Long Island Winterfest Jazz On The Vine will run from February 13th through March 21st and will feature free jazz performances in East End winery tasting rooms every Saturday and Sunday afternoon.  Visit their website at www.liwinterfest.com to see the schedule of all events and special offers.

Posted by S. McGuire

My husband and I recently returned from a 6-day trip to Jamaica, our real first vacation in five years, and the first without our 4-year-old son.  It was absolutely wonderful and I am anxiously looking forward to our next “parents-only” vacation. In the days leading up to our vacation however, while I greatly looked forward to lounging by the pool, catching up on some reading and indulging in some tall, frosty Piña Coladas,  I couldn’t help but to feel some trepidation about leaving my son in someone else’s care for the first time.  This vacation, I realized, would require a lot more than just packing my cabana clothes! It was time to get organized and get some paperwork in order.

If you’re looking for contemporary or traditional guidelines regarding appropriate gifts to give on those special occasions, consider the following sites:

• Leah’s Gifts and Etiquette
• Emily Post Institute

Posted by Ray Arroyo

The longest running love affair in American history may well be the American love affair with movie crime .

Criminals on celluloid debuted in the earliest days of the movie industry. Before there was sound in movies, there was crime on the big screen. Crime from coast to coast intrigued all. Audiences in 1903 thrilled to Edwin S. Porter‚s silent short western The Great Train Robbery. In 1915 Raoul Walsh‚s first feature film, Regeneration, shot on location in NYC‚s Bowery District on the Lower East Side, depicted east coast lawlessness.

We added a lot of great audiobook titles to our collection last month. Some are new titles and you’ll also find some old favorites. Fans of Eat Pray Love will want to read Elizabeth’s Gilbert new memoir, Committed: a skeptic makes peace with marriage. Other new titles include Unfinished Desires: a novel (Godwin); The Unnamed (Ferris); The First Rule (Crais); The Honor of Spies (Griffin); I, Sniper (Hunter) and Not My Daugher (Delinksy). Old favorites include Clan of the Cave Bear (Auel), Cold Hit: a Shane Scully novel (Cannell) and Sailing to Capri (Adler). You can find the complete list of new audiobooks by clicking on the link New Materials from our homepage, or visit the Media Room and browse our whole collection!
Posted by H. Cohen

We are pleased to announce that we are now offering some audiobooks in an MP3 format. Most new cars are equipped with CD players that are MP3 compatible and many CD players are also MP3 compatible. An audiobook that consists of ten compact discs will fit on one MP3 CD! We are able to offer these MP3s at no charge to the Library through our order plan with Recorded Books. Some of new MP3 CD titles we added to the collection are Churchill (Johnson), Remarkable Creatures, (Chevalier), Thereby Hangs a Tail (Quinn), Pirate Latitudes (Crichton) and A Touch of Dead (Harris).
Look for MP3 CDs in the Media Room on the shelf by the Playaway collection.

I learned yesterday that the Department of Civil Service will no longer print examination announcemnts, starting February 1st. If this cost saving measure was discussed in our local papers, I surely missed it!  All announcements will be available exclusively at the Department of Civil Service website at www.cs.state.ny.us.  For the convenience of potential applicants and other stakeholders, such as libraries, an automatic email announcement notification service is available. Details about that can be found at www.cs.state.ny.us/announ/emaillist.cfm.

Posted by S. McGuire

The Suffolk County Office Of Public Information advises that Suffolk county senior citizens should take cold weather precautions and plan ahead for emergencies that are always possible yet unpredictable in our winter months.

We need to take precautions to avoid possible life threatening situations. Although winter months bring us great beauty, they also bring hazards particular to winter storms, blizzards, icy roads and sub-zero temperatures. These are conditions for which we need to consider and for which we need to prepare before they actually occur.

Many of us have become increasingly concerned as we’ve read reports of homeless people sleeping in the woods, and of food pantries running out of supplies. The hunger situation has worsened in the four years since a large study was conducted, as part of a program called “Hunger in America “. If you’d like to find out more about this study, and the local L.I. facts, there will be a Press Conference and Study Launch on February 3rd at Hofstra University’s Leo A. Guthart Cultural Center Theater.   You will hear about the demographics of people using local emergency food sources, and what impact this has on the broader L.I.  community.  There will be three great speakers:  Art Gianelli from NuHealth System, Deidre Parrish Williams from Newsday, and Nancy Douzinas from the Rauch Foundation. Community groups, and concerned individuals, are invited to attend this program which is presented by Island Harvest and Long Island Cares.
Please RSVP at HUNGERREPORT2010@GMAIL.COM

Be of good cheer!

Why you say, should we be of good cheer. We had barely shoveled out from a winter preview of record breaking, back breaking snow, when old man winter brought additional helpings of snow and ice.

As if that were not enough, Icelandic temperatures blanketed just about place on our map.

Folks lucky enough to have fled south for some warmth, found that the lucky ones were really those who had packed gloves and mufflers.