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.

“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)

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!

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?

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

Walking in the French Quarter

During my university’s fall break this month, I spent a few days to head to New Orleans and take in the city. I’d never been there and was looking forward to exploring a new place. I connected with one of my good friends at the Louis Armstrong airport who flew down the day before to visit family. (Side note: I love the fact the airport is named after a musician!) We spent the next four days checking out the various sites & sounds of NOLA. I can definitely say that New Orleans is unlike any other city I’ve visited. It has its own unique brand of eclecticism. And I would definitely go there again!

Some observations:

• The history in this town has been preserved (despite the hurricane). I’m referring specifically to the French Quarter and the Garden District. When you walk into the Napoleon House for lunch and learn that this building was supposed to be a residence for Napoleon (he never made it here to use it) and it was built a couple hundred years ago (1797), you get a sense of the history here. So many places have razed their old buildings along the way, but New Orleans seems to have recognized that history is more than just something in a book.
• The names of places (and streets) are unlike anywhere else I’ve been. For instance, the Voo Doo Barbecue where you are asked, “To sauce or not to sauce? … It’s all good!” Also, the pronunciation of certain things is not what you might assume. Example: Callliope Street is pronounced “Calley-ope.” And this: Tchoupitoulas Street (pronounced chop-uh-tool-us).
• The “cities of the dead” (cemeteries) are a world all their own. We walked through Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District. It is still an active cemetery in that we saw a few 2008 and 2009 burial dates. The odd thing was how a mausoleum that looked to be in pristine condition was right next to one that was falling apart. We saw that continually throughout the cemetery. Interesting side note: according to a tour guide we heard, it  takes about 50 years for a coffin and body to break down in the humid conditions of New Orleans. In fact, I read somewhere that the most famous cemeteries in the city (St. Louis #1 and #2) have had their real estate reused so many times that it is estimated over 100,000 souls were laid to rest on (above) that small patch of ground.
• The National World War II Museum was amazing and very moving. I think every American should go through it. New Orleans was the home of the Higgins boats (famous for landing on the beaches of France on D-Day), so it seems somewhat fitting that the museum is here.
• Other venues we visited/liked: Jackson Square in the French Quarter (with Cafe du Monde on the corner of St. Ann)
  

  St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square

  , the Moon Walk along the Mississippi, the Audubon Zoo, the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, Garden District Books (and the Garden District in general!), the Borders on St. Charles Avenue that used to be a funeral home, the Blue Plate Cafe, the streetcars along St. Charles Avenue and in the French Quarter, the Mardi Gras beads in the trees along St. Charles Avenue, and the music (of course!).

  

  Mississippi River - photo taken on the Moon Walk, French Quarter

   

  

  Streetcar in the French Quarter

• To get a flavor of the city and its people, I highly recommend the book 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose. Rose is a columnist for the Times-Picayune and details the city, its people, and the struggles and triumphs in its recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

Finally, I’ll close with a sign we saw near Magazine Street. It, too, captures part of the spirit of New Orleans. “You can’t buy happiness, but you can drink it!” Let the good times roll, indeed.

While driving home last  night, the sky was filled with two double-rainbows. I pulled over and took a quick snap of part of one over the trees which are changing color. It was a nice moment. One of those – “it’s good to be alive and see this” little snippets of life.

Then, not five minutes later, I received a call from my mom’s nursing home about bills. I’ll admit that I have become like Pavlov’s dog when I see the nursing home pop up in the caller ID of my cell phone. I immediately get frustrated, upset, etc. because it’s always bad news or something else I need to do. Needless to say, the call completely pulled me from my “life is good with rainbows” moment to the opposite end of the spectrum. I guess it was a not-so-gentle reminder: “That’s life.”

Three years gone and I still miss him.

“We must not, in trying to think about
how we can make a big difference,
ignore the small daily
differences we can make
which, over time, add up to big differences
that we often cannot foresee.” -Marian Wright Edelman

Anyone who checks here on any sort of regular basis has probably wondered what happened to me. At the risk of sounding very whiny, here it is in a nutshell…

Before the summer hit, I had a very rough goal of trying to post at least once a week. Then, summer school hit and I was spending a ton of time trying to learn a new program to teach an online class for the first time. In conjunction with that, my office suite was under construction and I was working out of a cubicle in our campus library. Thank goodness I have a cell phone and a laptop or I don’t think I’d have been able to function! The other piece that was a challenge was the fact that my department at work was just kind of hanging in the breeze, waiting for upper administration to decide what it was going to do with us and a reorganization. Our boss also resigned in June – kind of. So we have been waiting with anxiety (budget cuts are still in the air around here), but we’ve been assigned a supervisor (finally!) from the Academic Affairs office for the remainder of this academic year. She is over in our office a couple mornings per week now (started this week).

Of course, there is the constant drag of my mom’s situation. She slowly, sooo painstakingly slowly, is mentally deteriorating. Over the course of this year, I’ve  found myself just wanting to avoid it all (the immense paperwork/bills, the visits, the constant phone calls). I think I’m just tired of it all and, in many ways, I want it to be over and done.

Anyway, despite feeling like there hasn’t been much going right for a large part of this year and that I was on a bad path, I’ve been hanging in and am still trying to accomplish things. It has been a beautiful autumn so far and I’ve been grateful for the weather. The wild sunflowers along the edges of the highway that crop up during September always make me smile. And, at long last, I’m taking a little trip over the university’s fall break next week. All of this is good. Perhaps I’m back on track after all.