John surprised me with a new camera as an anniversary gift. We tried it out in the following video where we show some of the quirky features of our hotel.
Notes on this video:
1) of interest is the latter portion of the video where we sneak into an adjacent room (that was unoccupied during our stay) despite the fact that there was a large sign saying not to sneak into other rooms and that NO CAMERAS or VIDEOTAPING was allowed. Enjoy our quick escape back to our room when we hear someone coming up the stairs.
2) In the moments at the end of the video, I look decidedly stony. Part of this was bliss at having a very romantic anniversary. Part of this was complete lack of sleep. When John and I finally settled into bed (after watching Amelie, having a delightful carpet picnic, and a lovely test of the hot tub’s features), I heard a loud scritchy-scratchy sound in the wood paneling about the head of our bed. As we were on the top floor of a 127 year-old Victorian inn (just under the eaves), we knew that some type of animal had tunneled into the space above our heads. Despite my efforts to pound the ceiling with my crutches, the beastie kept up his racket. John, my hero, saved the day by pulling all of the bedding off of the bed and making us a sleeping space on the other side of the room. He wrapped himself around me, assuring me that any beasties would have to gnaw their way through him before they could get to me. Ok. So I maybe slept 10 minutes that night. So remember that as I you see me looking so spacy at the end of this vid.
3) I will probably only keep this link up for a few days. I’m feeling a bit shy about posting this to the web. :)
"video"
SIP Day 70, wearing a black short-sleeve tshirt and black gym shorts; 76 degrees outside; writing from my home office
The now-famous squirrel obstacle course video highlights how our relationships to our backyard wildlife has changed since we have spent two months at home. And while we haven’t manipulated any of our backyard wildlife like @MarkRober, or even made friends with them, we have become quite intrigued by the wide variety of creatures that we’ve discovered in our backyard.
We installed a “game camera” near the back part of our property when we began noticing animal poop appearing there nearly every morning, and what we found was that we have multiple regular nightly visitors. Most frequent is a possum who likes to hang out between 1-5am and eat bugs from the grass. While I have zero fondness of possums, I have massive respect for them as bug-eating machines. Around 4am it is common for us to have raccoons visit–we have caught them visiting solo and in pairs. And before midnight, a calico cat often visits and when he does, the first thing he likes to do is poop. I have no idea why our yard is her preferred litterbox, but I suspect it might have something to do with that cat showing dominance over our two housecats who we’ve caught staring at the roaming poop-cat through the back sliding glass door.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of our backyard fauna is of the avian variety. There are dozens of birds who visit everyday and who are especially enchanted by the bugs and worms that they find in our un-mown and gone-to-seed back lawn. In the late afternoon 2-4, we have crow feeding hour where we often have 12-15 crows gathered in a herd under the orange tree (they cooperatively open and eat the fallen oranges). Then, from about 5-8 pm each evening the yard is full of a variety of small birds, the most striking being a large number of neon-bright bluebirds.
SIP Day 52, wearing a striped cotton tank and black linen joggers, writing from the desk in my home office; 73 degrees outside today.
It’s the last week of the semester. We will spend this weeks’ classes getting closure on many of the big ideas that we’ve worked with throughout the semester as well as having the student groups get peer feedback on the final draft of the their Final Projects. It’s a time of many endings.
I have also been taking a class this semester, in User Experience Design. I thought it would be wise for me to have more background in this area due to the fact that I am working with software interfaces all day long. Though many come “out of the box” and we don’t have control over the design, we can control customize some elements of the software experience, and of course we can control how we do outreach and training on the software. Most of what I learned this semester has underscored to me that users have very idiosyncratic ways of approaching new tools based on past behavior and that it’s important to take that into account. I also had my own “user experience” this weekend by playing around with a new to me application: TikTok. I learned a lot from “fiddling” around with it and am getting some ideas about how I would like to create some content for my little homestead garden for the platform.
Bonus: so much kawaii on Tiktok: I am especially loving the goat, calf, and piglet videos.
SIP Day 38, wearing a navy blue cotton sundress, writing from my home office; 80 degrees outside today
Many years ago, when I was an avid blogger, I would share or link to poetry on Mondays. I can’t remember exactly how this began, but it came from my love of Mary Oliver’s poetry and so I called this weekly feature “Mary Monday.”
