Cross-country hijinks

I haven't posted for a while. Been busy with other things.

These pictures are from about a week ago. My husband and I dusted off the cross-country skis. I'm a little rusty - especially if there's a hill. But at least nobody can tell if I fell or not, right?:

I figure with a few more practices, I'll be ready for the Nordic Combined:

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you snow, go play!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day! My husband left this for me to find on a hike through a snowy park:

The name of the park is Gorge Metro Park in Akron, OH. It's in a river gorge, so there are plenty of interesting rock formations. The snow adds to the interest:

And there are some frozen little streams here and there:

Here's a snowy scroll (or a wig):

And as a parting shot, I'll throw in this picture, can you find the heart? Mother Nature left this one for hikers to find:

The Secret of Roan Inish

If you have never encountered this movie before, I would highly recommend it. It tells a beautiful tale about family and the pull of love - and there are many kinds of love, not just romance, although you'll find that there, too.

If you're the kind to sit by a fire telling an listening to tales, then this movie is a must. Roger Ebert writes about it here, and really gets to the crux of the film's meaning. Here are two quotes from his piece:

"The secret of John Sayles' "The Secret of Roan Inish" is that it tells of this young girl with perfect seriousness. This is not a children's movie, not a fantasy, not cute, not fanciful. It is the exhilarating account of the way Fiona rediscovers her family's history and reclaims their island. If by any chance you do not believe in Selkies, please at least keep an open mind, because in this film Selkies exist in the real world, just like you and me."


"One can easily guess how this legend could have been simplified and jollied up in other hands - how it could have been about cute little Selkies. But legends are, after all, told by adults, not children, and usually they record something essential to the culture that produces them. What this legend says, I think, is that the people who tell it live on the land but live from the sea, so that their loyalties are forever divided."

Don't know what a selkie is? Watch this movie and wonder no more.

We own a VHS version of the movie. I'll have to upgrade to a DVD version. It's available from my library, and lord knows that I make use of my library so much that my library card is smoking, but this is one of those things that I want to have for my very own.

The soundtrack is also very nice, sometimes while listening to it I want to get up and dance a jig.

So find this gem at your library, or rental store, or purchase it. If you have a fanciful mind, you won't be disappointed.

What we woke up to this morning

We got about a foot of snow overnight. The wind piled up some drifts that were deeper:

Snowy walks are the best:

When the snow stopped early this morning the clouds started to disappear, and now we have a rare blue sky and sun:

Ceiling Cat - the muse

To ensure that I have a muse to inspire my writing, my daughter has put ceiling cat above my workplace:

She found the ceiling cat papercraft here.

This is the original ceiling cat, from lolcats, not to be confused with basement cat, his nemesis:

There are lots of things to distract me from my writing:

Hopefully ceiling cat will keep me on track.

An Icy Excursion

My husband and I went for a stroll in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park yesterday. Here's a covered bridge that you can find in the park:

It was pretty cold and we saw lots of icy crystals in interesting shapes:

and patterns:

You can find the remains of an old sandstone quarry in one part of the park. One of the quarry walls is in the background below. The stacked stones here, I think, are spalls - the parts that were trimmed off of larger blocks in the sizing process and left lying around:

Sharp crystals laced the tops of frozen ponds, streams, puddles and rivers:

Some tumbling blocks of Berea sandstone:

Sandstone steps leading nowhere in particular:

We didn't follow the steps today, maybe we'll go nowhere in particular some other day : )

Keeping the faith - some writerly advice

Kristin Cashore, author of Graceling and Fire, has a nice post up about keeping the faith while writing, even if you feel your manuscript is "a total mess".

She emphasizes that, yeah, your book might fail, but it definitely will fail if you quit writing it. She talks about faith and doubt, and how you can have both at the same time - give yourself permission to believe even as you have your doubts, and don't fail because you didn't work hard enough.

Only, she says it all so very much better. See her post here.

And talking about writing, I almost seem to jinx myself if I talk about my writing here. I'll throw caution to the wind, though, and say that I am indeed writing, and the story is coming along nicely so far.

Heading West

This summer my family and I will be loading up the pack mules and heading out west:

I suspect we'll be gone for a couple of weeks or so, visiting relatives and seeing sights.

These pictures are of Bryce Canyon. We took them on a trip we made out west five years ago.

This time we'll be further south. We'll be in Texas, New Mexico, and possibly Arizona.

