New Years

I like transitions. For some reason new years and birthdays fill me with the same type of hope and wonder. I believe that all things are remade. For a couple days I believe in omens. Two years ago I posted about how the moon would be strange that new year. I joked about omens. Now I'm more of a believer. Two days later I broke my ankle, an injury that will continue to impact me for the rest of my life. Tomorrow I'll look for omens that will signal how the new year will go. Today was a beautiful way to end a year.

I had amazing day with the love of my life. Jeff and I relived the old days by waking up and suddenly deciding to go out of town. We used to take spur of the moment trips all the time. The plan was that we would hit the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge to do some birding and hiking (for me). Then take the back roads to Tanger Outlet Mall and to Iowa City for dinner (for him). Before we could get out towards Neal Smith, Jeff said that we had to take a detour. He wouldn't tell me where. I had to wait to find out. I didn't have long.

Every bird you see here is an eagle (some juvenile, some mature)

There is a lake between Des Moines and Ankeny where we had seen a ton of American Coots a couple summers ago. We headed out there, not for the coots this time, but for eagles. There were hundreds of bald eagles spread throughout the trees around the lake. We had the camera and tripod and were able to take some pictures. I hadn't seen this many bald eagles since our trip out to Rock Island. And the weather was perfect for viewing. If I was looking for an omen of a good year ahead, this was it. That many eagles in one place, and right along the road, was incredible.

After some time (and way too many pictures) we hopped into the car to go out to Neal Smith. We're blessed to have this fantastic refuge so close. Neal Smith has been working for years to bring back the prairie to Iowa, something that had been nearly eradicated by development. Jeff and I hiked the long trail at the refuge because it takes us right down next to the enclosure where the buffalo roam. We were rewarded with a huge herd. And some good position for pictures. With the tripod I could take some nice close-ups.

After Neal Smith, there were back roads drives, tons of shopping (I picked up some books and a really nice new robe). Then we headed to Steak N Shake for dinner. Neither Jeff nor I had eaten today so this hit the spot. Steak N Shake is a guilty pleasure. We don't have one in Des Moines so it seems more like a treat. Then we headed home talking the whole way. It was a fantastic day. And a nice way to end 2011. I had a ugly piece of mail (a rejection letter) but I'm trying not to let that damper the day. Now to see what 2012 has to offer. Hopefully plenty of days like this. Happy New Year all.

Words Create Worlds

I've mentioned before that I love book art, art based on books. This stunning creation is one of the best examples I've ever seen. This was created as part of an ad series for Anagram Bookshop in Prague, called Words Create Worlds. The image was created by Kaspan Company. I'm not sure how much of this is digitally created and how much of it is paper sculpture. Either way, the idea behind it makes me giddy.

Edit: Shortly after putting this up I thought to link to Anagram Bookshop only to find that it closed at the end of last year. :-(

My Own Starry Night

I think I've found my writers retreat. I found this picture on Lovely Listing and fell in love with the set up. I imagine that there is a desk across from the sink. I imagine myself spending the evening writing or reading at that desk, with a cup of tea or coffee. And when I got tired, I would climb up the ladder into my own personal starry night. My own private retreat. And everyone needs a room of their own.

Holiday Rush Winding Down

I hope everyone is having a fantastic holiday season. I hope you have spent time with family, relaxed, eaten too much, played lots, and enjoyed all the little beauties of the season. I'm enjoying that the holiday rush is over and this week is really all about relaxing. I have three more days of work this week but it's been quiet and I'm using the time to do some catch-up. Nothing seems rushed at work. Heck, what am I talking about, no one seems to be at work. 

The weather is downright glorious. We are seeing forty degree days. New Years Eve they are predicting mid-fifties. We had a sprinkling of rain yesterday. I can walk outside in a sweatshirt and haven't had to wear my extra-warm wool socks in weeks. Normally this time of year we have a couple inches of snow on the ground and we consider ourselves lucky if the temperatures rise above freezing. I know a ton of people that bemoaned the lack of a white Christmas. I practically danced through the brown grass with my sack of presents on my back. I don't need icicles to feel the holiday spirit. 

I generally dislike the rush leading up to the holidays but this week might have to be one of my favorite times of the year. The week between Christmas and New Years is like an extended holiday, even with a bit of work thrown in. The frantic shopping, wrapping, baking, addressing... is done. Now it is time to just sit back and enjoy a slow relaxed week. I've been reading like crazy. I've finished three books on the last couple days. I'm starting my fourth as soon as this is done. I'll stay up a little later than my standard 10:30 bedtime. I might be a tad more tired at work tomorrow but I probably won't have too much to stress me out. Did I mention I love this week? I hope you are having a good one as well. 

