Giving Thanks

There’s a Facebook challenge that’s been going on between Hubby and some of his friends. For each day in November, they’ve been posting something for which they are thankful. I’ve been thinking about this Facebook challenge, although I didn’t take part in it. I figured I’d give it a shot here on my blog – 30 things I’m thankful for (because November hath 30 days).

In no particular order, I give thanks for …

1. Family, particularly Hubby and the kids, but the rest of the whole bunch of you are included, too

2. Food (Need I say more?)

3. Clean, abundant, easily accessible water

4. Hot showers

5. A comfy house with strong colors on the walls

6. A cozy bed with a heavy comforter

7. Music in all its forms (Although I wasn’t ever sure I’d be thankful for an mp3 player that didn’t have physical art or lyrics. That has changed and now I’m VERY thankful for my iPod.)

8. My ability to easily string words together

9. The internet – for the voice it gives to ordinary peeps through a variety of apps (and the research, too!)

10. My computer – for letting me access the internet

11. Flowers

12. Birds

13. Books, acres and acres of books

14. GoodReads – for helping me keep track of the books I’ve read, and most especially for the books I want to read

15. My health. It’s been relatively good over the years. Not too many scary situations.

16. Dictionaries, thesauruses, grammar & punctuation guides

17. Yarn

18. Notebooks

19. Movies that suck me in over and over

20. Human creativity (although animal creativity is pretty fascinating, as well)

21. Museums – for saving so much of our culture and for being enthralling repositories of investigation

22. Kitties (They purr, which is a most loverly sign of affection.)

23. Bic Round Stic Pens – medium flow, black ink

24. Heated car seats (They keep my butt warm while the engine and heater heat up.)

25. Gift bags – for making gift wrapping easy

26. Life mysteries – for giving me so much to think about (What do those darned khipu mean, anyway?)

27. The opportunity to sleep in late (refer back to #6)

28. My sewing machine (a needle and thread will also do)

29. Sweaters, jackets, sweatshirts, turtlenecks, mittens, gloves, hats, scarves, neck-warmers, thick socks, and Steger mukluks (Can you tell by this and several other items on the list that I like to stay warm? Yeah. I’m thankful for warmth.)

30. Friends, both offline and on, because you’re all part of my real world no matter where I find you.

Have you been taking part in the Facebook challenge? Whether you did or not, what are you thankful for?

Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well & be joyous!

Wordnik & The Art of Digital Storytelling

I have an email subscription to writing related articles produced the Utne Reader and got a couple of gems today.

One discussed The Art of Digital Storytelling, an article by Danielle Maestretti, that points to several new avenues for producing stories in unusual ways, including cell phone stories, stories produced with assistance from online communities, and stories you must fold to read. Definitely a bunch of resources in the article that I have to investigate further.

The other article was about a new online uber-dictionary called Wordnik, which allows users to subscribe in order to keep track of the words they look up. Along with providing a basic definition, the site shows links to other online dictionary definitions of whatever word you search. (No need to have an account to do a search.) Wordnik also links up to Flickr (think visual definitions) and Twitter (see when a word has been tweeted). Users can also interact with a word through the “Take this word and … [List it, Favorite it, Tweet it, Comment on it, Shove it] feature. Pretty sweet.

The design of Wordnik is clean and intuitive. This may become my favorite online dictionary.

I’d put one of the Wordnik badges in my sidebar, but WordPress does not like Javascript, so a link will have to do.

Movies That Suck You in Over and Over

You’re channel-surfing. There isn’t a whole lot on television that you really want to watch, but suddenly you come across a movie that you’ve seen at least 52 billion times. Rather than turn off the TV and do something else, the nature of the movie is such that it sucks you in. Doesn’t matter where you catch the movie along its plot line, you’re hooked.

