walk home: thankful

Last week Brent read me a story in the morning about a man who was 93 who froze to death in his house after the electric company put in a switch outside of his house to keep him from using too much energy. They never told him about it. His overdue bill was $1000. (You can click this paragraph to read the AP story.)

We went to dinner tonight and on the way home had to call 911. A woman was yelling at a man laying flat on the ground. "Sean, get up. Sean, Sean, get up." Over and over and over. Brent said to me, "I think he might be dead." I called 911 and the police showed up pretty quickly. A man at the bus stop thanked us for stopping. At least 25 people walked over this man as he lay there. I sure hope he is ok.

And then my girl friend just posted at her blog about her good friend's little girl who has a brain tumor. How scary.(Click here to read about Carly.)

We all need to pitch in together, take notice of each other, become real neighbors again. Thank you to our group of neighbors. Life remains not a burden for us.

art in portland

I just re-found this little video I took in Portland at the art museum.

Cincinnatti Airport Rapid Transit

A little video from today's trip to see Maureen for the Oscars!

snails...moving...

Snails Go west ! Funny TimeLapse from www.time-lapse.fr on Vimeo.

"Every evening, after my automatic water system stops, all the snails who where hidden behind flowers go out and go on the grass to make parties, eating and drinking!" (from boingboing.net of course.)

the credit freeze explained understandably

Wondering what is happening to our economy? Here is your explanation...Great work Jonathan Jarvis.

no comment

when

I am just back from St. Louis. Left Gram in good stead. Lots of good food, a woman coming in for four hours for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when Kate, my aunt will show up to stay till Sunday. I just hope she does not get bored...Kate that is.

I took this photo last weekend when we were hiking. And sometimes I feel like this. WHEN, WHEN, WHEN. I don't like feeling like this. I liked to live now, in this moment. But alas, when is where I am this evening.

When will we have a bigger place? (Oh I wanted one? Who knew?)
When will we move to Seattle?
When (if) will we have kids?
When will they be out of the house? (Above mentioned kids.)
When will Gram need to move into a different place?

If I knew all of the when's though, life would be a bit boring. I must try to embrace the when and the anticipation it brings.

Gram's Doing Well

Good news... The pacemaker went right in no problem. She might even come home today!!

one day up, the next day, less up.

Headed to St. Louis because Grammy is getting a pacemaker today. We get in when she goes to have the surgery. At least we will be there when she wakes up.

This sucks.

Ada has arrived!

It is so crazy that my youngest brother is a dad now. He was just a little guy yesterday! Here she is!

Again, this is not the all babies, all the time blog even though may seem to have been hijacked...We will give Ada a few months before we put her in the running for the cutest baby ever...

Congrats Montana and Erin.

Love,
Nicole

forgot the link

to the rest of the word project pics. Click these sentences to check the others out!

the word project

I found these letters on sale at Target last year sometime...I think the word spelled with the letters was "Inspiration." I then went around trying to find other words, in an effort to find the whole alphabet. I did not get all the letters. C is missing.

Yesterday on our hike we started using the letters to make words...

from all weddings to all babies: Competition for Sean?

Ok people, I clearly get obsessed with things...I am NOT, I repeat, NOT obsessed with babies. Yet.

But Sean has competition in the cutest baby in the world competition...and Sabine is the competition. Look at the expression on her face! Is she surprised, posing for the camera, just happy? Oh, that is Tania there on the side.

it gives me much lubency

Save the words. That is right people, the words need saving now. The website, www.savethewords.org, allows sponsors to commit to using a word as often as possible so that it stays in the dictionary. You have to check out the website though. It is really cleverly done. Someone must have taken a lot of lubency from working on it.

Lubency

n.

willingness; pleasure

Go forth and use my sponsored word please.

the cutest baby...ever maybe....

John just sent out these new pictures of Sean and Caitlin...and this one of Sean is almost too much...

Update: Operation Lose Weight in 09

Loyal readers I figured you might be interested in a progress report…so here it is.

“Why eeew heeeeer?”

“Well a friend of mine came once, to get the toxins out of her system, and that sounded like a good thing…”

“Eeeewr tongue?”

“My tongue? What?”

