travelertrish

The Gardenia Bush

2009-07-06T21:26:07Z

The Gardenia Bush, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Click on the photo to get just the scenic shots from the 4th in Florida.

OMG...another week just flew past...

2009-06-27T03:46:22Z

Suzan was having a weird week. I've been thinking of things I wanted to post all week, and then just not getting to it. I went back to the online book I wrote about a trip JF and I took in 2002, to bicycle in Holland and then to the family for a christening (the kid is now 8 and a total hellacious malicious little beast and the marriage is falling apart and the whole situation is sad) then to Berlin, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and finally back through Prague before checking in with our friends on the coast of France. You can access The Road, The Road by going to www.travelertrish.com and then clicking on the top icon. The splash page says "Enter and Please Donate" but ignore that and just click.

That was really towards the end of my life as a writer. Blogging was new then. Almost nobody was doing it. I'd heard of it because I'd posted photos of girls in Afghanistan around the time we went to war there after 9/11. Remember the war in Afghanistan? One of the first bloggers mentioned my photos on his blog and somehow I heard about it. I decided to try out this new form while I was traveling that summer. Reading over my words, I thought, hey this isn't bad!

I just finished Three Cups of Tea this week. At first I was thinking that The Great White Hope was at work...again...but Greg Mortenson, the hero of the book, is a genuinely unique kind of guy and I think he's gotta do what he's gotta do. And I do think he's right that a solid non-religious education is the ultimate weapon against terrorism. On both sides of the ocean, actually.

We saw an African film tonight that was just incredible. The Silence of the Forest. About a guy educated in the "West" who comes back to build a new Africa, and ends up going to live with the pygmies in the forest...at first to "educate" them, but they end up educating him. Lots and lots of identity/ colonialization/ anti-colonialization/ who's teaching who what stuff. Complex and also naive. Interesting.

travelertrish @ 2009-06-17T22:48:00

2009-06-18T02:59:33Z

Well, Netflix scored a hit tonight. I asked for foreign romantic comedies and ended up with one about a hairdressing salon in Beirut, Lebanon called Caramel. For those of us who think we have the picture about women in the Middle East, this is a lovely movie.

Oh, and I got some actual gardening in, too. Deadheading the roses as well as the hydrangeas. We're keeping Danielle's three bunny rabbits and JF felt bad for them in the rain, so he built a roof for them.

Raf saw his future apartment today and declared it quite nice. I got the ruling on the savings account under the control of The Man from Birmingham. I was afraid they'd see that that money and have some idea that it belonged to Raf. Here's how it works. He's disabled and also makes very little money at his dishwashing job, so he's entitled to Supplemental Security Income (SSI.) Except if he works and makes money, the govt reduces his monthly check by roughly half of what he made working. BUT, if you have a Plan to Achieve Self-Sufficiency (PASS), they will allow you to open a savings account and put "their" money into it every month. Do not imagine it is YOUR money; it isn't. But with a bunch of bureaucratic locksteps, they WILL let you spend it on what they have determined is in line with your PLAN. For Raf, that means he can pay for his college classes. His expensive animation software. Maybe, one of these days, a new computer.

But heaven forbid the housing people think it's HIS money. He'd be positively RICH. But...luckily...this branch of the government money doesn't think THAT branch is Raf's money, so his rent for the new place is probably going to be reasonable.

So we're percolating along here. JF got in last night. It's different around here now, but it's also back to what passes for normal around here. Check out that movie.

Until I have a book...

2009-06-16T01:45:02Z

I got home fairly early today from work. I'd planned to "stay as late as it takes," and lo and behold, it only took until about 4:30...so off I sneaked. I worked on projects both days of the weekend, so I felt not a twinge of guilt, though when I take much of Wednesday off to deal with Raf issues, we'll see.

I got a technology plan together yesterday, and did a bunch of work on the movie-making class Saturday. Today, with a little help from my former boss and good friend Don, I got the grant proposal ready for the community foundation. It was one of those days where plans and efforts come to fruition in their modest little ways and of course it felt just sassy.

The weather was fine when I pulled into the library. I checked on Danielle's rabbits...I'm rabbit sitting for the next month and a half...looked at the various plants I've been worried about...wilting leaves, yellowing leaves at the bottom of the plant, stuff like that. Nobody had died, so I repaired to my bedroom and a rollicking tale of Rumpole the barrister and how She Who Must Be Obeyed actually landed him. And took a break to make myself some pork chops, saurkraut, baked beans and fried onions (a meal my beloved would NEVER fix and probably wouldn't even EAT), and then...finished the book. Not a whit of gardening on an evening that would have been perfect for it.

