marc and katie's life

Westward Ho!

2011-06-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

We're packin' up our every possession and headin' West! Our ten-day road trip will include Niagara Falls, Mackinac Island, the world's largest ceramic figurine, the Spam Museum, parts of Canada, Mt. Rushmore, an old west town inhabited entirely by robots, Carhenge (think Stonehenge with cars), and a zillion other quirky sights in between. Farewell Cape Ann, we're headin' out to see America!

Doing Without

2011-06-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Marc, we never ran out of firewood. That pile was always stocked. But we did do without a lot of stuff in this experimental year, which is ending at the end of this month. We've really enjoyed doing without some things (*), and some others we'll be happy to have again (§), and still others come with both pros and cons, and we'll be happy to have them, or not, in the future.

Stuff we did without:

TV *

Driveway (road access to house) *

Any non-homemade decorations *

Blender §

Mixer §

Couch §

Mixing Bowls §

Radio/Speakers §

Piano §

Cell Phone

Doorbell (or knocker, or any way for visitors to show they're here)

Dishwasher

Microwave

Car

Cape Cod Surprises

2011-06-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

Before now, I'd never been to Cape Cod. But I'd read a few novels set there, and the Cape Cod of my imagination was dreamy and mystical and quiet. I couldn't wait to take a camping trip with Daniel and Michelle and see it for myself! Turns out, Cape Cod was full of surprises.

In my imagination, all of Cape Cod was windswept sand dunes. But it's actually very wooded. It felt very New Englandy, which surprised me. And the woods, it turns out, are chock-full of ticks. Beastly things! Nasty creatures! Horrible, loathsome bloodsuckers! We had eleven ticks between us all, and seven just between Marc and me! I googled "Cape Cod lyme disease", hoping to find something that said, "incidents of lyme disease on Cape Cod are extremely rare," but instead came up with this:

"Lyme disease on Cape Cod has reached near epidemic proportions, with Nantucket being called the Lyme capitol of the world."

oh goody!

Another surprise: giant horseshoe crabs!

I had also imagined sleepy, dry hot summery days on Cape Cod. But instead, we got a monster thunderstorm with hail the size of dimes pounding down on our heads! Here Marc and Daniel are rushing to save our tent from the pool of water that surrounded it in a matter of minutes:

Another surprise is that there's an amazing Portuguese bakery out on the tip of the cape, that makes the most amazing malasadas!

Maybe my favorite surprise, though, was the one we offered to other beach patrons. Harnessing our European sensibilities, we decided that it was fully permissible to be semi-nude on the beach. Shirt or shorts, take your pick.

The Shakers: it's not too late to join!

2011-06-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

I've always liked the Shakers. What's not to like about a people whose intention was nothing less than to build Heaven on earth? Plus, they ate apple pie almost every day. And made really excellent chairs. And worshipped by dancing.

They believed in simplicity above all, and were the most successful communal society America's ever seen.

They pooled their possessions and built perfect little towns, where they worked hard everyday to sustain themselves. They considered good work a form of worship. They sang a lot. They ate beans and cream for dinner and said it was the most delicious thing in the world.

The didn't believe in nuclear families. Instead, they organized into large, communal groups.

They believed in gender equality waaay before anyone else did -- we're talking equal rights in the 1780's! At their peak, there were thousands of Shakers, in Shaker towns all across the eastern US.

A few of their towns are open to the public. There's one in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Meredith and her friend Lexie were visiting from Utah, so we took 'em along.

The place is gorgeous and peaceful...

...and empty. Because, well here's the problem: Shakers believe in celibacy. So, without a steady influx of new converts, they're destined to die out. They believe in keeping men and women separate. When we visited their meeting house, there was a door for the men, and a door for the women on the other end of the building. We sat on opposite sides of the room. Quirky. Lovable. But inevitably unsustainable.

There are now three Shakers left in the world. They live in Maine. And they're happy to accept new recruits! Actually I really wonder why they haven't had an influx of new members lately. It seems like it's just the thing for these insecure times. Simple, old-school, dependable living. The lifestyle seems charming.

I was completely enticed by the Shakers' simplicity, their connection to the seasons, their industrious hard work, their worship-through-music-and-dance, and their true sense of equality. Marc and I would totally join --it would be a next great adventure!-- if not for he whole becoming mere brother and sister thing. ...and the religion thing. ...aaaand the beans and cream thing. But other than that, we're so in!

Spring Roundup

2011-06-04T08:38:00.000-07:00

Photo-tour of ways we tried to distract ourselves from the fact that Spring was just a cold wet mess this year in New England:

The Big Apple Circus came to Boston...

...and we got to go with the kidlets, who were sometimes in awe and sometimes very bored.

Figure drawing night at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- what a sight!

3-wheeled car, love at first sight.

Newport, Rhode Island: a little bit of coastal England...

...and a tiny bit of China. Plus a zillion gigantic mansions. What a place!

Intense egg dyeing. Masterpieces were created.

Easter feast at our house. In America! With family!

The season's first surfers offer hope. Summer is going to come. right? .....right?

Living Deliberately

2011-05-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

the pile of rocks left by pilgrims who visit thoreau's cabin site.

Thoreau and Marc are two peas in a pod.

So many times I have been delighted to be attached to Marc, because he makes me cool by association. He's always doing the thing I don't dare to do. Little things, like swimming in our yard even though it's 59 degrees outside.

And joining the local Shakespeare Troupe. And composing beautiful music.

And setting up our nephew with the event of his five-year-old lifetime by befriending the guys working construction nearby.

We took a trip to Concord a week or so ago. sigh! New England is so beautiful!

We paid our respects at the graves of Thoreau, Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott.

And crossed the bridge where they fired the "shot heard round the world". The best part, though, was this pithy inscription on the grave of the British soldiers who died there:

We hiked around Walden Pond...

and took a brisk swim in the pond.

I think Marc's willingness to do is the number one reason we make a good team in life. It's my job to dream the big dreams, and convince us that it's possible. Then, at the crucial moment when, if I were on my own, I would be too afraid to really take the leap, Marc grabs my hand and takes the leap for both of us. Thanks to him, when we come to die, we will have lived.

.

Ocean Trash

2011-05-04T06:03:00.000-07:00

On Earth Day we had ourselves a little coastal cleanup. There's nothing like cleaning up other people's litter to make you depressed about humanity. Just along our local coastline we collected this heap of junk:

(the pile is higher than it seems in the photo)

I know that most people weren't lucky enough to be raised on Don't Waste Utah ads (that guy came to my elementary school. Rock star status). But littering really gets my knickers in a twist.

True story:

Early one morning last winter, just as dawn was breaking, Marc was standing out on the rock and saw, up the coast, a hunched old man in a tattered sweater slowly working his way down toward the water. He had a bulging garbage bag in his hand.

"He's not gonna..." Marc thought.

I mean, no way, right? This is an elderly gentleman who lives on this coast in the winter, which means he's gotta have a serious love of harsh mother nature.

The guy hobbled on down to the rocks above the water, and then just stared out onto the icy sea.

"Yeah, he's just soakin' it all in, like I am," Marc thought.

And then the dude hurled his bag of trash right out onto the water, and watched it slowly float away.

What the hell?

Kids get it. Grown-ups don't. Is this how it's always going to be?

We've belonged to the Ocean Conservancy for a long time. They do good things. But also, kids around the world do good things for the ocean and then send their findings to the Ocean Conservancy.

Nothing beats a good bar graph, except a good bar graph in kids' handwriting.

Based on what we've seen, our stats around here pretty much match what these kids saw. Plastic everywhere. It's amazing, the plastic garbage we produce. We go big. We don't just litter our coastlines with the stuff. We create land-masses.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating glob of plastic garbage twice

the size

of Texas.

In some places the floating garbage is 90 feet deep. And in other places, garbage outweighs plankton by 6 to 1. That is a monster island of our own disgusting waste.

Animals eat it.

In 2006, a UN survey concluded that every square mile of ocean has 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it. No wonder we get a new batch of trash here with every high tide. It's bleak. It's bad. It's sad.

Even though what I do won't make even tiniest difference, I'm gonna keep picking it up. And mark my words: when I'm a billionaire, I'm taking a thousand cargo ships out there, and I'm cleaning up that crap! Then maybe the Don't Waste Utah guy would take me for a ride in his awesome car.

My Winter of Hibernation: Restoring Antique Chairs

2011-04-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

Sunset in the Windows

Our landlady had a whole bunch of antique chairs in sad shape. I agreed to bring them back to life in exchange for part of the rent! I knew how to refinish the wood since my dad forced me to help him refinish chairs when I was younger (hated it then, love it now. typical). But during the winter I also learned some sweet new seat-weaving skills.

I'll just go ahead and admit that this makes me a whole new brand of geek.

Whatever I don't care. Because seat-weaving is really, really satisfying! Here's the basic process for each caned chair that needed a complete makeover:

I did a few of them, most of which were in a sad state at the beginning. (Marc did all the paint-stripping for me, because he is the nicest man.) You can see on the bottom left that I ran out of caning pegs and started using chopsticks. Making do.

The cool thing was that most people who saw these chairs in their original state (myself included), thought, wow, these need to go to the dump. there is no saving these chairs. They were so sickly. And so wobbly they seemed about to fall apart. But they are beautiful now, ready for another solid two hundred years.

Two Cane Chairs - Right, finished; Left, in Progress

Other chairs, that have a groove around the seat instead of holes, require sheet cane, which you buy pre-woven and then install. It's way faster than hand-caning, but really annoying!

Sheet Cane Installation in Progress

With some other chairs the wood was fine and I just wove new seats. This one was an old shaker rocker that had the wrong kind of seat:

Blue Rocker Before - With Dilapidated Old Cane Seat

Blue Rocker After - With Shaker Tape

And here's two antique fiber rush rockers... the one on the right is really old:

Fiber Rush Rockers Before

Fiber Rush Weaving

Fiber rush makes a really sturdy, pretty seat, but my hands were always covered in blisters after a few hours of weaving!

After weaving, you can stain the rush to match the chair.

Fiber Rush Rockers After

After a winter of this, I am completely converted. Learn new hobbies and pay the rent? I'll take it!

I plan to scour second-hand shops from now until I die, in search of dilapidated old chairs to bring back to life. So if you ever see any, grab 'em for me!

My Winter of Hibernation: Knitting

2011-04-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

Last winter I busted out the knitting needles for the first time since we moved to England, and kind of went berzerk.

I had about twenty projects I wanted to undertake, but yarn (especially good yarn) is expe-hen-sive! Something had to be done.

So I learned how to "recycle" yarn by unraveling sweaters. Once you learn what to look for in the way sweaters are constructed, you can really cash-in. I went to the Goodwill Outlet (praise it forever and ever amen), and perused their mountains of sweaters. I came away with a bunch of 3XXX sweaters made of really nice yarn, many of which were still brand new with tags attached! Then the unraveling began.

With this sweater alone, I got at least $50 worth of yarn for $1.50.

Plus, it came with the satisfaction of unraveling a sweater, which was irresistible even to Marc. We spent a couple days sitting by the fire unraveling stuff. It's like popping bubble wrap, but better.

Now, after a winter of knitting, I still have TONS of yarn left.

In addition to all the projects I have sitting around unfinished, here are some I did finish:

Kangaroo (with front pocket) and Bunny bean bag dolls for Logan and Eva

Juggling Balls

Tea Kettle Cozy and Mug Cozy

I should add that Marc will knit, too, when coerced. And for Christmas we did some teamwork on a knitted shopping bag for his earth-friendly brother Peter. It's made out of plastic grocery bags. After cutting the plastic into slits and then weaving it into a "yarn," it knits up into super strong stuff. We forgot to take a picture of ours but it basically looked like this:

We were working on the project on the train and got so many curious looks and people asking, "Sorry to interrupt, but what on earth are you doing?"

The process was much slower than we expected, so at the end we declared we'd never do it again. But lately I've seen some pretty amazing stuff online knitted out of plastic bags, including umbrellas and clothes, and I'm tempted to take it up again.

I also made my first piece of "real" clothing for little Eva. This cardigan took forever, too, but it was really satisfying and inspired me to launch full-force into knitting clothing.

