travelertrish

New Year's Sabering

2010-01-03T17:13:31Z

I'm very happy with this video. It shows our friends and it also shows the sabering trick that we love to do. And it also has a very sweet message for the new year.

travelertrish @ 2010-01-02T18:40:00

2010-01-02T23:40:15Z

Just got an email from a friend who used to live next door. At some point a few years back, he spent a month or so in our guest room because work brought him back here. Ted is a very hard-working kinda guy. Some time ago, we came across this demographics article which divided Americans up into various cultural sub-groups and we all decided that we were Cultural Creatives and Ted was a Heartlander. There were also Moderns and maybe some other group. Anyhow, Ted remains in my imagination as the True Heartlander.

He asked if we had rented out our guest room after he left. My response?

Jean-Francois HATES the idea of renting out a room to a...uh...gulp...STRANGER! So we don't. I'd love to have an international student or some other interesting character. But not with my present husband, no. Nor was my house where the teens hung out (something I would have wanted) nor did they feel particularly comfortable even having anyone at all over. Sometimes I have to battle to invite people I want to come over.

I have friends in Alaska who started letting somebody just HAVE a room in their house with them. Basically free room in exchange for looking after the dogs when they went fishing in Mexico or driving them to the emergency room if they had a heart attack or some other emergency. It's not the kind of thing you can do once you get ancient...too set in your ways...but if you start in middle age, the way my friends did, then it can work out really well.

It certainly did for Jean and Dillon. I need to email her. The last Christmas card I got was signed "Jean." Which sounds ominous.

Looking Back at 2009

2010-01-02T12:08:56Z

High Point of the Year:
The Gala Premiere of our Movie-Making for Immigrants and Refugees. I was so proud of our students, and the party at the Greensboro Historical Museum was just spectacular. I wore the dress Amina had given to me-- not one I'd ever have chosen but a super ethnic triumph once I had it on.

Low Point of the Year:
The darkness before the light of the chronic depression of a good friend. I've seen this pattern in him for years and years, and he's finally started to understand it and work on it. But before the decision was taken...It was rough, rough, rough. My helpful amnesia has allowed me to forget the details.

I once had a boyfriend who had a photographic memory. It was useless to use the past in an argument with him, because he could totally replay the "you said, I said" tape. Anything you sort of remembered, he totally recalled. While this quality was often useful, I can imagine that it also tortures him now. What if you could remember every detail of every bad experience? I think one of the lessons I learned from that relationship was that carrying around a sack of grievances, with details, is useless anyway. Better to put them in a paper sack and drop them out of the bus window.

One of the great things about the fading of short-term memory as we age is that we can also fail to remember the stuff we resented, felt angry about, and felt all drama-queen wounded about. So this year has a blurry memory of some difficult times overlaid with some nice vivid great times. And though the great times will fade too, I'm left with the feeling that it was a year of hard fulfilling work, a very few but significant in-country trips (San Francisco stands out), and a Long Term Relationship that improved in passion and commitment and basic appreciation.

I'd give 2009 a B+.

New Year's Eve and Onwards

2010-01-01T17:02:13Z

We had an ideal New Year's Eve. Our friends Sara and Hyden came over for dinner and then Rudi and Claudia showed up after their concert around 10:30. We took the saber to the champagne bottles, always a fun party trick, and put the 70's disco station on to dance. Jean-Francois simply outdid himself, I must say. Sara had requested couscous ("You know, the one with raisins.") and they brought over pork steaks to add to the mix. Of course, it's heretical to add PORK to a couscous, but Jean-Francois overcame his moral objections and the result was exquisite. He even did a little tajine action with prunes.

We had dessert about 11, after Rudi and Claudia arrived. Crepes. I do love crepes, and we had plenty of lemons to do lemon-sugar crepes as well as Nutella. Mmmmmm...with Spanish champagne...the black bottle. We've been drinking this champagne since we got married 29 years ago. TWENTY-NINE YEARS????? I never thought I'd see the day I could say that. And, indeed, there was a whole raft of folks who also never thought they'd see the day, either.

Yesterday really kicked my butt, so it was good to kick back to an evening that I had absolutely no responsibility for whatsoever. Just hand me my glass, honey. The database I am using, Salesforce, is great for many things, but making mass changes-- updates in this case, but also uploads...I just can't seem to make it work. And I've got to. So I fiddled and diddled and finally quit in frustration. And my honey handed me my champagne glass and I kicked off my grumpy self.

So. Looking forward to 2010. Who was it that said, "Lose your mind and come to your senses"? Thank you, Google, it was Fritz Perls. Who also said:

“I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.”

When I first saw that on a poster in the 60s, I was appalled. OF COURSE I was in this world to meet the expectations of others. OF COURSE I wanted the world to meet my expectations. Ha! What a difference 40 years makes, huh?

Anyhow, I don't want to actually LOSE my mind. I think it's a good idea to misplace it from time to time because my senses need more attention, care, stroking, developing, exploring and just plain play. I'd like 2010 to be the year of the body and the senses. Voila, my New Year's Intentions.

Today, I'm NOT doing Salesforce. I'm doing photographs.

Dreams and Invisibility

2009-12-20T14:29:11Z

I dreamed I was in a big room charged with removing all the old stuff from the walls. These old posters and educational prompts were thumb-tacked into the wall going right up to the ceiling. This was supposedly at FaithAction, but it wasn't my work now-- we don't have such a room. At one point, I woke up and realized that I wasn't dreaming about any space we have at my work. In fact, I don't recognize the room from anywhere. It did occur to me, both in the dream and out, that when you have things on the walls, they become invisible after some time.

This is what happened to the messages at work about making sure the water was off at the tap and that the toilet had stopped running water. But it's true for all sorts of signs and pictures. In fact, even things that aren't on walls become invisible. There's a beach towel half-draped over the window to my left. Its purpose was to block out the sun coming in during the afternoon. But I haven't sat in this chair in the afternoon for months and months. And the towel has become invisible until now.

