A patron walked into the library

and the Librarian asked:  "Why the long face? "

Answer:  Because it's just not the way it used to be!!!

That is true.  For now. 

The good news is that we are putting together plans this month so you CAN walk into the library.  In early September!!  There will be guidelines, limits on numbers and reservations needed.  We will get the details out to you as things are finalized and people are back from vacation. 

One piece that is falling into place this week is that we will be having a MERV 13 air filter put on our HVAC system, we hope by the end of the week.  We will also be increasing rates of air circulation through the building.  This CDC recommended approach to improving the air quality in the building is just one of the steps we are taking to be sure that library staff and visitors are safe.

Another reason for the long face?  I just learned this about the hand sanitizer, that we will have placed hither and thither around the library (I'll have mine with the fish...):

FRANCE DISPATCH

Of Wine, Hand Sanitizer and Heartbreak

Between the coronavirus and the Trump tariffs, the French wine market has collapsed. So winemakers are — sadly — sending their excess product off to another life as hand sanitizer.

A tanker-truck arriving to pick up Jérôme Mader’s wine to bring it over to a distillery where it will be transformed into hand gel.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

By Adam Nossiter

• July 27, 2020Updated 4:09 p.m. ET

HUNAWIHR, France — The tanker-truck pulled up and it was time to let it go. The decision to send the wine to the distillery had been made weeks ago. It still hurt. Soon the wine would be sanitizing hand gel.

“We’ve got to load it up now,” said Jérôme Mader, a 38-year-old winemaker, muttering to himself. “OK, I am not even going to think about it anymore,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”

Head down, he dragged the hoses out through his shed, affixed them to the truck’s valves with the help of the driver, walked up to his cool cellar, and turned on the pumps. The wine — good Alsace white wine, drinkable wine — coursed through the hoses and into the truck’s belly. Its fate didn’t bear thinking about.

Across the emerald Alsace wine country, now carpeted in deep-green vines — and across France’s other wine regions as well — thousands of winemakers, famous and obscure, are facing similar moments of heartbreak.