Perspective(s)

So the soda machine ate my dollar, my boss continued to let two of my slacker colleagues slide, the pilot light on my hot water heater has gone out (translation: cold shower this morning), I’m having to re-figure my budget for one of the programs I direct (less money available than I thought), and the list goes on. It has been a very rough week personally here, but my frustrations with my job and my mother’s situation are really nothing when compared to what I’ve been reading about in Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column recently. I am deeply inspired by this one person’s attempt (Lisa Shannon) to make a difference for her “sisters.” And, after all, aren’t we all sisters and brothers? There’s nothing like a little perspective to make you wake up and be grateful.

You can follow Lisa Shannon on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thousandsisters and at http://twitter.com/LisaJShannon. Learn more about her work by checking out the site Run for Congo Women. She also has a book coming out in April: A Thousand Sisters.

New Yorker Fiction Podcast

I stumbled across a bit somewhere online in the past couple weeks that mentioned the New Yorker’s (free) fiction podcast. If you don’t know about this, I highly recommend it. A new podcast is loaded each month. An author selects and reads another writer’s short story. There is also a great discussion about the story with the reading author and the New Yorker’s fiction editor. I was delighted to discover there were lots of podcasts already recorded and waiting to be heard. They last about as long as my commute to work and are a nice diversion when I can’t handle any more depressing news on NPR. I also think listening to someone read takes me back to being a little kid. I’ve always enjoyed having someone read a story to me. Some things don’t change no matter how old we get.

A Different Take on Resolutions

So, it’s a new year. The internet is full of posts about new year’s resolutions. I’ll admit, I’ve looked at some of them & found that they’re full of the same, general advice that you might expect. However, I found a site that offers a different approach from the same old, same old. I’m a fan of Zen Habits, and this new site, 6 Changes, is developed by the same blogger. The premise is to pick six changes you want to make this year, and work on making each of them a positive habit for 2 months (6 x 2 = 12 months). 6 Changes has a lot of good information contained in the site and I recommend it if you want to make some changes. I’m going to follow it and see how I do.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Quote of the Moment – January 2010

“Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.” ~ Buddha

Solo Christmas

KC Plaza-December 2009

Today I learned that my sister and her family will be unable to come to my house for Christmas because of the impending bad weather. Assuming I can travel a bit in that weather, I will go spend some time with my mom at her nursing home on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I’m not sure how I will feel about this very unusual Christmas situation. Although I know how horrible this will sound, I don’t even want to go over to Mom’s. However, I hate for her to be left alone, so I’ll go. It will be very strange for Christmas to occur, but not to “have” it.

A Serendipitous Moment

Sunday afternoon, the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, found me picking up a few things at a local bookstore. I’d tossed a couple of Christmas cards in my bag thinking I’d grab a coffee and write them at the bookstore’s cafe. However, the cafe was packed. So, not ready to go home, I drove through the KU campus and thought I’d write those cards at an overlook point above Potter Lake near the Campanile. I finished my task and was ready to head home as the light was nearly gone when the 5 PM bells rang. Right after that, someone gave a 30 minute concert on the carillon. What an unexpected treat! There were even a few Christmas tunes included. During that time, I decided to walk around a bit and found myself at the perfect place to take this picture.

Quote of the Moment – December 2009

“Think of a letter, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged his daughter, as ‘a kind of picture of a voice.’”

– from a NY Times book review on Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon. (Book review by Stacy Schiff)

A Couple of Fun Collage Websites

There’s not much news to tell (at least not much in the way of positive news lately), so I thought I’d mention a couple of neat websites I’ve come across recently. The first one is Wordle. Essentially, it takes a piece of writing and creates an interesting combination of the words. Words used more frequently are supposed to be larger. This image was from this blog’s RSS feed. You can adjust the colors, the fonts, and the design. Recently, our Career Services department used this with students’ resumes to see what key words they were emphasizing. -A neat use, I think.

The other site I found via Lifehacker is Shape Collage. It takes your photos and creates interesting collages into any shape you want. (You can even create your own shapes by using a “draw” function.) The only drawback I see is that it doesn’t allow you to move the pictures around manually. If you want to do that, I think Google’s Picasa is still the way to go. If that’s not a concern for you, the sky is the limit on how you can shape your collages. Here is a link to the video posted on the site which gives you a good overview of its capabilities. And here is a quick one I put together with some recent pictures of my niece.  In addition to using this online, you can also download an application to your computer.

Both of the sites are free and very user-friendly. Have fun!

The Berlin Wall-20 years after it fell

While rolling through Twitter feeds over my lunch hour today, I came across a great collection of photos about the Berlin Wall and the 20th anniversary of its falling on November 9th.  They are well worth taking the time to look at them.  The ones that fade into each other (#s 12-15) with “now and then” views are particularly interesting.

I look at my students today and  they have no memory of the Cold War. To them, it is something in the history books or from movies that reference East-West spying and Checkpoint Charlie. However, I remember being their age, in college, when I heard that the Wall was coming down and finding myself mesmerized by the TV footage of something that had been a major piece of my understanding of post-WWII foreign relations. This was a HUGE development and a great boost for world peace.

As we find our country embattled in two wars on this Veterans’ Day, it is good to take a moment to remember that sometimes HOPE does come to fruition. Wouldn’t it be great if 20 years from now all of our current war involvement was just a history book memory for the kids who will be in college then?

Quote of the Moment – November 2009

“If you can’t see God in all,
you can’t see God at all.” –Yogi Bhajan