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One of the things I do in the real world is serve on the board of our public library foundation. The Foundation gathers supplemental funding for our library, primarily through bequests and large gifts. One of my proudest moments was helping some 20 years back to promote a referendum that created a separate taxing district for the public library. This meant that library funding was no longer at the whim of elected officials who saw a library as nice, but not as important as roads.

It worked, and our library system has been steadily growing and expanding ever since.

Anyway, I've been put in charge of a project to turn one of the plain vanilla meeting rooms in our headquarters library into more of an executive board room, which will serve as a meeting room for the foundation and trustees, but also be used as a high tech training site for the library staff. The architect is showing me Arts and Crafts style chandeliers to drool over, beautiful wood cabinetry, plush carpet, and I get to oversee all of this wonderful spending.

*Sigh* Now I want to remodel my own house. Unfortunately, I don't have a foundation willing to underwrite it.

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