Holiday wishes

May you all have a peaceful Christmas and a beautiful Winter.







Apologies for getting carried away with the effects in that second card. :)


Here are a few pictures from our day with Allie and Layla. We took them to Build-a-Bear Workshop and then opened presents and played a few games at home. Layla wasn't feeling well some of the time, but she was determined not to let it ruin her day!

Recipes and an autumn weekend

Novelty cookie recipe: Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies. I made these for my brother this weekend, and although it sounds like a terrible idea, try it before you decide! (Unless you just don't like bacon, chocolate, or cookies, of course.) The consensus here seemed to be that they're surprisingly good, and they don't taste "meaty."



And another recipe that might be of interest with the holidays coming up: Gingerbread House. It's much easier to buy one of the kits with the gingerbread already baked and cut in the right sized pieces, but if you want to do it from scratch, this could work. I did it last year and Allie and Layla helped decorate it; it was very fun. (Edit: My bad! Andy provided vital assistance in the construction and decoration of the gingerbread house, too.)



We got to spend a day with Allie and Layla this weekend, so I'll continue learning to work with Flickr and share some pictures. (I've edited the links so they lead to large versions of the photos, rather than the photo page on Flickr, which I've made Friends/Family only. Let me know if it doesn't work!)

Layla had fun with a pile of leaves in the front yard.




And here she is playing with Zoe, and with pudding.


Allie is as tall as Grandma now!

Veteran's Day

This dog is really, really excited that daddy is home from Afghanistan.



A French teacher in my department said today that not one of the students in her class knew why we celebrate Veteran's Day on November 11. Sadly, I don't think even prompting with "Armistice Day" would help those kids. I was momentarily tempted to create a photoessay on the subject, but none of the intended audience are going to read this blog, so I'll settle for saying Happy Veterans Day and thank you to the veterans in my life.

The divine and the odd

Here are two things I've found interesting lately. One is amazing and beautiful, the other is amazingly... odd.

The beautiful first: some truly "little things." I love how when you look at the minute details of the natural world, art emerges in unexpected places. Nikon holds an annual competition for photomicrography. Wired.com has a few gorgeous images in their article about it, and more can be seen in the Nikon Small World gallery.

(I wouldn't normally think of a mouse colon as something with the potential to be pretty, but check it out in the first link!)

Now the slightly absurd... or not? At home recently, we were talking about a woman who knits cat hair into tote bags, and I assumed she was a one-of-a-kind oddity. Well, apparently not. I found a website that promises if you send them your pet's hair, they will wash and spin it into yarn, then send it back to you so you can knit things out of your pet. But it doesn't stop there. There's also a book to help out if you need ideas on what to do with your pet's hair! That's a relief.



I have to admit, at first I did find this weird and possibly ooky, but the more I think about it, the more I'm picturing my parents' chow mix, Gitta, and the piles and piles of fluffy blonde fur I throw out into the yard every year while stripping her winter coat. It would be so practical it would be to use that stuff! Don't worry, if I do something crazy, I promise not to give any knitted gifts without checking on the allergy status of the recipient. :)

Allie and Layla at the state fair

The first weekend in October, Allie competed with her 4H lambs at the state fair and did very well. I was thrilled to be able to make it to watch her and hang out with Layla. Allie worked hard with her lambs, taking care of them, practicing, and traveling to lots of shows. We're so proud of her.

(click on the thumbnails for bigger versions)




Once in the ring, the kids have to handle the sheep without any kind of halter or lead, just their hands to guide them around the ring and set them up for the judge. It can't be easy controlling an animal that's as tall as your chest and outweighs you! Allie won Grand Champion in the Arkansas Bred competition with one of her lambs.


After a long day of hanging out in the livestock barn, Layla was a little antsy, so I took her on a couple of fair rides (a caterpillar roller coaster and the Scramber -- she's a brave four-year-old!) and into the children's petting zoo and education tent. It was nice to have another indoor place to let her run around, because the weather was awful that day; when it wasn't drizzling, it was pouring down rain.