Unrepentant...totally.

The week's finally over!

2009-06-13T12:41:35Z

It's finally Saturday and I'm having one of those mornings where a dozen ideas pop into my head about my various projects. I've had five movie-making ideas already this morning, including how we can use this one art teacher at the Newcomer School (posters? flyers?). Also had a few Salesforce ideas (getting people to sign up for hours from me when I get back from Admin Training). That one resulted in a request for a meeting week after next from the head of the nonprofit consortium.

I have a technology plan meeting on Monday and I want to get some pine bark scattered around, shore up some of the plants that have been pounded by all our recent rains. Looks like a pretty nice day.

Evening

2009-06-09T00:52:06Z

I think if I could be home every evening of the summer, I could take great pleasure in working in the yard. Is that me saying that? Ms. Neglect? True though. I was out deadheading the hydrangeas and cutting back some of the shrubs on the side of the house tonight. It takes me a little push to get myself out, but once I'm doing it, I feel so good.

Toilet Paper

2009-06-07T13:26:06Z

Utterly satisfying and glorious week.

My dear friend Mary from the desert came in for nearly a week, starting Tuesday. I picked her up from the airport and we went directly to the beach to stay with Chip and Susie at their place. All my childhood, my family had a place at the beach in Navarre, Florida. Sometimes, when we were flush, we had a boat, once a beautiful Chriscraft. We lived on the Santa Rosa sound and either took the boat over to the island or, in later years, drove over the newly built bridge to the beach.

All this flooded back to me-- the beach vacation par excellence. Seafood for dinner every night. Long walk on the beach. Getting into the water and jumping through the waves. Hours reading curled up in a favorite chair. We added a yoga session. Even cooking was more fun: We decided, on the spur of the moment at the fish market, to buy scallops and to have Coquilles St. Jacques, the way we always had them at my parents-in-law's in France. We had to go in search of a recipe, since the one in my head was definitely fuzzy. So we made our way to the local used/new bookstore (a REAL bookstore! owned by a PERSON!) and found a recipe in a lovely old meats & main dishes cookbook from what looked like the 50s. $4. But the recipe I remember has the scallops in a pastry shell with a wine sauce over them, so we bought fillo dough and disposable muffin tins and when the time came, painstakingly brushed each sheet with butter, folded it over and over and fitted it into the muffin tin. Of course, in France, you can buy the ready-made pastry shells. The recipe I've referenced above calls for sauteing the scallops, but the one we found has poaching them slowly in milk for ten minutes. They were delictable! If I ever make them again, I'm putting more wine into the white sauce. It was nice, but not wineful enough.

The house-- I'm hoping for Mary's photos at some point, she was better about taking pix than I was-- was exactly what you want in a beach house. Everything you need and nothing more. Good books on the shelves. One set of dishes and pots and pans. Porches front and back, so you always have the shade. Rocking chairs. A hammock. An outdoor shower with a good clothesline for wet suits and towels. Bird-feeder. A sunset view over the marsh to the inland waterway. Binoculars ready at hand.

And talk, talk, talk. The kind of conversation flow that feels seamless from one topic to the next-- personal, complex, families, large philosophies and great fact-filled discourses on topics of specialized interest. Life, the universe and everything. Catching up after six years with Mary. Pleased that she and my newer friends could connect on such a real level, practically from the git-go.

We stayed an extra day, and stopped on the way home to tour the battleship USS North Carolina. Mary's husband had been in the engine room of a destroyer during the Vietnam War, and so now she is fascinated with those engine rooms and bunk beds, the ice cream parlor and movie projector, the various communications rooms. Three hours we walked around that ship. Then home, to outsource a salad from Harris Teeter and sleep.

Saturday, we'd planned cherry-picking, but it was an hour and a half in the opposite direction from her airplane, so instead we did our hair. We got practical identical cuts, beautiful and expensive from my hair salon housed in an old firehouse, and then colored our hair. George, our hairdresser, had said to me, "You need color. Today." I tried for platinum blond and got a creamy light blond I can feel good about. Mary went for dark auburn and looks lovely deep red.

My friend Carole-the-poet came over for a little while Saturday afternoon and the two poets got a chance to talk shop a little. Turns out they were both in Prague last year at the same time and didn't know it.

