Happy New You!

What are your New Year's resolutions? Learning a new skill, traveling the world, reinventing yourself, or getting around to something you've put off for a while? I just put up a display of books to help get you started. Here's the virtual version!

• Freerunning and parkour amp running and jogging up a notch, into an extreme sport. Do you dare try?
• Get crafty! Arizona's own Crafty Chica writes about sparkly, fun, Mexican-heritage-inspired crafts, not to mention fashion and style. She even penned a little crafty fiction! And you can save the planet by delighting your friends and family with recycled crafts from Recyclo-Gami, Craft Activism, Upcycling, or Steampunk Emporium.
• Take an offbeat vacation with The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel. Challenge your travel-mates to a game of "Trip Poker": winner picks a destination...and loser pays. Already have a destination in mind? We keep some always-available guidebooks in our ebook collection.Visit our digital downloads page and see if we have the right one for you! (P.S. If one of your resolutions involves reading classics, we have plenty of free public domain ebooks available that don't count against your checkout limit and never expire.)
• Create something really important, a lasting video record of a life-and death struggle where all of human existence hangs in the balance. That's right, I'm talking about making your own zombie movie with Filming the Undead!
• A lot of resolutions involve diet and exercise. Our collection includes books that run the gamut from vegan diets to pilates to fat acceptance; something for everyone!
• Maybe all this talk about diet got you thinking about growing your own food. We have a wide selection of gardening books, and we've got an awesome seed library to check out...literally!
• Finally, do you have trouble sticking to your resolutions, feeling like they're important, or even remembering them after a few months? (Me too!) This Year I Will offers tips on making lasting changes in your life. And although I have a pretty low tolerance for the self-help genre, Sark always makes me feel creative and inspired.

But library resources don't end with books! Visit our website to...

• Learn a language,
• Research your family's genealogy,
• Find articles, instruction videos, and more for all kinds of hobbies,
• Or start a business!

We also offer a wide variety of free classes in person at your local branch, where you can learn anything from computer basics to GED prep to languages to photo editing to Excel!

What are your resolutions? How do you use the library help you reach your goals?

Houseplant Survival Hope

I love houseplants! Unfortunately, houseplants have very short lives under my care. I tell myself that's OK, they are just cut flowers that last a little longer. My dilemma is that I recently bought a house that has an indoor atrium. This 5 foot by 5 foot area has a faucet, a drain and a skylight. I am afraid that since the average houseplant under my care lives only about 2 weeks this could become a very very expensive indoor gardening experiment. A lot of plants can fit in an area that size. Pima County Public Library has great books on indoor gardening. Find them by searching for the subject house plants.

I have checked out almost every title about growing houseplants in the Pima County Library system. My favorite book is The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual: Essential Know-how for Keeping (Not Killing!) More Than 160 Indoor Plants by Barbara Pleasant.

The $64 Tomato

Critters are destroying my garden. I've replaced the tomato plants three times but I know it's futile. My humble little plot is barricaded so completely I can barely get to it, but these critters are unstoppable. I think they're airlifting themselves in.

Man vs. the enemies of cultivation is the subject of The $64 Tomato, a memoir sure to hit a responsive chord with frustrated farmers like me. If your attempts to grow your own salad have been thwarted by the superior forces of Mother Nature, you'll appreciate William Alexander's account of adopting the life of a gentleman farmer in New York's Hudson River Valley.

To Manhattan transplant Alexander the plan seemed simple enough: put in a kitchen garden and some fruit trees, weed a little, water a little, then sit back and enjoy nature's bounty. But instead of apples and corn he got all-out war, with contractors, plant diseases, bugs of every variety and (of course) deer, ground hogs, rabbits and all sorts of hungry, determined fauna.

Alexander's response to his negative gardening karma is hilarious. When organic solutions don't work he moves on to the hard stuff, including dreaded pesticides, traps, and a 10,000 volt-electric fence. Outsmarting Mother Nature takes up all of his time and most of his money. When he harvests the fruits of his efforts--his glorious heirloom beefsteak tomatoes--and figures the production cost per tomato, the result is an astonishing $64 each.

Still, Alexander's passion for gardening in spite of the odds is endearing, and his responses to horticultural adversity are a hoot. If you're struggling with mealy bugs and javalinas, or even if the local Safeway is as close to a garden as you want to get, this laugh-out-loud book is sure to delight.

--Helene