Checking In

Hey, everybody. I just got e-mail from a worried blog reader who wondered what my absence here meant, and hoped I was okay.

I'm fine! Actually, better than fine, since we're leaving for another cruise on Friday. Yay!

I'm spending my time on Facebook these days because a) it gives me a sense of what my friends are up to and b) I get much more feedback there. If you're on FB too, please look for me. If you aren't on FB because you just never got around to it, think about joining: it's fun, and you don't have to spend vast amounts of time there. If you aren't on FB because you don't like it, I understand; feel free to shoot me an e-mail once in a while if you'd like to hear from me.

I'll still post long things like homilies here, although my new church -- which is having its own financial problems, and I'm praying won't go the way of the old one -- doesn't have me on the preaching schedule as often as the old one did. I'm only preaching about once a quarter now.

If there are any big publishing announcements, I'll post those here too.

Everyday nattering, though, is over at The Other Place.

Thanks! Be well, everyone!

Well, Nertz

Tonight I took a cute video of Bali playing with a toy; I was going to post it, but the "add video" button doesn't seem to exist on the post editor anymore. I did a bit of research and discovered that I'd have to switch back to the old editor to post videos, but I'm not sure how to do that, so at the moment, you'll just have to imagine a fluffy black cat romping around chasing a small green pom-pom. It's adorable, honest.

Our Fourth was very quiet, which is how we like it. I'm not a big fan of explosions or Festivals of Drunken Driving (yeah, I know, some people are just no fun), so we stayed home and watched a few episodes of True Blood. I loved the first two seasons of this show, but two-thirds of the way through the third, I'm seriously annoyed with it.

For one thing, it's turned into one of those shows where hardly anyone isn't some sort of supernatural beastie. As I often tell my writing students, just sticking a label of "vampire," "werewolf" or "fairy" on someone doesn't automatically make that character interesting. One of my classroom mantras is, "If you can't write an interesting story about a mailman, you won't be able to write an interesting story about an elf, either." Having Sookie turn out to be a fairy who flits around in a white dress through a sparkling meadow with other fairies waving flowers -- talk about kitsch! -- makes her character less interesting, not more, at least for me. (I haven't read the novels on which the series is based, but I believe this is Charlaine Harris' doing, not Alan Ball's.)

And anyway -- as I'm also constantly reminding my students -- having too many vampires in town just doesn't work. Vampires are major predators. They need food. If their prey don't outnumber them by a fairly substantial order of magnitude, a lot of them are going to have to move on. In fact, I'm slightly suspect of highly organized vampire societies: seems to me much more likely, given the population biology of the situation, that they'd hunt on their own and spread themselves out very widely.

Then we have the infamous vampire-versus-werewolf feud, which has become such an old story that I yawn every time I see it. Then we have the really excessive amounts of gore, which has lost whatever shock value or interest it once had. Then we have the fact that every supernatural beastie on the planet seems to have settled in Bon Temps, and don't local law agencies suspect anything? Buffy at least explained this with the Hellmouth trope, and even had characters fantasizing about moving to non-Hellmouth locations (and, in some cases, actually doing it, as when Buffy moves away from Sunnydale at the end of Season Two).

To be fair, Being Human has a lot of these same problems too, but I think that series acknowledges them more honestly (and I find the characters more interesting). Right now, the True Blood characters I'm most interested in are Tara and Lafayette, who are still human (as far as I know) and dealing with interesting conflicts. The Tara/Franklin subplot this season was worth the price of admission, even if it was just a tiny bit reminiscent of Spike and the Buffybot. The most appealing supernatural at the moment is Jessica, who's trying to figure out how to get along with a human, fang-phobic coworker, instead of getting caught up in succession struggles and internecine bickering and Ye Old Nazi Werewolf Conspiracy Plots.

Nazi werewolves? Please! Has anyone else noticed that writers who don't know what else to do invoke the Third Reich? This really bothers me. For one thing, it's lazy writing. For another, it ultimately trivializes the subject, which I -- for one -- find problematic.

Okay, I'm done venting now. I still think Alan Ball is a genius, but at this point, I'm basing that on American Beauty and Six Feet Under, not on True Blood.