I've FELT invisible at times. It happened to me again at the Rotary Club Christmas party. There are several members that I am already speaking to, greeting, exchanging pleasantries with, on the path to becoming at least nodding acquaintances. But there are a few that, while they know me, did not introduce me to their wives, and did not acknowledge my existence. From the Emily Post point of view, that is a failure of the hostess, whose job it is to introduce people around, to make sure that people know each other. In large parties, the hostess is supposed to simply make sure you are connected with SOMEONE that you're likely to talk to. But in a party that size, there should have been some effort made to see that everyone was introduced to everyone else. As some of you know, I'm pretty fearless about introducing myself and talking to strangers. But I'm also capable of freezing...and just not able to pull it off. When I'm aware of feeling invisible, that's when the paralysis sets in.

This happens to me less and less lately, fortunately.

When I left my dream, I had finished getting all the stuff off the walls and was rolling up sleeves to start painting. I wish I could remember all the details, though. There was an emotional content, there were people I know but are not connected with work, there was some sort of opposition going on, I think...

Natasha comes in tomorrow. After noon on Thursday, I've got 10 days off. Well, sort of... I have a couple of things I need to get done while the office is empty, so I'll probably sneak in when Natasha leaves on the 28th.

Merry Christmas everybody.

African Sisters Dress

2009-12-16T14:49:53Z

This is the dress that Amina, my dear African sister, gave me. I wore it this night to their party, and I wore it again at the Gala Premiere of the Movie-Making Class.

Christmas Cards and Candy

2009-12-15T13:14:53Z

I reckon it's been about ten years since I sent out Christmas cards. I've collected cards at garage sales for a pittance, but I just never got around to sending any. This year, something went click...and I just put a batch of cards in the mailbox. What made the difference? The cards. I happened to be at the West End Thrift Store when Brenda was hauling out some extraordinary cards from National Geographic, a wreath on the front made with different kinds of birds. Just beautiful. I bought them on the spot, and I've proceeded to address, stamp and then WRITE on them.

The lucky recipients are not representative at all of the hierarchy of friends, family and acquaintances that populate my life. They are, simply, the people who are still sending ME cards after all these years. I felt that their persistence and loyalty MUST be rewarded. So if you send me a card last year, you get a card this year. There are a couple of exceptions. My new best friend Mary Jane in San Francisco went on the list. She's the Servas hostess who was such a doll to me, hauling my cold-ridden self around the city, not giving a FIG when I told her I had a cold, even though she's 75 and living alone. I loved her energy, the hot flame of life that I felt every minute in her company. And Pam got one because she's my birding buddy.

Going through my paper address book was a trip. I kept this loose leaf marvel for years and years, painstakingly marking every time I sent a letter or a card off to someone. This is the same me that kept a running list of every book I read. All this is gone now, swept away by the computer, the internet and the kind of 40-hour-week I work. But I was astonished to read some of the names in my book, people I only vaguely remember, people I've basically lost. I never used to lose people. I remembered them all because I went through that book regularly. Who the hell is Kim Zumwalt? I remember that her father was the famous Zumwalt, an admiral in the Navy, or maybe it was her uncle. But what was my relationship with her? I am clueless. The same is true all through that book. People whose names are a complete mystery or practically.

I used to be amazed that other people would simply LOSE close friends. Just stop seeing them or calling them or getting in touch with them. I think it used to puzzle me because I was constantly moving from one residence to another, one town to another, and so held fiercely to the people who meant something to me. I didn't make casual acquaintances much. What Gladwell in The Tipping Point calls "weak relationships." As a teacher in a boarding school, those few years I wasn't writing, we were too much in each other's business, and as a lonely writer, every friend counted...until the last one died or moved away and I spent several years feeling quite frantic and bereft. I'd always had a BEST FRIEND and now there just didn't seem to be one to be found.

I don't know when I stopped worrying about that. Or, actually, yes now that I think about it... It was when I started working full time doing what I do, loving what I do, being "out in the world," being a social activist, being a tech maven, being myself at last. I hadn't realized that "I" had moved on and that nobody is going to cleave to someone who is not authentic. I remember college parties where I felt totally and utterly invisible. Jean-Francois had painted a picture of me that was not at all the way I saw myself-- a Feminist with a capital F, which wasn't SO bad, really, except that seemed to imply that I "wore the pants in the family," or as my parents-in-law put it, "led him around by the end of the nose." My aesthetic tyrant the docile and dominated one? Ha! I'm just more of a Yankee than he is. And his personality has been distorted by years of living without really assimilating in a foreign country.

In addition to the Christmas cards, I've also done a bunch of chocolate bark with nuts and dried cranberries. lizardek managed to squeak out, "They weren't SALTED, were they?" well after I'd already made the sheets of melted white and dark chocolate with salted cashews and Spanish peanuts. I tasted them and they reminded me of certain crackers you can buy in the bazaars of India and Nepal that are both salted and sweet. It's a really interesting taste phenomenon because each different taste fires on a different part of your tongue.

Every year, the entire female staff of the Modern Foreign Language Department hauls into work little presents of food for everybody else on the staff. Loaves of zucchini bread, nut bread, cookies, etc. etc. Last night we counted 18 people who needed these goodies. Every year, JF feels beleaguered by all this bounty because he never has anything to give back. They don't do Secret Santa, where you only have to come up with five little gifts, leading up to the revelation of who has been putting pencils and erasers into your mailbox. When lizardek showed pictures of this pistachio and cranberry bark with white chocolate, I resolved that this year, JF would have something to reciprocate with.

He's been telling everyone he's bringing in some toxic waste for them. Or maybe he's only saying that to his best friend on the staff. He's still the tyrant, though perhaps he's also anticipating the fact that Americans are not going to buy the "they do this in India and it's really quite good" argument. I did NOT throw it all out, run out to the store, re-purchase sacks of white and dark chocolate and cranberries and UNSALTED pistachios at $10 the half pound, thank you very much.

So this is going to be interesting. For MY people, I made up a batch of chocolate chip cookies that came last year in a gift jar with all the ingredients in aesthetic layers, topped by a square of tasteful Christmas cloth and a nice little golden cord. I got an email from Ryan. All it said was: "Amazing cookies." He's going to miss the white chocolate bark I'm bringing in today. There was one cup left over. Perhaps my reputation will plummet!

To Kill or not to Kill

2009-12-13T15:35:12Z

There are more polite ways of putting it, but the plain fact is that we have to start contemplating the death of our dog. She has lumps all over her body that are getting more numerous and bigger. A couple of the smaller ones look as if they're open. She has...well...I'll spare you more details.