She sticks out her tongue at me and motions for me to do the same thing. So I do.

“Eeeewr heeer, eeeewr fat.”

Things moved on. I let the woman who had called me fat stick me with needles. Nothing happened.

But in the spirit of operation lose 30 pounds this year, I decided to go back, to a different acupuncturist. My knitting crew goes to a guy in DC who studied in China. We spent about 45 minutes talking about my health generally:

“How often do you urinate?”

“Do you have any cravings?”

“How is your libido?

I felt comfortable talking about these things with him, but was curious about what he thought about my responses. He also listened to my pulse using three fingers on both wrists.

And then he asked to see my tongue.

I am going to go back for the next six weeks. I feel good. The poking me with needles was not painful at all.

Brent and I are also wearing pedometers, and both trying to walk 10,000 steps a day. After wearing the pedometers for three weeks I realized that contrary to my original assumptions, we are a lot less active on the weekends. So this weekend we started operation go for a Sunday morning hike. We went to the National Arboretum. We will be going back. The place was amazing. And they had these hundred year old bonsai trees! (Click this paragraph to see some of my experimental photos of the day.) There are also the original columns form the Capitol Building.

Bottom line: I am down between 3 and 4 lbs, so only 26 to go.

debt video

$184,000 anyone? That is how much we all owe to the national debt...Check out this video! Click on the picture to see it.

Nice.

the funniest new blog

Ok, so I am going to add a link to this blog, but in case no one clicks through:

Eavesdrop DC.

If you hear something funny in DC, you email eavesdropdc@gmail.com

They posted this today (click anywhere to go to the actual blog):

The annexation of America's hat begins

@the inauguration:

Excited Lady (standing on a concrete divider, pointing at random people): Where are you from?
Random Person A: Montana!
Excited Lady : Let's hear it for the great state of Montana!
Crowd: [cheers]
Excited Lady : You! Where are you from?
Random Person B: Chicago!
Excited Lady : Let's hear it for the great state of Illinois, birthplace of our new president!
Crowd: [cheers]
Lone voice in the crowd: He wasn't born there!
Excited Lady (ignoring lone voice): You, where do you hail from?
Random Person C: Toronto!
Excited Lady : Toronto?! Where's that?
Random Person C: Canada!
Excited Lady : Let's hear it for the great state of Canada!
Crowd: [laughter]

book review: Collections of Nothing

Collections of Nothing
by William Davies King

I collect nothing, but I collect some things too. I collect cameras. I have thirty or so. I have used more than half of them. Some of the cameras require special film that, while still produced, is only available through places on the internet. I collect mini things: anything that is diminutive in size. Mini-cameras are one good example of a marriage of my favorite things to collect. Oh and I collect friends. I have a lot of friends. Brent thinks it must take a lot of energy to stay in contact with all of these people, but because I am an extrovert, I get energy from talking to everyone…but I digress. My collections of nothing include random items.

When I lived with my friend Nicole in law school we moved, or she helped me move, twice. I can pack clothes, I can pack towels, and kitchen items. What I have problems with is my collection of nothing. It is the detritus that has overtaken your junk drawer in your kitchen. Things that may or may not ever be useful again, but that you are not ready to part with. Randomly acquired items that remind me of a moment, a movie, a date. These items currently compete with my yearning for order in my home. I keep my nothing in various containers, in my desk, in giant plastic bins hidden under our stairway. These little objects remind me of places or people. The stuff makes me happy when I go through it.

Mr. King actively collects nothing. His nothing is different than my nothing, but I think it has a similar meaning: his collection makes him happy.

My nothing defies categorization, while his nothing is well organized and catalogued. For example in the book we learn that he has hundreds of cereal boxes from years gone by. He has many tuna can labels. If you were a PhD student in advertising, you would want to go to his collection because in his collection you could trace the changes in language used to catch consumer’s eyes as they shopped.

The book is part self-examination and part confession. What does it mean to collect such things, to basically collect trash?

I had not realized that I too collect trash until I read his book.

What is a collection? This question is at the heart of the book. His conundrum lies as to whether you can collect or hold a collection if the collection has no monetary value. Further, because his collection is so large and well organized, it may have become valuable. Therefore, while he started collecting because of his own feelings of inadequacy, or lack of value, his collecting may have in turn given him value.