Then off to Cary, to spend the night at Bill and Louise's. They live about 15 minutes from the airport and Mary's plane was at 7:15am. An evening of eating cherries (bought, not picked) and ice cream, talking GLBT diversity issues (a subject dear to Bill's heart) and teaching and how to deal with bullying at school. And birds and travels and languages.

So why the title of this post? Because both of my friends' houses possess toilet paper that is more expensive than the one-ply puny stuff we buy. At Susie's, theirs was positively luxurious, and I realized that it is truly false economy to buy what we've been buying. Theirs can do with three sheets what mine takes a yard or more to accomplish. Every time I visited the WC, I was struck by how much NICER theirs is than ours. Change is coming to the Llorens-Perkins household! Bet on it.

I did check out the price of a spot in the RV park. High season: $329 a WEEK. Off season: $187 a week. Guess we'll keep hanging out in the back yard. But with different toilet paper!

Morning Before Coffee

2009-05-31T11:33:07Z

Delicious awakening. The best waking up I've ever had was when I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat. I'd never experienced anything like it before. I think I analyzed it this way: I became conscious BEFORE I actually woke up, so I could in a sense watch myself moving from sleep to wakefulness. It felt a little like emerging from a tunnel or swimming, yes, it was very like swimming up from the bottom of the pool. I would break the surface...and then I'd be awake. I never get that now that I'm back on land, so it might have to do with the rocking of the boat. I don't know but it definitely puts a glorious horizon on your day.

This morning, before I heard the rain, I lay there just letting my mind roam pleasurably over the various things I could do upon getting out of bed. Yoga, definitely yoga. But then, what? Vaccum? Maybe some cooking? I just imagined the various things that crossed my mind. I have nothing on the calendar.

I had this sensation of a wide day in front of me, and realized that I have rarely felt that this year. My experience has been that I'm never able just to think lazily about what I might want to do, that I have plans, and when I don't have plans, I have chores. The weekends seem crammed full of laundry and cleaning and doing the family finances and taking care of critical paperwork. It FEELS as if I don't have any time. Of course, we know that's false. We all have time, and we have the power to choose what we do with that time.

One of my LJ friends talked yesterday about seeing time and the things to do moving towards her rather than her moving along the time line. Now that I'm trying to articulate it, I'm not doing such a good job. But while her picture feels too passive to me, not empowered enough, it does get at the pleasure that comes when I'm still, and imagining moving, the moment before the decision to act. Maybe that's why it is so yummy. It's like being conscious before I'm awake.

Writer's Block: Multilingual

2009-05-31T02:54:36Z

How many languages do you speak?

Submitted By 40alatariel

View other answers

English, French, a little Nepali, a little Turkish, a little German, a little Spanish.

A Gardener At Last

2009-05-31T00:43:02Z

Spending a morning at Handy Capable is like being in the roots of the garden one tends all day, every day. They FIX computers. They fixed ours. Or made it work. Now, will Eric be content? He didn't want THIS one, he wanted another one. Can he live with this one? Ah, now that is another story.

On the way home from Barbara's, I stopped by the local Lowe's-- the hardware store. And garden. And instead of agonizing, I said, "I'll have one of those yellow ones, and that pink and purple looks good, and those blue shoot things are nice and oh, something with elephant red leaves." And I bought okra and four different herbs and a huge container of potting soil and some pine chips.

I tied the tomatoes up yesterday, and so today's foray into the world of gardening came as much of a surprise to me as to anyone. I'm floating these days, not trying to be "disciplined," and indeed not being disciplined much at all. Chocolate chips, sweet cranberries and pecans, indeed!

I learned how to fix the old clunky laptops we have, and now all I need to do is advertise that I'm giving them away. I'm thinking the first fifteen immigrants who apply for the movie class will get one. They are really out of date, but for someone who doesn't have a computer at all and wants to learn a little...this is perfect.

My fingernails are still lined with black. I put the herbs on the back stairs, on the landing. They smell so nice. Oregano, marjoram, thyme and cilantro.

The real triumph here is overcoming this weird reluctance just to BUY the damned plants. I walk through these huge garden centers and I feel overcome with the inability to act. There is so much I don't have a feeling I know how to choose. Today, I just went, one of those and one of those and hey, I'll take two of those! And came home and didn't even PREPARE the plot. I dug holes in the ground, filled them with potting soil and stuck the plants in, filled in and watered. Possibly I've killed them all.