Since I began blogging two decades ago, I have all-but-lapsed the past few years, posting only once or twice per year, when I used to post twice per day (generally one text post, one photo post). It feels right to pick up this practice again now, if only in some small effort to document my daily tasks/thoughts/work/reveries. Also, in the past 10 years WordPress has changed significantly, and it seems a worthy project to teach myself how to use the new editor.
So true to the roots of Mary Monday, you might consider spending some time with poet Mary Oliver today, being interviewed about her craft, and specifically, about her mornings:
And below is a bit of a Mary Oliver poem that resonates specifically with me, as she seems to be imagining herself becoming a fish or a mermaid, or remembering some past primordial self where she was a creature of the water:
An excerpt from The Sea, by Mary Oliver
Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself–
fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh–my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
feel like!
SIP Day 37, wearing an olive tank top & black cotton shorts, writing from my home office; 87 degrees
Today’s tasks:
- grade papers and students’ creative projects
- wash laundry
- mow the grass around the garden beds
- exercise (ab roller, pushups, foam roller massaging)
- set up fancy webcam on external monitor
Things I did for fun today:
- had a quiet cup of tea on the back porch
- listened to some favorite Stromae songs
- took a 15 minute drive around the neighborhood to admire everyone’s front yards
- watched youtube videos of animals riding roombas and toy trains
- napped on the floor of my office (after exercising)
Things I have not done in a very long time:
- worn shoes
- worn clothing that requires dry cleaning
- paddled an outrigger canoe
This is the story of Elly (nee Ellan Vannin) who joined our family seventeen years ago. We chose her at the local animal shelter, she was born there in a litter of other tuxedo kittens. All of her siblings were adopted and only she remained out of the bunch, likely because all of them had symmetrical masks and her face was not. We fell in love with her liveliness right away. As a kitten she loved to climb up my body like a tree and sit on my shoulder under my hair and watch everything I was doing. She especially loved to sit on my shoulder while I was cooking.
She was our “high places” kitty, who loved standing on the tops of doorways, on mantles, and on high bookshelves.
As the years passed she gained great fame for her hunting skills, and would terrorize me by bringing home possums, birds, lizards and rodents (both dead and alive). No one who attended our wedding dinner will ever forget the rat-of-unusual-size that she killed that night (photo not included).
One thing that most people did not know about Elly, was how she would comfort me if I ever was crying–she could tell if I was upset and would come right over to me and stand at my feet mewing until I’d pick her up and she would snuggle into my chest and purr until I’d calmed down. She saw me through some hard times: hospitalizations, surgeries, divorce, and those awful days that I put Stijn or the kids on a plane and would come home and sob into my pillow.
She loved to eat the strangest things: such as bolognese sauce, avocadoes, hummus, raspberries:
This past week I could see that she was not quite herself, she stopped enjoying cheese treats and was only barely able to nibble on the scrambled egg with cream that we prepared for her last night.
This morning it was obvious that she was not going to bounce back this time and so she and I spent a few hours telling stories and visiting all of her favorite haunts in the house and the backyard. She got a last nap in the sun and a last roll on the pavement and then just an hour ago she curled up in my arms in front of the fire and took her last breaths.
It’s just so hard to believe that I will never get to kiss that velvety little nose ever again.
Some Elly videos:
And some photos from over the years:
I am more than a little bit obsessed with letters. Ever since I was a young girl I have been a prolific writer of letters, often spending hours every Sunday writing to friends and family members, loving the practice of telling the stories of my life and sending little thoughts out through the post. In fact, I used to keep a large stash of little things that I collected from magazines and newspapers, just to have fun little things to include in the letters that I was writing. One of my greatest treasures is the address book that I kept for years, where I would record all of the places where my correspondents lived. Even though I no longer add to that book, I still keep it because of the waves of memories that it holds as I look at where each of my friends moved over the years.
And my love of letters even overlaps with my love of books. Three of my all-time favorites are Angle of Repose (which includes letters as part of the narrative), Pamela (an entirely epistolary novel) and Letters from Africa (the real-life letters of Karen Blixen to her beloved Denys Finch-Hatton). This is also why I am so very delighted by the current novel that I’m reading, Hello to the Cannibals, which also has letter writing at the core of the narrative.
