Everybody calls me Jana Banana: There is nothing to do around here!

HARTSVILLE - If I hear that again, I’m going to have to clean out my piles of papers on my passenger seat of my bumper-stickered white mini-van and invite the complainer to follow me around for a while. There is SO much to do in Hartsville that I scarcely have time to do it all!

The problem is where do you find your information on events. In the not too distant past, people found out information about events in the newspaper. If you had an event, you put it in the paper, and that was that.

Nowadays to promote events, there are so many places to share information it becomes a Herculean task. Between newspapers, buyers guides, magazines, Web sites, online calendars, television news stations, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, blogs, billboards, message boards and citizen journalism sites to get the word out you’d better be prepared to get busy.

As someone who attempts, and I stress attempts, to learn how to use all these effectively, I can tell you that it is disheartening when you find out that there are some folks that still don’t know what is going on a given night in our dear Hartsville, and it is even more disappointing when you learn that a great event was missed.

That is where I ask for the help of readers of this newspaper. Please share your ideas on ways to share the news here in Hartsville.

Could there be a central location such as a kiosk protected with a cover that events could be posted like the one at Kalmia Gardens for their maps? Could there be a place where banners could be placed in the city that would be easy to view? What ideas do YOU have? Not everyone has a computer, so it’s important to have a way to share news that is not dependent upon the Internet.

In the meantime, we do have The Messenger and the Happenings, HartsvilleSC on Twitter and Our Hartsville on Facebook and Hartsville Today, the citizen journalism site www.hvtd.com that has recently been re-built after a devastating crash.

We also have a brand-new online calendar on the www.hartsvillegoodliving.com Web site that I’m asking for your help on. If you could, please send events to my e-mail address HartsvilleMatters@gmail.com, so I can add them.

There is a function on that calendar that additional calendars can be added as a drop-down menu, such as Hartsville Sports, which after my Tuesday night marathon of snapping photos at the Hartsville High JV soccer, girls’ varsity soccer, boys varsity soccer, softball and baseball home games, I can see that this calendar is a must.

One great place to get good information about what is going on in our community is at the Good Living Marketplace the first Saturday of every month where vendors join informational tents sharing great information about groups in our city and opportunities to volunteer. The March event had many great vendors, food and information on Hartsville Downtown Development Association (HDDA), Census 2010, Athletic Trainers, Red Cross, Grumpy Old Men raffle, Girl Scout Cookies, Carolina Kids LLC, Relay for Life and the new Keep Hartsville Green – Shop Local campaign spearheaded by the Greater Hartsville Chamber of Commerce in partnership with Hartsville the Art of Good Living and HDDA.

And if you happened to have attended the Good Living Marketplace, you might have gotten a glimpse of my last date ever. That handsome fella’ drove 100 miles just to buy some Girl Scout cookies from a certain adorable Brownie named Sarah Michelle and eat a famous turkey leg from Shirley’s Restaurant.