The real issue is: is she suffering or not? Sometimes, when I'm FORCING her to go to the laundry room where she has her mats and water and food bowls, she acts as if getting up is a terrible ordeal. Then, when she wants to go outside, she trips down and back up the stairs as if nothing is wrong. She is even still playing her getaway games: She heads out on an urgent errand and then disappears and goes silent on the other side of the Avion trailer that now takes up the back parking space. She waits back there as long as possible and then makes a DASH for the other side of the driveway leading to the front, the road and the park. She has a whole routine for how she's going to get away, and she's refined this over the years as the getaway space has narrowed to just this one spot in the driveway. She likes to lurk just behind the garbage cans so that the time I have to see her and call to her is its utmost minimal. Once she's out of sight on the driveway, she's GONE.

I've started going down the steps with her to position myself in the getaway zone and even then she's tried to zip by me. In order to stop her, you have to SEE her and also be close enough to her. Sometimes, I've seen her from the back porch after she's made it to the park, which is on the other side of our privacy fence. She laughs bitterly at me when I try to call her from my perch on the back stairs, as if to say, "My captors, you have no power over me now!"

Velvet has never really been trained. That is, she can perform amazingly at staying out of the kitchen whenever JF is in it. She can even stay almost always on the tiles and not getting on the wood floors...when we are there to see. But there's no loyalty there; she does that because JF has trained her with fear of pain. Despite classes and books and efforts, I've never become her Alpha Dog. She'll come when she's called only VERY SLOWLY and only if I am about 15 feet from her. She continues to use the house as her toilet, sometimes even when we're home and would gladly let her out. Does this mean she has become incontinent? Not really...at least 80 per cent of the time she lets me know when she wants to go out.

So she gets lumpier and smellier. She rolls over on her back and seems to be scratching her back, moaning and whining as if, either it is a profound relief or a pain. It's hard to tell.

Sometimes, I look at her and think, somebody is going to feel this way about me one day. When is she just going to die? As far as I'm concerned, it would be useful for humans to have the tools to do the job that we have for dogs. But I'm not sure that would actually make anything easier for anybody but the one exiting this mortal coil. At least I could put my wishes into words. Velvet can't.

Ruminations on Music Night

2009-12-12T14:16:24Z

Because we had music night last night, my whole weekend's calendar has nothing on it until 6pm Sunday night, when the annual High Point University Christmas Party will take place. This will be a Nido extravaganza, if it's like former years. When I was in San Francisco, wandering around the totally over-the-top Salesforce convention, I was reminded of Nido and his grand gestures. I'll never forget the first time JF brought home 10 POUNDS of Ghiardelli chocolate.

The social dynamics at music night were especially interesting because there were two couples there who haven't come in months and months, and who really formed the core of the musicians at the beginning.

Now, I do want to say that JF and I have been doing music nights since our poverty-stricken days in Marseille, when we had two little kids and lived on $10,000 a year. We were so poor that even though we owned an automobile, we couldn't afford to GO anywhere in it. Those were eat-and-pay-the-rent days. So we invited our friends over to play music and partake of the canned dinners that JF's father created for us. He used to arrive at our apartment with cases of these quart jars filled with main dishes like "Canard aux Oranges" and "Pot au Feu." There was always some kind of meat in a sauce. We'd break out the spaghetti or rice and a couple of "Boccaux de Papa" and we always had a feast.

Those evenings in Marseille were, for a time, dominated by JF's sister's boyfriend Hakkim. He came to France from Algeria to study painting, but he already had a rich history of playing traditional songs at weddings and other festive occasions. The only thing about Hakkim was that he didn't really play WITH anyone. He simply delivered a concert of Algerian music. But he was a brilliant guitar player and so we mostly just sat back and enjoyed.

Then the music nights went sort of away while we were in Massachusetts (where we landed after we left Marseille) and Texas (where JF was finishing his dissertation and teaching. We reinstituted them here, mainly with these two couples I was talking about, and other people who have since sort of dropped off the social map. (Or moved away, sigh sigh, Traci and Rob.)

There were a couple of things about the dynamics of that old group that annoyed me. One was that while we had sort of agreed to take turns suggesting songs, one of the guys would just launch into songs he wanted to play and sort of, as JF calls this kind of move, "grab the microphone." Not unlike our buddy Hakkim. This meant that we were all more or less hostage to HIS songs, and HIS repertoire. What we've found since is that, in truly taking turns, even among those who don't have guitars, we end up with a richer mix of songs. We find stuff we had forgotten we loved. We get stretched musically.

The other thing that used to really piss me off was that these guys would start a song and be well into the first verse before the rest of us found the words in the songbook. There was the feeling that we could just damn well catch up, that THEY were the engine and WE, the singers, could just keep up as best we could. What we've found since they stopped coming was that it feels much more like a community to spend a little time so that all the guitars can get the chords down while the singers all get on the same page.

The upshot was that one of the guys from the old style (of the two couples that haven't been in months) started making "jokes" on the theme of "there are so many RULES here, and I don' want to violate any of them but it's hard because there are so many RULES." Meaning, I thought, that no, you can't simply hijack the group to sing YOUR usual songs you always sing with your buddy who sings HIS songs that HE always sings and the rest of us are there to follow as best we can.

He also likes to imply, somehow, that I'm the one keeping herd on everyone, though that may be a projection on my part. Well, I did ask the rather largish group of yakkers to pipe down when we were trying to get started. We do a wonderful potluck dinner before we sing at these affairs, and getting the group from eat-and-talk to pluck-and-sing has sometimes been a challenge. But that's also part of the new drift...some of the people there are really wanting to SING and people who talk at the top of their lungs over the singing are not appreciated. After all, there are other rooms in the house to have conversations. So it could be that after I told the peanut gallery to pipe down and got some pushback from one of them, I felt that old feeling of "oh dear, I'm too pushy, too loud, too too too..."

But I loved it when the guy started in about all the rules and being afraid of being punished for breaking the rules and chuckle chuckle I'm only just joking tone, that Judy bless her brilliant heart joked right back that there was a time-out chair over THERE and if he didn't behave he'd end up in it.

I do like the guy who used to always hijack the microphone. He had the widest repertoire of all our group until Carl came along. But I also love the new songs that come into the group with our new system.