All these hands-on projects were really satisfying to a part of my brain that's probably been dormant for a while. I don't feel like a full-blown knitting geek yet (right? ..... right?), and I'm sure I'll never be an expert because I'm too impatient, but if you need an old sweater unraveled and turned into a hat, I'm your man.

My Winter of Hibernation: Reading by the Fire

2011-04-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

After I submitted my dissertation, I went deep into winter hibernation.

It was another aspect of our experimental lifestyle this year. I wanted to shut myself away from the world, and take stock.

Besides my frigid walks along the coast and in the woods, I left the house exactly two times in two months.

Since our house opens out onto the big, wide, ocean, I never felt a trace of cabin fever.

The winter felt like a big, deep breath taken in between deep dives into life. I reveled in my transition time, and clung to my solitude, and thought everyday how lucky I was that I had the time and the means to take big, long rest.

"O ye that have your eyeballs vexed and tired,

Feast them upon the wideness of the sea!"

- keats

I basically spent my winter doing three decidedly un-academic things. Reading by the fire was one of them (posts on the other two later).

It was on my List of Things to Do Before I Die: spend a winter reading by the fire. No TV, no movies, no Facebook, minimal communication with the outside world... just me and winter and books and a fire.

So we made it happen. Marc spent the greater part of the autumn scavenging firewood, sawing it all old-fashioned like, and chopping it into perfect logs. Man, did he stock us up a lotta wood. Even now, emerging out the other side of winter, we've hardly made a dent in our stash.

Our evenings were pretty much just like this painting: big old fire, big old house, hardwood floors, slightly uncomfortable antique furniture. Piles and piles of books from the Goodwill Outlet Store (praise it forever and ever amen). No restrictive black dress, though. More like sweats. Purple sweats.

Just me and the winter and the fireplace and the books. I had romantic notions, clearly.

So what did I learn from my winter reading by the fire? That reading by the fire, like anything, can be overdone. ha! Why did I not suspect this before?

Books and I are taking a break for a while.

10 Reasons to Cheer

2011-04-12T11:08:00.000-07:00

1. The thermometer finally moved up above 60 degrees. When it's that warm, it means you can take your morning cup of tea right out onto the rock. You might feel compelled to dance jigs barefoot in your pajamas, tea cup in hand.

2. Relatives from Utah came to Cape Ann to visit our little coastal heaven. They made exclamations of joy. They scoured the coast for sea glass. They offered up a stunningly generous graduation gift. They agreed to go out with Marc in the canoe.

3. This moment right here:

4. And here:

no cell phones were harmed in the filming of this canoe disaster.
Plus, the kids were both game to go out paddling right afterwards!

5. Then there's this charming brother-sister scene...

6. ...Which is especially poignant for me, since that very evening I got to witness the triumphs of my own brother, who shared my childhood. We are growing up.

7. His own doctoral showdown happened only a week after mine. But his was more fun (for the rest of us): a full-blown big band concert of his own compositions at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

The Daniel Henderson Big Band (Daniel is crossed-eyed on the left)

8. His performance, his music, and even his more-than-expert band, was a delightful expression of Danielness. I'll steal a line from his concert notes. Daniel was describing Stravinsky, but I think it describes his own music perfectly: "a blend of charm, humor, and derangement." It was obvious the band was having a fantastic time, as was the audience!

He sings, too!

9. Not to be overshadowed by a doctoral jazz concert, is our ownership of a particularly excellent toy. With our Stomp Rocket (thanks Meikles!), we devised a Dodge-the-Rocket game that entertains both children and adults. Someone will almost certainly lose an eye.

10. Last weekend, the sun came out, we ventured outdoors once again, and visitors big and small ran along our coast, pulled our croquet cart frantically around the lawn, swung in the tire swing giggling, and cooked hot dogs over a bonfire on the edge of the water while the bright pink and purple sun set over the ocean.

Spring is here, and I feel us coming alive again.

Viva Highlights

2011-04-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a somewhat scattered collection of photos from that existential week back in England. At first, we felt like we were in the strangest twilight zone on the planet, as strangers in a familiar land. We were freaked out.

Gloucester Cathedral - familiar to Harry Potter fans?

Then, when that feeling wore off, we felt so at home that it truly felt like we'd never left, and when we finally arrived in Kenilworth near the end of the week, I was quite prepared to open the door to our flat, dump our bags, and pick up right where we'd left off. It was like America never happened. So that was weird, too.

Knaresborough

We spent the week cruising around England visiting the last few sites that were on our list but we'd never gotten around to seeing. It was a salutary tour, and it succeeded in giving us a real sense of closure.

Mother Shipton's Hanging Well
famous since the Middle Ages, this magic dripping well turns things to stone. For real.

My viva was on the final day of our trip, so everything was sort of leading up to that pivotal moment. I wondered if that would turn out to be a bad plan, and that I'd just simmer in nervousness the whole time. But it was good. I felt serene. Probably because we were wandering around places like this:

Chatsworth House Garden (it's the house in Pride and Prejudice and The Duchess)

One of the places on our list was Whitby Abbey, a ruined abbey perched dramatically on cliffs overlooking the sea. It's quite far up north, but we made the pilgrimage, and oh man am I glad we did. Because as fate would have it, there was a peculiar convention going on that very day.

Whitby Abbey

It was the annual World Goth Convention. They convene at Whitby every year because the abbey is the setting of Bram Stoker's Dracula. And there are no words to describe the spectacle that was the unofficial Goth-photo shoot in the cemetery near the abbey.

Whitby from the cemetery near the abbey

The spectacle began with a trickle and grew up around us, as we were innocently wandering the cemetery. First there were two or three people in odd gothic victorian clothes, and I was trying to sneakily take pictures of them. Then came more, and more, and then photographers came out of nowhere. More and more hordes of both Goths and photographers flooded in to the church yard, and suddenly we found ourselves smack in the center of the most amazing impromptu costume party I've ever seen.

um.....what's...happening? more and more people arrive

My favorite part was that people in elaborate outfits would just set up shop somewhere and start posing... for nobody. It was fantastic. But then photographers would somehow materialize out of nowhere and snap photo after photo as the crowd grew and grew. I wish I'd joined in the fray and taken more pictures. But I was too busy continuously retrieving my jaw from the ground and staring all around me in awe.

Here's a typical scene:

This woman got up on the tomb, and started posing dramatically. I think she was trying to look like she was flying. Suddenly a photographer or two noticed her, and the crowd grew and grew as she shifted from pose to pose. I must have caught her between poses in this shot, because usually her arms were outstretched, or reaching threateningly toward the cameras.

I also love that the above photo has an orb in the left corner. Because during this amazing event, I overheard one awesomely costumed couple passionately discussing the capturing of ghost orbs on camera. yesssss.

Just.

Look.

I have no words.

But, I would like to take this opportunity to say that on this particular day I happened to wear almost all white/khaki. So that was great.

I am kicking myself that I didn't get more, better pictures. But you can use your imagination. When we left, the event was still going strong, and it was hard to tear ourselves away. The whole church yard was crawling with incredibly costumed Goths of all ages, from kids to seniors. I'll be forever delighted to have witnessed it.

tearing ourselves away, as the crowds of Goths kept streaming in

The next morning was my viva. To ensure I didn't get too comfortable on the way there, we were this close to being in a car accident, and then barely escaped running over a big old bird. So my heart was pumping. Marc was snapping photos as we approached the very moment. Here's one from the elevator up to the meeting room, where I was making sure my fly wasn't open and my shirt wasn't tucked into my underwear -- and that I had, indeed, remembered to wear pants.

I think he captured my "nervited" state

And afterwards, one more walk on our beloved footpaths around the castle. With some celebratory leaping here and there...

Bidding farewell to our dear Kenilworth was sad and surreal, and complicated by the fact that we felt like we'd never left, and that America didn't really exist.

A sign at the airport on our way home seemed to capture something about the past four years. It was a rich and wonderful time for us, being stretched in so many new directions.

A chapter has closed, a new one has somehow already begun, and my stunned disbelief persists.

Yeah. It Feels Like That.

2011-03-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hotel Receptionist as I checked out to head to the airport in England: "Our computers are down so I'll need to send your receipt on to your home address. Let me just write it down..." (grabs a pen and starts writing "Miss") "Now, it's Miss..."

Me: "ummm..."

Receptionist: "Or it is Mrs....or Ms, rather?"

Me: "uhhhh....ha, actually, it's Dr, as of yesterday."

Receptionist: "Oh!" (shocked blinking) "...Now is that you, or your husband?"

Me: "It's me."

Receptionist: "Oh!" (frantically scribbles out "Miss" and writes "Dr") "Well done. Dr. Nelson, then?"

Me: "I guess, but you could just address it to Katie Nelson."

Receptionist: "But I thought you said you were the one who was the doctor."

Me: "Yeah..."

Receptionist: "I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused... You're Dr. Nelson, am I right?"

Me: "I am, but you could just... you know what, nevermind, I don't think I need a receipt."

Receptionist: (looking relieved) "Alright, I'm sure you can just check your bank statement can't you." (crumpling up the page of Miss-es and Dr-s). "And congratulations! "

Me: "Thanks, very much!"

Another long flight, after an existential week in England, and we're back in America where mail is not addressed by title, and I will hopefully never go through that again.

But the viva itself, I could definitely stand to do again. It was positive, pleasant, surreal, and wonderful. To be sitting there, with these great minds talking for hours about my book! And they said it was good. They said it was really good.

vita est bona. life is good.

Confer Title Here

2011-03-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hi guys, Marc here. Pardon the lengthiness of this post. I'm making up for how seldom I write on this blog. AND, today marks the end of something really really big.

If everything goes as planned I’ll be getting remarried today.

Katie Nelson was good, nigh perfect. There was nothing wrong with that wife. I just wanted someone with a little more, how should I put it, doctorality to her. So the new wife will have all the attributes of the old, but with one significant bonus: she’ll be a doctor of philosophy.

Yes, with my new wife I want a new title. Goodbye Mrs. Nelson, hello Dr. Katie.

But there’s one catch. It’s all about the intentions: the woman for me can’t have worked for the title just for the sake of having the title. In fact, few of the most common motivations for earning a PhD would impress me. Which is why I’ve chosen THIS PhD candidate:

Knaresborough, England. Yesterday

Katie didn’t do it for the job prospects. Her idea of a great job is teaching basic history courses like world history and ancient history, engaging with students at the introductory level, and shunning the politics and research of the tenure track. That and selling kick-ass sodas. All this she could have done with her Master’s.

She didn’t do it for the money. No, on the contrary. While the vast majority of PhD candidates in her class are applying for post docs, research grants, or tenure-track professorships, Katie decided to write a novel. One geared toward teenagers. Because she wanted to. And because I told her it would be a waste of talent if she didn’t!

She didn’t do it for the recognition. Not for any initiation into the academic elite, the less than 1% of Americans who complete a doctoral program. In fact, I don’t know anyone more critical of academics than Katie. Now, this might seem hypocritical. A PhD candidate who criticizes academics? Until you realize what kind of academic Katie is: one who writes in plain English; one who loves to inspire students to think and hear them—not herself—speak; one who would write a novel for teenagers after submitting her diss; one who would call her dissertation her diss; one who would want to move to Utah given her choice of anywhere in the world; one who would appreciate a part-time job teaching introductory history courses because she genuinely loves to inspire college students and one who is good at it; one who thinks that “publish or perish” is a bitch.

The more I think about it, the less I think I know why she did it. But some things are clear.

Katie obviously likes rigorous intellectual stimulation. She eats it up and uses it in her everyday. It’s one of the most admirable things about her I think. One of her greatest goals in life is to rid her thinking of all bias and keep a clear and open mind. Earning a PhD has helped her in that goal. All the reading she has done in the last three years would do that for anyone. Not to mention writing a 300 page book!

It’s clear that part of her reason for completing a PhD is the opportunity it gave us to travel. Living in Europe for three years doesn’t come easy and post-grad work is a great way to get that visa in your passport.

She wouldn’t have gone far without that ardent love of history itself that you can’t help noticing about her. Who can tell the story of Edward the Second’s demise with such relish? Who else would site the Bayeux tapestry as the highlight of her trip to Northern France, or the Book of Kells as the highlight of her trip to Dublin? Who else do you know that would reconsider the fight to stop global warming because of her insight that change has always been inevitable? No one I know loves history like Katie does.

