Manchester Library Friends Newsletter

June 2007

2007 Schedule of Events

June 8, 9:30 Garden Weeding

June 17, 12-5:00 Salmon Bake

June 27, 7:00p FOML Mtg

July 13, 9:30 Garden Weeding

July 25, 7:00p FOML Mtg

August 10, 9:30 Garden Weeding

August 22, 9:30 FOML Mtg

September 14, 9:30 Garden Weeding

September 15, 9-3:00 Book Sale

Message from the President

---John Winslow, President FOML

All of the “Friends” of Kitsap Libraries were awaiting the outcome of the Library Levy Lid Lift vote with keen …apprehension. Would the voters come out with a hearty thumbs-up, endorsing all the efforts so many of us put into the success of our community libraries, or would they tell us that libraries really aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?

Well, we have the results of the voting in hand now. Perhaps there is a different message that we were not anticipating; maybe the voters just don’t like very large tax increases in one single gulp. The problem is that KRL hasn’t gone to the voters for a number of years to ask for an increase, and has been eating up reserves and getting along on a 1% increase in tax revenues on existing properties each year. If my wages only increased 1% each year, they wouldn’t retain any where near the same buying power; its called inflation!

The libraries in the KRL system cannot operate at their existing levels without the needed increase in funding, so short term there will likely be cutbacks. I’m hoping that in the intermediate term, we can find a funding proposal that the voters will support. In the meantime, the “Friends” appreciate your support of our fund raising efforts which go to pay for the operation of the Library building. Have a great summer!

39^th Annual Salmon Bake Upcoming

--by Gigi Weixler

Mark your calendars for June 17^th, and come spend an afternoon with your friends, family and neighbors at the annual fund raiser. The cooks are ready to cook the salmon over a smoky alder fire, volunteers are signing up to serve your cole slaw, baked beans and bread, and Manchester’s famous cookie bakers are planning to feed your sweet tooth some tasty morsels. If you’d like to volunteer, contact John Winslow at 871-7115 or johnwinslo@aol.com.

April 21 Plant and Book Sale a Success

---by Carol Campbell

The annual plant sale, organized this year by Joan Winslow, set a record for financial success. With donations of hanging baskets, a blue ceramic pot, a potting bench, and somewhere around a thousand plants, the parking lot was full of treasures for the discerning gardener. The many volunteers made a difference by helping customers, explaining plant eccentricities, and making great deals. Other volunteers ran the book sale, which also set a record for plant sale day.

Our thanks to all the volunteers, and to the following businesses who contributed:

Albertson’s Smith and Hawken (Seattle)

Brother’s Greenhouse Saars Marketplace

Lisa’s Leaves and Greenhouse Pelican Ranch

Port Orchard Nursery QFC

Scott McLendon’s Ace Hardware WalMart

Have Fun With Sedums

--- by Norma Brady

We sold a lot of sedums at our plant sale this year; I think one of the reasons is that they are such versatile perennials. They have a huge size range: from a small button such as our native Cape Blanco (s. spathulifolium) to flamboyant Donkey Tail (s. morganianum) and gorgeous Autumn Joy (s. telephium). And there are hundreds of varieties in between these extremes.

Sedum is derived from the Latin word meaning “to sit”, and this is what they characteristically do – they place themselves on rocks, walls, fences, logs, and look beautiful. They are usually hardy, mostly evergreen, require little attention and are decorative in a winter garden once established. They are very forgiving if they dry out, and do especially well under eaves, in pots, or filling a bare spot under a tree. Most have attractive blooms but can stand alone with their fleshy and succulent leaves. They are good companions to lewisia, rhodohypoxis, ice plant, ixia, and other plants requiring scant water and lean or even rocky soil.

All sorts of fun ideas can be used to display sedums: fill old boots and rusty mail boxes with soil, and stuff in a variety or two of sedum. Buy several small pieces of pumice (available Erin rockery, Gig Harbor), drill some holes, and plant. An old hanging bird cage makes a great container for Donkey Tail variety. Let your imagination run free and you’ll have fun with these interesting plants. Check out the wild use of sedums at Brothers Greenhouse in Gorst. A local source for sedums, sempervivums (hens and chicks) and lewisia is Pelican Ranch owned by Wally Hansen (call 876-5833 for an appointment). Wally has been a generous Friend to our library.