Thinking about these guys who play guitar (and not counting Kris and Scott who are truly musical and have lived music as long as I've known them and well before no doubt), I'm reminded of something a shopkeeper told me in Eureka, Arkansas when I stopped there on my USA van trip. She described the guys who show up in her little hippie-dippie town on big motorcycles. "They came of age in the 60s, watched Easy Rider, and always wanted a hog. Now they've got gray ponytails, a paunch, and their hogs."

Many of our music night guys came of age in the 60s and really really just wanted to get stoned and play their guitars. They played along with the big name performers, they mastered their moves, and they fantasized about being musicians. But reality intervened and they became doctors and lawyers and department heads. These were the ones who didn't give up their music, even if they gave up being musicians. Since I, too, am an old hippie girl who loved to dance to that music, I'm just happy they're in my life and that, once a month or so, they come together to celebrate song.

Movie and Maven

2009-12-10T03:24:35Z

For those of my faithful readers who can stand sub-titles, Central Station, a Brazilian movie, is excellent. Tugged at the heart-strings, I tell you!

I had a full day of Geek work, followed by Barbara's annual open house over at Handy Capable Network. Followed by an abbreviated visit to the Y...but better than not going, is what I told myself. After last night's for-EVER insomnia, I wasn't going to get up for yoga this morning, that was a given. And the Y made me feel ever so relieved after pigging out at Barbara's. They always have a nice little feast there. I got some SERIOUS networking in.

Have I talked about how much I enjoy networking? Mary Jane, in San Francisco, took pity on me for having finished all the "literature" I had with me, and so gave me a book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He talks about three kinds of people who can influence what happens in the world. Connectors, mavens, and salesmen. The connectors are people who just love knowing people. The mavens are people who love knowing about stuff and sharing it with people they know. Salesmen are people who can persuade people, who can intuit...empathize to the point of being in subliminal sync with them. The book made me think about myself in those terms. I don't think I'm a salesman. If I were, I'd already have the money for the next movie-making class. There are elements of the connector in me. One thing that Gladwell says is that connectors specialize in WEAK relationships. People you know, people you maybe share interests with, people you admire for who they are or what they have done or are doing, but not your inner circle, not your FRIENDS. The French make a distinction between ami and copain... The ami is close, close. If she knocks on your door in the middle of the night, you are glad to see her. If she needs money, you lend it. You tell your ami what's going on in your soul and she tells you back. A copain... I usually translate this as buddy, though that feels like an awkward term. A copain is someone you do stuff with. He comes to dinner at your house. You meet for drinks. You discuss film, football, even politics. You do NOT get into the intricacies of your emotional and spiritual life with a copain. It's a weaker relationship.

The connector's relationships are even weaker, though as Gladwell points out, they are still real. We might figure these people as folks you'd send a Christmas card to, if you were into sending an extensive mailing out. We invite all these people to our Christmas open house. We invite our inner circle of friends, too, but also everybody we "know."

But the more I think about Gladwell's categories, I think I am more of a maven than a connector. I like networking not only because I basically like people but also because I have a lot to offer. I met a young woman at the gallery hop last Friday and she seemed like a perfect candidate for the Idea Exchange at the Center for Design Innovation that I attend some Tuesday afternoons. They love the collision of science and art/design at CDI, and she was talking about having been to college to study biology, but now that she's out, wanting to explore her artistic self. I loved telling her about CDI. I like knowing about technology for much the same kick...It's so fun to connect people and opportunities to celebrate life in some way. When I think of myself, I'm comfortable with the idea of being a maven. I'll go back to the text and see if there isn't more to explore there.

In the meantime, no decorations up yet. I need to sign the cards I addressed last weekend. We are now in the Holiday Party season. Nothing gets done for the next month. The Nepalis have a monthlong holiday season like this. We Westerners grump about it, and then here we are doing it.

Midnight ramblings

2009-12-09T05:01:24Z

The rain pours down, an all-night-long soaking cold winter rain. In a month, we'd wake up to sheer ice everywhere. JF goes into his seasonal affective disruption and refuses to go out. I am determined, however, so I drive through the rain to Winston where the contra dance whirls. It's live music, real bands playing this down-here music...a kind of blue-grass music. I read recently that this was dancing for people without a lot of time to practice. They needed a dance without complicated steps and figures. Even the square dances we sometimes do are pushing it for most of us. Forward and back. Do-si-do and swing your partner. That's what we are good at. I love Susie's Facebook page because she regularly posts contra dance photos and videos that remind me why I love it.

And that reminds me of something she said after the last music night. This is the way I love to celebrate life, she said.

I'm sitting in what has become the breakfast room. One of the funny things about being nomads who have stopped roaming is that we can't really stop. So we roam inside our house. We move our rooms around. We move our furniture from one room to the next. We shift whole areas of the house someplace else. This room was my office at the beginning. This is the room I painted such a bright shade of yellow that I couldn't see out the windows into the park. I was defying the Interior Design Czar I live with, who dictates ALL the colors and ALL the shapes and textures. Which is usually fine by me. But here, in this my first office in this house, I wanted to assert my own personality.

My next office, when Natasha graciously relinquished her bedroom after her first year of college, I did better with the color scheme. Jean-Francois, the Czar, was skeptical, but he had to admit I had a winner. Violet and dusty green and sky blue.

In a few days, we'll have to move out of the breakfast room and give it over to our main Christmas installation, the creche. Actually, I'd like to see it take over the living room, which has become somewhat pathetic since JF moved the easy chairs and recliners out to his new "movie watching" guest room. This is the room that was once Raf's bedroom, and then JF colonized it for his computer/music/mess and has now moved all that to his new room, the 34-ft trailer that sits in our back parking lot. Talk about colonization! It's his playroom, his retreat, his cave and his visual studio.

I'm feeling somewhat dispossessed in a way. Interior decorating is sort of like gardening for me. Perfectly compelling theories. Not such compelling ACTIVITIES. I do think my nomadic past is responsible for this lack of attention to the aesthetic environment I live in. Though, of course, maybe it's just living with an artistic tyrant. Loveable, of course...truly loveable, but not less tyrannical for it.

Work proceed apace. JF's brilliant photography has won me a web design job, I learned tonight. I'm so tickled. I love web design. I love databases, too, and this week I've finally just put my foot down and said...I will not be distracted. We must perform certain geek-type maintenance and that is that. I just love the puzzle, the play, the little thrill I get when I set up a meeting over the internet with a woman in Australia I have only met online...and she takes me to her computer and shows me stuff she's done there. And we talk over the internet. And my desktop refuses to get online so I quick set up my laptop and earlier her login didn't work and so she quick set up a new account. Raise your hands, now. WHO finds that kind of stuff fun?

