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By Griff Wigley, on April 11, 2011, 8:19 am
Bonnie Jean Flom has a blog post on Northfield.org:
The Arts and Culture Commission of Northfield, in partnership with the Friends of the Northfield Public Library and the Northfield Public Library, has announced a Sidewalk Public Poetry competition to mark National Poetry Month in April.
See the Friends of the Northfield Public Library blog post: 2011 Northfield Sidewalk Public Poetry Contest
 All residents of Northfield, and all students enrolled in Northfield schools, are eligible and encouraged to submit short poems (10 lines, 240 characters maximum) that are appropriate for the public sphere.
Up to 10 winning poems will be stamped into Northfield sidewalk pavements and will be considered for other public purposes including publication and readings.
 The Locally Grown Triumvirate has requested that one of the winning poems be used to replace the sidewalk graffiti that one of our fans scrawled into the cement in front of the HideAway Coffeehouse & Winebar last summer.
By Griff Wigley, on April 8, 2011, 8:42 am
The Friends of the Northfield Public Library held their annual meeting on Tuesday night. Where? At the Northfield Public Library.
There were evidently some tense negotiations on Monday about the fee that the organization would have to pay for use of the library’s meeting room. With the library’s recent budget cutbacks, Director Lynne Young is on the lookout for additional sources of revenue and has reportedly become a tough negotiator over non-profit use of that space.
    
Friends president Bill North and treasurer Kathy Sommers ripped on Young during their presentations but she placed responsibility for the Library’s financial predicament on the City Council, as well as on library patrons like Will Healy who have hundreds of dollars of unpaid library fines for overdue books.
   
The rhetoric was getting pretty heated but thankfully, Northfield psychiatrist and author Dr. Henry Emmons was on hand to, um, calm things down. Henry was the featured presenter, speaking about his new book, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety.
All went well until after Henry’s speech when Lynne Young noticed Monkey See Monkey Read bookstore proprietor Jerry Bilek selling copies of Henry’s book. She argued that the Library should get a commission on all books sold on the premises. Jerry told her to stick it in her bookdrop. Henry refused to moderate the dispute unless someone agree to pay him his usual counseling fee. The crowd was getting riled up, and when someone mentioned Zamboni tires, I decided it was time for me to leave.
By Griff Wigley, on February 7, 2011, 10:15 pm
I noticed today that there is a public telephone in the lobby of the Northfield Public Library. Has it been there a while?
Can anyone remember where the telephone booths were in Northfield? And when did they cease to exist?
By Griff Wigley, on February 3, 2011, 8:00 am
The Northfield Public Library and the Archer House were looking so pretty during Tuesday’s snowfall, I just had to take a few photos.
See album of 10 photos, the large slideshow (recommended), or this small slideshow:
By Griff Wigley, on April 27, 2010, 7:09 am
By Griff Wigley, on January 20, 2010, 8:36 am
 No, not Northfield Public Library Board Chair Margit Johnson, though she, too, is getting up there. (I know, she hardly looks a day over 75.)
It’s Northfield’s Carnegie Library that’ll be hitting the century mark this year. On Monday, Margit stopped by my corner office at GBM to show me the planning document for the centennial celebration. See her guest column in today’s Nfld News, Library building celebrates 100 years in 2010.
By Griff Wigley, on January 16, 2010, 10:06 am
 Looking at the December 2009 Library Expansion FAQ (PDF) has started me wondering:
To what extent has the plan for the expansion taken into account the need for libraries of the future to function less like grocery stores and more like kitchens?
Continue reading Northfield’s library expansion: a nicer grocery store or a better kitchen?
By Griff Wigley, on December 16, 2009, 5:05 am
  Librarian Kathy Ness dropped a not-so-subtle hint for me last week when I, um, tried to check out a book at the Northfield Public Library. Yes, you can now pay your library fines online via SELCO’s eCommerce service (login to your account via the Electronic Resources link).
What she didn’t tell me was that, depending on the amount that you owe, you get a customized message when it tells you how much you owe. Want to see mine?
Continue reading Kathy Ness says I can pay up online
By Griff Wigley, on October 19, 2009, 11:55 am
 I stopped by the Northfield Public Library this morning for some quiet wi-fi use and got stopped by Kathy Sommers, volunteer with the Friends of the Northfield Public Library.
She asked me to fill out a user survey — "… you can help us by telling us how we are doing" says the form. The on-site surveying will continue all week. I filled one out and got a treat!