I also use letters in my teaching, not just as source material for my students to examine, but for themselves to use the act of letter-writing as the basis for a reflective practice. One of my favorite assignments is at the end of the term, when I have my Digital Humanities students write letters to future students in the class, telling them what they can expect of the course. Here are some fun excerpts from those letters:
This class will take all types. Those who are tech-savvy, and those who still carry around those bricks people affectionately refer to as “Nokias.” Those who know how to code, and those who can barely form a proper sentence. And that’s okay. The hope is by the end of the class, you’ll find something, no matter how small, you can attach to and find what interests you in this honestly intimidating field. Once you find that thing, run with it and run far. You’ll have the freedom to really make this class work for you, if you want it to…I also thought I wouldn’t be using any of these tools after the semester ended. After all, they looked really cool, but how could I integrate them into my own studies? In this case, desperation is both the mother and father of invention. As work in my other classes became more involving and complicated, I realized I could unravel some of that complexity with some of the practices I learned from this class. Even if there isn’t a specific tool that you find particularly helpful, the concepts of critical thought, deconstruction, and distant reading will be universally helpful to you.
What I am taking away from this class more than anything is a new way of looking at , and questioning, our digital world. Why do our screens have to be rectangular? What does that do to our thinking? Why do our presentations needs to be composed of slides? What does that do to our thinking? Why do we only watch one video at a time? What does that do our thinking? Are these the only ways? These are questions I wasn’t asking before, but I am now.
And finally, there’s this letter that a student wrote using animated GIFs and is well worth clicking through and seeing on her wordpress site: http://wordpress.chapman.edu/juliaross/2017/12/09/good-luck-to-you-boo/
For those of you who followed along on the FBLive videos that we created in the Archive last summer, you will know that we left you hanging as to the outcome of the developing relationship between Florence and Wally. Specifically, you knew that they had plans to marry soon but also that Wally would “ship out” soon too, and we didn’t tell you which would happen first.
Therefore, today I’m here to tease you with a bit more information. It can be found in this snippet from one of Florence’s letters:
My transcription of the relevant parts:
It’s been so dreadfully long since you left darling — since you kissed me Goodbye on the street corner in Las Vegas. Just think we will soon be married for four months, a third of a year, and we haven’t had one week together. It’s hard to take and I don’t want to go on this way. I want to be where you are. I wish something would happen so I could make some kind of plans. I don’t know how I can get out of LA on a plane or train at Christmas. There is just no space and I don’t even know whether I’m going so I can’t make a reservation. I do hope you call tomorrow. I’ve received nothing later than your last Sunday’s letter. That’s why my spirits are so very low right now…
Poor Florence, she hasn’t heard anything from Wally lately, she had to say goodbye to her brand new husband on a street corner as he shipped out for parts unknown-to-her, and she is struggling to make her holiday plans. I felt so awful for her as I read this letter, perhaps even more so because it’s that same time of year that I’m also scheming about all of my own Christmas plans!
So I’ll let you in on a secret to break a bit of the suspense. She gets her wish and Wally does come home for Christmas. And this time it’s not a furlough or a weekend break. He’s home for good.
An earlier version of this post appeared HERE.
At the beginning of last summer I began a social media experiment, to bring people into the Center for American War Letters Archive with me (and my collaborator Doug) virtually, via FB Live, to share some of our findings from WWII letters. I had no idea what to expect from this experiment, whether it would flounder or fly. Doug and I committed to trying this experiment for 12 weeks, but it ended up running for nineteen. Here are some reasons why:
- For the fun of it. Hands down, this was my favorite part of my work week, to have a conversation about the War Letters. That it was a regularly scheduled commitment, with viewers, means that it happened no matter what other chaos is occurring in my/our work week.
- For the reach of it. Facebook tells me that our social media engagement with these sessions is in the hundreds. It would be very difficult for us to bring even a dozen people into the archive physically, so having this kind of reach is deeply satisfying. It has been surprising to see that many of the people in my FB circles who have engaged with these sessions are not scholars or historians, but they find the War Letters meaningful for other reasons.
- For the productive conversations. Often it wasn’t until Doug and I started talking about some letters that the insights about the letters start happening. Between the two of us we were able to make connections that we wouldn’t be able to alone. Those times that we’ve been able to add visitors to the sessions have added even deeper insights for us.