Technical Difficulties

Blogger was down most of yesterday, and some comments I'd approved and posted before the shutdown appear to have vanished. Claire and Jean, please be assured that I did read and appreciate your comments! I hope Blogger restores them at some point, if that's possible.

Housekeeping

I just cleaned up my sidebar a bit: deleted dead links, replaced my old church with my new one, added a section for my e-books, added knitting to my profile, and so forth. I've been meaning to do this for a while now, and as with so many dreaded chores, it took much less time than I expected!

Everything's Better with Rocks

I had a surreal day. I woke up with back pain and then, browsing around my sitemeter, followed a referral link to a post about how one of my posts -- a happy post, mind you, and not even the one about our cruise -- had more or less sent the reader into a tailspin and ruined the rest of her day. This made me feel pretty cruddy, as you can probably imagine, even though it was competely unintentional on my part. Comments from two of her readers, trying to cheer her up by insulting me, didn't help.

Several times in my life, I've discovered that people I'd never even met were saying nasty things about me behind my back. (On one occasion, people were gossiping about me in Paris, where I've never even been, and the things they were saying about me were based on third-hand reports that weren't even true.) Because I'm not particularly famous, these experiences have given me much greater empathy for people like politicians and actors, who have to put up with this kind of anonymous hatred all the time. Because I don't, and therefore never expect it, it always throws me for a loop. Learning that people you don't even know think badly of you, and maybe even wish you ill, makes the whole world seem scarier, you know?

Note: My entire life, people have been telling me that I shouldn't care so much about things, and especially not about what other people think of me. A former therapist routinely gave me reproving looks and repeated the mantra, "What other people think of me is none of my business." If that works for her or her other clients, great. It doesn't work for me. Furthermore, I don't think it's true. We're social animals. We're designed to care what other people think of us. Science (TM) has discovered that the brain responds to social pain the same way it does to physical pain. Furthermore, repeated rejection can literally make people sick.

On a more immediate and practical level, being scolded for caring too much has never, not once in my life, succeeded in making me care less. It's just made me more unhappy, since being criticized for feeling too much feels, let's face it, like another form of rejection.

That's all an extended footnote to this morning's debacle. I found these particular slights especially baffling because I couldn't figure out how my happy post had triggered them. I'd expected the cruise post to draw more PoCo/Marxist ire than it did, but this one seemed innocent. On reflection, I realized that my happiness made the original reader feel worse in comparison, but how my being happy led the two commenters to conclude that I suffer from personality deficits was much more of a mystery. (Mind you, of course I suffer from some personality deficits, as all of us do; my friends love me anyway.) Had I said something horrible without realizing it?

Because I really don't wake up each morning determined to offend people, and because I couldn't figure out what was going on, I fretted about the situation for most of the morning, developing a migraine while running errands. Through all this, I was obsessively nice to people I encountered, handing out any compliment I could think of, on the theory that if you want to reduce the amount of pain in the world, saying nice things to people works better than saying nasty ones. I don't think my motives for doing this were especially noble, but I also don't think I hurt anyone in the process.

Well, the day got a little better. At my (joy oh joy) annual pelvic exam, my gynecologist was exquisitely kind about my grief issues and shared her own experience of losing her mother. Several friends I'd e-mailed about the blog mess wrote back and said they didn't think I'd done anything terrible. I managed to have some direct conversation both with the blogger and with one of the commenters, which helped clarify some of the issues. The charge of personality deficits came from a perceived breach of privacy, and perceived name-dropping, when I mentioned another writer's full name on the blog. Since promoting a very public figure's work doesn't breach her privacy, especially when her website includes her full name (yea, verily, even in the URL), and since I have an honest-to-goodness personal history with this individual, I was able to dismiss the charges in my own head, if not in my accuser's.

So I was already feeling better when the mail came.

The last time Gary and I were in San Francisco, we went to the beach with our friend Ellen, her two kids, her sister and her niece. Her niece is seven or eight, I think, a very sweet little girl. Her mom told her I like rocks, so she found a small, smooth pebble and gave it to me. I still carry it in my purse.