Repost for Christmas

I published this on December 24th, 2008. It still sums up my feelings about the holidays. Merry Christmas all! Happy Hanukkah! Sensational Saturnalia! and all the other holidays out there. May you be surrounded by friends, family, love, warmth, and light.

Any of my friends will tell you, because I've said it often myself, that I'm a recovering Catholic. I was raised Catholic, attending Catholic schools, and went to mass every week. (during school twice a week) At 16 I decided I wasn't going to church anymore. I just no longer believed. My mother persuaded me to continue until I was 18 and then she would never mention it again. I went until 18 and she has never said a word about it again. I love her for that.

So Christmas is an odd time for me. I love the festivities and the cheer of Christmas. I'm not huge on the commercial side of it but I do love wrapped gifts. I'm not a shopper but I actually like buying gifts for people. But the religous part of the whole holiday kind of escapes me. Over the years I've paid it less and less attention. I just love getting together with family and spending time.

So this year I'm focusing on what I do love about the season. Strangely it's the same thing that the pagans used to love about this time of year, the lengthening of days. Jeff and I joke that we are phototropic. We love the sun. And particularly love the warmth (Yes I still have no idea why I'm in the midwest in winter. Makes no sense to me). So the sun's return is a reason to celebrate. The ancient pagan religions of early Rome celebrated Saturnalia to honor Saturn, the god of sowing. The holiday was to bring about the return of the sun and the return of agriculture. A statue of Saturn, which was bound throughout the year was untied. It was a seven day festival (Dec 17-23) that included visiting family, gift-giving (particularly gifts of candles), and decorating. In Rome it was a week of sheer debauchery: feasting, drinking, dancing, gifts, and merry-making.

Over the decades the worship of Saturnalia changed to Sol Invictus (meaning Unconquered Sun) which was celebrated on December 25th, which is the first day the lengthening of days can be noticed. Many of the traditions of Saturnalia moved to this new holiday including gift giving, decorating the greenery, and candles. When Christians began to rise in power they wanted to find a day to celebrate Jesus's birth. Since no one knew exactly when that was, the early Christian leaders set it for December 25th. They figured that since people were already celebrating, then it would be simpler to add new (more Christian) traditions in. This worked, slowing ending Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, and bringing about the modern ideas of Christmas.

So this Christmas, as I celebrate with family and friends, it will be the return of the sun (son, hmmm) that I am thinking of. My idea is that we are either moving away from summer or towards it. Tomorrow I celebrate that we are visibly moving towards it. Merry Christmas all. And Happy Saturnalia.

Special Olympics Scarf

For the last couple years, Jeff and I (along with others in my knitting group) have been making scarves for the Special Olympics. The idea is that the scarves will be handed out to all the athletes at the opening ceremonies of the games and then they can take them home. When the program was conceived in four years ago, the call went out for 5,000 scarves. Knitters all over the US and world responded and donated over 60,000 scarves. A huge effort. The Special Olympics says what colors the scarves will be but the pattern is left up to the knitter. I've seen some really cool things done. One of the girls in the group did a double knit scarf with the alternating colors making blocks. Jeff is making one that will have the date imprinted into the scarf (I will have to post a picture, It's incredible).

And here is my scarf for the year. I like the red and blue far better than last year's blue and turquoise. I knit it lengthwise to create the stripes. I'm a slow knitter so I started it back at Thanksgiving and just finished it now. But I figured I'd share. I hope that it makes some child very happy. I need to do more knitting related charity. The ARL is always looking for knitted things for the animals. Soldiers are always in need of hats and gloves. Babies are always in need of caps. And the poor worldwide are always in need of warm woolen things (like mittens...these are a few of my favorite things). So I'm going to try to be more active in 2012 as a knitter for charity. I don't need everything I make and although I give away most of my knitting as gifts, more of that should be for those less fortunate.

Awesome Opera

Each year the Austrian town of Bregenz holds Bregenzer Festspiele, an opera festival. There are two stages for the event, an indoor theater that showcases lesser known works and a grand outdoor amphitheater on the lake for popular titles. While I haven't had the chance to see how amazing they performance is, I have had the opportunity to be stunned by the festival. The fantastic thing about Bregenzer Festspiele is the sets. Each year it seems that the festival attempts to outdo itself with another awesome set.

Designs like the one above, used for Tosca, have won international fame by appearing in the James Bond film "Quantum of Solace". I remember being awed by the scene in the film but to find out that this was a real theater was incredible. And then I saw the rest of the sets.

Above is one that was used for A Masked Ball by Verdi.

The above one, for Bizet's Carmen gives an idea of the setting for the stage and the huge audience. I can't imagine how incredible it has to be to see opera outdoors, on the lake.