It feels lovely.

travelertrish @ 2009-05-29T22:36:00

2009-05-30T02:55:25Z

Our office is now air-conditioned, thanks to the kindly data-entering detail-oriented volunteer who came in this week.

I've started putting together chocolate chips, sweetened cranberries, and nuts. Tonight it's pecans.

Our computer lab is gorgeous. Now we all just need to do is get some students. (We have a plan.)

I need to meet with the volunteer teachers...one-on-one, if necessary.

I'm working tomorrow. First Saturday morning since the last movie-making class ended.

I'm planning a Google training in August for the consortium. My next career is in the making. My boss understands that. Yahoo!

I'm definitely going to Salesforce training in DC in July. I'm hoping to get to Texas some time this summer.

I've been a friend indeed this week and it feels wonderful. Several people talked to me, told me stories about their lives, let me in, loved me. That feels pretty good.

Planning a summer staff picnic.

A New Home?

2009-05-29T12:33:38Z

I visited an apartment complex for disabled folks in Greensboro yesterday with the idea that Raf might want to move in there. If you click on the photo, you can see the others I took at my Flickr photostream.

Reconnecting

2009-05-28T12:32:49Z

I'm headed to Washington, DC in July for a four-day training in Salesforce, the database I have installed at my org. That in itself is a coup, since my little org could never have afforded the funding for it, but the local nonprofit consortium, which believes very strongly that nonprofits need technology support and have put their money where their mouth is before, has stepped up to the plate for me (and the area nonprofits). I feel triumphant and happy-silly about this whole thing.

So I sent out a bunch of emails to folks I'd like to see in DC, people I want to reconnect with after many years, mostly. One is an old grad school boyfriend who has done wonderful things with his life, becoming an architect, and then becoming a voice in the field for where we're going and what makes sense on how to get there. He's taking a global approach and while I don't always fully understand what he's up to, I'm always amazed at how articulate and smart he is. I've never met his wife, and haven't seen his face in at least 30 years. He's already responded and is going to be in town.

Another is a woman who was, for a couple of years, my step-daughter. She's now in her 40's and I haven't seen HER since she was 18. She sent me a Christmas card this year and we're now in touch. I am really looking forward to having coffee and just learning who she has become. She works for a policy institute in DC, having gotten a law degree and clerked for a politician or court justice or something.

And one is a guy I used to mentor on the North Adams Transcript, the newspaper job I took when I was trying to learn how to be a writer. I want to be circumspect here a little until I talk to him about what I CAN say...not that I have a bunch of dirt on him from the old days. He used to put his fingers in his ears and rock back and forth and produce the most cutting edge stories that little local rag had ever seen. He called me about 11pm last night and we talked for an hour. It's the same voice, streaming back to me across probably 15 or 20 years. Our spouses were not, I think, particularly fond of our old newspaper friends, and so we haven't kept up. He was laid off last winter the same week his wife died of cancer. He has twins approaching puberty. He got another job, this one astonishing-- speechwriter for one of the most important people in the country. Not Obama, but almost. But the story that tore my heart was the tale of losing his wife. Echoes of my friend Scott's death came back to me, but his experience was ten, a hundred times more horrible. Still, what I took away was the feeling of being honored by his having told me. At the end, he said, "I love you," and then I think he was amazed he'd said that, and then, with wonder, I told him I love him, too. I've always loved this guy and it blows me away that it is still THERE. Friendship is such an amazing thing. When you least expect it, it can reach across years and years, and wham, just smack you in the face with its depth and warmth and enduring life.

Short update in lieu of substance...

2009-05-27T01:35:25Z

My life at the moment:
Getting a movie-making class for immigrants and refugees together....finding the computer lab to use, getting the teachers lined up, working on improving the curriculum, thinking of and contacting various partners who can support us.

Setting up a client management system for my org.

Fixing the computer problems that our Immigrant Assistance Director seems to have a daily batch of.

Attending the idea exchange at the Center for Design Innovation (try googling that...they stream the weekly sessions on the web site live!)

Getting Raf situated in life...many many tasks. Today it was writing his job coach to see if she is up on his two jobs...will he have them when he comes back from France? performance evaluation from the movie special effects job he had? And on and on.

Haven't gotten the tomatoes staked yet. Meaning to. And I'd like to plant some herbs. Put in a few flowers. Can I save the lavender?

