Working, working, working, on this bright white and blue day

Outside, it's bright with snow, sunlight and blue skies. Temperatures are beautiful too, for the time being, and I sweated buckets when doing my part of the driveway shoveling and car-digging this morning. I felt really, really bad for our old neighbors and friends in Massachusetts, though. They have it SOOO much worse!

We're all working hard today. The boys on their science fair projects and robotics (Kelvin is at school doing that now) and I'm translating as much as I can. I'm not far from finishing the longest (100 page) chapter!

K is at the university working because our internet is really bad and his remote access isn't working properly. Next week he'll be away at his national conference and I don't know how I'll manage by myself with the boys (sob!).

K was emphasizing this morning that I complain that he doesn't cook, but that it takes about 30 minutes to prepare and feed the boys breakfast and that he did "cook"  every day, yes. OK, I have to concede he is immensely helpful in everything around the house. He's even been preparing salads lately while I cook the main dish!!!

In any case, I'm looking forward to watching the Oscars while grading a big pile of exams, quizzes and compositions. It's the BEST strategy to grade and I'm thankful for the Grammys two weeks ago and the fantastic amazing SNL 40th anniversary last Sunday. I had much fun while being extremely productive. YAY!!

OK, I'll work some more before I have to drive to the elementary school to pick up my son...

LinkedIn and... Birthdays!?

What?

Has LinkedIn become WORSE than facebook and is now emailing me about people's birthdays? What in the world?

Subject of the email: "Say happy birthday to .... so & so" 

I don't even use my linkedin account for anything (marginal academic that I am) and I'm leery of the fact that purportedly it can be used to allow cybercriminals to have access to me, so maybe I should just delete it?

Do you use LinkedIn at all? Does it help you be in touch with colleagues & friends?

P.S. What label should I have for a post like this? Social Media Woes? I'll be thinking about it...

Now a Pioneer Covered Wagon?!

Yeah, first there was the mousetrap car, and now my seventh-grader needs to make from scratch a pioneer covered wagon that needs to look as authentic as possible, but which cannot be made using a kit, but which can use store-bought things such as a horse and little implements.

To make matters worse, this project overlaps with the finishing of the super-involved science fair project that needs to be done by March 4.

All this and I never even blogged the woes of the Fall semester when my husband and I spent hours driving around looking for specific trees for our son to photograph for his "Leaf Project." Seriously!

I don't know how we'll survive three more years of science & social studies. And apparently there will be other projects like these in their high school too.

Sigh...

Grieving Friendship Loss/Change

Sometimes grief takes me by surprise. It blindsides me in the middle of an ordinary day as sudden tears roll down my cheeks, seemingly out of nowhere. Obviously, that's not the case. They always stem from something quite specific, something I've pushed very deep inside, trying to prevent it from ever coming up to the surface. Sometimes the pressure it too much, though.

This weekend we spent some time with a group of true kindred spirit friends that we found two years ago (the "house church" crowd, I want to write more about them later). S, the friend I sometimes car-pool with (this semester our schedules are 100% off, though! :-( How upsetting!) asked me how the holidays went, since we hadn't talked since December, and I explained the basics, a summarized version of our sad, expensive short trip to Florida.

That relatively brief conversation with S and the fact that I spent many hours last night looking at photos of the idyllic holidays of 2013-214 (in Brazil with our whole families, 10 days in an incredible beach) probably messed with me.

The tears came as I thought about the depressing second day of that Florida trip. Driving three hours South on the rain to meet friends at this science museum we didn't want to go to. Friends we hadn't seen in nearly a year. And when I rushed to write this post, the tears were gone and dried soon after I'd written half of these lines.

The tears have dried, but now I've been made keenly aware of the grief. It's there and I need to acknowledge it. I need to accept the fact that those friendships are changed forever and that there's not much that I can do to mend or change it. I wish there was, but life is too complicated.

At four years old my son wanted to marry their daughter. The girl that now, given our common interest in books (and maybe in my son, even), feels like she's my friend (and I feel the same way). But I'm sorry to say that as much as I'd love for our kids to actually have a relationship someday, deep down I think it would be too complicated. Thankfully, it probably won't happen. And if by any chance it does (how cool would it be for kids whose grandfathers were friends & roommates and whose uncle & aunt got married, to be together?) ;-) we'll have to work out in mending those relationships.