Most importantly, she did it, I think, to prove it to herself that she could. If she comes out of that room today with a smile, she knows that she held herself up to the light, nakedly and honestly, gave it her best, never sacrificed anything, and came away knowing, for herself, that she is excellent. Emerson says it all:

“None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to the whisper which is heard by him alone.”

So. She did it. She reached the pinnacle of studenthood. She finished an eleven year journey with flying colors (colours?). She made me and everyone she knows proud to call her a friend. No matter what happens in that room. Not because she earned a new title. Because of her reasons for doing it.

Top Ten Things I Will Not Do At My Viva

2011-03-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

Our flight leaves tonight for England, and on March 28, 10:30 am GDT, I will defend my dissertation before a panel of world experts. My fate will hang in the balance. It will all be in my hands. I must do everything right. I have therefore drawn up a list of

Top Ten Things I Will Not Do at My Viva:

10. Realize suddenly that I forgot to wear pants.

9. Phrase all my answers in the form of a question.

8. Declare apathetically that history is useless.

7. When asked to explain my methodological approach, say, "I drew almost exclusively from Wikipedia."

6. Mock British dental hygiene.

5. Suddenly wail, "Okay, okay! I never read any of those books! It's all a lie!"

4. Admit that I didn't know who Marco Polo was until the day before I gave a lecture on him.

3. When asked to describe my research approach, say, "It was easy. I just watched a lot of costume dramas."

2. Ask if I can Phone a Friend.

1. If they offer me a doctorate, say, "A doctorate?! I was just here for the food!"

not freaking out. not freaking out. not freaking out...

Shakespeare Will Follow You Anywhere

2011-03-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

Marc's job at the hardware store plopped him right in the center of local society. You should see when we walk around downtown -- every other passing stranger greets him by name.

It's like we've lived here all our lives. And everybody loves Marc!

Anyway, one of the guys who frequents the hardware store is also the director of the Cape Ann Shakespeare Troupe. And he cast Marc as Sebastien in The Tempest during a conversation in the plumbing aisle.

And so it was that Marc got back on the stage after a ten-year hiatus. And since we spent our years in England watching every production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, it connected the dots nicely. Shakespeare has been a theme in our lives for a long time.

Sebastien is the sinister, sarcastic bad guy who decides to murder his brother. His equally sarcastic and evil cohort, Antonio, talks him into it.

a shot from rehearsal

He did an awesome job. I wish you could have seen it, seriously. He had the crowd laughing and gasping, and got lots of compliments from strangers in the audience after the show. Two middle-aged ladies were even overheard talking about how he was "easy on the eyes". (Another replied, "Yes. he. is." Ha!)

Besides the sexy Sebastien, the play's highlights included live music, written for the play by a composer at the New England Conservatory (Daniel's school, by the way), and dancers playing Ariel, the nymph.

I wish you had come, if not to see the play, then to have eaten this chocolate cake that Michelle brought him, topped with ganache and a mound of chocolate candy.

As it was, the two of us managed to eat the whole thing ourselves.

after the play -- Daniel is feeling particularly Shakespearean

Everybody asks him if more plays are in his future. And apparently the answer is yes. They've already roped him into doing A Shakespeare Celebration for Shakespeare's upcoming birthday. It's a show that blends Shakespeare with music, and he's opted to play his guitar, not deliver lines. (Because there are fewer rehearsals that way, and when you live in a beach house and the sun has finally begun to to shine...you don't wanna miss it, you know?)

Check out the venue! It's Rockport's Shalin Liu Performance Center downtown, right on the water. Annnnnnd they're serving birthday cake and punch after the show. So...why haven't you bought that plane ticket yet?

Heaven Comes in Bins

2011-03-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

There is a wondrous place in Boston. It's not The Old North Church or Faneuil Hall ... and it ain't no Fenway Park or Harvard University, neither.

It's way better.

It's the Goodwill Outlet Store.

This is no ordinary Goodwill store. It's the place where Goodwill items go to die. Or, to get moved out the door as fast a humanly possible. And man, it is a sight to behold. The human drama! The maneuvering and finagling! The incredible mountains of stuff!

Here's why, since my brother Daniel introduced us to this Promised Land last Fall, we feel a profound desire to go there every time we're in Boston:

Books. 33 cents each. I'm talking giant bins and bins and bins full of books. For 33 cents! Sometimes there will be a whole bin full of brand new hardbacks. Sometimes you'll find a complete Dickens collection. Sometimes you'll find every book on knitting published since 1976. Sometimes it's 50 copies of the Da Vinci Code. Sometimes you get to dig through paperback copies of all the classics. Sometimes, as in my mom's case, your favorite childhood book--the one you've been searching for in vain for the past ten years--is sitting there on the top of the pile, waiting for you.

For me, walking into that place is roughly equivalent to what I always imagined it must feel like to walk into that one room in Charlie and Chocolate Factory. ...The one where candy is growing everywhere, and he drinks chocolate from a tea cup and then eats the cup. It's like that. Except with books.

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky,

My piles of books are a mile high.

How I love them!

How I need them!

I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

-arnold lobel

Waiting for Spring

2011-03-12T12:46:00.000-08:00

Groceries by Canoe

2011-03-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

At breakfast:

Katie: we're almost out of milk.

Marc: mmm.

After breakfast:

Marc: I'll be outside if you need me.

Katie: okay.

One hour later:

Living on the Edge

2011-02-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

Here's one of the reasons all the other houses out here on the edge of the Atlantic are shut up for the winter.

The little road that leads from our house out to the main road was a solid sheet of ice the other morning. I'm talking like three inches of slippery ice, coating the road from top to bottom. It was like someone took a Zamboni to it.

One of the reasons we are generally not bothered by stuff like this is that we don't get around with a car. When we need to get somewhere, we walk or ride bikes; when we need groceries, we have them delivered.

But on this morning, neither of those worked. At about 8:30 our delivery driver called to say he was stuck at the top of our road, waiting for a tow truck to winch him back out to the main road. (That road was completely clear; ours was an ice rink. Typical.) The driver said that if we wanted our groceries we could walk up there and get them, because no car was going to survive a trip down our road that day. So we threw on some boots and headed out, but with our first step onto the road both of us were flat on our faces.

I felt like a 95-year-old, shuffling along by the centimeter trying to keep my body upright. We laughed and laughed our way up the hill, stepping a few inches and then sliding back down a few more. We tried to get some traction by walking along the edge of the road, where there was knee-deep icy snow, but usually we couldn't walk there because it was actually snow-covered bushes.

When we finally made it to the stranded grocery delivery truck and gathered our stash, there was way too much to carry, even after we'd crammed Marc's Alps backpack full of goods. But that's where the ice came in handy: we just laid our gallons of milk and boxes of cereal on the ice, and off they slid down the hill to home!

Then Marc had to go to work. There was no getting the bike up that hill, so he ventured back up on foot again, this time with his bike on his shoulder. Never been more impressed.

I followed him, with the camera, because someone had to be there to document his potentially epic slip and fall if it should happen. And maybe call an ambulance. Sadly/happily, it didn't happen. Here he's approaching the top of the road, where the delivery truck was still waiting for his rescue winch. When Marc got to the main road, it was all cleared and salted and off he cruised to work.

I was left to wonder about the chicken-and-egg situation out on the edge of the water. Does no one live out here in the winter because the road (and everything else) turns to a sheet of ice? Or does the town opt not to plow and salt our road because they think no one is crazy enough to live out here in the middle of winter?

A Little Winter Never Hurt Anybody

2011-02-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

I finally remembered to grab the camera in time to get a shot of Marc heading out the door on his morning commute. People around here think he's crazy; I think he's inspiring. Maybe it's a fine line.

When we dreamed up this lifestyle, where we would live out on the edge of the water miles outside of town, and where he would commute to town on bicycle throughout the depths of winter, we knew it was going to be extreme.

Extremely awesome!

Of course, I'm the one that gets to stay bundled up at home all day. But Marc has been pretty pumped about this aspect of our experimental lifestyle, too.

Read the aticle he wrote for the Cape Ann Beacon (local newspaper) and see if he doesn't inspire you too!

click to enlarge ... also, enjoy the misspelling of his name at the end.

Benjamin Franklin: Still Awesome

2011-02-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

When my youngest brother Sam was only about two or three, he was obsessed with Benjamin Franklin. He got a green plastic bowler hat on St. Patrick's Day and immediately called it a "Ben Franklin Hat" (because in his mind, Ben Franklin wore hats like that...?). For about a year, little Sam was rarely seen without his distinguished Hat.

I thought the hat thing was cute but didn't get the Ben Franklin obsession really. I mean, yeah I guess he was clever to put a key on a kite, and sure, he signed a bunch of important documents, but didn't everyone? :)

Last year I started thinking he might be cool, just because the actor Tom Wilkinson made him seem so interesting in the John Adams miniseries. I was convinced to give the guy a chance, and a couple days ago I picked up his autobiography (it's in the public domain, so read away).

So it's only now that I've discovered that my little brother was way ahead of me on this one: the dude was brilliant and inspiring. Completely deserving of hero-worship. Where can I get a green plastic hat?

To the Future

2011-02-01T13:16:00.000-08:00

Snowy day. Quiet day.

I only want to be wrapped up in winter and huddled inside with music and thoughts.

What are we going to choose next?

Oh the wintry ocean. Oh the paths ahead. The trajectory of my lucky fate.

Oh the choices I've made, the choices I've yet to make.

The Worm from Heaven

2011-01-28T13:46:00.000-08:00

Crows are really smart. I've known this for a good while, mostly because Marc has the capacity to talk passionately about birds in the genus corvus for a long, long time. They're his favorite animal.

There are resident crows out here on the coast, and since our house is nestled inside a circular grove of locust trees they've been hanging around here a lot. Especially since they've discovered our compost pile. It's handy-- we chuck our compost right out the kitchen window. To the crows that window is like a drive-through service, I think. They love to come load up.

They especially love our egg shells. I dunno, someone said they like to eat the nutrient-rich inner lining or something? All I know is they love those things.

And here's why I am telling you all this. Because I think those clever crows are forming some kind of relationship with us and our egg shell-spouting window.

On two different occasions, I've stepped outside to find an egg shell placed ever-so neatly on the stone path right in front of the door (not at all near the kitchen window). The first time I saw it, I thought, that's weird. I wonder if they know that we're the source of those shells, and that we come and go from this door? The second time it happened, I really started to think something was up.

Then, Marc and I were sitting out on the grass by the water one afternoon, when suddenly from out of the Heavens fell a big, fat, juicy worm. It landed right in front of us. What the heck? We looked up, and there in the trees above us was a crow, watching us carefully.

Was this crow was trying to establish some sort of system of reciprocity? If so, we totally ruined his plan. In such a scenario we should have scooped that worm up and eaten it right there, and said thank-you. But instead I just fretted about the worm. Can they fall from such great heights and survive? Had he just escaped from the jaws of death? Should I quickly bury him back in the dirt? Was the crow secretly screaming at me to lay off his worm?

It was only later that I wondered if the crow was offering us his own juicy lunch. How rude we were, if he was!

These are smart birds. And that could be really cool, or really scary. Are they sending us messages of friendship and gratitude? Or are we about to live out "The Birds" in real life?

Two new things we've learned this winter:

2011-01-20T08:14:00.000-08:00

1- this area is prime dog sled racing country. who knew?

2- Norman Vaughan, a local hero, is fast becoming one of our favorite people to walk this earth.

He was born nearby in 1905, and when he was twelve he hooked up his mutt, Rex, to his flexible flyer sled and taught him to mush.

Because who needs fancy equipment? Then his friend joined in and brought along his dog Fido. With the addition of a St. Bernard from the pound, they had a dog sled team that they rode all around the backwoods of Cape Ann.

That alone is reason to love this guy. But then he went on to do amazing things for the rest of his life! He died in 2005 at the age of 100.

Last December, when I learned there was going to be a national dog sled race nearby, I instantly knew I had Marc's Christmas present-- a trip to the races! The main race of the two-day event was a "Norman Vaughan Memorial" race, to honor the native son dog sled racing hero.