Library Garden Volunteers Needed

---by Carol Campbell

The Long Lake Garden Club designed the gardens and organizes their maintenance, with help from the Friends, but we need more willing hands to work on the weeding during growing season. Check the schedule of events, and join us for the monthly Garden Weeding work parties.

The Library Staff Recommends:

Kirsten: Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1760's. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara. [It is available in a compilation called "Three Gothic Novels".].

Lauri: Dragonfight (Dragonriders of Pern) by Anne McCaffrey.

This is a science fiction/fantasy classic and part of a trilogy. It is the story of a futuristic world barely settled by mankind, which was then cut off from all contact and aid from the motherworld (Earth). Genetic engineering of native life forms created “Dragons” which formed psychic links to individual humans (dragonriders) for life, to aid in fighting a recurring biological threat.

How to Murder a Millionaire: A Blackbird Sisters Mystery by Nancy Martin

Murder mixes with grand theft when three sisters, who have lived the good life, discover one day that their parents have taken off for a warmer tropical climate in another country with thousands of dollars bilked from their friends and the sisters’ inheritance.

Dee: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Death is the narrator of The Book Thief which is set in World War II Germany. In this unusual tale Death meets the book thief, a girl named Liesel Meminger, when he comes to retrieve her little brother’s soul when he dies, and she becomes an enduring force in his life, despite his efforts to resist her. As Death lingers at the burial he watches the girl, who can’t yet read, steal a gravedigger’s instruction manual. Later she rescues a book from a pile being burned by the Nazis, then begins stealing more books from the mayor’s wife. All this Death watches and recounts dispassionately (he hates to get involved) and he recognizes words not only for the good they can do, but for the evil as well. This very well written novel will have you laughing and crying as Liesel and her foster German family struggle through the war years.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins, crypts by moonlight, travel to faraway mysterious places and unraveling creepy mysteries, then this is the book for you. The author weaves fascinating historical information with real exotic locales and dark tantalizing tales. As the complex mystery unravels you realize that this intelligently written novel is actually the story of Count Dracula.

Deidre: What Was She Thinking? [Movie; Notes on a Scandal 2006 with Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench & Bill Nighy] This novel (and movie) is about a teacher who has an affair with one of her students. The book explores how the affair destroys both her personal and professional life.

Leigh Ann: Mountains Beyond Mountains; The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracey Kidder. The central character of this marvelous nonfiction book is one of the most provocative, brilliant, funny, unsettling, endlessly energetic, irksome, and charming characters ever to spring to life on the page. He has embarked on an epic struggle that will take you from the halls of Harvard Medical School to a sun-scorched plateau in Haiti, from the slums of Peru to the cold gray prisons of Moscow. He wants to change the world. Certainly this luminous and powerful book will change the way you see it.

The Guido Brunetti series by Donna Leon

--a review by Bill Lounsbery

I enjoy a good, fast-paced mystery, and Donna Leon delivers every time. Starting with Death at La Fenice, she has written sixteen novels. Her latest, Suffer the Little Children, was authored this year.

All center on suave, urbane Commissario Guido Brunetti. Wise and humanly sympathetic, and a genius at detection, he tracks his culprits through the winding streets and dark canals of contemporary Venice. Leon uses the serenely beautiful city as an effective backdrop. It’s the elegant Leon’s trademark that not even the most mysterious city on earth can upstage her characters and skillful plotting.

Brunetti and Signorina Elletra Zorzi, secretary to the vice-Questore, Giuseppe Patta, are perfect foils to Patta (a sleek political hack) and his protégé, Lieutenant Scarpa. The scenes where Brunetti and Elletra discreetly collude against Patta provide comic relief to the story while adding dimension and power. Many of Leon’s novels contain a scene like the one where Patta, feeling political heat, calls Brunetti into his office and asks, “Well, where are you!?” To which Brunetti calmly replies, “In your office, sir.”

And the beat goes on.

Leon’s perfectly paced novels inevitably contain domestic situations where Brunetti more than meets his match in his wife, Paola, the daughter of affluent and influential Venetian parents – and a professor at the University of Venice – and his teenage children, Chiara and Raffi.

Eventually Brunetti solves the felony and tracks down the killer, often to the embarrassment of Patta who manages to remain aloof while displaying a certain measure of implied confidence. Leon’s stories can be read independently, although A Death in Venice and Acqua Aqua are sequential and contain two of the same characters.

