouse Port Burwell, Ontario, Canada.)

~ Happy Birthday Canada

A House Without Books???

"A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices."

~ Horace Mann (1796 - 1859) American Education Reformer, U.S. House of Representatives, brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Quotes are Tremendous, Charlie E. Jones, Executive Books, 1995.