That happened to me this weekend with Adam Sandler’s “The Wedding Singer.” I can’t deny the appeal of the movie’s 1980’s theme, complete with music and clothing of the era. I was a teenager then. Daughter asked if we really dressed that way, insinuating that we were peculiar for doing so. Yes. We really dressed that way, plus we overdid it with the hairspray in order to achieve our big hair.

It’s not simply nostalgia, though, that sucks me into particular movies. I can’t always put my finger on what precisely draws me in repeatedly. Rather than try to figure it out, Hubby, Daughter and I put together a list of movies that insist we watch them over and over.

The Wedding Singer

Any of the Legally Blonde movies

Miss Congeniality

The Princess Bride

Rambo: First Blood (not so much me, but Hubby and Young Son are addicted)

Shaun of the Dead

Airplane (also not one of my favorites, but Hubby can’t resist)

Not Another Teen Movie

Pretty much any James Bond movie

Any in the Pirates of the Carribean series

Any in the Harry Potter series

The Shawshank Redemption

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Psycho

Monty Python’s Meaning of Life & Life of Brian

Down with Love (one of my favorites, particularly for the fashion)

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Hudsucker Proxy

Indiana Jones movies (only the 1st and 3rd for me, don’t care for the 2nd)

National Treasure

Sister Act

Your turn. What movies suck you in over and over again? Do you know why they have this effect?

 

 

A Busy Few Days

Wham-a-lamma-ding-dong, baby, my blog stats tanked over the last couple of days. Everyone must have been as busy as I was. Either that or esoteric discussions of khipu appeal to very few peeps.

So, just what have I been up to these past few days? On Thursday, Hubby and I attended the funeral of our brother-in-law’s mother. The funeral took place in a gorgeous Catholic church done in a Romanesque architectural style, complete with vaulted ceiling and columns that looked like a cross between Corinthian and Ionic. I’ve always been impressed with Catholic statuary and art. This church had a number of fine statues, plus a Black Madonna, direct from Poland, I believe.

Because of the space and construction of the church, the acoustics in the church are great. Our brother-in-law served as cantor for the funeral and we had a rare opportunity to hear his beautiful voice. When he sang for our wedding some two decades ago, he did so with a couple of other family members, so this was the first time I’d ever heard him sing solo.

In the late afternoon, when Young Son returned from school, he and Hubby took off on a trip to my sister’s so they could go deer hunting. One of Hubby’s sisters decided to stay for a couple of days after the funeral because of her long drive. She and I hung out most of the time she was here, with her staying over night at our house because we had empty beds.

Thursday evening we went to visit another of Hubby’s sisters (Hubby has three sisters) and we had a late supper at Famous Dave’s. Daughter couldn’t go with us for this outing because she had band practice.

When we returned, we found Daughter in the middle of making “faux mousse” for a class the next day. Faux mousse is simply chocolate pudding mixed with Cool Whip. Strangely, only about two people in her class had ever heard of mousse, let alone faux mousse, which tends to be a staple on restaurant buffets. Everybody liked it though and the gigantic mixing bowl came back empty after school on Friday.

While Daughter was introducing classmates to faux mousse, my sister-in-law, her parents and I went to St. Cloud. The parents had a meeting to attend and my sister-in-law’s car needed an oil change. After her car was serviced, we went to Bonnie’s Spinning Wheel, a local yarn shop that is filled to the rafters with luscious skeins of every conceivable color and fiber. I picked some out as a birthday gift to my other sister-in-law (the one we had visited the previous night).

After retrieving the parents, we ran a couple of other errands, then headed home to pick up Daughter, who was home from school. We had dinner at Perkin’s, where I ate pot roast that was to die for.

On Saturday morning, my sister-in-law left. She wanted to get an early start on her long drive home. I caught up on dishes and started the laundry. In the afternoon, Daughter and I got a ride from Hubby’s parents to the birthday party for his sister. (Are you keeping track of the sisters/sisters-in-law in this post? It’s hard for me to keep this general, but clear.)