Garden

2009-05-25T00:15:13Z

Well, I didn't actually DO any gardening today, unless what Heartsong says is right and moving the punier tomatoes to a sunnier place counts. Anyway, I'm posting a couple and you can click on either photo to see the others, including that corner, sad to say, not at all the aesthetic wonder of my British friends, of the garden.

White Teeth

2009-05-24T13:02:14Z

by Zadie Smith.

Wow. I just finished reading this book that my daughter Natasha recommended. Well, it's brilliant. On one level, it's about immigration. Pure and simple. Only the book is not at all simple, as immigration is not simple. It's about racism but there's nothing simple about that either.

The book takes place in England, and so the racism is not so straightforward as ours, since they have the large Muslim population of their former colonies to deal with as well as the population of Jamaicans, also a former colony. It is a tale about two families-- one is from Bangladesh and the other is half British and half Jamaican. The two husbands in the tale meet during WWII, both of them in a platoon of soldiers not really getting much done in the way of fighting. And because of an incident that happens, the two men become friends. Their lives are all intertwined, their children's lives are all intertwined and messy. This is also a story about fundamentalism, both Islamic and Christian, and also about the fundamentalism of rationality and science. This is the fundamentalism that pushes its adherents to action, to DOING something about the evil in the world, and it is that doing that drags the novel, all messy with human interaction and feeling, to its final chapter.

One thing I love about literature, about the novel, is that at its best it is NOT fundamentalist. At one point, reading into last night, I began to wonder if this book were not some kind of Ayn Rand novel, something the uncompassionate among us might get ahold of and make into a kind of right-wing required reading. But no. The novel is about the human experience and, since the novelist is doing what novelists are supposed to do, it is an exploration of all the levels of that experience, including asking what drives the fundamentalist, what drives the rationalist, what drives the upper-middle class self-congratulatory altruism, what drives the men who think they own the world, what is bloody underneath of all this. So many of these characters want to save the world, or at least some small corner of it. And so many of them fail to love. Or they love and then they get old and where did it all go wrong?

Jean-Francois did his doctoral dissertation on the literature of the second generation of Arabic-speaking immigrants to France. In White Teeth, we have also the third generation, the daughter of the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant. And so the exploration expands even further. What does it mean to live one's life in a culture that is utterly not one's own? What does it mean to be the sons and daughters of that group? How do we really live the displacement, the isolation, the inability to "assimilate?" What do we do with our disappointment, when the promised land does not live up to its far-away promises? Do we send our children back, to grow up somehow properly? And what effect does that have? What if the one who was sent back comes back more English than the English? Taken up by do-gooder white people who are simply clueless about what the immigration experience really feels like?

JF was talking last night about a book club meeting he attended in France with his mother. They meet quarterly to discuss the ten books recommended for prestigious prizes in the French literary marketplace. He loved that. And I thought, well there are plenty of my friends who read, we could do that. We meet to sing, we could meet to talk about books. But it's not that simple. JF made a distinction-- these people are reading LITERATURE, not who-done-its. So, what? Some of my friends read literature. Still, the experience of the music group comes to mind. JF can and does, with pleasure, play along with the Rise Up Singing songs, and every now and then he sings one of his French folk songs. But so much there depends on the words, and we can't understand the words, and the whole feel of the evening is nothing like the feel of a bunch of FRENCH people singing THEIR songs together, the way we are singing OUR songs together. And so it would be with the books. Because he's an immigrant, who speaks our language but won't be fluent in the subtleties of the literary discussion, he will feel that same in-part that he feels when we do folk singing rather than the whole that he feels when they talk in France about French books.

The immigrant will always be outside. There is no way in because there is no way to be raised in a culture that you breathe in like air when you get here after the age of about 15. There will always be this double vision-- this valuable insight into what these people THINK they are doing as opposed to what they can be seen to be doing from the outside. The double vision is embittering, in and of itself. So easy to blame THEM, for not letting you in. So easy to fall into the critique because the semi-blind just-living-it is denied to you. The immigrant's children are even more doubly-caught. They've lived through years of the critique, from the parents, and yet they can so clearly see-- see better than their parents can see-- what one needs to do to get IN. They understand the signals, the unsaid, the subtleties of the host culture, and they understand the critique of the outsider.

It is, as Zadie Smith says in White Teeth, a quandry.