Today's mail brought a mysterious package, a flat padded envelope, oddly heavy, weighted with small objects that slid when I moved the envelope. When I opened it, I found a note from Ellen's sister. She and her daughter had gone to the beach and collected five rocks they thought I'd like. She apologized for the fact that it had taken a while for her to mail them.

I e-mailed a thank-you note via Ellen (I don't have her sister's address), thanking them effusively, and assuring them that the rocks had arrived at just the right moment. I can't tell you how much better they made me feel.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words may hurt me just as badly by igniting the pain pathways in my brain, but if you give me a pretty pebble, I'll feel loved forever. And five pebbles? Such riches!

So the world feels friendly again. I still have a smidgen of a headache, but I'll swim after dinner, which should help.

Postscript: I just heard from Commenter #2, who'd read the blog entry and the first comment, assumed that both the blogger and Commenter #1 were referring to unhelpful comments left on that blog by someone else (I'd never even visited the blog before this morning), and vented her own frustration.

Moral of this story: If you feel like assassinating someone's character, make sure you at least have the right target!

Still a Little Broken

Okay, so I can post from Blogger the normal way from work, and from my iGoogle homepage. In the Blogger "compose post" window, though, the "publish post" button doesn't work. I have to save the post and then go to the "Edit Posts" screen and publish from there.

This is vey annoying, although not quite as inconvenient as the problem I was having before, when I couldn't even save. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this? I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium. We've emptied my cache, deleted my cookies, restarted the machine, etc., and the problem persists.

Help!

Blogger Ate My Comments

I've had some technical difficulties this morning. Jean and mybabyjohn, I got your comments, but when I tried to post them, Blogger ate them instead.

Bad Blogger!

Or, as my friend Barbara would correct me, "Bad Blogger behavior!" The behavior is bad, but we don't want to shame Blogger. Blogger isn't bad even if Blogger behaves badly.

Sigh.

Anyway, thanks for the comments. I appreciated them, as always.

Test and Testy

I just got a new BlackBerry -- a Curve 8530 -- and I'm trying to see if I can blog right from the phone. So far, so good.

I went back to the hospital today. I wound up spending a lot of time with an extremely agitated patient who decided that I was one of the only trustworthy people in the building (probably because the minute I walked into the room, I said, "If you want me to leave, I will," which meant that for a while, at least, I was the only person the patient wanted to stay). A nurse made it into the patient's good graces too, but only after a shoving match involving lots of shouting and banging on the door while security guards, the social worker, other nurses and I milled around outside. I'd left the room to call a social-service organization, at the patient's request.

Meanwhile, one nurse scolded me for "enabling" the patient's behavior and not understanding hospital procedures regarding agitated patients, which in fact I understand very well. Apparently other nurses were talking about what I'd done wrong, which led to the nursing supervisor informing me that since I wasn't trained to handle this kind of patient, I shouldn't be in the room. I explained that in fact I'd done nothing wrong and that I felt safe with the patient (the nurse was clearly worried about liability).

Mind you, this was after two different nurses, earlier in the shift, had treated me as completely invisible. It was a really busy day, but I was still annoyed. I'll take invisibility over being chewed out by staff, though, especially for things I didn't do.

I wound up back in the room with the patient and the one acceptable nurse, who'd talked the patient down after the shoving match, had miraculously gotten the patient to follow instructions, and was now the patient's best friend, aside from me. The patient told me repeatedly, "You make me comfortable. You're perfect for this job. You have rainbows around you."

The nurse agreed I had rainbows around me. I told the nurse how wonderful she was. We both did everything we could to reassure the patient, who kept saying plaintively, "I'm not a bad person." When the patient and the nurse realized that I'd stayed ninety minutes past the end of my shift, they both insisted I go home.