The sights in those parts of the west are very different from the Bryce Canyon area in Utah. On our trip this summer, we'll be seeing things like White Sands National Monument, Carlsbad Caverns, and lots of other interesting things.

I just wanted to warm up a bit and think ahead to summer and the hot, sunny southwest.

The Reindeer People

This book just came in from my hold list at the library. I've read some excerpts online already - it's a captivating look, via an anthropological study, at the reindeer herders of Siberia.

Can't wait to crack it open today and sink into it. These people are descendents of the peoples who erected the reindeer stones in mongolia thousands of years ago when Mongolia still had the climate to support reindeer. Maybe that's why I like fantasy. I'm an anthropologist by training and sometimes, as evidenced in lore, myth and ancient religion, beliefs can often be quite fantastic - and fascinating. As, of course, can be what has happened to these peoples today.

Blackbringer, by Laini Taylor

This week I was going to start on a new story idea in earnest. I’ve begun gathering information, I have books on hold at the library for research purposes, I have websites bookmarked, I have some doodles and a few fragmentary elements jotted down. The whole process started over a year ago, maybe two, when I tagged some websites and wrote down a couple of ideas, but then it all sat, unlooked at, on my computer for a long time.

I dusted things off a week or so ago and started the wheels in motion again. I’ve been excited to sit down with books all around me, websites at my disposal, a pen and notebook in hand and begin the dreaming stage – when I sit and stare, read through various tomes, look up rosters of ancient names, and let things coalesce into the story that tugged at me, waiting to take form in the first place.

But then everything screeched to a halt. Why? Because a young adult fiction book that I had put on hold a few weeks ago finally came in at the library, and, like a fool, I began reading in on Sunday. I couldn’t put it down and all of my wonderful plans for starting my new story in earnest flew out the window on faerie wings – specifically on wings of the Faeries of Dreamdark.

The book in question is Laini Taylor’s Blackbringer, the first of now two books featuring the Faeries of Dreamdark.

Laini Taylor has one of those minds that can pull forgotten bits of lore from far flung places and twine them together with her own imagination to make something wonderful and deeply satisfying. The world she creates is solid and remarkable and her characters are unforgettable.

Blackbringer is the story of faerie lass, Magpie Windwitch, and her clan of crow friends. She is a bit remarkable, as faeries go, because she travels the world where most faeries stay in their forests. She also hunts devils, something that faeries used to do, but have forgotten all about. But she and her crow friends have learned something about the old days – the days of the devil wars – by traveling with her parents who find the lost, forgotten temples and read through their ancient libraries.

But not all devils are alike, it seems. When Magpie and her feathered friends come across evidence of some new kind of devil, unwittingly set loose from its prison, it’s nothing like they’ve ever encountered before. And Magpie must find the ones who trapped it all those millennia ago – if they even still exist – to see if it can be trapped again before this very old, very powerful force proves to be the unraveling of the world.

I’ve put the second Faeries of Dreamdark book, Silksinger, on hold at the library. I can’t wait for it to come in, and when it does, there’ll be another few days that my own story will be put on hold so that I can once again enter Magpie Windwitch’s adventurous world, and hopefully learn a thing or two about how to write a remarkable story.

A study in crystals

Get comfy and pull up a seat:


It was frosty as well as snowy this morning, so when I went out to replenish the bird feeder, I grabbed my camera to snap some frosty pictures. Click on any of the photos for a close-up view.

A crystal-encrusted tulip tree bud sleeping through the cold:

Thorns and frost:

I heard yesterday that all snowflakes are hexagons. Is that true for frost crystals too?:

It's a rare sunny day. Maybe I'll go out for a snowy adventure. Hope you're staying warm!

I found Narnia!

Aslan??

Oh. Wait... it's just my dog and the park next door.

But it FEELS like Narnia. Always winter...

One last word on my TruFocals (now called Superfocus)

(Edit: TruFocals are now called Superfocus) I recently received an email from someone who read my Trufocals posts. Here's what they said:

Hi,

I found your blog looking for some unbiased trufocals info. Considering a purchase myself but trying to get past the marketing hype before dropping that much money. Now that you have had them for awhile what is your opinion? Worth the $? Pros and cons?
Here is the email I sent back:

Here's what I think.

