April 2026 in review; Looking forward to May

Marcie and Giraffe by Kim Gregory

 I am still very much feeling SMOOSH-FACE. Everything that was stored in the basement last summer, then hauled up into our program spaces, then hauled out into the general youth department, had to be sorted, discarded, cleaned, and stored. Mice got into a lot of stuff, birds pooped on it, and most things were coated with detritus from the basement construction.

The new space has less storage and what there is generally doesn't fit any of the containers or materials we have so carefully accumulated, labeled, and organized over the years. We also had to paint our program spaces, put shelves back up which required breaking the old shelf pins out with pliers and hammer, then gluing new pins in, painting the old shelves, and refitting them, since of course every single shelf is a unique size.

Meanwhile new carpet was being installed (yay fumes!) we had torrential storms, tornadoes, and heat waves, and of course the new HVAC system does not work yet. Needless to say, I have not finished any of the prep work for summer that needs to be done. We didn't even manage to get everything stored away in time for our reopening on April 27th, but we had gotten through enough that the rest could be moved out of the way so people could get to the main part of the youth department.

However, we have survived and managed to keep things functioning. Field trips start on Monday and I've scheduled a handful of programs to run in May. In between field trips and programs, I will be finishing all of the summer planning, the nonfiction weeding I've been in the middle of for almost two years now, and the rest of the preparations for our "official" reopening and kick-off on June 6.