On my way upstairs to sign out, I got another lecture from a security guard who thought I'd endangered myself needlessly. I didn't bother telling him that the patient became most agitated when I left the room, and that in fact I felt far more comfortable with the patient than the scolding nurses. I actually loved talking to the patient, who between bouts of fear and anger was funny, smart, and caring. And yes, this was an unstable person who theoretically could have gone off on me at any time. But I could have gotten my car totalled on the way to the hospital, too. We all could have been killed by a meteor crashing into the building. Every single one of us is surrounded by risk, all the time. I went with my gut feelng that the patient wouldn't hurt me, and my gut was right.

I know at least some of the lecturing came from concern for my well-being, but it's still frustrating to have so little credibility after over five years of volunteering. I felt like my presence was helping (the patient clearly thought it was), so I wish the medical staff hadn't seen me as part of the problem. Patients' responses to me are far more important -- and more uniformly positive -- but patients come and go. I have to deal with the staff every week, and it's harder to do my job well when they see me as a liability rather than an asset.

Ah well. For all the chaos and frustration, I still wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else. It's deeply meaningful and satisfying work, even when it's difficult.

Technical Note

For some reason, I'm not getting e-mail about blog comments. I have to go to the website to see them. So if your comment gets published days after you sent it to me, please know that I haven't been ignoring you; I've just forgotten to check the site!

Narrative Medicine Workshop, Day One

The first day of the workshop was great. Rita Charon greeted me at the door of the conference room and, when I introduced myself, said, "We're so glad you're here! We were just talking about your blog!" Evidently some of the Narrative Medicine faculty at Columbia read it; Rita told me later, "You're our PR person." That's a bit of an overstatement, but the recognition was still flattering.

During the registration meet-and-greet, I mentioned to Rita that I'm doing a Narratve Med freshman-comp course in the fall. She grabbed my arm and pulled me over to a young woman who's at the workshop to figure out if she wants to go to medical school, but whose faculty mentor from college has done a lot of work with both Narrative Med and composition. "You," Rita said to the young woman, "have to introduce Susan to Ann," and then walked off to let us get acquainted.

The participants are diverse and fascinating. There's a psychotherapist who specializes in clients with chronic and terminal illness; a writer who started a volunteer program pairing professional writers with cancer patients, who work on a writing project of their choice; an oral historian who specializes in trauma narrative; a massage therapist who treats patients with chronic pain; and a family physician practicing refugee medicine in Canada. And that's just a few of the thirty-odd people at the workshop. Quite a bit of geographical diversity, too, with attendees from Canada, the UK, Israel, and South Korea, not to mention from all over the U.S.

And, of course, three of us are chaplains (although I'm really there more as university faculty). The other two chaplains are lovely people, and the one in my small group is an amazing close reader.

It was a busy afternoon. We registered, attended two plenary sessions in an auditorium, moved back to the main conference room to sit in a large circle and introduce ourselves, and then broke into small groups (we'll be working with the same peers all weekend, although faculty will rotate) to do a bit of writing. My group's leader for the first session was Rita Charon herself, and the writing prompt was: "Tell me the story of your name." We had four minutes to write, and she asked us to read aloud exactly what we'd written. We could opt out of reading aloud if we chose, but no one did.

You can't write much in four minutes, and the prompt didn't especially interest me. I was amazed by the results, though. The group analyzed each person's short text in great detail, and in my case, at least, the results were remarkably perceptive. The other group members came out knowing a bit more about my psychology than I'd have chosen to reveal to strangers!

The point of this, of course, was that all writing reveals self, but that the writer him or herself often doesn't see what a reader will. I could have told you that from twelve years of teaching fiction workshops, but being on the receiving end from a group -- rather than one or two individuals -- was both fascinating and unnerving. (Another, even more basic point is that we learn who we are only by narrating our histories, by being our own witnesses to the creation of our own stories.)

After the small-group session, we all went out for a buffet dinner at a nearby Dominican restaurant, and then I walked the fifteen minutes home to Larry and Laura's. I'm hoping to get to sleep early tonight. For one thing, the workshop resumes at 8:30 tomorrow morning (luckily, there's a place across the street that sells very strong coffee!), and for another, I wrote a few pages of a New Secret Project today before the workshop started, and hope to write another few tomorrow.

All will be revealed when I'm able, but it's too soon now.