I've read through a few other reviews and I think that if you are a long-time, full-time wearer of glasses, Trufocals seem to work out very nicely. I wore glasses only for reading up until a few years ago when I began to need them for distance, too. I got bifocals and they worked very well for sitting in a college classroom and taking notes from the board during lectures (I was an older student working on a 2nd degree after raising a family). But I didn't wear them full time because I didn't like the sort of fish-bowl effect. I don't need glasses for driving yet, but I would wear my bifocals while shopping or at concerts or at museums, etc.

I didn't like having to tilt my head to read (anything, not just at the computer) with the bifocals, so I got a prescription pair of reading glasses for reading, computer work, and other close work. They were ground for computer work, so when reading books or newspapers, etc, I had to keep things at a bit of a distance, which wasn't always comfortable or cozy.

When I heard about Trufocals I decided to give them a try because I figured they would take care of having to keep things at a distance, and I would need only one pair of glasses instead of one pair of bifocals and one pair of prescription reading glasses. And the Trufocals work very well for that purpose for me. I can hold books at whatever distance is comfortable, whether I'm at a table, in a cozy chair, or sitting up in bed. I can hold my knitting at a comfortable distance too, and everything's in sharp focus. I must say, though, that while wearing them shopping, etc., using them for distance, things are still a bit fish-bowly. And that's where I think full-time eyeglass wearers may not be bothered because I guess they might be used to that effect in eyewear. Not having ever really worn glasses full-time, that effect still bothers me, even with the Trufocals.

They are pretty amazing, though. You can focus and see things extremely clearly and it's so gratifying to be able to read really small print, or zoom from the newspaper in front of you over to the little time display on the thermostat on a wall and read the time clearly.

I have to say that maybe they work a little too well. Sometimes I catch myself re-focusing from the top half of a page in a book to the bottom half because the focusing is so minute that even over that tiny change in distance, you will notice that things change in sharpness and a re-focus adjustment will sharpen things up. And then of course you re-focus again when you reach the top of the next page. I think that behavior is a function of being spoiled by being able to have everything in such crisp focus, and when it's not exactly crisp, you reach up for that little slider to adjust things.

They are very pricey, though. But purchasing a pair of bifocals and a pair of prescription reading glasses can be expensive too. And last summer I found that regular sunglasses were not working very well anymore because they made things a little blurry for me. Add a pair of prescription sunglasses and the cost of those three pair of glasses will be comparable to the cost of a pair of Trufocals, even with the added expense of the tinted lenses. Still, I think you could probably do the three pairs for just a little less than the Trufocals if you played your cards right and shopped around.

One more thing. Each of my eyes is a little different prescription-wise, which I think is probably true for most people. As the prescription for my reading glasses got stronger over the years, I could tell that each lens was a little different and didn't always make what I was seeing on the page exactly the same focus-wise or size-wise in each eye - just by minuscule amounts, but it's something that I've noticed over the years. I am here to tell you that it is the same with the Trufocals. In fact, I sometimes have a bit of trouble focusing because when you get in the range of sharp focus, it seems that the two eyes never quite meet up. A small adjustment of the slider to the left and my left eye's focus is sharp, but the right eye isn't quite there. A slight adjustment to the right and the right eye's focus is crystal clear, but the left is now just slightly off. It seems that I can't quite hit that golden place where both are right on the sharp spot. But then again, it was the same story with my prescription readers. And it's on a minuscule scale - but I do notice it.

Hope this was helpful. There is that 30 day trial. You can always send the things back if you don't like them. But it's a big decision. Good luck to you!

Breaks

There have been a lot of breaks around here lately:

• Winter Break, from school
• Elbow Break, my son's (a slip & fall accident)
• Thumb Break, my daughter's (a shut-in-the-car-door accident)
• Sunshine Break (nothing but clouds and snow for us lately)

This has lead me to consider another break - a small one from blogging. Not a bleak, no blogging break. More of a blogging slow-down. With a newly re-built computer gracing the desk in the office room of our house, I'm trying to get back into my writing. In order to do that, I need to concentrate on the blank page and not my blog page.

So, I'll still be posting, but perhaps not quite as often. If there is a real dearth of posts, you'll know my writing is going well. If I'm posting fairly regularly, then tell me to get back to writing!!