The survey’s not mentioned in the two most recent Friday Memos, nor on any of the four library blogs, nor on the Friends of the Northfield Public Library site; nor is there an online version of the survey. So you can probably guess what my comments were on the survey. 
By Griff Wigley, on April 9, 2009, 6:49 am
 I have a Meebo chat widget for Locally Grown at the bottom of our LG Live page, below our Twitter widgets.
And I just discovered that the Northfield Public Library has one, too. It’s on their Ask a Librarian page. I used it this week to get a reference question answered and to renew my card. Waaaaaay cool, IMHO.
This will likely make Ross furious, however, as he sees the library as one of the three legs of a stool that anchors downtown (along with the post office and the liquor store). By using this chat tool, I didn’t drive (or bike or walk) downtown to complete this task and then stop by a local downtown store to buy something. Ah well, he probably wants them to disconnect their phones, too, for the same reason. No pleasing that guy.
I hope the library is also considering using Twitter, as these Twittering libraries are doing.
By Griff Wigley, on June 10, 2008, 5:35 am
I blogged about my high-tech hearing aids over a year ago and wrote:
 When I finally got over my ego problems at having hearing aids (geezer!) and began showing them to people, I was amazed at how many people (baby boomer guys, primarily) admitted to having the same hearing difficulty and had no idea that this technology existed. I now think of them no differently than my reading glasses. And if a battery runs out in the middle of a meeting, I swap it right in front of everyone, just like pulling out a kleenex and wiping smudges off my glasses. No big deal. So this blog post is a public service announcement.
Guess what? It’s time for another report from the front lines of impending geezerhood, but this time, the topic is low back pain.
 I had my first episode of low back pain in 1988. I was working late at night at a job in Eden Prairie when suddenly, I couldn’t stand up straight. I literally had to crawl to my car to drive home. I started standing at a desk back then and have been doing it every since. But I’d still have episodes where I’d pinch a nerve in my low back (sometimes doing nothing strenuous, other times, doing stupid stuff) and then hobble around for a week or two. I would always get immediate relief from a variety of chiropractors, and then I’d try umpteen different back/stomach exercises to prevent it from happening again but nothing ever worked longer than 3 or 4 months. Until a year ago.
That’s when, after another pinched nerve episode, I found this book at the Northfield Public Library:
Back RX : a fifteen-minute-a-day Yoga-and Pilates-based program to end low back pain forever, by Vijay Vad. (See this web site with more excerpts.)
Dr. Vad prescribes a combination of muscle strengthening, stretching and endurance with one main difference that I’d not heard of ever before: an emphasis on the hips.
… The other was to conduct a research study into why low back pain is so prevalent among professional tennis players. The study I conducted found that the players most susceptible to low back pain had the least range of motion in the hips. In 2001 the PGA asked me to do a parallel study of professional golfers. This study produced the same results, showing a significant link between a restricted range of motion in the hips and the incidence of low back pain. This finding is important for the rest of us, whether we are fitter than average or committed couch potatoes, because of the sedentary nature of modern life and work. Sitting in chairs, which most of us do for long hours every day at work, school, and home, leads inexorably to a restricted range of motion in the hips. The Back Rx program accordingly features exercises specifically designed to counteract this tendency and increase the range of motion in the hips.
I started with the set of Series A exercises in Feb. 2007, 20 minutes, every other day. It took me 2 months to do those completely pain free. I was feeling so much better that I went back to both racquetball and motorcycle trials competition early last summer. No problemo. By fall, I was pain free doing Series B so I started with the most difficult set of Series C exercises. I was pain free doing those by December and was feeling so cocky that I decided to return to snowboarding after a 5-year layoff. Yeehaw! I wiped out dozens of times every time I went with no problems. (I dinged my shoulder but that’s another story.)
I’m still doing Series C every other day and expect that I’ll need to do that for the next 50-60 years so I can still keep doing the sports I love.
Moral of the story: support your local public library.
And if you want a copy of the book to own, support your local bookstore. I’m sure both Locally Grown regular contributors David Schlosser at River City Books or Jerry Bilek at Monkey See Monkey Read can get it for you.
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The Locally Grown Triumvirate has requested that one of the winning poems be used to replace the sidewalk graffiti that one of our fans scrawled into the cement in front of the HideAway Coffeehouse & Winebar last summer.
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