Because my handmade sweaters hae big enough armholes.

Because Commodorified has some excellent things to say about feminism, agreeableness, and sidewalks. Also airplane armrests.

I'm not convinced I understand the Taiwanese style of humor. A coworker just emailed me (and others) a video fo a Japanese man peeling a banana between his ass cheeks. The subject of his email was "Japanese Style of Peeling Banana" and the only text in the email was "You will like it ... it's miracle"

Fortunately, I am working at home this morning (my oars are being delivered! Yay!) so didn't open the video in the office. Actually, stuff like this is why I generally *don't* open videos in the office, anyway.

So I started that books-read meme, but ran into some issues. I do not read or own books to impress people. Frankly even if I did, I don't know many people who are impressed by one's having read a specific book. The only people I know who might care if I've read a specific book are the ones who love it and want to bond with others who love it, and there's no faking that.I'm out of school and I don't have to read books I don't like any more, so I don't do it. There are too many I would like for me to want to waste time that way.

Also, I am quite honestly not sure whether I've read some of them. There are several, like The Iliad and Les Miserables, that I think I read long ago in children's versions. I have only very vague memories and no idea of just how abridged they were. Then there were a few I was supposed to read for school that I never actually did - class discussion plus a quick skim was usually sufficient to pass a test, even an essay one. (I have never yet read more than half of any book by Hemingway, for example. Or The Red Badge of Courage. Or The Count of Monte Cristo.)

My FIL at one point thought about becoming a river guide on the Rogue River. He eventually decided against it, becaue that would take something he loved and make it too much like work. I think that about sums up my attitude to reading a book for any reason but that I want to.

1. Reading a story set just down the road from where you lived for a decade, and knowing the author will have gotten the place right because she lives there, and she pays attention.

2. When you plot to give someone handknitted purple and pink socks as a git to mark an Occasion, and she shows up for said Occasion in hot pink Crocs. (The confirmation last week - and apologies, I only got to talk to the Squirrel fora few minutes and didn't get to pass on the greetings from here. I keep meaning to do it in email, and forgetting.)

3. Having half a hundred things to do on your day off and actually getting the majority of them done.

(Cross-posted to spoonriverrail.

I've gone in and added links for each of the recurring characters to their earlier post. (If someone notices one I've missed, please let me know!) I'm still debating adding hyperlinks whenever one character references another; it would be a pain to do, but it feels like a waste to use this medium and not have them. Opinions?

I've also updated the What We Know post.

I think I need to start taking my blood sugar more seriously, remembering to carry food and also to actually eat it. After all, my Dad is diabetic. I'm in training all week, and the hotel where it's being held is not doing well by us in the matter of food. (My standards have been setest training set-up ever: Honeywell's Training Center in Phoenix, where they provide bagels and croissants and stuff in the morning and tasty and varied snacks mid-afternoon, different stuff every day but always including sweet, salty, and some healthy choices, not to mention coffee, tea, water, and sodas. And newspapers, and internet connections.)

This place gives us coffee, tea, and water, but not quite enough of any of them (they will replenish if called). Lunch is small sandwiches with not a lot of filling, and before someone tells me that's Dutch culture, everyone in the class but me is Dutch and they're complaining too. Monday was just sandwiches, yesterday they gave us some fruit, today they had a bowl of yogurt (with not much fruit syrup swirled in.) Today our teacher gallantly refused to sign for the food until the hotel sent us more sandwiches. The server claimed we had three per person, until he counted and pointed out that 46/23 = 2, not 3. No snacks.

The other class members have taken to bringing in crackers or fruit; I did bring a fruit bar, but having eaten more than I wanted at lunch because I knew I wasn't getting anything until dinner, I never ate it. The problem with this strategy was that by the time I left, my stomach still felt full, but I could feel my blood sugar crashing, which isn't all that good a thing when you have to drive home in traffic. I mean, it was never dangerously low, but still, I realize that I should probably try to avoid that situation. It's always been an issue for me, though it took until I was in high school or college to realize the real cause of the crashing fatigue and extreme crabbiness I sometimes got at the end of a long day (without much food). I do best when I eat like a bird: not a lot at once, but constantly.

So tomorrow, I promise to actually eat my apple bar.
Off to dinner now!

I spent the night of the second Seder in the Anglican church in Rotterdam - a friend was being confirmed in her faith. So during odd moments of the service I read the book of Exodus, because that seemed like the appropriate thing to do. (One nice thing about both church and synagogue services: they always give you a book to read!) I came upon a passage that just baffles me, and would appreciate any light anyone can shed on it. Ancient and modern explanations and your own opinion are all welcome.

This happens after Moses has seen the burning bush, spoken to God, been told to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt, and gotten permission from his father-in-law Jethro to go:

And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that HaShem met him, and sought to kill him.
25 Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said: 'Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me.'
26 So He let him alone. Then she said: 'A bridegroom of blood in regard of the circumcision.'