I'm leaving you with a picture my husband took over the holidays. I know Christmas is over, but I really liked this picture of our quaint little downtown on a snowy night just after Christmas:

I'm sure I'll be in touch again soon!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Lebkuchen II - or - My cookies are so good they deserve a special box

I talked about making my own lebkuchen in the last post. I must report that they turned out very yummy. I sealed them up with sliced-up oranges for a few days, and they are now so spicy and Christmas-y that I am over the top with taste happiness.

In fact, they're so good, they almost deserve their own special box, like this one from Nuremberg which came stuffed with German lebkuchen and pfeffernusse:
The red sock is a failed felted slipper that I was attempting to make for my son a couple of years ago. It came out HUGE. My son has big feet, but not that big. So we saved it and now put it out with the Christmas decorations and call it, "Santa's Sock." I did consequently make him slippers that fit, and all in grey (although I must point out that red and white were his original color choices).

Here is a shot of the inside of the tin's lid - all in German, of course:

Here's wishing you all a Frohliche Weihnachten!

Lebkuchen

I'm attempting to bake the German holiday cookie, lebkuchen, today. I became hooked on them when I had a sister living in Germany and she sent them to me at Christmastime. My mother-in-law is German, too. In our earlier years, when we lived closer, my young family would visit the in-laws at Christmas. She always had a huge, beautiful tin full of lebkuchen and pfeffernusse cookies and treats sent to her from relatives in Germany. Yum!

I can find lebkuchen at a store here called World Market during the holiday season, so I always buy a few packages. I did so this year, too, but my children have come to like the taste now too so the packages didn't last long.

So I found a recipe. I made the dough yesterday, and today I will bake my first lebkuchen. I'm so excited! I hope they turn out.

You can find the recipe I'm using here. If it turns out that I don't like the results, there are lots of other recipes out there to try.

Gaa!

I am so far behind on everything!! What am I doing sitting in front of the computer?!

Oh yeah, getting my daily dose of lolcats.

Hope the holiday season hasn't run you ragged yet!

A photo is worth a million words

This photo was in my morning paper:

photo by Phil Masturzo of the Akron Beacon Journal

I found it extremely touching.

Let me explain. The University of Akron's men's soccer team was ranked #1 with an undefeated season going into the playoff games for the championship. The players are all talented and worked hard this season with their young and extremely effective coach to reach the championship's final game on Sunday against the University of Virginia, ranked #2.

At the end of 90 minutes of play the score was 0-0. This was followed by two scoreless ten minute "golden goal" periods. So the championship game came down to penalty shots. Each team had five shots on goal.

UVA scored on their first penalty kick. Akron's first penalty kick was blocked. Score 1-0 UVA. UVA scored two more times, and so did Akron, score 3-2 UVA.

Then hope sprouted as Akron's talented goalie blocked the next two UVA shots. If Akron scored with their last kick, the score would be tied and would send the teams into another five-shot penalty kick showdown.

We watched with anticipation - the Akron player ran to the ball, kicked... and the ball flew over the goal.

Final score UVA 3 - Akron 2, and the soccer team's chance to go down in history as the team with the perfect season and a championship win to top it off - dashed.

You cannot even imagine how the team looked after that missed goal. Completely devastated. Beyond completely devastated.

And that's why the picture of our mascot, Zippy, comforting one of the senior players afterward, touches me so much.

Zippy wasn't voted the nation's favorite collegiate mascot for nothing.

Birdwings, campfires, and Christmas

We decorated our Christmas tree last night. We cut it down ourselves at a nearby Christmas tree farm last Sunday, but had to wait until last night before we all had an evening free to gather round and decorate it.

I was clicking through some older photos on the disk drive from my old computer, which I haven't had access to for a while. I came across this photo from a family backpacking trip a few years ago:

The caption under the picture was, "Campfire tales." It occured to me that the cozy feeling of sitting around the campfire and telling tales is exactly like the feeling of gathering together to decorate the tree and then sitting around afterward admiring it and telling stories. I suppose a scene like that would likely be captioned, "Christmas tales."

The morning after the campfire picture, I remember standing near where the fire had been the night before and hearing a strange zip-zip-zip sound. I looked up to see a crow flying over us, and the sound was the sound its wings made with each pulse. That's how quiet it was in the mountains of Pennsylvania that morning - quiet enough to hear a bird on the wing.

This morning, however, I woke to the howl of a biting wind and to snow. I hope you all are warm wherever you are, and out of the wind, and telling tales with your families.