In the education tent, there was a life-size statue of a holstein set up with rubber tube "udders" and a feed line running to a bucket of "milk" substance. Layla absolutely loved milking the cow. She named it Sarah, patted it, and praised it for standing so still. :)

Army of Women

Goodness, it's been even longer than usual since I posted. I blame my awesome Grand Canyon trip with my parents back in May! I wanted to do a series of posts describing everything and linking to pictures, and my eyes were bigger than my stomach, so to speak, so it never happened. Ever optimistic, I still think I will get it done someday! It's ironic how I stress summarizing skills in my classes, yet I don't seem capable of it myself.

Anyway, to break the fast, I thought I'd talk about Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I joined the Army of Women recently. It's a pretty good idea: they're trying to recruit one million women to be available for research -- survivors of breast cancer, women who have never had breast cancer, all ages. You just give them some information about your location and demographics, and they can email you back if there's a study you might be qualified for. You get information on the study and you can decide whether to apply. I've gotten one email so far, but it was for women over 50 in the Chicago area. I'd like to be involved in a study if I can. I feel like I owe it to the world, to make up for the fact that apparently I can never give blood again. (The Red Cross thinks that since I spent some time in the UK, I must have mad cow disease now. Sigh.) Plus, medical research is awesome! I wish all cancers had potential research support like this.

Here's the link in case you know anyone who's interested:

Army of Women

Another cute cat vid

You'll need the sound on to appreciate this one.



I never meant for this blog to be all links and embedded videos! I've just been having a tremendously busy summer. (So... pretty much like every summer since I took this job.) I have lots of pictures uploaded and ideas for posts, but I never seem to get to that spot in my lists. I'm shooting for posting seasonally, I think. Stay tuned for Fall!

Another cat vid from Simon

If you've ever had an indoor cat, you've had 90% of this happen, I'm sure. Though you may not have slept through it.

July sunflowers

Daddy has some beautiful sunflowers in his garden. One, which came up volunteer from last year's scattered seeds, is 10 feet 10 inches tall! Daddy took a ladder and a measuring tape and checked.







Here are some others. (Click to see better.)

Ballin' the Jack

Aww, Dom Deluise died? :(

Here's a favorite moment of mine from a weird movie that I love, Haunted Honeymoon. It also features the radiant Gilda Radner.

Don't mess with a marching band girl

...she might be carrying a weapon.

I can totally see this! Don't underestimate majorettes, folks. Or drum majors (it's called a "mace" for a reason), or trombone players, or saxophonists, and I'd say even a piccolo case could hurt if applied with the right amount of force to the tender bridge of the nose!

It's raining today, and I'm so happy about it. I've been working my tail off for a month, to the point where all my weekends and evenings have been filled with grading papers, and it's been getting uncomfortably warm and muggy as well. So on the first Saturday I have a chance to relax, I'm loving the cool air and the sound of rain on the balcony.

Poem: "Yellow Bowl"

It's the last day of National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day! This is the poem in my pocket today:

"Yellow Bowl"
~ Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.


I like the concrete imagery and the sense of light and color and peace.

Earth Day

Hostas on a rainy Saturday at the zoo

(Goodness, I don't remember making the card that large! Sorry.)

Speaking of the earth... I like trees. :) I have a lot of pots on my balcony, and anytime one of them is "invaded" by a volunteer tree seedling, I try to surrender the pot and let the tree grow. (Okay, not for sweetgums. But everything else.) I'm currently raising two willows, four longleaf pines, and two oak trees, and I've planted one young oak and gave another to Andy and Charlie to plant. I hope to plant a lot more! I've been thinking about it recently because of all the beautiful old trees Mena lost in the tornado. I spoke with a Forest Service worker last weekend, and after offering me 200 mulberry saplings on the spot (sadly, I couldn't take them) he told me they're making arrangements to get some trees over to Mena, either for this planting season (which ends in a week) or next year's. The Forest Service will give away trees by the hundreds, the problem is arranging the labor and space to put them in the ground. I could personally plant five or ten at a time, but not 200.