We read a bit about the guy before the races last weekend, and on the sunny winter day of the races I was completely awestruck by the event, and by the inspiring figure of Norman Vaughan.

at the starting line

Norman Vaughan had the epitome of a can-do spirit. Wanna do some dog sledding? Hook your dog to your sled -- that's all you need! Think it would be amazing to trek to the interior of the Antarctic? Go, then! Think something's impossible? There's only one way to find out!

a team prepping for the race

Norman Vaughan left Harvard in 1928 to join the famous Byrd expedition to Antarctica (they were first to set foot on the antarctic interior), and went on to build a life around dog sledding adventure. He delivered medicine to isolated villages in Newfoundland, rescued fighter pilots lost in Greenland during WWII, and competed in the Iditarod thirteen times -- all after the age of 72!

To honor Norman for his contributions as chief dog driver during that first expedition, Admiral Byrd named an Antarctic peak after him. In December 1994, three days shy of his 89th birthday, he climbed his namesake, Mount Vaughan, at 10,302 feet.

The dog races were surreal. I've never seen a winter activity so inspiring. I tend to moan about winter and feel like I'm just waiting impatiently for Spring to come again, but something like this makes winter majestic, and beautiful, and too short!

And here's what I'm inspired to really do. This guy competed in the Memorial Open race, up against 12-dog sled teams in an 11-mile race. I can't believe it's for real!

approaching the finish line -- coolest sport ever?

We have (twenty-year-old hand-me-down) cross-country skis... all we need is a harness and a dog or two... Winter is looking more and more appealing.

Stomping through knee-deep snow we were both reminded so vividly of our trip to Norway, where we both first experienced a real feeling of magical winter wonderland.

What a world this is! What inspiring things to see and do! Norman Vaughan's lifelong message has struck a deep, reverberating chord:

"Live out your dreams. Take every opportunity to face your challenges with enthusiasm, and then live adventurously. Dream big, and dare to fail."

***

It's Cold

2011-01-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

This photo can't capture the frigid, bitter, biting, angry, shocking wind that blows right off the ocean. It sneaks in every nook and cranny of the house -- and in every nook and cranny of your clothes, no matter how many bag-lady layers you put on.

Luckily it's beautiful too. (And there's a king of all boulders to stand on to take in the evening view.)

My Dissertation, abridged

2011-01-11T08:52:00.000-08:00

Who needs a few hundred pages when you can read this graphic version in a few seconds? The bigger the word, the more often it appears in the whole of the dissertation.

There. Now you know all about "Thomas Whythorne and Tudor Musicians", which, they have informed me, I will be defending in March. England, ho! Once more into the breach!

A Thought for the New Year

2011-01-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

How To Tell If You're in England or America at Christmas

2010-12-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

It's happened to us all ... there you are, enjoying a lovely downtown Christmas festival when suddenly you can't recall if you are in England or America. Not to worry! This handy guide will walk you through the steps to discovering the side of the Atlantic on which your Christmas is occurring.

First, you will invariably find yourself in a crowd. Take stock of your immediate surroundings. Do you have room to breathe, or are complete strangers practically glued to your sides? A good test is to try to shift your weight left or right. Can you move? Do you feel like you have even a small sliver of personal space? Then you're in America!

Sometimes you can glean some clues from the method of festivities. For example, did Santa arrive by lobster boat? This is a dead giveaway that you're celebrating somewhere in lobster country.

The man of the season can also offer useful clues. Is he dressed in a green robe with a holly-wreath headdress? Are people calling him "Father Christmas"? Or is he wearing a red suit, with a big white beard and a floppy red hat? If so, you're probably looking at Santa Claus!

Here's another way to tell whether you're in England or America: go to a demonstration of some sort. Peppermint candy, say. Look around you. Is everyone politely reserving their excitement, so as not to make a scene even in the presence of master candy-makers? England. Outwardly expressing enthusiasm -- exclaiming "wow!", smiling, laughing, children clapping? America!

At the candy-making demonstration, you could also check for the crowd's reaction to this kind of behavior. If your engrossed nephew is looked on with smiles and giggles of delight by the strangers around him, you're probably in America.

Banjo. Dead giveaway.

Merry Christmas, American friends! Happy Christmas, English ones!

Another Kindred Spirit Out There Somewhere

2010-12-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, my faith in humanity is restored by mysterious strangers. Like this time.

And that other time, with the stop sign. And that other time with the cigarette butt.

Sometimes I forget that people are wonderful. It's good to have reminders.

And it makes me wonder ... how can I leave little reminders of my own? I am going to ponder this, and then do something.

.

The Ocean Provides, or, Lobster Dinner for the Poor and Destitute

2010-12-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

We live in prime lobster country. There are restaurants scattered around Cape Ann, promising fresh and delicious lobster, caught just off the shore. We gotta try those! we thought, but the price tag always sends us shuffling right back home to our peanut butter and jelly.

But the ocean provides.

And one early morning, a big old lobster cage came bumping up into our backyard in the waves. I saw it from our bedroom window, and we immediately threw waterproofs on over our pajamas and headed out to snag it.

Marc heroically hauled it in. I really wish I had had enough composure to snap a picture when he first went for the cage. It was crazy heavy, and before he could haul it in, a monster wave of foamy, stormy sea water rushed around him all the way up to his waist. But he never let go of that cage! I was basically screaming while I stared from a safe, dry distance. Only 15 seconds later, when the wave subsided and he had dragged it further in, did I remember there was a camera hanging around my neck. I took this picture, which is way less exciting.

The cage ("lobster pot") still had bait in it! ca-ching! There was only one thing to do. Get that pot out into the ocean, with our own bouy tied to it.

But to do that one needs a lobster boat. They look like this:

We have ... a canoe. Same thing, right?

A day or two later, when the weather was calm enough not to immediately capsize our puny little canoe, it was time! Just shove the canoe out there,

and paddle on out with the lobster pot balanced precariously on top, and then just dump it over the side. Easy enough!

Hauling it up a few days later? Not so easy. Again I have no picture because I was screaming and terrified, watching from the shore because I refused to go out in the canoe. But he did it.

And here he comes, approaching the "driveway"....

With a big old dude in tow.

Oh man.

You have to touch them. You know, to pick them up. This time I managed a picture even though I was shuddering and wimpering and negotiating the onset of both horror and guilt. That's disgusting! and, aww, poor guy! are we really going to eat him?

Maybe I could get out of it somehow. See, you have to check to make sure he's a dude.

and you have to measure the shell of his body to make sure he's within legal limits.

In both cases I thought it might be my Get-out-of-catching-and-eating-a-lobster-Free Card. No such luck, for him, or me. He's legally edible.

Keep him in sea water until dinner time.

Cook it.

Eat it.

There's this great restaurant called Marc and Katie's: they have the cheapest food and it's always delicious (although sometimes downright creepy). I highly recommend checking it out.

Autumn in New England

2010-11-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

the road to our house (John Coggeshall was the artist who built the house way back when)

mom visited for a week!

evening at the quarry

chopping wood (his current obsession)

the glassy sea

finding treasure (a broken acorn) in the Cape Ann woods

Hook, Wendy, and Tinkerbell

P.S. Halloween in Boston is a spectacle like you wouldn't believe

back on Cape Ann

eyelashes to incite envy

the old man on his morning walk

my walk home from the train station

Eva and her favorite uncle at the flagpole on the rocks

delicious autumn!

Oh ye that have your eyeballs vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the sea!

2010-11-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

-Keats

Let it be known that today ... I got dressed.

And on the Seventh Day, She Rested.

2010-11-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

.
My right eye has been twitching for about two weeks now.

I've also been wearing pajamas for two weeks.

I have nested in different parts of the house for the past couple months. Apparently that's the way I work: I find a location in the house that is so inspiring! and I settle in, planning to live in that little spot for the rest of my life ... and then after about 5 days it wears off. The spot is suddenly so uninspiring. I find a new spot.

My final spot was in a bedroom upstairs.

It was a good spot.

I could focus intensely like I've never focused before. It's the sound of the waves, I tell you.

I took a moment to take a picture of the sunset that greeted me on that final sprint to the finish. And then I turned to the computer and took a picture of it, too. It was a glorious moment, watching that mammoth file convert to PDF, page by page...

and you know what? tears welled up in my eyes. They weren't really tears of joy or relief, as in, "it's really over!" -- and they weren't tears of regret, either, as in, "it's really over??" They were the tears I've had only rarely in life, at those brief, profound and intangible moments, which I guess I can only describe as tears of "woah".

So, what's next?

Well, this was all two days ago. And I'm still in pajamas. And my eye is still twitching.

So ... nothing is next. A whole lot of glorious nothing, for as long as I can stand. If you need me I'll be out on a rock.

7 Days

2010-11-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

...until it's Go Time. And by Go Time, I mean end of an era time. Reemergence into human society time. Remember what it's like to get dressed time. Submission time.

Here's how it's gonna roll. I read a zillion extra books at the last minute, which for unfathomable reasons absolutely must appear in my footnotes. Then I put them in my footnotes. I set margins, I align subtitles. I triple-check all footnotes to ensure that a gazillion tiny punctuation marks are all in the right place in every citation. I revise my Introduction. I write a Conclusion. I get feedback on the conclusion from my supervisors, and probably rewrite the whole dang thing. I make a table of contents. I make sure all page numbers match up in the eight different chapters. I number all my figures and illustrations, and make a table of those too. (I do a lot of clicking on "help" in microsoft word.) I find every single time I said "See page XX" and replace the XX with the page I'm referring to, after I track that page down. I write legal declarations and fill out a four different forms. I arrange for a print shop in England to print, bind, and deliver two copies of my dissertation to the front desk at Warwick Graduate School. I shell out serious cash for them to do so.

Looking at this list, I'm sure I've forgotten at least seven impossible things.

Then ... I wait. Until the defense. I could be waiting for up to four months. No biggie. It's only my fate hanging in the balance. The school calls up the world's expert in my field to chair my examination committee. When eventually we all meet, they've all read my dissertation, and they grill me for as long as they want. hours. And then, they say yes or no, and that's that. I get a PhD, or I don't. The end.

Radical the way they do things in England, huh?

Marc's grandparents are all drastically and dangerously declining. Just gonna throw that out there.

So ... kinda overwhelmed. Let's take a break. Come have a seat in the backyard and watch the sunset with me. Everything's going to be fine.

ahhhhh. that's better. See you on the other side.

My Big Backyard

2010-10-25T20:11:00.000-07:00

I was a Ranger Rick kid. My grandpa maintained a subscription for us for every year I can remember and in so doing raised us up as good strong magazine addicts. He was an addict himself, a sucker for any kind of nature magazine.

In case you were deprived of Ranger Rick and now feel like you've been missing out on something vital all your life, Rick is a raccoon in a forrest ranger hat. In the magazine he goes on adventures and gives you helpful tips on how to make a homemade bird feeder, or what to take on your trek around the neighborhood to catch bugs. I highly recommend it.

Ranger Rick had this whole other feature called "Your Big Backyard". It was all about the wildlife kids could find in their own backyards. How to spot bird nests and all about grasshoppers and stuff like that.

Which brings me to my Big Backyard.

It's pretty big. And I've been meeting a bunch of creatures I've never had in a backyard before.

First, it's got about a zillion birds I've never seen before, of the sea and song varieties. We got squirrels galore. Cats, too, to whom I give the look that says, "do NOT come near me or you will regret it. otherwise, peace, feline friend."

We got mussels, oysters, crabs and lobsters, and starfish and sea urchins, and eels and those crazy big old horseshoe crabs. Also, seals.

We met a big one out on the water in our canoe, and this cute little friend came right up into our backyard to take a rest from the raging waves during a storm last week. We hung out with him until it was too dark to see. And by "hung out with him" I mean stared giddily from a distance, too afraid to get too close, forcing him to jump back into the raging waves. He'll be back.

I want to write a letter to my Ranger Rick self and send it back through time.

Dear Me,

One day you're going to have a really BIG backyard.

And see stuff.

So go ahead and keep your nose in that magazine for now.