It's midnight. Sigh. I really wanted to have a week of exercise. But what's a girl to do when she can't sleep? Not, I fear, get up at five. I am starting to feel Orpheus at work at last.

First Friday in Winston

2009-12-06T01:04:27Z

..and other delights of the week.

I just read karlkunkel's account of Friday night in Greensboro, and it sounds just a bit more decorated and populated than our foray into the same kind of thing in the neighboring town. There are three towns here-- Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. JF loves to defend High Point as being wonderfully perverse, happily screwed up and not at all functional, which he finds delightful. That's my husband. Ever the contrarian. We went over to Winston to hang out with Cornelia and Matt, newish friends. He's a prof at UNGC's film dept, so I wanted to pick his brain a bit about whether Raf might find success applying there for the MFA. (That's Master of Fine Arts, for our non-US friend...a terminal degree that gives the possessor the credentials he/she needs to teach at the college/university level, unlike the Master of Arts, which only works for the lesser universities like Junior Colleges and Community Colleges.) It was a helpful talk and I'm feeling better and better about that being a good place for Raf.

Then we went off downtown where the galleries were open and a whole different crowd of folks were wandering up and down. I'm thinking there was probably more music in Greensboro. But Winston has the reputation for being more artsy, more DEE-sign, more sophisticated in the arts than Greensboro. I'm not a good judge of all that. I do remember that last year's "First Friday" in GSO was really festive feeling and quite well-attended.

Raf and I went to see his prof of art history to try to wrangle a non-failing grade for the semester. I got lulled into thinking Raf didn't really need to register with the Disability Service...I won't make that mistake again. Raf did pretty well at Piedmont Community College, the animation program he attended after his BA at High Point University. But it was all hands-on. This was all book-reading and slide-memorizing, and a whole lot of detail that Raf can do, but with far more effort and dedication. The Disability Office will approve certain modifications so that Raf can have more time on tests, write with a computer with spell-check, and at times deliver his short answers verbally instead of having to write them.

Reading deponti 's friends list, I came upon a long detailed tale about a fellow taking his car out and was reminded that I have a "new" car. My friend Kris, upon seeing it, said, "Oh, it's a gas-guzzler!" And so it is. But it is a comfortable car, a car with doors on both sides of the back seat, a car with enough room for sleeping on a camping weekend. A car that can haul stuff, and transport people and even pull JF's motorcycle when we get a trailer to put it on. Then we can go somewhere, leave the car at the campground, and take the bike for touring the back roads. Yes! It's a 1995 Chevy Suburban with 127,000 miles on it. It's in good shape, while my last one, the Ford Aerostar, bless its turquoise heart, was really falling apart. It was vying for the POS award. That's Piece of Sh**. What finally convinced me was that it was leaking inside when it rained. I need a place to sleep that's warm and snug and NOT likely to leak, otherwise I'd camp in a tent like I did for years and years.

Now that I'm rattling on, I can think of four or five more topics of interest. Guess I'll have to get in here more often. I had the first full exercise week this week-- four days of exercise before work: two yoga and two weight-lifting. All I need is walking tomorrow and I'll be really up to speed on that front. I'm signed up for a shot of "Get Control of Your Food Addiction" starting in January, when I'm sure I'll be a full tub of lard. I'm at my all-time high and feeling really resistant to dieting because as soon as I lose, I turn around and start putting it back on at the speed of light. Or should I say, the speed of microwave? I will NOT bore you all to tears about this, except to say I'm off to a round of group therapy about it.

Natasha is coming home in just over two weeks. Suzan is hinting she might come for Christmas. Oh joy! What else? My life brimmeth over. I just wish I could get the videos to upload. Dreamforce was just over the top and I don't want to upload the little segments, I want to have a whole video.

Life, the Universe and Everything. That's my story.

Pondering the Big Questions...

2009-12-02T17:10:42Z

Whither movie-making?
I spent two hours this morning with my partner in the Movie-Making Class from the American Friends Service Committee, Lori. We're brainstorming where we might find the money for the next class, how we might structure it differently. She thinks that four hours every Saturday for 12 weeks is too long and too hard to get people able to commit to that.

Whither son Raphael?
Yesterday, Raf and I went to talk to the director of the master's program in film at UNCG. I'm of two or three minds about this application process. Could he get into the animation program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh? Or is it Durham? Down that way, anyway. An hour and a half away. He almost got in last year. But if he got in, could he negotiate all the administrative rigamarole necessary? Not sure.

But would the film program be a kind of sidetrack for him, since he's primarily interested in animation? Or could it actually enhance his resume in ways that would eventually be beneficial? And all the social interaction...oh goodness...it's just a minefield. And yet, and yet...maybe it would really help him with his social skills. Whew...we'll see.

Short San Francisco update

2009-11-29T17:36:15Z

Pam should be here any minute, so I'm trying to get my general news into this short report. San Francisco was MAH-velous! It's a beautiful city, as of course we all know, and while I saw little of it during the conference, I did get a wonderful tour from my Servas hostess, Mary Jane.

For those of you who don't know what Servas is, do check it out here. This is a hospitality organization that promotes world peace, one friendship at a time. There's a very active group of Friendship Force in Greensboro, which is roughly the same thing, in that they believe that it's through people-to-people encounters, patiently working the exponential effect of personal encounters, that people stop hating and start seeing The Other through the eyes of acceptance. Naive? Maybe, but it's also just a great way to travel cheaply. Mary Jane interviewed me to become an interviewer for the organization, so if any of my friends want to travel with Servas in the future, soon I should be able to be your interviewer.

The conference is best experienced through the short video I did, but I'm running into technical difficulties getting it on the internet. I may have to go the YouTube route, since my Vimeo account only accepts videos of something like 10MB and my first one is bigger than that already, and there are two more to go. I want to put them all together because they make a sort of summary statement of the experience...from my entrance into the youth hostel room I shared with three other "girls," to the view of San Francisco from Mary Jane's back deck (spectacular). I think Raf is going to put that all together for me.

...Back from a 5.5 mile hike with Pam. Feeling quite righteous.