Meeting Dr. Dino

Today I sat around, trying without success to untangle the mess-o-yarn (which is, as I pointed out to Gary, a fitting metaphor for my life), and then went swimming for the first time since I've been here. Swimming felt great, except when I bashed my head against the end of the pool. The last time I did that was the week before Dad died. Tomorrow I leave for NYC, where, as Gary pointed out to me, I may be physically safer.

In the meantime, though, something really cool happened: I got e-mail from #1 Dinosaur saying, "You're in Philly? Want to meet up? It would be fun to put a face to the blog!" (Lest anyone be alarmed for my safety, my sister and I spoke to Dr. Dino on the phone several months ago, after I got an e-mail saying, "Your mom's in the hospital and homesick for pets? How about a visit from my dog?" That plan didn't work out, so we didn't meet in person, but Liz and I were fairly sure we weren't dealing with an axe murderer.)

The upshot of this was that the esteemed doc stopped by the house after dinner, and met Liz and Lloyd and Mom, and patted kitties and ate chocolate. We talked for three solid hours about blogging, writing, healthcare reform, American attitudes towards medicine, end-of-life care, cats, chocolate, family, grief, TV shows, and the challenges of running a personal practice. I can now happily report that #1 Dino is as funny and smart in person as in cyberspace. It was a terrific visit, and I hope we can do it again sometime.

One of the more interesting parts of the discussion was our debate about how to define "medicine." Dr. D. wanted to limit it to the scientific aspects, which would leave out many people on the healthcare team (chaplains, social workers, etc.). I wanted a broader definition. Okay, said Dr. D, what about breaking it into the art and science of medicine? Too blurry a dichotomy, I said. We didn't get the issue settled, but it's interesting food for thought.

Maybe the wider idea I wanted was simply 'healthcare," with science-based medicine a necessary but not sufficient component: true healthcare, in that model, is bigger than mere medicine, as essential as medicine may be. That's the best solution I can suggest right now, anyway. Healthcare incorporates science, art, policy considerations, economics, sociology, and any number of other disciplines. This leaves Dr. D's initial definition intact, but also makes medicine only part of the picture.

Anyway, it was a lively discussion, good for the brain. After Dr. D left, I watched TV with Mom and Liz. Tomorrow I'll do laundry and, i hope, swim again -- without mishap this time! -- before catching my train for Part II of the Great Adventure: New York City!

Stay tuned!

SNAFU Epidemic

I've been having computer problems since I got here. Neither my sister nor my nephew were able to get Sally Samsung to connect to Liz's home network, even though Vera VAIO always did fine (which means that it's not some mismatch between their Mac and my PC). No problem: I'll just use their computers, right?

This evening I'd planned a long post, with lots of photos, about our jewelry shopping trip today, my latest yarn purchase, Mom's condition and my reaction to it (short version: I've fled into comfort knitting), yada yada. But when I tried to use the upstairs computer, it got hung up switching between web pages, so i turned it off and then back on, but it didn't come back: all I got was a blank white screen, no matter how long I waited.

So now i'm downstairs, where the Mac's working, but where I can't seem to sign into AOL. And right now, I don't have the patience to thumb replies on the BlackBerry or to set up the Bluetooth keyboard; I've had it with computers tonight!

So if I owe you e-mail, I probably won't be answering it for a while, unless by some miracle AOL's working when I finish this post. If it's still not working tomorrow, I'll use the Bluetooth keyboard -- thank goodness i brought it! -- but in the meantime, i think I killed the upstairs computer.

Gahhhh!

Technical Details

Just after I posted last night about my wonderful iGoogle home page, the whole thing disappeared and reverted to a bland classic Google format. Gary and I scoured the net for all the info we could find on the subject, and got nowhere -- the restore feature took me back too far, and my cookies were fine -- so this morning, I had to recreate the whole thing. What a pain!

I now have even more new and wonderful gadgets, though, including one that will allow me to write blog posts straight from the iGoogle page (as I'm doing now). I can also read my AOL mail straight from the page and search the UNR library catalog. Very handy! And before anybody tells me to switch to some other e-mail program: I've had AOL since 1995 or thereabouts, and I don't want to go through the hassle of changing my e-mail address. Okay?