And listen. Don't worry about that awkward fact that no boys ever seem to like you. You get to marry a man so great you can't even imagine! And he'll make firewood from a fallen tree that knocked out your power in the storm that brought you a seal. You'll roast marshmallows. You'll bake him a cake on his birthday. Things will turn out well.

Love, You

"When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs." - Ansel Adams

2010-10-19T18:30:00.000-07:00

home, as seen from the water at low tide

quick, Katie, help me sneak off with this wagon full of autumn goodness

birthday whale watching - giant tail about to appear, use your imagination

being graceful among flowers. marc fails.

french chocolate birthday cake -- for me?! cute niece

haunted hayride. "look, dancing skeletons!"

harvest veggies, schmarvest veggies. give us hot donuts and caramel apples!

excited nephew, exciting canoe, who needs a car?

our first lobster catch. a whole three inches long!

A Land Full of Good Things

2010-10-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

Autumn begins in New England

Hugging my knees as I sat on a giant boulder last night, I watched sunset on the milky blue ocean and thought I'd never seen anything so beautiful. Flocks of geese passed overhead close enough to hear the beat of their wings; egrets bobbed on the sparkling silver-blue water and there I was, a tiny speck of existence perched on my rock. Soon Marc joined me, having just rolled up on his mountain bike, reveling in the fact that his commute from work is a dirt path through the woods that blanket the center of Cape Ann.

How did we get here?

This place is starting to feel like home, especially because Marc got a job at the local hardware store, where most customers are greeted by name. Two resident dogs hang out at the cash registers to welcome customers' dogs who head straight to the cashiers for their free dog biscuit.

On his first day of work an old man came in to buy some rope and offered Marc twenty bucks to come by his house on the way home and help him rig a pulley system for his bird feeder. I like this place.

I am spending my days on the porch, on the hammock, or sitting at the window, making the final touches to a dissertation that I'll submit this month. It's mostly footnote checking, bibliography construction, and making sure that the 400 pages flow together in one seamless . . . book.

How did I get here?

Marc and I are constantly wondering at the non-inevitability of human history. Nothing was destined to happen as it did; it only happened because certain individuals did certain stuff. Civilization was not fated to have violins, the English language was not meant to be, cars were certainly not the inevitable form of personal transportation, electricity could just as well never have been harnessed.

Once my life has taken a certain path, it always feels inevitable. It feels like of course my life was always headed this way. I have to pause and remind myself that every path I've taken, every dream I've chased, was not laid out before me. I forged a way, frightened by never having a reassuringly well-trodden path.

Anyway, that's how I got here. Only to find our Cape Ann woods full of the lessons I've been learning all along.

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; make it hot by striking."  -William B. Sprague

Here's a List of the Everyday Things That Are Still Weird to Us in America

2010-10-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

the coins are lightweight, the bills are skinny and green; it all feels like fake money
people fly the flag, just because
produce is not pre-bagged at the store
people call us on the phone before 4 pm
driving on the right side of the road
windows have screens, and don't open out like doors
soup and juice both come in condensed forms
...and tomato soup is so, so red (as opposed to orange)
breads labeled as 'French' or 'Italian' are nothing like either
everybody has a mailbox that is shaped like... well, a mailbox. And they have little flags on them with which you can send outgoing mail! From your very own mailbox!

And Here's a List of the Things That Are New to Us Entirely:

Free seafood in our own "yard". This will be the year (for me) of learning to like seafood. Also, learning to be able to grab creepy animals with my own hands and then kill them myself. and then eat them. It's all so ... real.
We now live in state that offers 5 cents for ever bottle/can you recycle. (Look at that coke can in your hand. See the MA on it? ca-ching!) When I was about 14, I cursed my fate that I was not in a top-of-the-can state. It seemed a brilliant source of income back then. --All you had to do was collect 20 cans and poof! you had whole dollar! So, I'm going to save up and cash-in, to honor both my young self, and my grandpa who did so his whole life long.
The ocean really is different everyday. And I mean really, really different. All the time. From milky silver to scary blustery black. It's like a whole different ocean every time I look up.
Paradise is, apparently, chock-full of spiders. Who knew? Thankfully the horrifying ones remain outside. But only technically: they build giant webs spanning the window screens, reminding us that they own this place. They also like to build around the door frames so when you open the front door, you realize you've just broken a giant spider's giant web and he may very well be clickity-clackity-ing his 8 armored legs down your neck at this very moment.
Wait, did that last one just make you decide you're not going to visit anymore? I was just joking, really. They're harmless, sweet little friends . . . and they build words into their webs like "Terrific" and "Some Pig". . . and "Welcome Visitors" and "Why Haven't You Booked That Flight Yet?"

You Know How Sometimes You Get Hypnotized By the Waves When You're Sitting By the Ocean?

2010-09-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

It's happening to me for huge expanses of time. Can't.....do....anything....but stare.

We're settling into an old beach house in the tiny town of Lanesville, Massachussetts. Maybe you can visit us, now that we're in America again? Come on over and stare out at the backyard with me....

Just Like George Washington, We Throw Off the Yoke of British Oppression!

2010-09-17T17:07:00.000-07:00

This is us, playing baseball with my brother and his family in Boston Mass. See that monument rising up behind us? It marks the location of George Washington's army in their first victory against the British during the Revolution. That's me, running into the shot after setting the timer. I am holding the bat but you can't tell. The bat...with which we will throw off the shackles of British Rule and declare our freedom to live as we please in America the Beautiful! Okay so we we weren't exactly shackled....and really the British Kingdom treated us very well for the past three years....and we loved it....but still. We're in America! The land of root beer and Chewy Chips Ahoy and personal space while waiting in line and customer service and genuine friendliness and milk in gallons and skinny sticks of butter and phrases like "you're all set" and "I need your attention, folks". And crown this good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!

Good Morning, America. We're Back.

2010-09-11T12:17:00.000-07:00

From Kenilworth to London, to the middle of nowhere in France, to Paris, to Iceland and then, at long last, to Boston, we are back on American soil.

Strange and surreal can only barely begin to describe how we felt leaving Europe. The time has actually come. We are back.

We spent the day before we left wandering around Paris one more time, and trying once again to figure out how we crammed all our stuff into four suitcases. It was possibly the strangest Twilight Zone-feeling-day of my life. Where was I? Was this really happening? After discarding even more of our belongings at our hotel, we got everything back in the bags. Then we spent another hour at the airport weighing our bags in turn, finding each one to be overweight, and discarding more and more stuff. We were a sight to see, and there were plenty of passengers at Charles de Gaulle Airport who took a seat and watched the show while they waited for their flights to open for check-in. We set up camp at an empty check-in desk, used their weight scale, opened all our bags, and proceeded to strew our stuff all over the place. Underwear and books and pajamas and you name it, it was unpacked and thrown all over and repacked again.

At one point an overly friendly Frenchman became curious and joined us in the packing, extracting our life story along the way. He made off with the pile of stuff we discarded at the airport, insisting that we NOT throw it away and that when we come back to France we can call him to pick up our stuff. He'll be waiting for that call for a long, long time.

In the end, every one of bags was overweight by about 3 pounds, but the dude at the desk let it slide. The looong flight home, with a layover in Iceland (cool place!), was as strange as the day before. Is this really really happening? Is this my life? Where is it going? Where has it been? Who am I?

I tried every way I could think of to process what was happening, and what has happened over the course of the past three years. But the only conclusion I could come to was that, since 2007 we have lived so richly that any attempt to quantify it, or make it ordered and sensible and decide what it all means, baffles itself.

There is one thing I know to be true, though. It’s something I think I’d always hoped was true before, but now I know it for certain.

Listen to the Musn’ts, child, listen to the don’ts,

Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, and won’ts,

Listen to the never-haves, then listen close to me:

Anything can happen, child; Anything can be.

shel silverstein

I'm Pretty Sure Big Adventures are Made Up of Little Ones

2010-08-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't move to France when they have the chance? We're going to live here in this cottage for a little while. It's in the middle of France in a tiny village. (I stole the pictures from the website.) It's going to be sunny and quiet and we shall have not a single care in the whole wide world except, what's for breakfast? and then, what's for lunch? and then, shall we go swimming, or just stroll through the countryside? and then, what's for dinner?

If I spoke French I could have translated all those questions into French for you. But you know who does speak French, and has had an awful lot of practice doing it lately? My lifetime travel buddy. Lucky, I know.

So much has been happening in the past week I don't even know what to think or where to even start thinking. So rather than do my own (impossible) reflecting, as we sat in the cottage at midnight I told my travel companions (Marc, sister Meredith, and friend Ryan) to say what news they had from our past couple weeks in England and France and I would type it. And here's what I got:

Meredith: Every cathedral we've been in has had an organ playing in it!

Marc: we were craving home-baked goods and comforted ourselves with the thought of Michelle baking us some when we get there [to Boston, our new home in a few weeks].

Meredith: the old lady at the boulangerie had a beard

Ryan: I drew some cool pictures

Marc: Chartres en Lumiere (lights festival) (Ryan interrupts): it was cool

Marc: oooohhhhhhhh creperie (everyone together, interrupting each other) ooooooo! mmmmmm blew our brains out of our noses and onto our plates! which did not affect the quality of our crepes they were that good. Sausage. ham. gruyere cheese. egg. mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms! golden raisins and walnuts. ratatoille! --yours was almost as good as ours. --it was like ten notches down. --no way! maybe two.

Ryan: London, in two hours.

Meredith: National gallery in twenty minutes

Marc: raaaaiiiiiny London. (Meredith and Ryan) rain, rain, rain

Ryan: scary Cadbury Chocolate World ride.

Meredith: all of us carrying at least three HEAVY suitcases in London

Ryan: sneaking bags of trash around town trying to find garbage cans to fit them in

Ryan: Ryan killing it on Settlers of Catan

Meredith: Ryan killing THE CAR five times in a row

Ryan: I've never seen so many bunnies

Meredith: the lady who ran the camp ground and her six kids that followed her around

Marc: the way Ryan can flip a thingie up off the table and catch it

All three: oh! our circus show -- our three ring circus show that we put on for you. (this was a show they practiced for a good hour while I was out running and when I came home they had a whole music-accompanied circus routine involving throwing a roll of tape, catching marshmallows in mouths, and juggling tennis balls)

Ryan: lots of Twenty Questions and variations thereof

(pause)

Ryan: hedgehog.

Marc: (gasp!) a kingfisher! (screams like a girl)

Ryan: make sure you put down "Marc screams like a girl"

Ryan: um, Joan of Arc stuff in Orleans.

Marc: sweet stained glass personality show slide show thing

Ryan: she's typing that, Marc, she's typing it all! Marc: no, no!

Ryan: oh hey, I got a root canal.

Marc: not being able to fit all our luggage in a standard car and having to get a minivan.

Marc: pulling over on the side of the road because we had to wait for all the cycle racers to fly by.

And that's what we've been doing. Glad you could spend this midnight with us remembering the little adventures of these past weeks. Now back to wondering what's for dinner/breakfast/snack/elevensies...

"He who would travel happily must travel light."

2010-08-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

-antoine saint-exupery

In two days we're moving out. Moving away from England -- forever. Besides the emotional roller coaster of the bittersweetness of leaving, there is the issue of reducing all our stuff to four suitcases again.

Here's a phenomenon that amazes me every time: I find a dusty old box, tucked away somewhere. I think, "I have no idea what's inside this box, and it's been sitting here for two years, which means I don't need whatever is in there. I will open it to inspect, and then throw it away." Then I open the box and gasp! I forgot about that beloved, precious item! I cannot possibly do without it! And then I tuck it away in the corner for another couple years.

Why do I do this? Why can't I just remain unattached to stuff that doesn't matter? And what does matter, really? That is the question I am now faced with ... again.

What would you take? Do you fill your precious suitcase space with books? Do you take your clothes? Do you take a few big items and then pad them with all your scarves? Do you take DVDs, or what about those binders full of bank statements and all that horrible stuff? Scrapbooks -- or do you just scan the pages? How much school stuff do you keep? What about the stuff hanging on your walls? You know what takes up a lot of space? Shoes. Do you leave all your shoes behind? Do you just assign every possession a number and then draw a lottery?

