The Traveling Librarian Goes Home

I'm just back from two weeks in sunny Southern California, where, as you can see from the photos above, it was raining, but that's all right. Fresh snow on the San Bernardino mountains and lush green in the desert--gorgeous!

Riverside is about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Its library serves over 300,000 people in the city, but like Austin, the surrounding area (called the Inland Empire) is densely packed, and also like Austin, you only have to live in the state to qualify for a card. RPL has an area history collection in its basement, and is planning a new, bigger library building (sound familiar?) to accommodate new technology. (I hope they don't trash the decorative cement grids on the front.)

The pagoda in the center photo was a gift from Riverside's sister city, Sendai, Japan. Behind the trees to the right of the pagoda is the Mission Inn, the most fabulous thing in town, a 1920s luxury hotel with world-class service where movie stars and Presidents have stopped. Most of the time I was growing up it was a ruin. A series of investors bought it, poured money into it, and bailed out, but the latest owners have brought it back from the brink. (Sorry to sound like a commercial. The Mission Inn and I are old friends.)

This has been a quick, disjointed post written by somebody returning from vacation with a lot of e-mail to wade through, but I do have a puzzle!