The book serves not only as a meditation on his collection but as a memoir about his family. He uses his family history to explore where his collection compulsion comes from.

There was a sense of voyeurism in reading his book. I wanted to know more about what kinds of strange things he has? Where it all comes from? Where the stuff all resides now? I wanted to see pictures and hear stories about how awkward his collection made his life. I am interested in the strangeness of his collecting.

The book did not satisfy these yearnings. I feel like he is a professor, with a hobby, and a complicated family not that different from my own. And at the end of the book I was left to contemplate my own collections and what these collections mean to me.

oddly addictive

Someone took pictures of the Washington State Legislature and put them together. If you click here you will go to the website to see what I am talking about. Click on the picture to go to the next set of Legislators. It is really strange to look at.

a less weighty topic

So the New York Times had two interesting articles regarding health today.

The first article stated that it takes six months to see the positive health effects of working out. Wow. That is a long time. Kind of un-motivating. (Click this paragraph for this article.)

The other article was about detox programs (click this paragraph to go to the article). You have heard of them...you drink only water, juice, or what have you for x days or weeks and this gets the toxins out of your system. You will have more energy, lose weight, and live happily ever after.

I want to try these things. Brent says they are crazy. My rational brain says, yes, definatly crazy. The other half of my brain says, hey why not try it, can't hurt. The rational side is currently winning.

But the article in the New York Times is a bit annoying. It is unorganized and poorly argued and explained. “There is absolutely no scientific basis for the assertion that the regimens popularly defined as ‘detox’ will augment the body’s own capacity for identifying and eliminating your own metabolic wastes or doing the same for environmental toxins." Can this be? No scientific research into the area of whether detoxing your body is good for it? I don't believe it.

Then the article goes on to state that there is at least one trial ongoing currently.

Any one out there ever tried it?

pictures from the inauguration

We walked down...it was so cold, but so inspiring! Check out the pictures here.

Pictures from the Night Before

We walked all over Washington last night to see the sights. I had been feeling sick during the day, but then got more and more excited about the changes in government and just had to get out there. Click here to see some of the pictures we took!

a new president

Driving back into Washington from our cabin in West Virginia, we see many different license plates. One large white van from Alabama carrying a group of people to see the inauguration rolls past. I get verklemt. On the radio they are talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. and whether Obama fulfills MLK’s dream.

I feel a sense of relief. I did not expect to feel this relief at the change in our presidency.

I am done with Bush. I am tired of him saying that he wanted to do the right thing, and then did the opposite. I am tired of the hypocrisy of it all: that he could be a God fearing Christian, and then somehow feel that breaking the Golden Rule ((Editors note: mistake changed.) was ok.

Last year, a girl friend from college sent around the forward about Obama being a terrorist. I responded nicely, but with some force, that a bit of internet research would show this to be false. My friend did some internet research herself and then sent out an apology for having forwarded the email. She said she was wrong, and that Obama was not in fact a terrorist. What a relief. She went on to say that as a Christian it was her duty to rectify the lie she had forwarded along, because one of the Commandments is not to lie.

Does anyone remember life before Bush? Eight years ago I was in Montana helping Linda as she became more and more ill with cancer. Jack was trying to get me to move home to take care of Montana. Erica was pregnant, but only just, with Tanner. John was still in college. I had not started law school, nor could I foresee living in Berlin for two years at that point. Brent and I were just friends. I was over Clinton. I was tired of his questioning the nature of “is.”

On Friday, Bush told us again that torture anywhere of anyone was wrong and he stands against it.

Really? Really? That is your final word? That is where you are going to leave us? In this double speak world, where Gitmo is still open, as you saunter off to your home in Texas? Look at our country Bush: the economy sucks, our reputation in the world sucks, and the Israelis knew that if they attacked Gaza today, your power was so small, that nothing could be done to stop it. The country gave you the keys and you are handing the keys back not a minute too soon.

So, yes, I feel relieved. This too shall pass. We can make the US a better place again.

what? you want to see more wedding pictures?

well, here you go. Click anywhere to see the amazing work of our actual wedding photographer!