Curse us for our books-as-souvenirs idea. Curse that great pair of boots that require more space than they deserve. Curse the airline for having such limited cargo space! This here car is looking pretty darn luxurious right about now.

So, about that emotional roller coaster. It's a dramatic ride composed of delighted-despairing, nervous-excited, sorry-grateful. My sisters decided to simplify such feelings by making combo-names: delairing, nervited, sortful.

I am especially sortful. It's all near the surface, too -- I feel like I could burst into tears at any given moment, whether with love and gratitude for this place, the heartbreak of leaving it, or the thrill of what is to come. I cannot figure out what to do with myself, except part with all my stuff, finish that eternal dissertation, and make plans that seem too surreal to ever really happen.

Seriously though, what do you put in two suitcases?

Things I Learned in the French Alps

2010-08-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

by marc

Use the fork end of your 3-in-1 utensil for pasta and the spoon end for hot chocolate, or your ho cho will taste like spaghetti sauce.

You can’t average 15 miles a day for 15 days in one pair of underwear, even if you go commando sometimes.

Abandoned ski lift shelters make awesome places to sleep in a thunder storm.

There’s a big difference between waterproof and water resistant boots (mine were water resistant).

When something needs to get done and quick, I can totally kick it into gear and get it done.

I LIKE being social. Just not with anyone I don’t already know and like a lot.

Those walking sticks I’ve been making fun of for years: they actually serve a purpose! (But still, you don’t have to go out and buy posh versions of something you could have picked up in the woods.)

Trekking is a great excuse to eat tons of junk food.

I can get used to sleeping on a hard ground.

I can’t live without Katie.

A high, pure lake surrounded by rocky cliffs and ravens is an intensely awesome and intensely cold place to camp.

Reapplying sunscreen doesn’t work when you’re immediately going to sweat it off.

“Positive self-talk” really works!

If you put 3 eggs in a small pot with cold water and cook them for 6 and a half minutes after boiling, the eggs are perfect and easy to peel.

How to use toilet paper very conservatively and still get the job done.

How to set up a tent like nobody’s business.

Training actually works.

It takes 11 hours to hike 23 miles with 8,000 feet of ascent with a half hour break to eat some dried meat, an egg, and change your socks.

The Alps aren’t messing around: trails go over things, not around them.

I can walk 205 miles in 15 days with all my gear on my back and come out of it with a few blisters, sore hips, and a profound appreciation for hot showers.

Life in the Hinterland

2010-08-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

Let me paint you a picture: pouring rain and eerie fogs, sleeping under a tarp in a ski lift shack during a monster thunderstorm, snowy peaks from which hikers must hurriedly descend, wickedly sore legs, refuges where thin, narrow mattresses are laid shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor (read: tons of stinky hikers crammed into a tiny space and snoring through the night). This is Marc's life.

But also: more French hot chocolate than you could dream of (served in soup bowls), buying freshly made cheese from a swiss lady as you pass by her farm, sunny intervals that light up the magnificent grandness of the alps and make your heart want to burst, copping a squat to 'do your business' in a field and discovering that the cows crowd around with great interest, refilling your water bottles at the shack of a bearded hunchback in a never-washed, unraveling sweater, who makes you realize that the meaning of life is relative. That's his life, too.

And this is my life. Lots and lots of this. Sure, I'm not trekking over grand mountaintops with a pack on my back and a belly full of fresh cheese. *sigh*

But I am..... I am...... hmmm, trying to think of something positive here.

Oh yeah! as Marc reminded me before he left, in these intensive days we are both accomplishing major life goals. His is just way better.

And So Begins Our Period of Extremism

2010-07-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

Obsessed megalomaniac invaders, that's who used to cross the alps.

There was Hannibal, determined to conquer Rome with his army of elephants. The poor things were from Africa and not meant for winter trekking. He started out with 37 elephants and made it to Rome with 3.

And there was Napoleon, who, at least in the paintings, crossed the alps with panache, probably with a personal stylist to get his whole look just-so.

Historically speaking, no one was crazy enough to cross the alps unless he had to, as part of his grandiose plans to take over the world, or to get some goods to the other side of Europe to make a fortune.

Marc's doing it for fun. Because one day a couple years ago, he came across the blog of an old man who was hiking the GR5 Trail from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean, and his imagination was captured.

He's hiking 200 miles of French Alps in 15 days, with his brother Peter for the first six days, and alone for the rest. Because he considers that kind of thing a good time.

The plans have been in place for a long time now: I thought that if he went right at the time I was finishing up my dissertation, it would be perfect! I would stay home with nothing better to do than work, and he would go have his adventure. But as the day of reckoning drew nearer, I started declaring to Marc, "bad plan! bad plan!" Because

1. I didn't want to do that dang-blasted dissertation.

2. I didn't want to be so terribly alone for 15 days.

3. I wanted to go eat baguettes in France, too.

It wasn't looking pretty, folks. But then, a couple weeks ago, I gave a paper at a conference in York (up north). Marc came with me and we stayed in a convent -- the world's oldest living convent! Since being a nun isn't the most fashionable thing to do right now, they've got a lot of extra rooms, which they open to visitors. And luckily for Marc, my imagination was captured while we were there. The life of a nun! How fascinatingly serene, quiet, and slow. I started imagining what it would be like to be a nun for a short time. Lo and behold, I had two weeks of solitude and study coming right up!

And so begins our 15 days of extremism. Me, alone with my dissertation by day and the castle fields in the evening. Marc, with the French Alps and the pack on his back.

He doesn't have 37 elephants or a personal stylist. In fact here you see everything he took. He did stuff like cut the handle off his tooth brush to save weight. See his puny little foam pad? He actually cut it in half too. And it was only at the very last minute (and at my insistence) that he packed soap. One fragment of a soap bar will serve for washing his body and his dishes. Only when I found a tiny tube of toothpaste did he agree to take that. And here I sit in my quiet luxury of home. I'll post any interesting updates from him as he passes over those 200 miles, and can pass on any messages to him when he calls once a day. Just in case you have any philosophy or botany questions that just can't wait...

If You've Never Heard of It, It's Probably Fantastic

2010-07-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

In the back of one of my notebooks there is a sentence I scribbled in a frenzy after I heard someone say it on NPR like five years ago. "When you care about only what you care about, you won't change." I don't remember who said it, or even the context in which he said it, but I liked it then, and I like it now.

Did we care about Belgium before we went there on a magic underwater train? Not particularly. Because I don't know, what's in Belgium? More Europey-looking stuff, which, not to be snobbishly bored or anything, but it's not really worth the expense to go somewhere else just to experience European charm when it's right outside our door. So what is in Belgium? Well, it turns out, a lotta stuff we didn't know we cared about until we cared about it.

Like the artist René Magritte. There's a whole museum of his stuff in Brussels, and when we passed it we thought, "Uh. who's that?" But Marc's dad (who was with us) wanted to go in, so, okay, let's find out! We went in and found ourselves staring joyfully at the bright, wonderful paintings of a kindred spirit. We wandered around eagerly and kept returning to each other in delighted amazement. Who knew? We love Magritte!

What else is cool in Belgium?

Well, there's this toy museum on a quiet side-street on the outskirts of town and apparently no one cares because it was completely empty when we went to see what it had to offer. And I'll tell you it had so much to offer we were overwhelmed with baffled wonder. It was like wandering around a creaky old mansion packed to the nines with old toys. Actually, it wasn't like that, it was that. No labels, no information panels, no tidy aisles or professional displays. No gift shop. Just a three-story house absolutely crammed with antique toys. And there was an old dog wandering around like our personal tour guide. It cannot be described, that place. It was the feeling of childhood and time travel and a strange old man's attic and the love of teddy bears worn bare and the melancholy of abandoned toys and who knew? we care about dusty old toys now, and forever.

And now we care deeply about waffles, chocolate, and fries. Waffles, done like they must do waffles in Heaven, and chocolate with such artistry you're convinced a passionate chocolatier stirred magic spells into your truffle, and fries which deserve their world fame because they are served topped with caramelized onions and why must that only happen in Belgium?

As moving day approaches, I am thinking that we could, and maybe we should, spend the next few years traveling to places we don't necessarily want to see. Towns no normal tourist visits, and tiny museums no one cares about are always the highlights of our travels. Over the years I have, for example, acquired a deep appreciation for pencils. And learned that I would hate to be a salt factory worker in the 19th century. And that a lot of culinary care goes into making all the variants of mustard at the store. And that a giant raft made from balsa wood can certainly travel from South America to Polynesia (and oh! what if you did that?!). And how sugar was made and sold in giant cones in Victorian England. I've marveled at collections of real shrunken heads --and learned that they were such popular souvenirs that natives started making them out of monkeys to meet demand. And I've vividly imagined what it must have been like to be stuck on the arctic ship Fram in the frozen sea for three whole years. ...I feel like I could go on indefinitely. Should I stop now? Are you bored?

I guess all I'm saying is that it seems that travel is the best way to learn to care about something we didn't care about before. And since there's an endless list of quirky destinations out there, that means there's also an endless number of things to discover in ourselves.

Didn't U2 Fix This Little Problem Like 10 Years Ago?

2010-07-14T04:33:00.000-07:00

It's been pretty crazy to see the footage of the riots in Northern Ireland going on right now, since we were there only a week ago.

While we were driving around there, I was amazed to see that flags still fly at the edge of almost every town, identifying it as a Irish National or Unionist town. It was so hard to believe that regular people -- the people I was seeing and meeting on the streets!-- had such a violent history of hate.

But it's not really a history, it's still happening right now. This footage from last night is absolutely amazing. I mean people are really doing that! In this modern time? now?

It's crazy timing too, because we just watched a really good movie about the Troubles and reconciliation. It was great; not the "let's watch people forgive each other, oh isn't that sweet, " kind of way, but the "let's be honest about how painful it will be to forgive" kind of way. (That preview makes it seem a little more melodramatic than it is. trust me.)

While we were in N. Ireland we went to Armagh, because my great-great Grandma came from there. We discovered that the city has always been the "spiritual" capital of N. Ireland, and it has come to symbolize the Troubles. It's got two towering spires, from two cathedrals on opposite ends of town. One is Protestant, one is Catholic, and they're both called St. Patrick's Cathedral. There was a quiet and peaceful happy little arts festival while we were there. And yesterday, there were missiles and riots and explosions. 'Cause that's just the way they roll in Northern Ireland.

Protests and riots are things that we are comfortable having in our past. We like our struggles neatly depicted in our history as a fight for freedom and civil rights and liberty. We make nice stories out of the past, with good guys and and bad guys and happy endings.

But this mess, it's just a mess. It's just hate and violence born from centuries-old imperialism. And the peacemaking process is never going to come from outside--it never does, right? We just have to wait for the peace movement from inside Northern Ireland. Sometimes you just gotta admit that humans and our history haven't really changed much at all.

In a Thousand Years Won't Our "Science" Just Be Another Myth?

2010-07-08T04:12:00.000-07:00

There's a Unesco World Heritage Site in Northern Ireland that was on our list of things to see before we left Europe, so we had to squeeze it in. It's the Giant's Causeway, where a bazillion hexagonal basalt columns are sticking out of the sea.

What the heck?

For thousands of years there was a perfectly good explanation for this. The legendary Irish giant Finn McCool had once lived on the northern coast, and this site marked the spot of one of his most epic fights with the Scottish giant Benadonner.

Finn McCool stood on the Irish coast and hollered to Benadonner on the Scottish coast, calling him a sissy boy. (He flung a big piece of mud at him to make his point, and it became the Isle of Man.)

And Benadonner was like, "Oh yeah?! I'll come over there and show you a thing or two. Except. I can't swim. So thank your lucky stars."

And Finn McCool was all, "Sure. Well why I don't I just build you a bridge, huh?! Let's see what you do then."

And he spent the next week building a stone causeway to Scotland to call Benadonner's bluff.

But then, as he got closer and closer to Scotland he realized that Benadonner was much bigger than he had seemed at a distance. Finn McCool did the math and realized that he didn't stand a chance, so he ran back home. And he cried to his wife, "I'm doomed!"