So, anyhow, I'm very happy with the latest setup. I just hope it stays put!

Empty Space

After conferring with my sister, I deleted my post about the kind, lovely, extraordinarily compassionate thing that one of Dad's healthcare providers did for him, and us, because -- as several readers pointed out, and as my sister had wondered -- that kind, lovely thing was, technically, Against the Rules, and we don't want this wonderful person to be punished. I don't think that's likely from a blog post, but as my sister observed, "Some people are just mean," and I didn't want to have to worry about somebody reading the post and narcing on the person who was so nice to us.

May I observe here that HIPAA sucks? I know the reasons for it, and I know the people who instituted it did so with good intentions, but they've created a monster. The mere fact that anyone would respond to an extraordinary act of kindness with, "But Rules Were Broken!" shows the extent to which HIPAA has twisted the heads of everyone in healthcare.

And please don't post comments defending HIPAA, okay? Like I said, I know the reasons for it. I'm not interested. Aside from the fact that people stand to be punished for being nice, just think about how many continents we've deforested having to sign all those freaking forms. Ugh!

In other joyous news, I realized today that the three-month anniversary of Dad's death falls on Father's Day.

Yes, I'm cranky right now. Try to talk me out of it. I dare you.

Belated Christmas

Gary and I just exchanged our Christmas gifts, and I'm typing this on my Blackberry on a Universal Freedom Keyboard. Wheee! It's a great little device, and while I don't know all the ins and outs of it yet, I'm already delighted. It was a breeze to set up, and it's so much easier than typing everything with my thumbs!

Gary also got me a digital voice recorder (since I had nothing with which to record our meeting with Dad's doctor a few weeks ago), Shreve Stockton's The Daily Coyote (the book based on the blog of the same name), a lovely tapestry waistpack I'd requested, and a silk scoop-neck t-shirt from Land's End.

Oh, and the greatest thing! He found a PBS video called Healing Words about poetry therapy in a hospital: absolutely perfect for my narrative-medicine interests!

Yay, Gary! You outdid yourself!

The funny thing is that this morning I felt horrible, never less Christmas-y in my life. Swimming helped, though. So did getting to Dad's and discovering that I could deal, that I was still a competent adult. We are, to be sure, having Adventures in Gerontology: Dad's displaying some confusion, although we aren't sure if it's really cognitive or simply caused by deficits in sight and hearing. Fran's announced that taking care of him is too hard, and that she's going to give it another month and head back to Chicago if things don't get easier. Thing is, you can't have leases on two different Section Eight apartments at once, and she signed a one-year lease, so she can't go back to Chicago until it's up. Dad's tried to explain that to her, but she doesn't believe him.

Meanwhile, back in Philly, my mother's desperate to go home and seems to think that Liz is plotting to keep her in the nursing home, which must have been hard on Liz on her birthday. We just want Mom to stay another week or so for rehab (which is, of course, being broken up by the holidays, making the situation even more confusing for an elderly person).

So life remains challenging. But we're all doing the best we can: Gary chipped away at unpacking Dad and Fran's apartment today, and made enough progress that it looks more like a house than like a storage unit. I chipped away at bills, insurance issues, and end-of-life paperwork: among other things, Dad's advance directive is now attached to his refrigerator door by magnets, so that any ambulance folk who show up will see it and, we hope, read enough of it to discover that Dad's DNAR/DNI. That sounds morbid, but I've seen entirely too many elderly people who never wanted to be on ventilators brought into the ER on vents because the paramedics didn't have the paperwork readily available and were legally required to resuscitate and/or intubate.

With any luck, the situation will never arise. I'm not sure if we've been very lucky so far or very unlucky -- maybe both at once -- but I'm not inclined to push the issue.

Dad and Fran are both happy with unpacking progress, which should help ease tension. On Monday I'll take him to a bunch of VA appointments. On Tuesday he and Fran have their interview to be admitted to the paratransit system, which I certainly hope will happen, since it would make life much easier on all of us (or maybe only a little easier, but we'll take what we can get!). Fran reports that Dad's eating more than he had been, which has to be good news, although he's very tired and reports a sudden cessation of pain without pain meds, which alarms me because I know that happens sometimes right before people die.