Domesticity

2009-05-24T03:43:01Z

Took me a while to get going this morning. I woke up with a headache after one of my allergy days yesterday. Does Benedryl give anyone else a headache? I took a bunch of them trying to fight the sneezing. But I finally headed out to get some groceries in the house...and then proceeded not to eat them. Half a sandwich, a handful of almonds, a strawberry smoothie. I do believe my body is acting more normal... Yesterday, I went to a totally useless conference-- I mean, self-massage and tai chi and how to eat right when you're working hard is all very well and good, but NOT how I want to spend my workday. I ended up at one led by a very smooth-talking guy on the subject of "non-profits...help or hindrance in changing the world?" Save us.

But it was actually nice to be around all that young save-the-world energy. I especially like the kids who work at Habitat. And I got a chance to pitch my movie-making class to a lovely table of immigrant women. I think it is actually a great way to wander into American life. The pay sucks, but chances are they've got hubbies at low-end jobs so betwixt the two of them, they end up with enough to get by. I'd love to see them in my movie-making class, actually. There was one woman, from Sudan if I remember correctly, in my Nonprofits Plus or Minus workshop. I need to get with her and help her with her English. The kids had a rough time extending her the patience it takes to understand what she was trying to say.

We were supposed to get into small groups, think about our experiences, and then make human statues representing some characteristic of our work, plus or minus. One of the young women in my group totally missed the point and wanted to discuss "structure," whatever that is. I ended up letting them do their thang. Our leader talked about how it isn't always easy to get one's point of view heard when one is young. Hmmmm. I was feeling as though my age and my Sudanese friend's poor English dismissed us from consideration.

Anyhow, I ate a bunch for breakfast and then it seemed as if lunch was two minutes later. Free food. I can never resist free food. The only time I've ever been truly judicious in front of free food was in the early days of South Beach and the Beck Diet Solution. I just kept repeating to myself: I'll feel better about myself later if I don't eat that now. That particular voice of reason did not make it to the Americorps Summit. I skipped supper and breakfast...not starving myself or being self-sacrificing, just not hungry.

So went the day: grocery shopping, several hours catching up on my financial stuff --it takes me fo-evah to get that done. I keep all my accounts in Quicken, and zip back and forth between there and the online bank. But then, if I am going to make SENSE of it, I have to transfer everything to an Excel spreadsheet with my expenditures compared to my monthly budget. There has GOT to be an easier way, but I just haven't figured it out. A nice long chat with my husband in France over Skype and then out into the fresh air to mow the lawn.

I also had a long talk with the male half of a pair of my best friends. They are in rocky circumstances and needed someone to listen. God relationships are hard. I look at my Nepali friends, and they don't expect the same kind of soul-matedness that so many of my American friends expect. They have their roles, but they aren't ugly about them. He cooks. She makes more money than he does. He gets to go to college first. When I traveled in India and Nepal 30 years ago, I came face-to-face with relationships and families the like of which I'd never seen. "These women have the center of the earth inside of them," I wrote then. Sabita is like that. She is just carrying the center of the earth. Yes, her husband is idiotic at times. They banter and bicker sometimes. But she's not throwing it up in the air and wondering where it's going to come down.

The white roses are spectacular. I promised pictures of contra dancing. I haven't forgotten. But tomorrow, I HAVE to start doing something about my web sites. They are pitiful. Totally not professional or up to date. Oh and Monday off. My God, I never thought I would feel so fond of a three-day weekend.

Contra

2009-05-20T10:50:48Z

[Update: I found some videos JF took at a contra a few years ago featuring a portly me in a green overall shorts outfit that must be seen to be believed. I'll post them after my walk or sometime this morning.]

Penny wanted to know what kind of dancing we were doing. It's called contra dancing. It's a pretty simple kind of dancing done to a kind of blue-grass, old timey music. Around here, we always dance to live music. Every week, at the Vintage Theater in Winston-Salem, on lovely hardwood floors in air-conditioned bliss, we have live music to dance to.

The dances are called and taught. That means that everyone lines up and then the caller walks them through the moves at least once. And then the music starts and the caller yells out the moves until everyone is dancing seamlessly. There are a group of standard moves, not unsimilar to square dancing, such as swing your partner and alemand left. There's also...one of my favorites..."gypsy." In that move, you look your partner in the eye and circle them, not touching. Contra dancing is flirting and eye contact and playing with people.