But his wife was clever. And as Benadonner approached over the causeway, she put a pretty little blanket over Finn McCool and told him to pretend to be asleep. When Benadonner arrived, he demanded, in his bellowing giant voice, to see Finn McCool. His wife replied that he would soon be returning from the fields, but shhhhh, don't wake my baby! Benadonner looked at the sleeping Finn McCool and thought, if that's the baby, the father must be much larger than I thought! And he ran back over the causeway, destroying it as he went so his nemesis could never follow him.

I like this story. And I like that the Irish people took it as a perfectly sensible explanation for the causeway's existence for thousands of years. Especially since there just happens to be a smaller version of this "causeway" on the Scottish coast.

Nowadays we have different explanation. In the paleogene period, lava flow on the cliffs cooled from the bottom-up and cracked into all those basalt columns.

A little less dramatic, that.

But when you read about the Giant's Causeway, these two versions are always presented as "Myth and Reality", and I have a tiny, nagging problem with that.

I mean, I know that we're way more technologically advanced than past peoples and that we've had a lot more years to observe the natural world and think about things. But seriously. What gives us the right to say that every explanation we have today is "reality"?

A thousand years ago they were just as sure that every theory they had was reality. Everything they thought was based on the latest technology and the most advanced research, but hey, years later it still turned out to be bunk. Why would now be any exception to the long, consistent pattern of human history--the pattern where we think we know exactly what's going on, and our explanations make perfect sense to us, and then as time passes later humans look back at our explanations and say, "....and they really believed that was true! How cute."

Maybe in the future, after some new discovery or some new theory or some new technology, they'll look back at our time and say, "They thought Finn McCool wasn't real! They thought giants were only a myth!"

Yeah, so it's unlikely. But who's to say that anything's set in stone? Besides stone, I mean. Give it enough time and pretty much everything we think is true will turn out to be false.

Except the fact that this is the finest child's toy in human history. That will always be true.

You Know How They Would Always Say Anything is Possible? I Think They Were Right.

2010-07-01T07:02:00.000-07:00

They took a gigantic lifeless abandoned mining pit and turned it into the garden of Eden.

nothin' better to do, probably.

I tell you it's amazing. The whole pit is now full of lush green plants of every imaginable kind BUT, as if that weren't cool enough, they decided to go ahead and build a few giant biomes, because hey, there's nothing good on TV right now. They're the biggest greenhouses in the world! Here's a before and after for part of it:

It's called the Eden Project. And outside, it's England, where the weather hardly ever throws you a bone, but inside....paradise! Like, literally, tropical paradise. With waterfalls and exotic birds and lush, beautiful plants from every tropical environment. It's been called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

I can't begin to give you a sense of scale. It's huge -- like, imagine a huge greenhouse, the biggest your imagination can muster.

It's way bigger than that.

It takes over an hour to walk around one biome. It's got little villages inside. It's got waterfalls and huts and birds and you're walking around in a rainforest and then you look up and remember there's a roof on this thing. And oh it's so hot and humid that they have a little Cold Room in the middle of it for "emergencies".

Marc even got to meet ayahuasca, the psychotropic plant he wrote his thesis about. It's native to the Amazon, but, you know, we're growin' it here in the UK. no big deal.

Outside there's lot of amazing stuff, too. The whole goal was to combine science and art into a celebration of the world's plant life. And while you're walking around being amazed they're actually stealthily teaching you a lot about plants and world environments. It's an education-driven non-profit.

It's kind of like Disneyland, in that you walk around delighted and dumbstruck, and you're thinking, what the heck: this whole magical place exists because one visionary person was like, "You know what? I'm gonna do it, dammit! I'm gonna take this nasty mining pit and turn it into the garden of Eden, and nothing's gonna stop me!"

I think some of the greatest advice in my own life has been THINK BIG. It's harder than it seems. But then, after you've dreamed up all kinds of grand schemes, the next challenge is to actually do something about it. I think there are a lot of dreamers in the world who can come up with really cool ideas. And then there are a lot of people who are highly motivated doers who make things happen. And then, every once in a while there's someone who does both, and ohhhh boy.

I tip my hat to you, Tim Smit. Thanks for the overdose of inspiration.

And Here's a Story About How Life is Short.

2010-06-28T00:37:00.000-07:00

Should I even tell you this?

So there we were in Cheddar Gorge. It's where cheddar cheese originated. It's like England's only "canyon". And look! A darling little duck family! I stepped into the quiet street to take a picture. So cute, just a feathered-family strolling across the street -- you go, ducks.

Then that car came around the bend, and I cursed it for ruining my picture. But it was going so slow that nobody's worried about the ducks, you know? 'Cause the driver's bound to see them.

And the car slows down even more, and more, and the ducks are just waddling along, and the car's really crawling along, but it's... not ...exactly stopping....

...not stopping....

and I'm starting to think that the driver is cutting it a bit too close...

and then sure enough, he just ran right over them. the whole family. driving slowly.

It was too tragic, and I was so angry. but when I could uncover my eyes and look again, the driver was out of his car. He was a white-bearded man with a car full of camping stuff, and he was covering his face and weeping over the ducks. Somehow that made it better, because he really hadn't seen them; but it also made it worse, because now it was just a horrible tragedy.

There are a million things around us, dying all the time. Sometimes we tune into the tragedy of a little creature's passing -- like in Charlotte's Web when we suddenly care about a dying spider. (When E.B. White recorded that audio book, he couldn't get through the death scene because he cried every time. I love that.) Anyway, every now and then you see the tragedy of 'insignificant' deaths, and the world becomes a little bit wider. Bugs die, and duck families die, and pets die, and even our most beloved humans die, and we are all little creatures with only a moment on this beautiful spot called earth.

This is a Story About Girl Power Before Girl Power Even Existed

2010-06-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

This is a wacky 16-sided house the overlooks the sea called A La Ronde.

And this is Mary Parminter, the wacky woman who built it over two hundred years ago. I like her, a lot. Because when her dad died and she inherited his big fat business fortune, she didn't just sit around waiting for suitors with $$$ in their eyes to put a fancy ring on her rich little finger. (Or I guess since this is England they would have £££ in their eyes but that just throws off my groove completely.)

Instead, she packed up her stuff and marched off to Europe, taking her sister and two girlfriends with her. And the four girls toured Europe for 10 years, because why not?

That is girl power I tell you. Especially in the 1700s, that took some serious bravado.

When the girls came back from Europe, two of them decided to build their dream house by the sea, all on their own. And they wanted it to have 16 sides and diamond-shaped windows, because why not? And they covered the upper level of the house with seashells in intricate designs, and made friezes out of feathers in the living room.

And they lived there as happy spinsters in their own quirky world surrounded by all the strange things they'd collected on their travels, while all the other girls in this Jane-Austen era were doing the whole must-visit-miss-so-and-so-for-tea-and-oh-simply-must-find-a-suitable-husband shtick.

And they read a lot of books and kept them in wedges between rooms. And they were so far outside the box of normality that people laughed and pitied and worried and mocked. But Mary stuck to her guns. And when she died, she stated in her will that down through the centuries, the house could only be inherited by a woman.

Take that, social norms. I love this woman.

Five Star Longism

2010-06-21T01:47:00.000-07:00

This one's amazing! English Longism of "Check Out 10 am", courtesy of our hotel in Cornwall.

I had to use a flash so you can't quite read the middle part, sorry. Transcription:

RESIDENTS

PLEASE NOTE

that with regard to room

vacation we ask that all

rooms are vacated by

10:00 am on the morning of

your departure

THANK YOU

Seven Years Didn't Use To Go By That Fast

2010-06-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

Mystical 7 is a pretty interesting number. Mathematically, it's the only number that can't be divided into the 360 degrees of a circle. So is that what made humans decide it was powerful, and assign it all kinds of significance since time immemorial? For the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, there were seven planets. The Hebrews made oaths with seven lambs; Arabians made oaths with seven stones. Christians like seven so much they put it all over the place: seven days in Creation, seven deadly sins, seven sacraments, seven divisions of the Lord's prayer. For Jews, the biggest holidays last seven days, purifications do too -- and offerings at altars were in sevens. Elijah sent his servant to look for rain seven times. Pharaoh's dream saw seven years for each of his wives. Seven priests with seven trumpets marched around Jericho each day, and seven times on the seventh day. There were seven Kings of Rome. Seven locks of Samson's hair were cut off on the seventh day of his wedding feast. In Islam, there are seven heavens. There are seven promises in a Hindu wedding ceremony. And seven notes in a major scale. In British folklore, the Queen of the Faeries pays a tithe to Hell every seven years. The Irish folk hero Cuchulainn has seven fingers on each hand, seven toes on each foot, and seven pupils in each eye. There are seven liberal arts. Seven sages of the bamboo grove in China. Seven names of God. Seven wonders of the world. Seven seas. Seven sisters. Seven chakras. But my favorite seven is in the ocean: every seventh wave is larger than the rest. And you know of course what Sting said about that. "Love is the seventh wave".

So yeah, it's bound to be a magical year. Unless you believe in the seven-year itch.

It's Crunch Time, Folks

2010-06-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

I am currently on step five of six. Drudgery, baby, oh yeah! Naturally, now that I've actually written all the chapters, I discover that there were any number of easier ways to snag me a PhD.

See? Apparently it really could have taken just 15 minutes a day and I could have produced a masterpiece. Why didn't anyone get me this book?!

But okay so if I had to miss out on the 15-minutes-a-day secret, why wasn't I at least supplied with this inspirational doozy??

I really could have used the climbing-a-mountain metaphor, guys, I really think that would have given me courage to battle on!

However, if I'd felt like giving up, it would have been nice to at least know that there were other options out there:

Apparently, all I had to do was give these good folks my credit card number and they'd have waved a magic wand over my dissertation, transforming it into a New York Times Bestseller! Or, if even that seemed like too much work, I could have just shelled out cash for the actual dissertation.

"I'd like a 400-page dissertation on Tudor musicians, please. Make it good."

"Coming right up!"

There's even a sale going on right now. Really missed the boat on this one!

So really all I've got to show for my years at Warwick so far is some blood, sweat and tears, and a bazillion pages to edit. And a gazillion footnotes to double-check. I'm starting to think that I'm really doing this the hard way.

This is my poem about visitors

2010-06-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

this is my poem about visitors

--they stayed for almost a month, all of us crammed together--

and this is the poem I am trying to write

to say how this May

so crammed with family and love and joy

reminded me of what matters

so this is the poem I'm writing about our visitors

but I'm discovering there's no way to convey

how delightful it is so to show my world to people

who are as enchanted by it as I am

and how delightful it is to take from my oven foods they will devour

and to wake every morning in my living room,

to two smiling kids

who slept under the stairs in my little flat

this is the poem that can't say anything really

about love

and how sad I am to see them go

nor does it describe all the things we've seen

or the tragic fates we've narrowly escaped

or the calories consumed

this is the poem that is all I can say

about having them here until today

Gelato: It's Not Just For Richies Anymore

2010-05-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

They had gelato in ancient Rome and Egypt, which I think is just wonderful. It was made from ice and snow. And during the Renaissance they had gelato at the grand banquets of the Medici family in Florence.

Of course, back then, lowlife nobodys like you and me (and Marc, and Dan, who we magically met up with in Venice) couldn't just stroll along the water-filled streets, buying another gelato every couple blocks. Nope, gelato used to be only for the rich and famous. And so even though the art and architecture, philosophy and fashion, and everything about the Italian Renaissance fascinates me, I'd still choose to live now, because even one bite of pistachio gelato makes it all worth it. Here's to being a lowlife nobody in a non-Renaissance age. Here's to frozen decadence for a mere €1.

This is Puppy, My Favorite House Guest Yet

2010-05-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

We've had a lot of living guests, but Puppy is real.

Puppy was brought here by our nephew Logan (who also brought his mom, dad and sister).

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

-The Velveteen Rabbit

The Path to Unfulfillment

2010-05-04T02:40:00.000-07:00

Sure, I got some weird looks when I busted out my big old camera to take a picture of this on the London Underground. But I just had to record this advice from London Transport.