A Review of Wine in General

---musings by Bill Lounsbery

Man first cultivated grapevines of such familiar varieties as cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay in the Fertile Crescent. Initially, only the elite in Mesopotamia and Egypt drank wine, but in time it became an integral part of religious rituals as well as an important commodity in the Mediterranean basin. The Greeks sought wine for its medicinal properties as well as the pleasure it gave their senses. It was consumed at all levels of Greek society and even institutionalized at symposia where a group of garland-browed men reclined on couches and waxed philosophical. The Romans noted wine’s aspects such as aroma and color and, to a certain degree, correlated age with quality. They classified wines by region; e.g., a wine from Narbonensis in southern France rather than from a specific locality of vintner.

In the Dark ages little old winemakers consolidated vineyards on major rivers and planted grapes in western Germany. The Vikings, while elevating the rape-and-pillage mission to a new level, sowed vines in Normandy. Church bishops and monasteries nurtured grapes, as did the nobility. The Carolingian dynasty gave French wines a major impetus, so that by the Middle Ages French wine was shipped to markets in England, Flanders, Spain and Eastern Europe. Mediterranean wine went to markets in England and northern Europe, while German wine was sent to northern Europe, Scandinavia, and England. Iberian wines, notably port and sherry, became popular, as did tokay, a sweet wine from the Tokaj-Hegyalja region of Hungary, and varietals such as riesling from the Rhine and Mosel River valleys.

In the early 16^th century vines were introduced to the New World. In the United States, as in Europe, wine was popular with those at the pinnacle of power: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both experimented with viticulture. Early Spanish missionaries established vineyards in California. Later, when the Mexican government secularized California wines local Jesuits adopted a scorched-early policy of biblical proportions and ripped out all the vines. Other vintners filled the vacuum and California wine growing is now a world class industry.

Outside the U.S., vintners with familiar names such as Penfold and Lindeman, along with wineries along Hunter River and Jacob’s Creek made Australia a major player in the 1800s, while wine-makers in South America, especially Chile, developed top-notch products before the end of that century. And, although hampered by long-range transportation problems, South African wines gained prominence along side the Chilean product.

In Europe, Italy began marketing quality wines in the latter half of the 19^th century, while Bordeaux proprietosr directed their wines toward the upper class by adding the word ‘château’ to their labels. Other French vintners followed suit and wine snobbery was born. Wine makers from the region of Champagne not only courted the nobility, but also promoted Dom Pierre Pérignon (a monk who toiled in the vineyards of the Abbey of Hautvillers) as the founding father of fizz.

In the late 19^th century, winemakers not only had to overcome the nature adversities of powdery mildew and phylloxeria (a tiny yellow aphid that flourishes on wine sap) – grafted replanting saved the day – but anti-alcohol pressure as well as volatile economic and political conditions.

Despite the above and two world wars, the 20^th century saw a rise in wine consumption – due to the planting of improved varieties, effective disease control, and, in some cases, mechanization. France developed the Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée, or AOC system, to ensure the credibility of its wine labels. Other nations followed suit. Although these systems verify the heritage of a wine and not its quality, today’s consumer is better educated, has more confidence, and can purchase a better caliber of wine than ever before.

In the late 20^th century New World wines bore the name of the region they resembled (e.g., a California burgundy), which was in most cases the pathetic expression of a pious hope. Agreements were signed to stop the use of European names on new World wines as its districts’ varietals gained recognition: e.g., Oregon’s pinot noir, California’s Central Valley zinfandel, and Hunter Valley’s sauvignon blanc.

You know that red wines go with red meat and white wines go with fish or poultry, but then what? It used to be that you’d go to Oregon for reds and stayed in Washington for whites. But with the proliferation of local wineries of proven quality that’s no longer true. And wine does seem to possess health-promoting properties. Consider the ‘French paradox’ of a population with a low rate of heart disease despite its consumption of rich food. American doctors now even advise that the consumption of wine in moderate daily amounts (say, a glass of red wine) prevents coronary disease.

Today you can walk into a wine shop or a grocery store and confront quality wines from regions all over the world at affordable prices. The fun is finding the ones you like best.

(Much of the above was blatantly plagiarized from A Short History of Wine by Rod Philips.)