And then God sends Aaron out in to the desert to meet Moses, then they tell the Israelites that God has promised to free them from slavery and you know the rest.

I mean, what? Trying to kill your own messenger just doesn't seem like an efficient way to get the job done.
(x-posted to weirdjews)

Off to Rotterdam tomorrow to see a squirrel confirming her faith.

Those of you who know what I'm talking about, I can pass along felicitations if desired.

Tonight I am going to do something very silly: I will take the train to Amsterdam to have dinner with kiwiria, who's there on business. So the evening will probably be 1/3 ride up, 1/3 time there, and 1/3 time back - or else I'll get in far too late tonight, which I'll regret tomorrow. Either way, it should be worth it.

I feel a little guilty for taking off early today when I have so little time left here - I mostly haven't been working especially long hours - but I have a few documents to review so I'll go over them on the train (probably while knitting). (On second thought, probably not. I'm up to the heel.)

Last night was drinks and dinner from a project I'm working on; tonight is Amsterdam; Friday one of the rowers invited me to her house for dinner. Last week was the opposite proportion: two work dinners, one with someone who is (I hope) becoming a friend (a coworker, but she joined my old department after I left it). I will miss having a social life when I get back to Taiwan! (Yes, I know some people do not class work activities as "social life". Those are generally people with other options. I do, as long as they actually are optional.)

HOURS LATER: In far too late. Worth it.

Yuri's night is tonight. Thanks to 0metotchtli for the reminder.

(Notes:
1. There is something extremely meta about being reminded about the beginning of the Space Age by a fictional character across the Internet.
2. Unfortunately, it's a bit too late for me to plan to go to a party. There's not one in this city, though there is in the province. But it's feeling like bedtime, anyway. However, at least I can raise a toast - even f it's solo and in water the symbol matters to me. And for that matter, water might be more appropriate than any other liquid - except, perhaps, vodka. On second thought, there's a bar right downstairs.)

ETA: 15 minutes later. Na zdorov'ye.

Because I always seem to enjoy book-listing memes. I got this one from mokey4.

* Fill in each letter of the alphabet with a title of a book that you've read that begins with that letter (e.g. American Psycho for the letter A).
* Articles (a, an, the) don't count in alphabetizing, so skip to the first letter of the next word (i.e. A Thousand Splendid Suns would count for the letter T, The Great Gatsby would count for the letter G, and so on).
* Titles that start with or are entirely composed of numbers will be alphabetized by how they would be spelled when written out (i.e. 1984 would count as an N for Nineteen Eighty-Four).
* The letter X space will be special. The title will only have to include the letter X to count (i.e. Don Quixote). This isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds.
Customization: I actually did this twice, once for fiction and once for nonfiction. (I had to cheat a few times on the nonfiction.) In both lists, I've tried to pick books that I loved or that changed me over ones I've merely read, whenever I had a choice.

Fiction
All-of-a-Kind Family, Sydney Taylor
The Blue Castle, L.M. Montgomery
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
Emma, Jane Austen
Freedom & Necessity, Steven Brust and Emma Bull
Gone-Away Lake, Elizabeth Enright
Harding's Luck, E. Nesbit
The Iron Ring, Lloyd ALexander
Jenny Kimura, Betty Cavanna
King of Shadows, Susan Coover
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers
An Old-Fashioned Girl, Louisa May Alcott
Pride & Prejudice , Persuasion, Jane Austen
Quozl, Alan Dean Foster
Rogue River Feud, Zane Grey
Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean
Uglies, Scott Westerfield
Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
Gossamer Axe, Gael Baudino
Yarrow, Charles de Lint
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig (I could probably have counted this on either list.)

Non-fiction
The Adams-Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester J. Capon
The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, David Crystal
Drawn to the Rhythm, Sara Hall
Elements of Style, Strunk and White (Actually, I was in my 30s by the time I read this. I enjoyed it much more than expected.)
Frankie's Place: A Love Story, Jim Sterba
A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
The Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks
Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker (Still my most-used cookbook. I see it's been revised a couple of times since my edition, with a new author added (a grandson?). I ought to check that out.)
Knitting in Plain English, Maggie Righetti
Le Ton Beau de Marot, Douglas Hofstadter (Yes, I cheated, "le" is an article)
Made in America, Bill Bryson
Netherlands - the Michelin Green Guide, the Lonely Panet Giude, and a host of others with similar titles.
On the Art of Writing / On the Art of Reading, Arthur Quiller-Couch
Portrait of Oregon, Ray Atkinson
The Quaker Book of Wisdom, Robert Lawrence Smith
Rise Up Singing, Peter Blood-Patterson
Stitch 'n' Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook, Debbie Stoller
Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck
Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher
Voyage au Centre du CNES: Infotainment, a comic meant to teach about the French Centre of Space Studies. So OK, it coukd be classed as fiction - but the important point is, I figured it out in French. All by myself, and this was years ago without any handy internet translators.
The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garard
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman
Yosemite, Ansel Adams
A Girl named Zippy, Haven Kimmel (I'm cheating again - but what the front cover actually says is A Girl Named ZIPPY.)