I didn't do photographs while Mary Jane was taking me on her Famous Tour by automobile. I was really still suffering from the cold that brought me down on Friday night. I had planned to use Friday afternoon to zip around the city on cable cars and just feel like a tourist, but when I got out of the conference, it was raining. I had my umbrella with me, but it wasn't very conducive weather to running around, not with a sore throat and all that "You've Got a Cold" feeling. So I picked up a book at the hostel, curled up in bed and even slept through what might have been my supper (a can of beef stew I'd bought the night before.) So the next morning, I was still pretty much under the influence of the cold. I even called Mary Jane to let her off the hook, if she wanted to beg off, but she was game, so at 7:15 on the dot, she was there to pick me up so we could make the warehouse sale she had planned to attend. We spent the rest of the day driving around SF while she pointed out the sights and gave me snippets of history.

As for the conference, I spent one afternoon going from booth to booth in the expo, collecting swag which I took back to the youth hostel and gave away. Can you imagine that it's hard to give stuff away to a bunch of youthful travelers, who look at every item and judge whether the extra weight will be worth it or not. But I did manage to give a bunch of stuff away, and that was lots of fun. That also got me talking to the people in the booths...The sessions were okay, but really, either too elementary for me or pretty much geared to businesses, not nonprofits. The nonprofit track was woeful. There were a thousand of us there, and they had a total of nine sessions out of something like 300. And there was really a lot of fluff, I think.

Since I am not a "developer," that is, I don't plan to code, the special programmer area held no fascination. I learned too late that I could get special one-on-one tutoring for free from the Salesforce staffers. I got one good session of that in, but that would not have been worth the price of admission, even if I'd been able to do more. The thing about Salesforce is that everything you need to learn is online. Sometimes, you have to search for it. Sometimes, you have to take the TIME to watch the video tutorials, but it's all there. What is so often lacking is a perception that I have time to do this stuff, and also the self-motivation it takes to basically give yourself the course. But the courses are ludicrously expensive when you pay someone to teach them to you, especially when the information is all there, for free, for someone with the chutzpah to search and learn. So...unless my video next year wins the grand prize (which includes a backstage pass to meet the band ...which wasn't a band I'd ever heard of, so I didn't care about that part this year anyway...Black Crowes anyone?), I think I'll stay home. I'd much rather win an all-expense paid trip to the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network conference. Which, instead of 18,000 people attracts only 3 or 4,000 and everyone is all wowed at that.

Still, I think you either develop friendships across the country and the convention is the chance to hang out with your friends...or you stop going to conferences. The value...the real learning value...diminishes to zero at some point. And I certainly feel myself to be a part of the nonprofit techie group a whole lot more than the Salesforce group. The nonprofit party on Thursday was not within walking distance, and my throat had already started to hurt...and I hadn't connected solidly with any of the nonprofit crowd...so I went back to the hostel, made myself supper and played with my new Salesforce skills.

Voila...the trip to San Francisco. Spent a total of $204 on the ground...$112 for four days at the youth hostel, the rest several non-conference meals (the conference included five or six meals and probably another if I'd managed to get to the party). That is for EVERYTHING except the warehouse sale with Mary Jane, where I went nuts buying Christmas presents ($61 for probably a couple of hundred worth of paper goods). That's $33 a day. The airfare was $382 round trip. So the entire week in San Francisco cost me $647.85. Just call me travelertrish.

Dreamforce 09 Day One

2009-11-19T14:50:26Z

I ended up posting my notes from the keynote yesterday, but I didn't want to give the impression that that is what Dreamforce yesterday was about. I concentrated on sessions about reports and dashboards, since that's where I think we need to go next at FaithAction.

But I had the BEST time going around to the Expo booths, talking to the folks, getting my card scanned (oh, God, think of all the fruitless followup calls and emails I'm going to get!) And getting their swag. Then I came back to the Youth Hostel and gave most of it to the kids here. It was lots of fun, seeing what they were handing out so you'd remember them. For the most part, I avoided the candy jars.

That's the other cool thing. I don't have to spend money on food. It's all here. So I'm going to splash out for the coat-check...leave my laptop but have it on site in case I want to do an "hands-on" session.

Okay, that's really it!

Notes from the Conference in San Francisco

2009-11-19T06:23:34Z

So the internet isn't working this morning. I forgot to turn OFF my 5am weekday alarm, and then forgot that it was on. So I shook myself awake and put on my headlamp to brush my teeth and get dressed. One of our room's lodgers didn't come back last night, but there were still two young women asleep. The self-absorbed one turned on the light at whatever time she got in. It was a revelation to her that she could just open the bathroom door a bit and have plenty of light without waking everyone up.

The first clue I had that I was up too early was when the kitchen door was still locked. Huh? The door says 7am. Surely it had been more than half an hour since I'd gotten out of bed. It had. My phone said 5:40. Registration and breakfast at the conference is 7am too. Oh, well, I thought, a little internet. Not to be either. It's either off or out. I don't want to go PAy someone for coffee, so I'm left with organizing the files on my computer. Probably long overdue job, but not what I had in mind for Wednesday morning.

The flight was uneventful. I sat next to a retired English teacher who lives in Ashland, Oregon, which sounds like Asheville...ecumenical, artsy, cool. She volunteers with the local community theater company. My flight from GSO was delayed enough so that I had to actually sprint to make the flight to San Francisco in Philadelphia. I'm not used to flat out running. I arrived just after they announced the last call for the flight. Huff, puff.

So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put my computer and most of the stuff in my purse back in the room. And I'm going out for an early morning walk in San Francisco. A plan.

---

Waiting for the keynote. Total huge, huge hall, filled with blue light, projections of clouds everywhere. Trying to figure out how to get back to the hostel to dump some of this stuff. I am not even sure I want this laptop with me, but certainly the coat...They want $2 to check the coat and I am keeping this really on the cheap. Breakfast was lovely. Cute video intro. Software disks hover, take over meetings. Turn into surfboards with jet pipes. Up into the cloud. The room changes color. Sunset orange. Loud rock music.

Marc...19,000 people registered for this conference. At a grand apiece... 10,000 people in this room. Allow us to all come together. See the future, understand it, create it. Company update. Level set it. Strategy. Product strategy. Open a door and walk through it...That you see a new possibility. ceo@salesforce.com for what's bothering me. COFFEE before 7:30! Safe Harbor statement...Magnitude of the announcement. Recogize all the folks from outside the country.