The last one is from one of my favorite operas, Pucci's La Boheme. It was the first opera I ever saw, decades ago on TV. I loved the starving artist motif and the sad sweet tale of love. It was my introduction to opera and has lead to a lifelong love. I don't see the local operas every year but I try to go at least every other. And now I want to see the ones in Bregenz. I love good set work and it doesn't get any more dramatic or awe inspiring than this. For the history of the festival and the rest of the sets, click here.

Bears and Seals and Deer, Oh My

I need a cleansing post after my last one on Keystone. As you know I'm an animal lover and I love heartwarming animal stories. So many of the stories we normally hear in the news are bad for animals but these last couple weeks have been fantastic. There have been a ton of sweet wildlife stories in the news recently. From the bear that took a ride on the garbage truck in Vancouver. To the bear found in a New Jersey basement. Both were captured and released without any harm.

There was the recent story of a New Zealand woman who came home to find a baby fur seal napping in her living room. The seal had apparently crawled out of the sea, crossed a busy highway, into the yard, through a cat door, and up some stairs to find the living room. There it had made itself comfortable on one of the sofas for a little nap. The woman was obviously shocked but quickly fell in love with the seal. The NZ Department of Conservation was called and the seal was captured and released into the sea without harm.

But my favorite story from the week was the Alaska Quest Charters captain who found himself in an interested position when four deer swam to his boat in the middle of Taku Inlet and wanted to board. He was in the middle of a chartered cruise but still pulled each of the deer onto the vessel. He turned the boat back to the shore and when he landed the deer got up and wandered off the dock and into the woods. The youngest deer had some issues getting back up after the exhausting swim and was helped off the boat in a wheelbarrow. After a period of time it too ran off into the woods. The event actually happened in October of last year but it has just started making the internet rounds. My sister posted it to Facebook yesterday and I immediately had to steal it. I love those kind of stories. Like the story last year of a firefighter giving a koala water after an Australian blaze, these stories reaffirm my faith in humanity. I hope 2012 is filled with them.

Keystone

I don't normally get political. But I spent part of the day today listening to a politician talk about why we should build the Keystone Pipeline. They threw out all the classic reasons: jobs, income for companies and people, national security. When asked about why the president would put of the decision on the gigantic pipeline, he said something about how the environmentalists has lobbied him into waiting. Normally I would ignore it. But I hear the same arguments day in and day out. How creating jobs is far more important than worrying about the environment. How income seems to trump wilderness. It's one of the reasons that I hand over a small piece of my soul every day. My job helps bring these projects to life.

I don't believe that money trumps environment. I don't believe that the short term benefit we get now, outweighs the long-term damage we do. Thankfully there are others who feel the same. The Sierra Club posted these pictures from Garth Lenz, an award winning Canadian conservationist and photographer, who took them in Canada right around the area where the tar sand will be mined.

Above is the area where the mining would take place.

Above is the nearby area where tar sand mining is already taking place.

That is my reason. No amount of money is worth that. No local source of oil is worth that. I respect our president for waiting. I'm sad that we're even having the discussion.

Disney History

When it comes to childhoods, I know that mine was spoiled. I had amazing Christmases with piles of presents. I had a small children's books library that I only had to share with my brothers and sisters. I had two amazing parents who adored us and spent time with us. But when it comes to vacations, we were well past spoiled. We dragged my poor parents to 6 Flags, Busch Gardens, any amusement park we could find really. We spent time out West and down South. But our favorite (or at least mine) was going to Walt Disney World in Florida.

I think I've been to Disney World 6 or 7 times in my lifetime, most of them as part of family trips. One year Jeff and I went by ourselves but a majority of them were during my childhood. Even now I get the urge to go every three years or so. I am a Disney World fanatic. And it doesn't stop with just visiting. I read books about the design and engineering that went into the parks. I read about the history of the Disney Corporation, Disneyland, Disney World, and about Walt Disney himself. 

Recently I went through a bag of stuff that my parents had found in their house and packed up for me. Much of it was old school papers and things but I found a couple of books that I thought were fun. I found my Birnbaum's Guide to Disney World for both 1985 and 1993. I found some vacation guides I had picked up while in the parks back on the 1994 trip. It included information about the new MGM Studios. The 1985 book covered the newly opened EPCOT center. I found both of these hilarious. So much has changed for the parks since then. So much has been added or changed. 

But my favorite find was an old souvenir map that I had brought home from one of the trips. It shows the resort area, as it was at the time with some of the popular characters of the day. The funny part is that many of the character featured were 80s and 90s TV characters that were big then. The characters from DuckTales, Gummi Bears, TaleSpin, and Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers make an appearance along with Figment, the long defunct (but still beloved) character from Journey into Imagination. Many of the hotels and recreation areas picture above don't exist anymore. But the big change is the expansion. The park has spread and changed. New things have popped up all over. So even though I know the map is outdated I love it. I know the book I bought in 2007 will soon be outdated in the same way. At Disney World things change constantly. But it was nice to find this bit of history to remember the parks of my youth. And look forward to going back. 