My life is sometimes rather like Dutch weather; if I don't like it, I just wait awhile.

Yesterday we had a nice lazy day together, until Ted had to leave. I spent the evening feeling very much alone in this hotel room, checking the Internet for updates every few minutes just for some company.

But this morning's email brought news of a whole new person in the world. Someone whom I've known since he was four years old (and I was 13 and his babysitter) is now the father of a son. I know he'll be a good parent; he had the best example possible in his own parents and grandparents. His parents, who more or less adopted me as a little sister during my adolescence and who are still good friends, are of course thrilled to have their very first grandchild. And I'm excited just to know he's there, even if young Ezra will probably be walking and talking before I get to meet him in person.

I posted here a few weeks ago that I had decided to donate some money to various charities, and asked for suggestions. I ended up deciding to send 25% of that money to my university, not so much out of conviction that they needed it, as out of a feeling that I need to pay back in return for the scholarship that subsidized my own education. Today, the online alumni newsletter linked to an article that makes me very happy. In part it says,

The Penn trustees today approved the smallest percentage increase in tuition and fees in seven years.

Under the new financial-aid initiative, a student from a typical family with income less than $90,000 will no longer pay tuition. A student from a typical family with income less than $40,000 will not be expected to pay tuition, room or board.

The program, reviewed today at a meeting of the Penn trustees’ executive committee, eliminates loans for financially eligible undergraduates, enabling students from a broad range of economic backgrounds to graduate debt-free.

I wrote a thank-you note.

"Fear is a door, not a wall. Once you choose courage, you begin practicing it. Then it's all the easier to choose courage again. Overcoming fear is the thing I know about. Some songs you can sing because that's where your voice fits."

I have not yet read the book it's from, which is "Water's Edge: Women Who Push the Limits in Rowing, Kayaking and Canoeing", by Linda Lewis. That line is not from Lewis herself, but from Valerie Fons, one of the athletes she profiled. The book would have gone right into my Amazon shopping cart but it's out of print, so it's on the Wish List so that when I'm back in the land of easier mail-ordering I can buy it (or order it used in time for my next trip to the US). But I loved that line too much not to share it.

The following is a combination of a post that was rejected from curvygirls and my commentary on it, to female_muscle. I'm including both posts verbatim, rather than trying to edit them into a seamless whole, but the commentary summarizes the original.

First the commentary:

I just had a post rejected from curvygirls for not being body-positive enough; I'd said I'm carrying a kilo or two more than I'd like, that what I love about my body is what it can do, the feeling of flex and pull in my muscles when I'm climbing a wall or rowing a single, and that I want to keep improving what it can do. I'm OK with having some curve to my belly and resigned that I will never have a six-pack, but when that belly gets in the way of full compression on a rowing stroke, then some of it has to go.

The mods rejected it partly for the mention of specific numbers, which I do understand, but also for the negativity. They wanted me to talk more about what I love about my body as it is; they said my post was too negatie and could be triggering to some members. And yet, isn't that insistence on total positivity almost a negative thing in itself? The insistence that you must love your body exactly as it is at every instant seems like resignation to the idea that it can't get any better. I like my body: it's strong and it works well. Of course I'd love to be stunningly gorgrous as well; I'm human. I'm not thrilled about some of the signs of aging that are starting to show up (I'm 41) but they're to be expected and I can live with the inevitable. What I'm impatient with is anything that gets in the way of doing what I want to do. I like my body; I believe that it can get better (stronger, faster, fitter) and I love that about it. I want to grow up to be like some of the 70-year-olds I know who are still rowing competitively, and if there's wrinkly skin sliding over the muscles beneath I won't complain.

If that's negativity, I'd much rather have it than a defeatist positive attitude.


The original post is below (I'm including it largely for the photos, since went to the effort to gather them.)

( All photos are worksafe )

Today we went to the famous Kroller-Muller Museumfamous here, anyway - lots of van Gogh, Seurats, Picasso, etc, and a very large sculture garden). After we got back, I was reading my email, at about 5:15PM. Someone in the knitflame Yahoogroup had linked to Cory Doctorow's post on BoingBoing about a lampshade that knits itself, being shown at a design exhibition in Eindhoven (which makes sense, since this city bills itself as a design center). So I did a spot of reasearch and realized a) the exhibit closes today, b) the gallery closed at 6PM, and c) it's on the Staduisplein (City Hall Square), 5-10 minutes fast walk from my hotel. So I hurried on over to see it, along with the other stuff in the exhibit. And there it is below, much longer now than in the BoingBoing article.



