Tuesday my wife and I were out running some errands when we decided to take a trip to the newly reopened Ortega Library. I spent many a day there when I was a student at A.P. Giannini and I have to say it wasn’t a very inviting place back then, but it had books.
Well, libraries today have lots more than books. They’ve got CD’s, DVD’s, Computers and oh right, books.I have to say that the new Ortega library that one resident was trying to keep from being built to preserve an antique [and that’s generous] piece of sh*t building in tact is very nice. Like many of the new libraries there are lots of tables with pop up electrical sockets for your laptops and free WiFi that’s got a pretty decent bandwidth. While being bigger than it’s former self it’s still not that huge, but if you have a computer you can go online and find a book and have it delivered to that library which makes it very convenient to us since it’s closer to our house.
I’m really sorry I didn’t take pictures of the place, but I was busy doing so much else that my time ran out before I had to run off to get to work. On the other hand the playground outside the library I had to say is really spectacular. My wife and I oohed and aahed as we walked across the newly installed spongy anti-faceplant-then-run-to-mommy foam that was down. The play structures are well built, up to date and not the eyesore pile of sand with Russian Industrial Complex™ fixings like there used to be. I really wanted to be a little kid again and when my wife wasn’t looking I actually did begin to play around on the stuff. I figured I shouldn’t work too much since there were three elderly Chinese ladies all sitting on the triple see-saw so I suppose in there eyes I was a kid.
They’ve really done a lot of work around the library and playground to beautify the area, but we’ll all have to wait a year when all the newly planted greenery has had a chance to fit in or die. One downside I did see was that the plants all had thick layers of fine redwood mulch around them which I suspect will be grabbed by the handfuls by pixie stix amped up kids and thrown all over the place very shortly. While it’s a new playground I have to keep in mind that it is a new playground and hasn’t had to take on the wear and tear of a few years and drunken weekend teenagers who have a love for hanging out in playgrounds and acting like 8 year olds while drinking Old English 800 [not that I have any previous experience in that sort of thing of course.]
I seriously hope that the whole area holds up well because we have lots of kids in the Sunset district and the playgrounds are always used by private pre-schools around them as well as the kids, so many of them get crowded. It’s nice when you’ve got a special needs child that you have a place to take them where they can run around and play without feeling like 30 other kids equals 1000 other kids and overwhelms them. We’ll be giving it a shot with our daughter this weekend so I’ll have more to report about a weekend there when there’s more than just the Tai-Chi clan out there doing their morning workout.
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