Along with Mark Weston (past-president of the Douglas County Libraries' Board of Trustees), and Eloise May (director of the Arapahoe Library District), I have just returned from the biannual (every other year, not twice a year) conference of the Public Library Association.

The three of us presented there. The conference, held in Seattle, drew over 5,000 attendees. Our session pulled in almost 400 of them, about evenly divided into trustees, directors, and other staff. Our topic was "board self-assessment."

There are a handful of life lessons that I seem to need to learn over and over again.

One of them is that I am most fully alive when I'm learning something new. I just signed up for a small part in Castle Rock Player's "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat." I'm the oldest guy in the cast, and have been struggling to learn about 100 dance moves for the show stopping "megamix" number.

My family moved to Douglas County 13 years ago. Our daughter, Maddy, was a little over three years old at the time.

We lived kind of far out in the country, and had only one car, which I drove to work every day. My wife, Suzanne, says as she watched me drive off down the hill she would think, "I am Rapunzel."

Perhaps in part because of her early exposure to country quiet, Maddy has always had a rich interior life. She's a watcher: deep and observant.

Recently, I spent a Saturday selling tickets for the Rotary Clubs of Castle Rock 7th Annual Ducky Derby and Street Fest. The money raised through this family-oriented event is split between the Castle Rock Senior Center, and the Women's Crisis Center.

I was outside the local Safeway grocery store, which generously allowed us the opportunity to appeal to their foot traffic. (King Soopers has also provided this opportunity.) And in about two hours, I sold fifty tickets.