Don,
After some anxiety about missed flights,
we were glad to hear that Zack and his wife, Honey, made it back to China okay.
Hopefully your friend and his wife, have made it to Hungry okay. For all of the
grumbling that I do about technology, I have to say that I am so very grateful
for Skype. You are right, Don, it makes it feel like they are not too far away.
I so understand your comments about
insects, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits… I've been chasing squirrels out of my
container garden for the last couple of days. And I've noticed that there's
a rabbit that has taken up residence back behind one of our sheds. The
squirrels, of course, are living close at hand so that they can snack whenever
they want. And the ants! They are everywhere! The little tiny sugar ants are up
close to the house, and then we have mounds of anthills in the yard. I read that
coffee grounds will help move ants out – but every time I try to move them,
they moved to someplace I don't want them to be. For now, I'm leaving them alone.
So I've been keeping track of climate
changes, and a writer by the name of Becky Oskin put out a quick article on
climate records for 2013. According to The Annual State of the Climate reports,
the climate is changing more rapidly than anybody expected. Greenhouse gases
are of course blamed. I did read that the mysterious holes in northern Russia
had been caused by the release of methane gas from the permafrost.
I
also heard that a polar vortex is gearing up and should slide down sometime in
early September. Hopefully you are not on the hit list, Don. Thankfully it is predicted
that the temperatures will not be as extreme as they have been, but October
could be a bit dicey. There are also predictions about early snows for the
northern Rockies. According to the maps, this includes Colorado. We kept hoping
that El Niño would bring the needed moisture into California, but apparently
it's kind of dwindled out. There is also a possibility of big storms in December
and early January. This is all prediction – and we know how accurate predicting
the weather is.
Another article that I ran across that
was fascinating dealt with King Richard the III; apparently his remains were
discovered underneath the city council parking lot in Leicester, England, in
2012. There's been a huge controversy over where he should be reburied. It
finally took a judicial review to decide
that he should be reburied at the Cathedral in Leicester, in 2015. So maybe
when you go visit your friend in Hungry, Don, you can stop off in England and
see the new digs of Richard the III.
I spent most of this week putting
together a workshop on the wired generation. I'm also going to present a part
of it to my Composition II research class next week. As I have gotten most of
my notes together finally, and I've discovered where I have holes, I think I
can start the actual book.
As far as the millennial generation is
concerned, I'm coming to the conclusion that they are definitely a product of
society. I find it amazing that all of the books that I have read have never fessed
up to that. Every generation is built on the experiences and the modeling of
the generations before them. The millennial generation is a product of our own
anxiety, fears, and paranoia. All the writers are quick to point out
historically what happened, and society's reactions, but none of them have ever
gone that next step and admitted complicity to the problem. Not that that would
really help. I think our biggest goal should be on how to help them become self
-actualized, not social/cultural-actualized. Right now I'm just seeing a lot of
"this is the problem".
We have a new writer for Wormhole coming
to us from Nairobi. Laura Kuzig sent me her rough draft this week. It is a
fantastic voyage of a single stone and the lives that it touches in its
travels. Very stylistically done, has good individual character development,
and Laura is able to build curiosity throughout all of the different parts and
pieces of the story. I'm looking forward to publishing it in October.
I'm almost done with the cast. I get it
off on Thursday, then I'm 3 months in a removable splint. My better half has
decided that he's going to go with me to physical therapy so that he knows for
sure what I can do and what I can't do. As I have a tendency to overdo things,
I guess it's okay to not be trusted to push myself too far, too fast, too soon.
Oh, and before I forget, Google creative
lab has forged a relationship with a private engineering group that has been incharge of re-tasking the ISEE - 3 spacecraft that NASA sent out in 1978 to
study the sun. The private engineering group took over the spacecraft and has
been moving it towards the moon. You can see all of this and get all of this
information from a website called spacecraftForAll.com.
Give it a look see and let them know what you think.
Have a great week everybody!
Carolyn
all pictures retrieved from google images
No comments:
Post a Comment