Feeling stressed out? Stuck in a rut? Looking for ways to keep active and get your body moving in the comfort of your home? With a range of videos from guided meditations to advanced yoga sequences, Yoga with Adriene offers something for everyone, regardless of their level of experience! Now is a great time to begin your yoga practice or strengthen the foundation you may have already developed with Adriene’s easy-to-follow video collection. Make time for yourself to practice mindfulness, mental balance, and to get in touch with your body. Check one of these recommended videos to get connected with your mind and body:
Today is National Orchid Day. In celebration of the day, take a look at these articles and eBooks about orchids, available now in the New York Times and on Flipster & OverDrive.
Sign in to Flipster here to read these magazine articles about orchids:
Organic Gardener– April 2020: “From Donkeys to Flying Ducks” by Helen McKerral – exploring the world of native orchids and how to grow them. There are many articles and references to orchids in back issues of Organic Gardener too. Use Flipster’s Search bar on the upper right of your screen.
Horticulture– May 2020: Visit the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden and the Orchid Conservatory and use the Search bar to visit articles about orchids in back issues.
New York Times – April 18, 2019: “Orchids Bloom in Thousands of Forms. But Why?” by C. Claiborne Ray
To read this article and today’s New York Times, visit our Databases here. Choose New York Times and select Remote Access. Enter your library card number and PIN to create a free account. Type “orchids” in the Search bar on the upper left of your screen.
Maybe you’d like to read a book about orchids. These eBooks are currently available on OverDrive for download to your device.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an e.ndangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him.
A blistering romantic suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pursuit. Far from her sensible life as an English teacher in Kansas, Lora looks forward to a relaxing vacation in Cancun. But fate thwarts her careful plans when a darkly handsome American named Max jumps into her car with a loaded gun.
We offer a great variety of magazines, newspapers, eBooks and eAudiobooks, available for easy access with your library card. Read magazines on Flipster, access the Philadephia Inquirer and the New York Times through our Databases and download eBooks and eAudiobooks on OverDrive.
Join us to play Jackbox Games online this Saturday, April 18th. Registration required. Please provide your valid and accurate email address. We will email you the Zoom link and instructions at least two hours before the games start.
You can transcribe or otherwise work with historical documents to help make them more searchable and accessible to researchers and others!
Interested in volunteering your time? Below are a few crowdsourcing projects to explore. Each project site has its own instructions for getting started, as well as project-specific guidelines/support/help to aid you in your work:
By the People from the Library of Congress: Campaigns include “Letters to Lincoln,” “Suffrage: Women Fight for the Vote,” “Clara Barton: ‘Angel of the Battlefield,'” and many others. Visit the By the People Help Center to learn how to get started.
The 8th Annual Single Mothers’ Conference is a 2 day free event brought to you by the Chester County Community Collaborative and will be held online this year on Saturday, April 18 and Saturday, April 25. The schedule for Day 1 is above.
The conference gathers resources from vendors in the area, dedicated to various aspects of the lives of single mothers including health, family, childcare, legal aid, finance, resume building, work wardrobe, nutrition, and so much more. There will be a virtual exhibit hall in addition to the online workshops.
Looking for something to quickly pull together for dinner with what you have in your pantry or fridge? Here are some quick and easy ideas where there’s some flexibility with items that can be substituted.
In partnership with the United Way Financial Stability Center, Open Hearth, Inc. is making a number of FREE Personal Financial Workshop Offerings available to consumers through ZOOM during the COVID-19 pandemic:
Lawrence Husick, a technology attorney and terrorism expert, will discuss modern privacy issues from multiple perspectives. We are surrounded by surveillance cameras, smart phones, facial recognition systems, and other technologies that seem to know more about us than we know about ourselves. What should we think about the erosion of our privacy? Lawrence will discuss legal, social, technological and economic viewpoints. Is it possible to live privately, “off the grid,” in modern American society?
Did you know that in 1862, Emily Dickinson is thought to have composed over three hundred poems? Or that Robert Frost, who wrote in formal meter, compared his contemporaries’ experimentation with free verse to “playing tennis with the net down”? Maybe you’d like to know more about the works of beloved poet Mary Oliver who passed away in 2019. These facts plus literature and information about poets and their works are available through our library databases.
LitFinder (POWER Library) – discover literature content from more than 150,000 full-text poems, 840,000 poem citations and excerpts, 7,100 full-text short stories and novels, 3,800 full-text essays published in the 16th-20th centuries, 2,400 full-text speeches, and 1,250 full-text plays. It also includes biographies, work summaries, photographs, and a glossary. Within LitFinder’s collection, users can access works from over 80,000 authors from 660 nationalities.
MasterFile Premier – provides subject overviews, full text for magazine articles, an image collection and AP clips. Excellent resource for student research and classroom instruction. Information is rich, reliable, and easy-to-use.
ONEFILE: High School Edition (POWER Library) – offers access to age-appropriate content from magazines, journals, newspapers, reference books, and engaging multi-media covering a wide range of subjects, from science, history, and literature to political science, sports, and environmental studies.
As the temperatures warm and you spend more time outdoors in your yard or
walking the neighborhood, you may be more acutely aware of the birdsongs in the air as spring gets into full swing. If you have the time, this may be a great opportunity to begin identifying some of the birds creating these beautiful (or possibly annoying) sounds.
There are several free apps available for either iOS or Android phones that can help you in this endeavor. Two of the more reputable ones are the Merlin Bird ID app (created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and the Audubon Bird Guide app (from the National Audubon Society). Learn which birds are most common in your neighborhood at this time of year, look at their photos, listen to their different songs and cries, and find out more about their migration and nesting habits.
Slowing down our pace of life can certainly open up whole new worlds to explore in nature, and free apps like these can help you take the first steps. Happy Birding!
Organic Gardener – April 2020: “From Donkeys to Flying Ducks” by Helen McKerral – exploring the world of native orchids and how to grow them. There are many articles and references to orchids in back issues of Organic Gardener too. Use Flipster’s Search bar on the upper right of your screen.
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