As we approached my sister-in-law’s house, Daughter said, “Are the boys here?” I thought she was talking about my nephews, but it turns out she was talking about Hubby and Young Son. We didn’t expect them back from hunting until Sunday, but sure enough, the car they had taken was in the driveway. Woohoo! They were home early!

We had a lovely birthday party, complete with Dairy Queen cake and a meal of grilled chicken, Caesar salad and garlic toast. I mention the food because within these past few days, starting with the post-funeral meal, I have eaten more food than I thought was humanly possible and it was all delicious.

Visiting and eating. That’s what’s been going on in my life.

Possibilities

New notebook

Blank notebook pages

Don’t you just love a new blank notebook?

Khipu Questions

The preparation of my floor loom for action and my questions about different methods of human communication have brought me back to investigating khipu (quipu), an Inkan system of knotted cords that have yet to be fully deciphered.

I downloaded a bunch of articles on khipu yesterday and read through them this morning. The articles led to numerous questions. Admittedly, these are the questions of a novice, but asking questions is a good way to seek answers, so here goes.

1) 24 colors have been found within the existing khipu in the world. What are the colors? What sources were used to produce them? Where were the sources found?

2) Could something about the color have indicated a particular place or object? What about the combination of 2 or more colors?

3) Did men and/or women make khipu?

4) Was a loom or frame or some other device used to make them, or were they completely handmade?

5) How were khipu traditionally stored? (I look at one and think they’d be a horrible mess to untangle.)

6) When khipu are displayed, they are shown arranged in a circle or stretched horizontally. How did the khipukamayuq (knot readers) arrange them for reading? Did they read from left to right or right to left? Was the main string placed at the top or bottom? Were they read in a circular manner, with the arrangement signifying something like place?

7) Is some element of the khipu related to compass direction?

8 ) Are there “signatures” on any of the khipu? Some sort of element that identifies an individual khipukamayuq?

9) Many of the existing khipu appear to have been used for accounting purposes. Accounting can be fudged so that a company’s financial statements appear to be more favorable than they actually are. Could the khipukamayuq have fudged their khipu for personal gain?

10) Were khipu ever worn by people? Or were they like rosaries?

11) Musical notation indicates sounds and rhythm. Could khipu represent these things?

12) If I wanted to create a language out of string, how would I go about it?

I’ve found more online sources that have answered a few of my questions. Here are a couple of longer explanatory articles:

Variations in the Expression of Inka Power: Information Control in th ePalace of Puruchuco: An Accounting Hierarchy in a Khipu Archive from Coastal Peru by Gary Urton & Carrie J. Brezine

Khipu Accounting in Ancient Peru by Gary Urton & Carrie J. Brezine

The resource that’s going to take the most examination is the Khipu Database Project based out of Harvard and led by Urton and Brezine, authors of the articles mentioned above. The site includes pictures of known khipu and an analysis of the structures of many khipu in the hopes that patterns can be found so this knot language can be interpreted.

How Fiction Works by James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wood’s language usage feels old-school to me. Had to reread passages to understand what he was getting at. He makes many useful observations about fiction (particularly about conventions in fiction) that are helpful to writers. Wood makes many references to classic literature and shows how earlier writers influenced later writers. My hangup is that I haven’t read most of the literature he discusses. [Sad day!:]

View all my reviews >>

Everyman by Philip Roth

Everyman by Philip Roth

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a quiet story with an apt title. The writing is superb. Roth makes you care about this ordinary man while also keeping you at some remove from him.

View all my reviews >>

The Variety of Human Language

I’ve been thinking about the different ways human beings tell stories. I started a list, basing it on our senses.