Best Intentions

I made a list on Friday of things I was going to get done this weekend. I came home energized that night with the idea that I would be sitting on Sunday with every single task crossed off my list. I had the best intentions.

But not a single task was finished. Not a single chore was done. Heck I didn't even keep up with my online reading or blogs. Instead I've spent my weekend curled up knitting with Jeff or reading. I curled up in the house and read like books were disappearing tomorrow. I read three books this weekend. And I couldn't be happier. It has been a blissful weekend.

On Friday I started The City of Ember, a young adult novel about a town surrounded by darkness. For a long time the town had been supplied by endless storehouses and lit by gigantic floodlights on top of the buildings. But the storehouses are being exhausted and the lights are starting to flicker. Two brave young adults decide that they have to find a way to save their city and find a way to save the light. I put this book on par with The Hunger Games, which is pretty high praise. Those two books have kept me gripped from beginning to end. They both have strong characters and odd plots that I really got into. A good read.

I just finished the third installment of The Penderwick series. I don't normally read series. I generally have rules against doing so. I have boxes and bookcases filled with books waiting to be read. So I tend to avoid reading authors over and over. Particularly when they are talking about the same characters as before. The same way I hate sequels I hate series. But the Penderwicks are different. I read the first book years ago and feel completely in love with the sisters and their family. It is like reading Little Women over and over but with modern characters. And wonderful dialogue and plots. Jeannie Birdsall even throws in some fun Latin phrases to keep me entertained. I am completely in love with these books. They are stand alone books but I just can't pass up a new installment of the sister's adventures.

The last book I'll be doing a full review of later. I'm not ready to talk about it. Needless to say I read it straight through, only stopping for showers and dinner (and even sometimes not the latter). I grew up reading at the table and in the bathroom and stretched out on the floor and before bed. This weekend I've read in the morning and most of the evenings. I've gotten nothing done but I wouldn't trade these days for anything. What a wonderful time.

Poetry Friday

I've had picture books on the brain a lot recently, for a number of different reasons. Partly because I'm driving out tonight to pick up my favorite picture book of all time (The Library by Sarah Stewart and David Small) that I ordered from my local bookstore. Second because of my children's book blog. The third reason I hope to tell you about soon but I'm trying hard not to write or think about at the moment.

We also had our first real taste of snow yesterday and today I just want to hibernate. I was reminded last night how much I hate winter. When the snow starts to fly I just want to stay indoors, curl up under a blanket, read, sip cocoa, and hibernate. What better way to do that than with a poem about both picture books and winter.

Picture-Books in Winter
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Summer fading, winter comes—
Frosty mornings, tingling thumbs
Window robins, winter rooks,
And the picture story-books.

Water now is turned to stone
Nurse and I can walk upon;
Still we find the flowing brooks
In the picture story-books.

All the pretty things put by,
Wait upon the children's eye,
Sheep and shepherds, trees and crooks,
In the picture story-books.

We may see how all things are,
Seas and cities, near and far,
And the flying fairies' looks,
In the picture story-books.

How am I to sing your praise,
Happy chimney-corner days,
Sitting safe in nursery nooks,
Reading picture story-books?

Oasis Home

I found this image by Harrison Cady on Illustration Art, a blog I recently subscribed to. I love the image of the house as oasis in the middle of the city. As a hopeful gardener, the jungle surrounding the house is my idea of landscaping. The image is unlike a lot of Cady's work but I had to save it. And now share it.

Book image

I'm not really feeling like writing this week so instead I'll be posting images I like. That way you still get something new but I can take a bit of a break from writing. I found this one years ago and have had it sitting up on my desktop waiting to be posted. I like most of Cindy Grundsten's work but I love this image.

Talent

This morning a friend sent me a recording of himself playing and singing one of my favorite songs. It's "Delicate" by Damien Rice. He does a fantastic job. The guitar work is nearly perfect. And surprisingly he has a really great voice (only surprising because I've never heard him sing before). It brought a huge smile to my face and put the song in my head all morning. I've listened to it several times already and marveled at all the hidden talent I didn't know this friend had.

This same morning Jeff showed me the finished fingerless glove that he's been working on for a while now. He finished it late last night and it's a beautiful thing. He designed the pattern, worked in the tiniest softest yarn I could imagine. He managed to repair it when he dropped several critical stitches on his last round. He's recreated it several time, always persistent, and has come away with something that's really wonderful.

With both of these things I'm reminded how incredible a thing it is to share talents. I've smiled all day because of two people who were willing to share their talents with me. I tend to be a private, hidden person. I'm generally guarded with my passions and interests. But today I'm seeing how much joy I could offer by sharing more. By offering my services and talents. And maybe I could bring a smile to someone's face.