Friends Annual Meeting

Once a year, towards the end of January, the Friends of the Sacramento Library (Friends) holds its annual meeting. The President and the Treasurer give reports on the accomplishments and fiscal situation of the organization, and the library representative responds and also gives a report on the development of the library. For example, this year she talked aboaut the groundbreaking for 3 new libraries.

I must say that our outgoing president Cherril had things timed down to the minute and was able to keep the meeting exactly to what was writing in the agenda. After the initial call to order and we conducted our usual business of approving the minutes for last year's minutes (as if anyone could really remember that long ago).

I gave my brief presentation aabout the financial situation for the friends. Like the rest of the country we have lost about 25% of our investments in the stock market and therefor some crazies have decided to bomb or shoot up the place.

Cherril then introduced our speaker and program today - Gail Tsukiyama. Gail has a real fan club behind here. We don't usually buy such an expensive program.

Gail is a very animated speaker. She described how she went about researching and bringing the characters to life. Often what she thought would be a small book turned out to be large and vice versa. She believes that everyone has one story in them so often the second book is the hardest. In fact, she feels that it gets harder with every main book because she holds herself responsible.


After the program Gail stayed to autograph books. We had contracted with a small bookstore to provide a couple dozen of each of her books for people to buy and then get signed by the author. The bookstore brought the complete wrong book. Our office assistant made a quick run to Borders Books and brought back what she could. It wasn't much but every one helped.

Before and after the meeting we had cookies and a variety of beverages like tea, coffee, lemonade, and water.