This is the Story of The Little Metal Detector That Could

2010-04-28T03:26:00.000-07:00

I'll straight up admit that I've always thought metal detectors were really, really cool. No matter how dweeby it is to stroll slowly along the beach swinging the beeping thing from left to right, I wanna do it. When I was a tween I kept asking for a metal detector for Christmas, but my parents could never afford it. And too bad, really. Because it could have been me who discovered the hoard of buried treasure in a field right here in the English midlands.

As it happened, it was an old, unemployed bachelor who had the metal detector. He bought it at a car boot sale (garage sale) for £2.50. And you know, if it couldn't be me, I'm glad it was him. Because here's what happened: one night last year, he dreamed about finding buried gold, woke up, took his schnazzy detector out into a field, and ka-blam, he unearthed the Staffordshire Hoard, a massive trove of buried Anglo-Saxon treasure. Remember when I was telling you about The Sutton Hoo treasure? This treasure blows it out of the water, people. It's roughly the equivalent of finding a new Book of Kells or King Tut's Tomb. And you know what the metal detector bachelor did?? He didn't tell a soul and spent six feverish days digging it all up with a shovel. I love this man.

There are 1,500 pieces of treasure, which are valued at £3.285 million ($5.5 million), and since they were legally declared "treasure trove", they all belong the crown (how convenient). But, there is an element of finders keepers, too -- the treasure was purchased from the bachelor metal detector man, who will split the millions with the farmer on whose land he was trespassing when he found the stash. I wish I could have been there when Farmer Johnson got the call.

"Hello, Fred Johnson?"

"Yes."

"You know that field you've been slaving over for your whole life, trying to eek out enough grain to earn a pittance to live on?"

"Yes."

"Well I was strolling through your field one day and just happened to find a massive stash of 1200-year-old buried treasure . Can I offer you 1.6 million pounds?"

Now that the treasure's all been cleaned and analyzed and whatnot, it's on display at Birmingham Art Gallery, if you'd like to come have a look. But more importantly, next time you see a metal detector for £2.50 at a car boot sale, buy it for me, kay?

On St. George's Day You Learn That the English Can Be as Crazy Patriotic as Americans

2010-04-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

...and you happily sing along with gusto, giggling only a little.

Don't You Just Hate It When Volcanic Ash From Iceland Gets All Up in Your Airspace?

2010-04-17T01:52:00.000-07:00

It's eerie calm and chaos at the same time. Eerie calm because there's still not a single plane in the sky over northern Europe and every airport is bathed in cricket-chirping silence. Chaos because every traveler is stuck wherever they are. But the ferries and the chunnel train are making a booming trade! And one lucky taxi driver cashed in when someone paid him £700 to drive from Belfast to London. But do you know all this already? Is this in the news in America? It's domino-effect chaos over there, too, right?

Parts of Scotland are blanketed in ash on the ground, and people there are having strange health problems. (Ash is made up of shards of glass and rocks as sharp as knives! Who knew?) But round these parts the blanket remains up in the sky. Since we're not trying to fly anywhere at the moment I am free to be fascinated by the whole thing instead of stressed. But our friend is due to fly from LA tomorrow to come stay with us, so the stakes are elevated. We'll spend the weekend with our fingers crossed, gazing up into the strange sky. And also cleaning the bathroom, because you owe it to any visitor to do that, you know?

*Update: bathroom cleaning a total waste. Airspace still closed until further notice, with warnings of food and drug shortages to come if this continues. The Royal Navy is stepping in and ferrying stranded Brits back home. cool! So absolutely fascinating, the sudden shift to a world without air travel! I like it -- a radical experiment we could never try otherwise. If it hadn't ruined our fun plans (sorry Dan!) I would be even more intrigued. In the mean time, there's a cozy air mattress all set up, and a sparkly bathroom, too, if anybody wants to come over...by steam ship.

Time Starts Here

2010-04-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Greenwich, a suburb of London and the one-time centre of the seafaring world, is the birthplace of time. Kind of. Because when it was decided that global time needed to be standardized, England and her navy was the Queen of the world. So England got to make up all the rules. And Greenwich harbor was England's centre of navigation and astronomy.

And Greenwich naturally got to make up the rules of sea navigation, too.

Let's see. How about...we divide the world into two hemispheres? the English scientists said as they sat around drinking in their fancy observatory above Greenwich harbor four hundred years ago.

Yeah, just split the world in two, cool idea! they said. And we'll call them...how about...East and west hemispheres?

Brilliant! But where do we draw the dividing line?

They all glanced around at each other, grins slowly appearing on their faces. Right here! Right bloody here! The line will go straight through this room!

And they drew the Prime Meridian straight through the room. And that's how it happened.*

*historical accuracy may or may not have been sacrificed for dramatic effect. I'm totally allowed.

In the 1700s tons of ships wrecked because seafarers actually couldn't calculate longitude (how far east or west they were). So a big old land mass like, oh, America could just pop up in front of you and swish, crunch, you were drowning in murky dark water. You and the other 900 people on board. What a drag. But then John Harrison solved the problem by inventing a clock. A really, really amazing clock. It's is considered one of, if not the most important machine in history! It saved a gazillion lives and changed the world economy and yada yada.

It must have been my college freshman year when I read Longitude, about Harrison and his mad clock-making skills and his astounding perseverance in the face of failure. At the end, I sighed and put it down and said, one day I will go to Greenwich and stand on the Prime Meridian and see. these. clocks. And last weekend I finally did. It's only two hours away, I have no idea what took me so long.

Marc was game for the trip but wasn't especially excited because he hadn't read Longitude, and who cares about old clocks, really? But then, once he found some informative museum displays, he was totally engrossed in learning about how to navigate at sea using a clock, and the whole theory behind degrees of longitude and other dweeby stuff. Couldn't tear him away from the yawningly informative stuff. He even had to vie competitively with kids to get in on all the interactive displays. I don't need actual children.

Here is the clock that tells the world what time it is. Greenwich mean time is still the world standard time, and this antique clock is still there to attract nerds (who shall remain nameless), who painstakingly synchronize their watches to the precise tenth of second, then high-five afterwards.

Before this clock was installed a couple hundred years ago, time was totally a commodity of the rich. And if you wanted to know what time it was (like, really, accurately what time it was), you had to pay a professional time-seller! You gave them money, and they let you look at their pocket watch. Remember in elementary school when that one kid would show up with something really exciting in his backpack but he only let the cool kids see what it was? No? Maybe it's just me. But this here clock reminds me of that. I see this clock as nothing less than a long-standing pillar of democracy in the face of elementary school coolness-discrimination. Because you, yes, even you, can march yourself up to Greenwich and see what time it is, no matter how much money you've got in your pocket, and no matter what the cool kids think.

It's Like Disneyland, But Real

2010-04-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

When Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the feast of Stephen, he did it in Prague. It would be cool to visit on the Feast of Stephen. But we were there for Easter. Which is the...Feast of....Jesus?

If I had to describe Prague in one word, I'd pick decorative. Dang, that place is decorated. And so much like Disneyland. Probably because Disneyland was based on Prague.

For us it was a place to make a number of pilgrimages. Travel is always better when it's a pilgrimage. Especially if your destinations are quirky, unimportant spots that no one else cares about.

Pilgrimage 1: Kutna Hora Bone Church. holy cow you won't believe it's real. The whole ancient church (outside of Prague) is decorated--and I mean decorated with thousands of human bones dug up from the graveyard.

Pilgrimage 2: Easter Eggs. holy cow you won't believe they're real. They seriously know how to decorate easter eggs. Puts us to shame really. It was a delight to peruse the market stalls, trying to pick the perfect one to take home. This is just a tiny sample of the impressive stuff they do. Those things that look like holes? they're holes. heart. shaped. holes. in eggs.

Pilgrimage 3: Marionette Opera. holy cow you won't believe it's real. Take Mozart's Don Giovanni, combine it with a really, really old theatre made for marionettes, throw in some Czech puppet masters and a bunch of 3-foot marionettes and you've got something to blow your mind and make you laugh for hours.

Pilgrimage 4: John Lennon Wall. holy cow you won't believe it's real. Okay, maybe this one you will believe. It's just a big old wall covered in Beatles-inspired graffiti that's been around since Beatles-mania back in the day. The authorities kept painting over it but the people kept coming back with their paint, until the French Ambassador asked the authorities to leave it (it's near the French Embassy). cool. I should have brought some paint and added my own Beatles-love. I'm cursing myself now!

Pilgrimage 5: Kutna Hora Medieval Silver Mine. health and safety officials all over the world won't believe it's real. It's a medieval silver mine you can tour, and it's very not safety-approved by western standards. We were basically scrambling around in deep dark wet cracks in the earth. With hard hats and flashlights. And wearing bathrobes, for some reason.

Being claustrophobic, I was trying not to panic. And when I came out the other end alive, euphoria! If Hell is exactly what you fear most, Satan's got a medieval silver mine (in medieval working conditions) waiting for me. I'd rather have my eye pecked out by a bird made of human bones.

That was going to be the end, but it feels wrong to end on such a creepy picture. Hm. Here's some happy news: they still have seesaws in Prague. Fantastic!

Easter in England

2010-03-30T14:27:00.000-07:00

Easter's a big deal around here. They even make the days surrounding Easter "bank holidays" (federal holidays), so Easter lasts from Friday through Monday.

It all starts with the Palm Sunday procession, where the community processes around the town carrying palm fronds and singing hymns before they go into church. In Kenilworth, the procession was led by Jenny the Donkey, who was certainly cute but seemed impervious. This is the beginning of Holy Week.

In the buildup to Easter Sunday it's all about the bonnet. Craft stores become Mecca as everyone concocts master plans for an easter bonnet that expresses personal style, taste, and the flamboyance of Spring. I like it when they have bunny ears.

They don't dye eggs here (weirdoes)! Instead the shops are crammed with every possible size, shape and flavor of chocolate egg, and this is what children dream about for Easter morning.

Want one? I'll take the monster on the right.

Or if you're not a chocolate person you'd probably enjoy a nice hot cross bun, traditionally eaten on Good Friday. They are scrumptious, spiced buns with currants. try them!

Then there's the Easter Sunday lunch, which is a pretty big deal. Legs of lamb and pork roasts are crowding the shops like turkeys do in America at Thanksgiving. But besides food, there are easter egg hunts. The church across the street hosts one directly after services on Easter morning. The children race around the churchyard in their happy bonnets, cheerily searching among the crooked ancient tombstones for their holiday delights. There's something so right about it. But now we're off to Prague to check out the Czech Easter, which I hear is a pretty big deal. Apparently they're hard core egg-decorators over there. So welcome Spring, and Happy Easter!

NEWSFLASH!

2010-03-26T00:50:00.000-07:00

It's that time again! More headlines for you from our beloved weekly paper. I shall begin with what is probably the greatest front-page headline of all time:

IT'S A SLOW NEWS WEEK

I had to read it a few times just to be sure. "wait, is this...? does that....? faaantastic." A thing of beauty! The rest pale in comparison, but I've come to appreciate the dedication to honesty. For example:

WEEKLY NEWS NOT QUITE SO HOT OFF THE PRESS

Yes, thanks for that. And the rest are in that typically Kenilworthian tone that I can't quite put my finger on. It has something to do with turning headlines into questions and calling people by their first names.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS 'BOMB'

REALLY TURNED OUT TO BE?

HOLY SPIRIT SERVED BY TOWN PUB

IT'S A JOB FOR CRYING OUT LOUD

WHAT A LOT OF LEGO FOR ANDREW

APARTMENT IS IN A CENTRAL LOCATION

FAMILY MEMORIES COME FLOODING BACK FOR KATHLEEN

GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS

SSSHHH! KEBAB HOUSE

THE CHAMPION POTATO GROWERS OF KENILWORTH

LEEK WOOTTON'S ANCHOR INN SENIOR CITIZEN'S MEAL

WHO IS MRS GILLET'S UNCLE?

THE PROOF THAT TOM WAS IN A 1947 PANTO [PLAY]

GREAT SCOTT, WHERE HAS IT GONE?

DESPITE THE COLD,THE SHOW DID GO ON

OLD FOLKS REVEL IN TOWN'S CARNIVAL ATMOSPHERE

FAMILY GET ON ITS BIKE FOR CARNIVAL [British grammar!]

ARE YOU IN THESE PHOTOS?

WHO IS THIS BEARDED GENTLEMAN?