Tornado photos

Easter weekend (two days after the tornado) I went home to see my family and go to church, and after church Mama and I drove around. We kind of needed to see things for ourselves to really get a handle on it. In case any of my hometown buddies would like another view of things, I put some of my pictures in the album linked below. Note, these were taken after two and a half days of cleanup had already taken place, but it still looks pretty awful. The photos aren't great, as it was a rainy day and the car was moving a bit.

Mena Tornado April 2009

Short video of Layla describing the effects of the tornado. Sorry about the wobble at the very beginning here. Layla is leaning out of frame because she wants to see my face, not the camera, while she talks to me.



(And another short vid of her.) She has seen The Wizard of Oz at least a dozen times, probably, so I wondered if she associated Mena's tornado with what she saw in the movie, but I didn't think to ask her.

In my last post, I said I hoped the main structure of the Middle School would be fine, but now the report is it's been condemned. I'm surprised at how upset I was by that news. I think I assumed that building would be there forever, and having a landmark like that is comforting, especially when it's a place that holds so many of my personal memories of my formative adolescent years. (As well as a lot of other people's.) I loved the fact that it had an upstairs - no other school nor most other buildings in town do, I loved the bathrooms with the old tile and the stalls made of solid wood, I loved the full sized windows that you could actually see out of. It was a good old building.

And it's a loss to the community: the auditorium hosted not only Middle School assemblies but dance recitals, beauty pageants, high school plays and more. And then there's the cafeteria, site of generations of proms and band banquets. (I'm sure it says something about me that I'm way more nostalgic about those band banquets. Remember how Mr. Gray would dance with each of the senior girls? It was so sweet.)

Well, that's enough moping about a building. The students have been moved to a church and an empty school in the next little town to finish out the year, and people are continuing to clean up their homes and workplaces and figure out what to do. I'm curious about the libraries and I've even had some librarian friends asking about them, so if anybody knows how the books fared at the Middle School, Community College, and public library, I'd love to know.

To end on a lighter note, here's a picture of Allie and Layla from Easter Sunday.

Hometown tornado

Well, it's been 16 years since the last one, so I guess we were due for another tornado? This one was worse than anyone can remember. I've heard from my family and they're okay, houses intact, thank goodness, but a lot of people and property were not so fortunate. I wouldn't mind hearing from my other hometown buddies - y'all okay? Families safe, houses still there?

The Arkansas Times has a photo gallery of damage. You can see Main Street, the courthouse, the middle school, and on the second page of photos there are some especially impressive and awful-looking aerial shots of damaged areas - large trees laid flat like grass, foundations of houses swept clean. Basically, your classic "holy cow" tornado aftermath pictures. It's been strange going through them to see if I can identify any houses of people I know. It's not going to be the same around there for awhile.

While looking at the photos, I remembered a teacher telling me sometime during middle school that our building was one of the best places in the county to be during a tornado: the main part was built back in the 40s (if I recall the date) with steel reinforced concrete and just very solid. It looks like it sustained some significant damage, but indeed, the main structure held up very well.

April at the zoo

I have a membership to the zoo here, and it's been a great investment. The zoo is a safe, pleasant place I can go to get out of my apartment and be outside, and bonus, there are animals! There's even a large gazebo with free wifi, and I often go there to grade papers away from the distractions in my office or apartment. That's what I was doing on Saturday for about five hours, but I also managed to take a few pictures.

(Click on the thumbnails to see the photos better.)



One of the giraffes observing a human family | Grey crowned cranes in their new veldt habitat


Dogwoods at the zoo | Young hickory leaves and a pine near my apartment


Green grass and a strawberry blossom growing by the camel enclosure fence | Profusion of pink and white azaleas

Humor is the hardest thing to translate

I think this NPR bit was my favorite April Fool's news prank today. It's not only the subject ("cetaceaculture" - in the Midwest, no less), they do a great job of spoofing their listeners' letters and even their own on-air corrections.

"In achieving three-part harmony in whale song, I think we have tied nature's most wondrous sound to a great barbershop tradition."

I was cracking up in the car on the way home from work. Then their teaser was a report that some Kindle readers have been injured by faulty online popup books. Ha!