We'll see what life will bring us. In the meantime, the tears have brought me more awareness and, paradoxically, more peace too. Thanks to writing (and blogging as cheap free therapy!). :-)

SNOW DAY! (Now with photos!)

YAY! I'll have my first snow day tomorrow, probably the last, but at least there was one, YAY!

I really really need to work on the translation (I spent time today backing up the photos, so much fun, but... oh-oh, work wasn't done), but I think I'll take the boys skiing. Sigh... after all, we paid for the ski pass, so we need to go! ;-)

and, OF COURSE -- there'll be REAL snow to ski on! (which will make it extra slippery for me, probably, yikes. Hopefully I'll survive, sigh...)

OK, I'm going to go to bed now. But I'm giddy with joy at the snow day. YAY!

:-)

Edited to add some photos. We're working in the morning & going to ski in the afternoon.

Backed Up

Finally, after nearly two years of constant complaints and agony over three years' worth of photos being "hostage to iPhoto" I figured out a good -- if extremely time consuming -- way of backing up ALL of my photos into an external hard-drive.

WOO-HOO!!! And since I have extremely good hyper-focus whenever I'm dealing with photos, I don't mind spending hours doing this (to the detriment of other things that must be done such as laundry, cleaning the house, etc., obviously!)

So... I'm using two SD cards, one 16GB and another 8GB. I put one of the cards in the card slot in my MacBook Pro and export as many photos as I can to it (it takes A LOT of time for them to be exported into the card). When the card is full I eject it, pop it into my PC and then copy all the photos to the proper folders in the external hard-drive that's connected to the PC (I organize my photos by year and month and also thematically within each year, depending on the photo, I won't bore you with the details -- I could talk about this forever!).

Copying the photos to the external HD takes less time and, obviously is lots of fun, as I get to organize them. Some of the photos -- particularly those from my iPhone, seem to LOSE their information (such as the date where they were taken) in this transfer, which is infuriating, so sometimes I have to refer back to iPhoto to figure out when the photos were taken. Other than that, it's a relatively straightforward process. When I copy the photos I delete them all from the card so I can begin the process again.

While I'm emptying one card I try to be loading photos on the other in the Mac at the same time -- too bad both cards aren't 16GB (our other 16GB card is broken), that would save me time.

In any case, after this is done (I have so far advanced from August 2012 to April 2013, having done this for several hours on Friday and Saturday nights) I will feel WHOLE again, as far as my beloved photos are concerned! YAY!! And then I will back up everything into another hard drive that I wish I could stick into a fire-safe box, except we don't own one. Those things are so expensive!

Do you have fire safe or something like that? I sometimes feel that we should get one. But what would we put on it? SS cards, passports, a slim HD with documents and old family photos? What else do you store there?

Productive

Just a quick note to say that I am being productive (finally!! Hopefully I'll keep it up!) and I'm working on the translation.

I also graded exams over over the weekend (while watching the Grammys) and I have more grading to do, but in spite of all that, I'm going skiing with my family and the kids' school on Thursday. I'll try to look at that as a reward for working hard.

It does feel good to be productive and I need to be! I still can't see the end of this project in sight, given that I'm just past the middle of it, but I hope it will be done before the end of the semester!

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Birthday!

Is/was today -- I learned that from Google's doodle:

That means she shares a birthday with my cousin Denise & my friend Simone. ;-)

Can't wait to have time to leisurely read Pioneer Girl!

Reading, Field-Tripping, Not Sleeping... (and dreading to wake/get up)

I guess the title kind of summarizes this week. Those activities, or lack thereof, added to my already super-busy teaching schedule.

I'm reading more of the books that arrived last week, into the night, obviously... sigh (I know I shouldn't be doing that, but it's fun to read like that).

I want to write a photo post about the field trip, hopefully I can do that later today.

For now I'm glad that the weekend is here and I hope to be able to sleep in and take naps.