Visual – painting, drawing, fiber arts, signs, movies/videos, writing (nonfiction, fiction, poetry, etc.), digital (internet, mobile devices, etc.), smoke signals, flag signals, maps, doppler maps, theater, objects (exhibits), sign language, cards (tarot, playing cards, etc.), tattoos, hieroglyphics,  petroglyphs, cuneiform, numbers, alphabets, text messaging

Auditory – speech, recordings (audiobooks, podcasts, albums, etc.), music/song, rhythm, Morse code, radar/echo-location, movies/videos

Kinesthetic/Touch – dance, body language (gestures), sign language, braille, sculpture, sex, khipu

Smell – scratch-n-sniff stickers (Can we tell stories through smell?)

Taste – Babies put things in their mouths.

By the time I got to the end, it had turned into a list of the different ways we communicate with each other. (Anyone got ideas about how we communicate via smell and taste?)

This list led to several questions:

1) If a person was alone, would there be any need to communicate? With one’s self, perhaps?

2) If a person never learned language, what sort of thoughts would form? Would they be structured in any way, or just a series of sense impressions?

3) Why is so much of communication visual? (I think I can surmise the answer to this question.)

Along with questions, the list led to some observations.

1) There are two parts (at least) to communication: the content that’s being communicated and the vehicle for communicating that content. (I guess it would also help if there was someone on the receiving end of the communication.)

2) We have highly visual languages built of characters/lines/drawings, etc. These visual languages tend to be complex.

3) When it comes to auditory and kinesthetic languages, they tend to be reduced, compacted into limited symbols that can be recombined in infinite ways.

These are the first things I thought about my list, but they are by no means definitive. I’ve got a lot more thinking to do about the subject. In the meantime, I’ve added several links to my sidebar that refer to some of the languages that most of us don’t typically use. Some of the links are for translators, so you can have fun seeing how our standard written language is transformed into Morse code or braille or semaphore.

FtTP: Chantal Claret + Meat Loaf

Before I head to work in the mornings, I plop down in front of the telly and catch me some VH1 videos while munching my bran flakes. Lately Morningwood’s video for “Best of Me” has been getting a lot of airplay. Every time I see the video, I have an overwhelming desire to pair singer Chantal Claret with Meat Loaf. She seems to have an air of rock opera about her that reminds me of Meat Loaf.

Open Door Writing Prompt

There is a deliciously provocative line in The Killers‘ song “Human.”

Sometimes I get nervous when I see an open door.

Whenever I hear this line, questions pop into my head. Why do open doors make the singer nervous? (I don’t necessarily take this to mean the literal singer, Brandon Flowers, but, like in literature, the narrative singer of the song.) What’s going on through the open door? Why is the nervousness only there some of the time? The line makes the imagination streak naked through the streets.

It’s also the sort of line that can hook a person into a story, thus it makes a great writing prompt.

If you’ve got nothing better to do, have a go at it.

Zen Master Leaf Blower

Another day of leaf pick-up for me. My goal was to get two of the six large piles cleaned up. I finished one pile by 12:30, then came into the house for lunch. I heated up some of Hubby’s leftover pizza and had just started eating when he came home from his parents’ house. He told me to put my food away; his folks had invited us to lunch.

After lunch, I went to the doctor’s office and had a physical. When I returned, I found Hubby using the leaf blower, chasing acorns and other little bits of debris into the second pile of leaves I was planning to pick up. He finished the area he was working on, leaving the grass looking like perfectly combed hair. While I picked up the second pile, he went around to the backyard and continued his leaf blowing.

Young Son arrived home from school and I enlisted him to help with leaves. Together, we managed to clean up all six piles. Woohoo! (I’ll be sore tomorrow – heck, I’m sore now – but at least we’re done.) The trailer was filled and our compost heap became a towering mass of leaves.

Compost pile filled with leaves.

Meanwhile, Hubby continued his leaf blowing meditation. Young Son and I commented to each other about how he seemed to be abnormally obsessive about cleaning the lawn this year. We guessed it had something to do with the new leaf blower. Hubby admitted as much, saying that using the leaf blower was relaxing.  He’s a regular Zen Master Leaf Blower.

Zen Master Leaf Blower - Note the line of leaves and the combed grass behind the Zen Master.