Did you also hear you can get squeezable bacon now? And Star Wars fans rejoice, because a tauntaun sleeping bag is available. It's brilliant if you're familiar with The Empire Strikes Back. It has an intestinal lining! Features:

* Classic Star Wars sleeping bag simulates the warmth of a Tauntaun carcass
* Glowing Lightsaber zipper pull
* Teach your children about the best Star Wars movie ever

The Guardian is switching all its reports to Twitter format. ("JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?") Oh, and finally a tartan sheep!

When warning/explaining to my students about the traditions of April Fool's Day, I let them look at the Wikipedia homepage for awhile. It had an article on the "Museum of Bad Art (MOBA)" and news briefs about the Irish prime minister being spotted naked in downtown Dublin and NASA reporting falling diamonds. The students were complete blanks; I couldn't get a reaction out of them at all. It's really hard to tell what's going on with a class at 8 a.m.; are your teaching methods inadequate, is the cultural context not translating, or have the students' brains merely not woken up yet? Today, I'm going to say it was the latter, because from the second class, at 10 a.m., I got a much more lively reaction. It may have also helped that I showed them this video of the BBC's classic 1957 prank story on the Swiss spaghetti harvest.



It helped illustrate my point that a good spoof or prank uses specific details to establish plausibility. I have a powerpoint presentation on satire which I put together one semester after a student turned in an assignment using an article from The Onion as a source, but it only seems to work when I have French students in class. Bless the French, they do appreciate satire.

Feels like it's been spring here for awhile, but officially...

These are pear trees on campus. I took the picture over a week ago; now the petals are drifting on the sidewalks like confetti.

Blog meta

While I'm here, I'll keep this separate from the already-huge photo post, but I've been meaning to mention that I recently figured out a system for keeping up with friends' blogs. It's always been hard for me to remember to check, because I don't hang out on Blogger a lot. I tried using a feed reader, but it just didn't work well on my small computer screen. (My computer is a tiny EeePC laptop, which was affordable and is wonderfully portable, but I don't recommend it as an only computer, since its capabilities in some areas are limited, and the screen on my model is only 7 inches.)

But I do listen to a lot of American public radio and BBC radio podcasts, and I use iGoogle to gather them so I can easily stream the audio. Finally, in a "facepalm" sort of moment, I realized I could just create another tab on iGoogle and use it to gather RSS feeds from all the blogs I want to follow. It's perfect for me, because the interface is uncluttered, works well on my small screen (it only shows the title of each post - the three most recent for each blog - and I can open the posts I want to read in a new Firefox tab) and it's a site I'm already familiar with.

So! This is just to say that I've been reading your blogs regularly for a couple of weeks, mainly lurking because I feel shy commenting, but hello! And if you're reading this and have a blog you'd like for me to follow, just let me know.

Okey doke, back to watching the Westminster dog show (David Duchovny, please stop making me cry with your Pedigree dog adoption commercials!) and grading papers.

Winter and spring

Pictures! These cover January through March, I believe.

I seem to have adopted a new cat. Just before Christmas I went and picked up Trixie from a friend in another state who couldn't keep her. Trixie is going through her difficult "teenager" phase (she's a little under a year old and becoming sexually mature) and loves to terrorize my older cat, though I don't think she really means any harm. She's pretty amusing when she's not destroying things. :)




I think I mentioned the pit bull puppy we had hanging around the farm for awhile - here are a few more pictures of her. She was all dog, and great with kids.





Layla's birthday was in February. She's four! She loves ice cream and pretending to be animals (a kitty is her favorite).






And Allie celebrated her eleventh birthday just this past week. She's still involved in 4H, lots of sports, and has recently started reading for pleasure. She has challenged me to read the Twilight books ("Shayna, if you don't read them, I've failed you as a niece!"), and I agreed if she'll continue reading the Harry Potter books. These are pictures from her little party we had with the family this weekend.






My cousin Jamie and her family came through a couple of times as they move down south. Baby Payton is pretty cute! Andy and I took them up on the mountain in January; it was a beautiful, clear, cool evening.






And here's just some miscellaneous naturey stuff. Our winter here was characterized by occasional ice with 70-degree periods in between, and spring seems to be keeping up that trend. We didn't have any snow this year.