At the beginning of every contra dance, there is usually a half-hour for the total beginners to learn the basic moves. One of the experienced dancers takes the group through a sample call and they practice a little. But the atmosphere and the culture of contra is that you don't have to be really good, you can stumble, you can forget where you are. Everyone will sort of push you and grab you and get you there. The other part of the culture I like is that you're supposed to change partners, not dance with your mate or with one person all night. This is one difference from, say, Salsa. Oh, and since there are almost always more women than men, the women do most of the asking.

Home from Contra Dancing

2009-05-20T03:10:02Z

I was a twirling, dancing fool tonight. What fun. I danced with all my favorite partners. Had dinner YUM with Susie beforehand.

Check out Susie's video taken at the Leaf Festival:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=1176500412960&ref=mf

BED!

Yard Work

2009-05-19T00:13:01Z

It's 8pm. My days have somehow expanded to fill the time I must have wasted before. Tonight, I stayed late at work so I could Skype with Jean-Francois in France. I didn't leave work until fully six. But since then, I've weed-eaten (is that the past tense?) the two sections of the back yard that the mower simply could not get to. Thursday, I'll get out and mow the back yard. I've also cleared out around the ailing lavender plants with an eye to trying to replant them in a more congenial place. I had originally planted a row of three or four of them and they were thriving on their little hill, but that hill was right in the way of the water pipe that we had to replace to the house a year ago, so JF moved them. Lavender is sort of finicky and these plants have not been happy in their new home.

The garbage is out at the curb. Since JF left Thursday, I've done the laundry, folded everything and mostly put it away. I've done dishes until I thought they were going to come out my ears. Life, life...I took some photos for Raf of "his" plants, the sweet boy. He's been taking care of them as if they were people. Despairing over every yellow leaf. Dire predictions of demise when one leaf is holey. I need to go download those photos so I can send them to him.

They've survived Paris, and are now happily ensconsed at the grandparents'. JF wants me to send him the brownie recipe. That recipe made history in France in the early 80s when I introduced it. At that time, you couldn't find brownies anywhere. I made them for my sister-in-law in Paris, for my friends in Marseille. And freely gave the recipe away. Then one night we ate dinner with some people that I didn't know very well, that didn't know anybody I knew...or so I thought. They brought out brownies for dessert, proudly, as if they had invented them. When we traced their ancestry, lo and behold, it was my brownie recipe! Ha! Six degrees of brownie separation.

Work proceeds apace. Exercise. Yoga. Even a spot of meditation. Where is all this time coming from? It's not like JF monopolizes me, only it starts to seem like it. Who knows. Maybe the Spider Solitaire feels so lonely I am forsaking it.

Podcasts

2009-05-15T01:32:44Z

Zipping in here before bed. I just heard an amazing and wonderful podcast from Speaking of Faith. Long url.

The other one I listened to was Thinking Allowed, on the divisions in Israel between European Jews and the Jews from the Middle East. As you know, if you've been reading this blog, I'm always fascinated by how groups within a culture sort themselves out. This was very eye-opening.

Husband and son off

2009-05-14T23:50:24Z

As we used to joke: WAY OFF

I left the two of them at the airport this morning and headed dutifully in to work. It's been a rather hectic day. When I got there, Eric's laptop is doing weird things and his desktop is slated to be sent back to TechSoup because of malfunction. Never fear, your techie's here! I played with the Salesforce, made a couple of calls about getting a venue for our movie-making class, set up an appointment to see one place, and went jogging off to the high school where I'm helping a Vietnamese kiddo with his computer skills. He has to pass that test to graduate from high school.

Back at home, I realize what a pigsty I'm living in. Laundry in various states of being done all over three rooms. Dog hair. Dishes. And me, little me, all alone with nobody to fix my supper. Ha! I'm going out! Grateful Bread, the wonderful place where Raf has worked for a couple of years, does a Thursday night dinner that is big enough for a Friday lunch too.

This weekend, my friend Jackie invited me up to her place in the mountains. Ah! So I have to get the front lawn mowed Friday afternoon and the stands of weeds in the back that no lawnmower can handle cut down with a weedeater on Saturday. It feels as if I'm going into battle. Me against the forces of entropy. Uh...those are the chaos-making forces, right?

The Puja Video

2009-05-12T14:28:31Z

Red and Orange

2009-05-12T03:46:27Z

Puja_14, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Here's another photo from this series from Sunday's puja.

Puja at Nar and Sabita's

2009-05-12T03:34:48Z

Puja_13, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Click on the photo to go to the photo series I took at my friends Nar and Sabita's puja on Sunday.