Sometimes the design students here get too carried away with trying to make Art and forget about function, but there were a few other things I liked, like something that turns into a light or a sunshade and ha a sensor to determine which, or a table and chairs that come as a flat board with punch-out pieces and can be assembled without tools, or a standalone table/dish-drying rack. And for bonus fiber content, here's some yarn made out of recycled newsprint.



Oh, and just to add to the international flavor of the story, I think the woman who posted hte link I saw lives in Israel.

Didn't make much of a big deal of it, as I was a bit ambivalent about the strike. I am in favor of better communication in almost any case where one group is making decisions that impact other people, and I am against decisions made out of homophobia, misogyny or other sorts of prejudice (yes, that was one of the strike points). On the other hand, I am not particularly convinced that this method of making a point was an effective one, though I can't see that it hurts anything either. My experience is that posts are usually down on any parts of LJ I read on Fridays, anyhow. A lot of what it came down to, for me, was that I am uncomfortable crossing picket lines, even virtual ones, and would need a much stronger reason to do so. And really, it wasn't a great hardship for me. I did post on my main site yesterday, and I don't post on LJ every day or even every week, so the only hard part was not commenting on things I found interesting.

There is one thing about the strike I found odd. Some people (call them group A) participated in it, for reasons that seemed good to them. Fine. Some people (group B) didn't, because they either disagreed with the reasons for the strike or disagreed that it was an effective means of communication. Some people (group C) didn't know or care about the strike. Both of those two categories posted as the spirit moved them, in some cases noting that they weren't participating in the strike and their reasons for not doing so. Also fine. All of those points of view made sense to me. Then there were the people who knew about the strike, and in many cases agreed with the reasons behind it, but felt for one reason or another that a content strike was useless. A perfectly reasonable viewpoint, and pretty much the same as that of group B above, - but then those people went out and made extra posts *just* to show their nonsupport. In some cases those posts were completely devoid of comment beyond the equivalent of "Neener neener, you're stupid and I'm posting today."

I don't get that. I don't see that those posts make any difference to LJ - they may counterbalance part of the effects of the strike, but these are the same people already saying LJ won't notice the strike anyway. I can't see that those posts do much more than send the message, "I think you're stupid", and I don't see much reason for them beyond mean-spiritedness. Again, for me this is totally different than "I'm not participating for reasons that make sense to me, and I wanted to post this so here it is."

Am I missing something?

I'm pleased to note that the Match It for Pratchett website has now made it easier to donate to Alzheimer's research. Via their tip jar, you can donate via Paypal, which allows you to give without entering lots of information and also to give amounts as small as $2.

They still have a link to donate directly to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, for those who prefer that option. That organization takes donations online via credit card, but I'm not sure what their minimum is. (A few days ago I had a $3 donation refused to the American equivalent organization, though someone else says he was able to give $5.) I have good and sufficient personal reasons to want to join this effort, in addition to a shelf-full of well-thumbed Discworld books and a general outrage at the idea of a disease that attacks your identity in such a central way.

While I'm including links, the text of Barack Obama's latest speech is here. I link to it because at least some of the links I've seen elsewhere didn't work for me. Also, I first heard of this speech in an email this morning from Democrats Abroad, and I think they excerpted the wrong part. They referred to the speech as "courageous", but the excerpts they gave made it look like just a particularly eloquent example of the usual desperate political speech disowning an associate who has said something incendiary. And that isn't what this is about, and there really is courage in that speech, in that he decries racism and defeatism in strong terms without disavowing anyone in his past who's ever spoken them.

If Clinton is smart, she will jump on the same theme, acknowledging the imperfections of her country and her campaign (as well as the other two) and vowing to continue to work toward perfection. She might do it: I don't think McCain will. So much of what happens in the next few years will be a matter of perception driving reality and the decisions people make that I think electing a President who can keep people believing in hope is of utmost importance.

Hey, LJ, you're falling down on the job - the job of keeping me updated what's going on in America while I'm away. I'm very, very glad to hear the House of Representatives rejected retroactive immunity for phone companies that did wiretapping for the NSA.

(Actually, it's not strictly LJ people's job - more LJ and other blogs and all my emails, and an email was in fact how I heard about House Democrats growing some balls. So I can't complain. It may also have been reported here via a video, and I mostly don't click on those.)

LJ and other internet outlets really are a very large part of how I get my news these days. It may not be completely unbiased - after all, it's likely that the people I read have political and moral views that agree with mine more often than the general population. But if I know a story exists I can always go looking for more data, and often enough I'm alerted to a story I'd have missed in national news or one that didn't get covered at all. It works very well (so thanks, y'all).