- For the scholarship. Diving into these Letters has aided so many other War Letters projects that we’ve been engaged with. It has helped us to author grants, to attract donors, and to garner the attention of students who want to join in the effort. (And on a related note, here is an article about our work with some fun “behind the scenes” images)
You can watch each of the episodes we created last summer on our Facebook Page, Voices from the Archive.
So now, we’re in the midst of planning several writing projects related to our work in the archive. If you’d like to keep updated on how that’s going, please “Like” us on Facebook and follow along.
This video shows a team of designers rebuilding clothing mannequins to resemble differently-abled bodies. It’s a moving story, well-worth the few minutes it will take to watch it.
For me, this video highlighted the oddness that I sometimes feel when techs are building the “cosmesis” of my prosthetic leg–the sculpted form that creates the structure to give my metal innards a symmetrical form. They trace my organic leg and then shape firm foam into a matching shape, shaving it down a bit here and there to make it look proportional, and then we test it under clothing to ensure that the fabric flows smoothly and doesn’t bunch up around the knee or gather in odd ways at the hip or crotch. In this process they build me a cosmetic leg with all of the requisite properties of leg-ness, despite it being a completely function-less addition to my body.
Due to still being in a phase where my new prothesis is being adjusted often (like today, it’s just started making a clanking noise as I walk around corners–time to go back in and figure out what’s going wrong), I’m not wearing any cosmesis at all. The asymmetry between my legs makes most clothing looks a bit strange, such as when the right pantleg of my wool trousers flaps back and forth in the wind as I walk across campus, or when I am sitting in a meeting and my right knee comes to an obvious narrow point instead of being neatly rounded like my organic leg.
And while I think my bionic parts are uber-cool looking, at work I rarely wear short skirts or other clothing that shows my metal innards. Because it’s so much easier to “pass” than to have my body be a spectacle to passersby (or colleagues or students). I’m not at all embarrassed of being cyborg, but it adds a layer of inconvenience to my interactions that I prefer not to introduce in my professional setting.
But on the weekends, it’s a different story. Then I wear short skirts and sandals and enjoy letting my robot hang out there for anyone to see.
Heather’s post about her changes in blogging since her marital separation got me thinking about how my blog has changed over the past couple of years. That, and the recent attention that my Mother Work post* garnered from various media outlets made me remember a time when a lot of what I wrote here was meaningful and interesting and widely-linked.
A huge change in my blogging practice is due to working full-time. Gone are the times when I could devote an entire morning to composing a blogpost. Added to that, is the fact that I’m not getting as personal anymore–for so many reasons. And, I’m working so much in ‘auto-pilot’ mode most of the time, that I’m not sure that I even have many deep thoughts to share anymore.
So, instead, I post random bits of poetry and some photos, my travelogues, and the music that’s driving my day. Because they make me smile and that happiness seems worth sharing with you.
These days I feel more like a magpie who’s pulling at random bits of string and shiny things to feather her nest, than I do a writer with something important to say.
*That Mother Work post was the product of a two-hour middle-of-the-night writing jag when I just couldn’t sleep. Those nights are few and far-between now that my alarm is ringing at 6am.
Lately I’ve been doing some electronic spring cleaning, which means clearing a bunch of old draft posts out of my dashboard. I’m either shaping them up and scheduling for publishing, or dumping them. Which means, perhaps a bit of randomness in my posting-topics over the next few weeks as I revisit stuff that’s been on my mind for awhile. In the meantime, some link-worthy stuff below…
- I’m wishing that I could buy a share of a local bookstore (or start a book co-op myself), after reading this piece.
- The video below rocks. The music, dancing and filming are charming/whimsical/stellar. After I watched it and realized how much I enjoyed, it, I asked myself whether a woman doing the same thing would be as charming (or would it seem gratuitous for her to be undies-dancing)? I’m still not sure. So I guess I’ll have to keep watching it over and over again until I have a strong opinion one way or the other…
Mikhael Paskalev – I spy from André Chocron on Vimeo.
- If you didn’t see this gem for International Women’s Day, you better watch it:
- And one more link for all of my fellow-travelers…I’ve been using this site for my train-travel dreaming for over a year now. And am delighted to use it once again for my big Europe-on-my-birthday-palooza coming up in a few months.
Note: photo above is of Vasia-kitty doing what he did best (purry-napping). Looking at photos of him makes me happy