Creating your Character

Hello everyone! Julia from JCPL here and this go around in Dungeons and Dragons world we will discuss the first step in beginning any successful DnD campaign- creating your character. As with most things in DnD, you have near unlimited control over who your character is and who she/he will become. Which also means that …

FRL – looking back, looking forward

As I get ready to retire next month, I find myself looking back at nearly 25 years of working for the Fontana Regional Library System.  There have been a lot of changes.  Walking into the Macon County Public Library on Wayah Street, for my first day on the job, the first thing I found myself …

D&D at your local library

Hi everyone! Julia from Jackson County Public Library here with my first blog for Shelf Life of the Mountains. For this first post I had originally thought to write about ghost writing, comparing and contrasting it to best selling writers that use co-authors, such as James Patterson.  I quickly realized that the content was well… …

National Parks and Recreation Month

Hi Shelf Life Readers! Happy National Parks and Recreation month! I am writing to you from the Jackson County Public Library but if you tried to find me during the summer months from 2012 to 2015, you would’ve had to look deep in the wilderness of either the Sumter or Chattahoochee National Forest, where I …

The (Irresistible) American Museum of the House Cat

We love cats, right? (Right, mom?) A month or so ago my sweetie pie and I visited the American Museum of the House Cat in Sylva. We’d actually just moved to Sylva and I figured out how to give directions to our new house using the museum as a landmark (the directions make no sense …

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

I made my first trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1975 when I was in graduate school at UTK in Knoxville.  Three years later, forty years ago, our family made our first hiking trip, when we participated in a church sponsored outing, which included a walk up Mount LeConte.   Since then, we've …

Let’s clear the air: a Vulture is not a Buzzard

  Today’s blog focuses on the Turkey Vulture, another one of the most commonly seen birds here in the Southeast. Before we talk about identifying characteristics though, I thought we could dive into the semantics of the terms vulture and buzzard, because it can be pretty confusing. Before researching this topic, whenever I heard the …

Libraries Lead

This past week, April 8th to 14th, was National Library Week! Hooray! We hope everyone celebrated appropriately with books and movies borrowed from your library. If not, don’t worry, Governor Cooper has declared this month as Library Appreciation Month!  National Library Week was first officially sponsored in 1958, making this the 60th anniversary! This week …

Success in the New Year

Gratuitous cat picture. This blog post has nothing to do with cats There are many worlds held in the stacks of our libraries--some funny, some sad, some colorful and rich. Stories that are taken from real life and those that are wonderful imaginations of the Authors. Any interest one has can be found and explored, …

“Bad Moon Rising,” Vietnam, Pt. 2

After the French left a divided Vietnam in 1955, the United States government agreed to take over the training of South Vietnam's troops.  The first military advisers found an ill equipped,  poorly trained army with an officer corps that was generally inept.  Advisers were embedded at every level of the ARVN and officers were sent to …