Thank you....This is our way of giving back to you. Mission: cloud computing driver, catalyst and evangelist. Applications moving to the cloud...Then platforms moving to the cloud. Force.com. Multi-tenant, pay as you go, elastic, five times faster and half the cost. 67,900 payng customers. Largest...marquee customers. Can serve every size of the market.

A different set of values of philanthropy and giving back. 1 per cent...equity, profit, time.

Mayor of SF...celebrates its diversity each and every day. Dreamers, doers, entrepreneurs, leading edge of cutting edge. Talk about the various give-back. Project Homeless Connect. Mobile capabilities. Power of an enabling model. Easy to put in place. 108 cities replicated.

Year Up ED to represent all the nonprofits. Earn a career in technology for young adults. Six months of IT training, internship. Social entrepreur model. Real data in real time, allocate limited resources. Use SF every day.

Update on the company...
force.com infrastructure...SECURITY. A lot of the power of security. We've learned much from you. Virtual cycle. Security and reliability. System with scalability. Five minute upgrade. Move data back and forth...salesforce to salesforce.

Force.com development platform. You've built tens of millions of customization. Knowlegement system.

Applications on top of the platform. 4th cloud, major new market segment.

Sales Cloud 2 --

Service Cloud 2 -- 55% market share. One problem we were trying to solve. Concept of customer support. Companies invest in contact centers. Waiting for calls while the action is happening on the internet. What happens when you have a next generation of service cloud. Customer service offering...Tel and online communities, email. Products she bought, sales calls, Search knowledge. Rich media in knowledge article. Customize to match your business. When we want to include this new category...Publish to the web site.

Salesforce Answsers...shipping it as a facebook application. Went to Dell's home page. Also installed Answers Application. People vote for the answers. Dell has access to all these answers and can put it in their knowledgebase. Made accessible to service agents, google and everybody in the facebook community.

Twitter...How do I join that conversation? Salesforce for twitter baked in. support channel on Twitter. Automatically created a case. Integrated into the Knowledgebase. Send tweet. Reduce call handling time. 360 view of our clients.

Custom

Movie-Making Class Videos

2009-11-17T00:40:01Z

For those of you who couldn't make the Gala Premiere of our movies, here is a link to the album on Vimeo.There are all nine videos on there, plus the video I put together the day the Flips arrived, plus one called Camera Class, which JF is going to clean up and make into a better video showing the whole process of how we run the class. I think from there you can get to the other videos I have uploaded there...including the video that got me a free pass to Dreamforce, the Salesforce conference this week.

I got a call tonight from Jessie, one of my oldest friends...I keep forgetting he keeps tabs on me reading my journal. James got after me for being absent too.

So since they have free wi-fi at the youth hostel, I'll TRY to post a little during the conference.

Later then...

Oh and p.s....There have been 39 viewings of the movies in the past week. Most of them yesterday (when I posted on FB) and today.

Sporadic...

2009-11-16T04:33:34Z

There have been more upheavals, triumphs and craziness, but that is really no excuse for neglecting my LiveJournal. I keep having LiveJournal kinds of THOUGHTS. I keep wishing that I could post something to Facebook and then click Send This to LiveJournal. Or vice-versa.

The two biggest pieces of news are:
1. JF got hit by a car while bicycling to the Y about two weeks ago. He's recovered, pretty much, but it really does sort of rearrange your brain cells. No...I didn't mean that he hit his head, he didn't. And don't ASK about the helmet.

2. Movie-making class got finished and the Premiere Gala we held in honor of the students went incredibly well. JF is supposed to be making a video incorporating the videos from the classes themselves as well as footage he shot on the day of the gala. He's also supposed to be making a video of the evening we spent with the United African Sisters of North Carolina.

Actually, he's been cleaning out my old but well-loved van because we are about to donate it to our local public radio station. I bought a different car, a very large gas-guzzling Suburban, which is an amazingly comfortable, roomy, camping-friendly, schlepping-friendly, great tank of a vehicle. I paid cash for it, and so instead of the car payments so many of my friends are paying every month, I'll just have a somewhat larger fuel bill. I think I still win, though I know that going greener would have been better. We live in the last days of these kinds of vehicles and I just love sleeping in a van. So I am.

The videos we made so far are here. I've also put the link on Facebook in a couple of places.

I leave tomorrow for San Francisco for a week. Staying at the Youth Hostel and attending Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce convention. I won a free pass to the conference for making a video telling them why I want to come. I didn't win the all-expenses trip. The guy doing a very witty take-off on a Bob Dylan song won.

Okay, I'm tired now. Beddy-bye.

Wow

2009-10-31T05:19:10Z

One thing I like about this is what a great French accent this kid has. Wanna brush up on your vocabulary? I think I even heard a passe simple verb tense go by. Play it phrase by phrase, and when you've got it down, you'll be ready for the Big Trip!

While we're in French, karlkunkel wanted me to comment on the fact...not confirmed by me, by the way, that Micky D is going to open up a shop in the Louvre. MacDonald is an American icon...it stands for everything the French think of us, including the fact that we eat badly. Including, but not limited to, mind you. JF loves to say that the French LOVE to eat at MacDonald's just to come away talking about how badly they've just eaten. It's a sort of reverse snobbism. In the Louvre, they'll have even more opportunity to cluck and do their Gallic shrugs. And can you imagine the numbers of American tourists who will flock there? It's a marriage made in heaven.

Bead Shop Cat - 3

2009-10-30T02:57:39Z

Bead Shop Cat - 3, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Click on the photo of this wonderful cat to access all the photos from our birthday celebration spa in Hot Springs, North Carolina. The cat lives in this fabulous bead shop in Asheville, one stop on our way home. Other photos include extensive pix from the Duckett House Inn, where we stayed, and some from the hot tub where we relaxed and got massages. Ahhhhhh.....

Catching Up

2009-10-26T19:25:18Z

1. Visit our new website: www.faihouse.org. I must say, says she, dusting her fingernails, I am pretty proud of it. And having to rebuild it from total scratch wasn't a bad exercise. Some things I got righter the second time.

