Hold It!

Guess what?  Today father time played his annual cruel joke on mankind.  Okay maybe not ALL of mankind, but on those of us who live in Eurpoe, Australia, certian parts of South America and the contiguous United States (unless you live in the part of Arizona that is not on the Navajo Indian Reservation).  That’s right: today begins daylight savings time.  Somehow, this completely fell off of our family’s radar this year and so the news of losing a whole hour of sleep was even more unwelcome than usual.  Add to it that Hubby and I both had late nights last night- I was at our school’s fund raising auction, he was working at a fundraising event for Cedars Sinai- and that we had to be somewhere this morning at 9am and you’ve got the makings for a grouchy morning. 

So, since we’ve all lost one hour today, I thought I’d share one of my favorite time-saving tips: the library HOLDS page.  Did you know that you can place any book in your county library’s system on hold?  Some counties even have agreements with neighboring library systems that allow them to borrow books from each other.

Here’s how it works.  First, visit your home library system’s webpage.  Login using your library card and pin number, then search the library catalogue.  When you find what you’re looking for, you can place it on hold.  Your library will notify you by phone or email (depending on how you set up your preferences) when the book is ready for you to pick up at the location that you have selected.  You walk up to the counter, hand over your card, and the librarian hands you your stack of reserved books.  It’s the perfect time saver!

I use our library holds system all the time.  I browse through the “amazon recommends” section of amazon.com and then head over to my library holds page to select the titles that most interest me.  It’s great for kid’s books too!  When the Scholastic Book Fair order forms come home from school, Kiddo usually circles 70% of the books in the flyer.  We use the library’s holds page to check out the titles we don’t purchase.

Lastly- but not least- most library websites offer you the opportunity to renew checked-out items online.  Over the years, this feature has saved our family hundreds of dollars.  Our family likes to check out DVDs from our library which unfortunately have only a 7-day loan period.  I don’t know about you, but for our family it can be tough to get to the library every 7 days.  

Okay – that’s it for now.  I’m already an hour behind schedule…