Too bad I have a stack of exams to grade... sigh. I do need to sleep more, though, and hope that next week I won't be dreading getting up and going to work as much as I did this week.

Sorry for the super boring update. Sometimes I feel the need to write one of these. ;-)

P.S. I can't wait to watch the Divergent movies. Even if they may not have had much critical success. From the trailer of the first one I can tell it'll be a way better adaptation than the Hunger Games (the first movie). 

The Chilling Super Bowl Ad (& the one I liked)

I had already seen references to it in M's facebook feed, but I didn't see the until today.

I couldn't help it. I had silent tears running down my face as I watched it, being aware that it was a real call for help.

We watched very little of the Super Bowl (only the second half, after the show) because had guests for dinner last night. My husband's uncle and aunt (who had last been at our house maybe 8 years ago, shortly before they went to Africa -- they came back to the U.S. two years ago) stopped by as they drove non-stop from San Antonio, TX to Maryland.

The only ad I actually saw was the Dodge one, and I loved it:

I don't know if I'll waste my time watching any other ads (unless someone recommends them).

P.S. you know we went to school in MA & my kids were born there. We were happy with the result of the game. ;-)

Eleanor & Park (comments)

Last year at the children's lit association conference I heard a lot about Eleanor & Park (by Rainbow Rowell), so I simply had to check it out.

Friends gave us all B&N gift cards for Christmas back in the December, so E&P was one of the books I bought (as you may have seen in this post).

Some random, maybe unrelated thoughts on the book (oh, J, please don't read this until you're done reading the book, if we don't have time to talk about it, this post will be one half of a conversation, OK?):

• It just occurred to me while typing the title that it reminds me of Jane Austen & her titles (and how an early title of Sense & Sensibility was Elinor & Marianne, wasn't it?). Other than that, the book doesn't have much to do with Austen at all (and maybe, in a tangential way, with Romeo & Juliet).

• What I liked the most about the book was its development of E&P's relationship, coupled with the development (or the slowly revealing and unfolding) of the characters. The most important thing to me is that Rowell depicts very realistically how they are drawn to each other because they have or develop interests in common and become/realize they are "kindred spirits." The physical aspect of the relationship (related to the hormonal teenage years) is important and relevant, but it's not the key aspect of their relationship and I thought that was great. 

• Obviously, I liked, no, loved that the characters are so geeky and misfits. And that Park is half-Korean, leading to discussions of racial identity, prejudice, etc. (and Eleanor's only friends are African-American girls).

• The most moving moment of the book for me (I actually sobbed aloud a few times and my husband checked on me from the other room) was when P's mom finally identifies, in a visceral way, with E and accepts her. That brief scene is one of the few moments of the book in which we get some insight into P's mom Mindy's (Min-Dea? Didn't seem very authentic) expatriate experience. When faced with the reality of E's family Mindy recalls her own experiences growing up poor in Korea. 

• Considering many young people's dramatic real-life experiences of abuse I appreciate how the book treats the situation of E's family fairly "delicately." Because it obviously could have been way worse, more dramatic and explicit (although it is pretty explicit through the characters words, at times, if not actions). 

• I like the relative diversity of the book, although most characters are still white. and its focus on poverty, marginality and immigration. It's not really centrally discussed, but apparently Park's family only lives in that run down neighborhood because they'd be misfits elsewhere given that his dad married a Korean woman. Maybe I'd need to learn more about Omaha, NE in order to understand this part of the story.

• Last, but not least (and I know there were tons more things I wanted to say, but it's just hard to remember them all, especially because I started writing this post last night & am finishing it today), I like Rainbow's (what a great name, I think it fits her well!) writing a lot. I don't know exactly why, but I do.

• ... and I thought it was absolutely awesome that she had Eleanor mom humming one of my favorite and also one of the saddest songs ever (Clouds by Joni Mitchell) in one of the few scenes mother & daughter have together. This author knows her music and has great musical sensibility!! I wish I had found out her "mix tapes" or playlists for the book earlier and had read the book listening to all that music. I'll need to re-read the book to that soundtrack someday.

I'd love to read other people's thoughts on this book and I'm thrilled to discover that Rainbow Rowell has a blog. I also want to read all her other books.