2. Spa! one of you asked how that went. Well, it was just lovely. I do have some photos that WILL get uploaded sooner rather than later, but for the past week, I've been trying to restore the backed up files to my wiped-clean computer. The B&B we found was reasonably priced and more like a European B&B-- shared bathroom (though we were the only ones in the building besides the owner, so we didn't have to end up sharing anything.) Nice quilts. Very antique-look. Wood. Nice lamps. The breakfast was scrumptious. And then we headed over to the Hot Springs themselves. This is something I love to do, and have done maybe five or six times. Only before we stayed in the campground. We read aloud from Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. We talked about our vision of our future. It was wonderful. The masseuse was not brilliant, but was perfectly adaquate. I give her a B+. It was a great getaway.

3. Computer woes: Here's the rule I broke and so read it and learn: Back up your computer files. And THEN test your backup. I worked with Judy on Sunday. That girl has enough on her computer to copy in about three minutes. She doesn't need a complicated backup system. Me, on the other hand, I've got something like 130 GIGA bytes. Sheesh. Takes hours. I need to get it done overnight. I had done the backup because that computer was acting sort of wonky and I didn't trust it not to crash on me. Which it did. But what I hadn't done was TEST the backup system. It turns out I just couldn't get the computer to recognize my backup files AS backup files. So it won't go in and restore them for me.

4. Tell No One. If you can't stand to read subtitles, you should get a reading course and get better. This is not a movie I thought I'd go for. I thought it would be too violent. It was violent at times, but so wonderfully shot, so well-crafted, such a nuanced and compelling story, that the violence didn't bother me. Rent that sucker!

5. Movie-making. Whew! All the movies are finished, though a couple of students needed some outside help to GET finished. I'll put the evaluation of the course up on the Worlds Touch Blog when I get it done. I learned a lot, including that not all students are going to love me. What a concept! Not loved by all? How can that be? But I do know that I'm a very intimidating teacher to some people...one reason why, if I ever tell you I'm going back to teaching high school, please shoot me on the spot.

travelertrish @ 2009-10-26T12:54:00

2009-10-26T15:54:51Z

Movie-Making Gala Premiere

Posted using ShareThis

The Gardenia Bush

2009-10-25T22:34:04Z

The Gardenia Bush, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Where my mother's ashes are buried, along with some from my father.

Building, building

2009-10-18T12:01:40Z

I did a couple of things right to get through the computer disasters of the past couple of days. The best decision I made was to call the young man who had helped me set up the web site for FaithAction in the first place, Dave. I had started out thinking I could think my way out of the problem, but after talking to him, I realized that I had not adaquately understood the underlying structure of the way WordPress works. I knew the information for your site is store in a MySQL database. Somehow, I imagined that the database lived in the files up there in the control panel when I log into the place I keep my site, my host is the way we geeks talk about it, my garage, is how I've come to think of it.

So when I uninstalled WordPress and saw all those files still there, I thought I hadn't actually ERASED anything. Ha. I had in fact erased everything. All that was left was the shell, the icing without the cake, the glory without any of the guts.

Dave and I did a bunch of exploring around...and of course he had to see all the clumsy things I'd done to try to rectify the situation in my ignorance. What on earth do people do who are hesitant to appear stupid and inept and ignorant in front of others? How do they get their messes cleaned up? Do they just not MAKE messes? Of course, Dave assured me that everything I'd done, he too had done once. Whither thou goest, I too have gone kinda thing. Which of course assuages the embarrassment of being a techie who didn't quite realize that if I uninstall WordPress, about two weeks of work is going to slide right down the tubes into oblivion.

And while it did take me two weeks to GET there, it won't take me two weeks to get BACK there. I spent about five hours last night after our board retreat reconstructing the site. It's still bare bones, but it's at www.faihouse.org. I have a couple of tweaks I'll do to it today before we leave for Hot Springs, but basically, this is the site. I rebuilt all the pages and put all the words on there and I'll get the pictures up next week. And there will be some changes anyway, since at our board retreat, we revised our vision and mission. Not a total tidal wave of change, but some good solid changes.

Now, as regards my laptop, which also crashed Friday. I have found my backup files and while Windows won't just "restore from backup" easily (because it thinks this is a new machine, is all I can gather from it), I can certainly just move the files manually from the backup. I need to check out and see why we aren't all just using Windows' generic backup on a regular basis. And the whole thing is a wakeup call about getting backups into the system as a regular and ongoing thing.

That'll fix the files, the photos, the documents, the videos. After that, there is the patient and steady evaluation of what programs need to be reinstalled here. I've got to get ahold of my virus protection people, since this machine thinks I didn't have any and so wants me to pay for a new deal. And there's iTunes and my podcast subscriptions. Essential. I've got my Office to install as well. After that, it's sort of waiting to see what comes up. My guess is that I've swept out a bunch of stuff that I wasn't using and didn't need.

So besides the most important technology lesson (BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! -- JF says the NASA rule is three backups and that is what he does, methodically and consistently-- and amazingly for the rest of his space looks like haphazard chaos), what am I taking away from this disaster? One is that panic and drama just would not have served anywhere in this process and boy am I glad that my boss didn't fall into even the first particle of that because I might have if he did. The other is that, with all things computer, patience is really the most important virtue. When intelligence fails (as mine did...I KNEW there was a database back there. I should have known I couldn't uninstall the program without eliminating the database. Duh, really!) then patience saves. The other of course is to get help from people that know more than you do, and that carries with it the willingness to turn up flat stupid.

Okay, I'm off to install iTunes.

Upheaval

2009-10-17T04:12:06Z

My disconnect with my technical world is complete. The web site that I've spent the last two weeks building has gone south, from my own lack of presence of mind this afternoon. I may be able to recreate it before Monday... I have to, my boss is announcing the new site already on the newsletter. I suppose I could go in there and take the mention of it out...hmmm....last resort.

But THEN! I got home and my laptop has gone into recovery mode. That is...everything EVERYTHING everything has been wiped off and it has been returned to the condition it was in when it arrived from the factory.

I don't have to reinstall the drivers, there IS that. And I did do a backup of the video, photo, and documents just day before yesterday. But all the software I had installed on the machine is gone. All the comfortable little things...my desktop photo, all that. Gone.

And tomorrow, I have an all-day board meeting and after that...web site recovery. It boggles the mind.

JF and I have reservations for Sunday night at a bed and breakfast in Asheville. And an appointment for a hot tub and massage on Monday morning. I'm boggled at the moment. Do forgive me.