One day at a time, right?

So, anyway, by the time we got back, I was feeling sufficiently festive to wrap Gary's presents. We put the Yule log DVD on the widescreen, and it worked really well, creating a great atmosphere for opening gifts. I feel as if maybe we've stumbled on a new Christmas tradition, and I already have ideas for how I want to handle next Christmas.

Bwah hah hah! And to all a good night!

Please lend a hand!

I've written here before about my friend Jessica's wonderful blog project, These Hands of Ours. For a while, she was posting gorgeous photos of women's hands every day, but then her posting rate slowed down, because people weren't sending her material. In an e-mail, she told me that she thinks women "our age" are shy about photographing their hands.

C'mon, ladies! You all do wonderful things with your hands: cooking, healing, writing, creating, caressing, caretaking, gardening, crafting, blessing. Please share what you do with Jessica, and with the world. All of our hands are beautiful!

Bali on the Silver Screen

So here's the first video I've ever taken, courtesy of the BlackBerry. This isn't exactly thrilling cinema ("Bali Looks Baffled! Susan Coos and Clucks Like a Demented Chicken!") but I'll try to get more entertaining clips from now on. I just wanted to see if I could film something and then post it.

I haven't figured out how to post videos using Mail-to-Blogger. Anyone know?

These Hands of Ours

My friend Jessica has started a wonderful project, a blog called These Hands of Ours. She's collecting photos of women's hands doing things that are important to them, along with descriptions of the images.

Here's the e-mail she sent out, which is also the sidebar of the blog:

I started a project for my 45th birthday. I'm gathering the hands of inspiring women - photos, self-portraits, snap shots. Women who have inspired me over many years, and the women who inspire them.

Thinking about the things I love about myself, I see a reflection of many women. And I'm creating a portrait - a photo montage of that - including text people send and any links to their own inspiration, websites or blogs.

It's through the women in my life that I am appreciating all the things I've done with those hands, the places they have traveled, the people they have hugged.

I wonder if we can create a huge quilt of inspired hands?

Pass it forward.

Love, Jessica
September 4th, 2008
Greenwich, Connecticut, USA

Above is the photo I sent Jessica (many thanks to Gary for taking it!), and here's the text:

I use my hands for lots of things -- writing, patting my cats, fetching blankets and water and toys for patients at the hospital where I volunteer -- but I rarely delight in my hands as much as when I'm knitting. I learned to knit last fall, and I've knit every day since then. I started with a prayer shawl for a friend whose husband was dying, and since then, I've made many shawls and scarves, and two balaclavas, although I have yet to tackle anything with sleeves.

Knitting reminds me that beautiful things are created stitch by stitch, one small loop at a time. It teaches me patience and perspective. It is both creation and recreation, inspiration and healing. I'm a lay preacher at my church, and last Christmas I preached about knitting as incarnation, as embodiment, the making visible of the holy. Knitting participates in the beautiful Jewish concept of "tikkun olam," the repair of the world; and when my hands use needles and yarn to make something warm and useful, so do I.

So there you have it. If you like this idea, please send Jessica a photo of your hands, with accompanying text. The e-mail address is thesehandsofours(at)yahoo(dot(com).

And let your female friends know! Pass the word!

Oh, and speaking of women (and men!) doing invaluable things with their hands, the latest edition of Change of Shift, the nursing blog carnival, is up and ready for your reading pleasure! Watching nurses in the ER makes me infinitely grateful for our hands and everything they do.

Twins

Gary likes this second reflection picture too, so I decided to post it. (And this is also a test to see if I can keep the "sent from my Blackberry" message from appearing on the blog.)

Later: It worked! Yay!

Harley Sees His Ghost

I got this shot while Harley was looking out the sliding glass doors to our deck. Cool effect, if I do say so myself!

And Lee, I don't know how many pixels. Sorry!

Later: Gary informs me that it's two megapixels. Thanks, Gar!