Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Banished Words of 2008

This doesn’t have to do with anything currently in the news such as Governor J’s appointment of IL Attorney General Burris to fill Obama’s vacant Senate seat despite being warned not to do so. Or how Israel is getting pummeled again. Or that they had to close the food/weapons road (sue me, I can’t remember what it’s called) into Afghanistan because it’s been pirated so much and is now considered extremely unsafe.

I can’t say that I’m surprised with some of the 15 words that made the list:

“going green” - in reference to corporations declaring themselves environmentalists; I guess if you can buy clean air so technically you are not polluting it, you are "going" quite the opposite.

“maverick” – if you paid any sort of attention to the RNC’s poorly run campaign, you’ll know why this made the list.

“monkey” – because supposedly people think it makes anything sound cooler if they put this word in front of it. Really?

Here are my suggestions:

“like” – it’s not supposed to be used after every other word when speaking out loud. It is not meant to signify a pause. It needs to leave a person’s vocabulary unless they intend it as a real metaphor.

“totally” – this makes you sound like an airhead, especially when coupled with “dude”.

“awesome” – same goes for this one especially since the word means “to be left in awe”; more often than not this word is used incorrectly

“wifebeater” – it’s a tank top and the name makes light of a very serious situation that effects thousands of women and their children every year.

“gay” – as an adjective to describe anything other than people or the fact a individual is very happy (it’s original meaning).

There are others but they get into their overuse more than the fact they need to be banned. Got any others?

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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Miscellany

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, put in blue the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

(via)

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

See if you know what any of this means

Preconscious Awareness
One begins to realize that he or she is not self-aware.

Simple Conscious Awareness
For the first time, one experiences awareness.

Reflective Awareness
One thinks about and reflect on what has happened in simple conscious awareness.

Reflexive Awareness
One pays particular attention to and understands how personal history and one's personhood affect the situation.

Social Constructive Awareness
One recognizes the mutual meaning-making that shapes what has happened in a situation.

Critical Reflectivity
One accepts responsibility for the role she or he played in the situation and asks questions about biases and power dynamics in the situation.

Contextual Awareness
One recognizes how raising questions about biases and power affect others, seeing the self in context.

The assignment?

Having read these definitions, see if you can provide an example of when you used each type of awareness. If you have not experience a particular type, make a plan to go to that level of awareness. Think about the costs and benefits of each level of awareness.
These 2 books were cited at the bottom of the page:

Who is the "self" in self-aware: Professional self-awareness from a critical theory perspective and Organization practice: A social worker's guide to understanding human services.

The former is something I would have liked to read prior to this exercise or at least peruse it a bit to get a better understanding since it is really hard to go backwards once you've successfully stepped into a certain amount of self-awareness, or enlightenment if you will.

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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yep, today is my 33rd birthday and I treated myself to a facial and massage; both were fantastic!

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Information Overload!

I attended the Masters in Social Work (MSW) Graduate School Orientation today. The first half was boring, the second half did nothing to assuage my fears.

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Pardon the mess

I upgraded my template because blogger made me and of course that wiped all my stuff out. Then I tried cutting and pasting only to be told my previous coding was ill formed. Argh!

So while I recruit a friend to help me out, bare with me while I straighten things out.

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How could I forget?

Me, along with 4 other people that make up the Church Hill Dog Park Committee, have officially opened Richmond's 2nd dog park:

Here's a birds eye view but you get the point. Me and my dogs can be found in the larger section to the left.

It was last August when we started the process and this August when we finish it as our Grand Opening will be this Saturday, August 16th. Can you believe it?

There is still lots of work to be done, but the major pieces are almost complete. Whew!

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Sunday, August 10, 2008

Rummaging

Today Bernie Mac died. He was only 50.

Then halfway across the world the Olympics are happening and Americans have so far kicked ass in fencing, swimming and maybe even men's gymnastics for at least the individual portion anyway.

Meanwhile I've been sitting back wondering how all this goes on and we somehow not remain ambivalent. Or maybe even patriotic? Two contradictions in terms I know, but so are the feelings those 2 stories bring up.

Our country has been quite the bully over the past few decades and this one has been no different. We've got thousands of soldiers in Iraq fighting for our supposed "freedom", Afghanistan is growing bolder with every passing hour and I sure hope Iran isn't stupid.

And let us not forget China, where, just weeks before the Olympics were to start, there was an uprising between them and Tibet.

Somehow, through all this, we're supposed to remain hopeful and optimistic, shunning words like jaded and bitter from our vocabulary, misanthropic even. Budding relationships bringing up new doubts but old worries.

I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago to a place cell phones don't work, tvs a commodity, not a necessity, newspapers have to be sought out....my first morning back in the "real world" was met with news of a man walking into a church and opening fire, killing 2 people I believe it was and injuring several more. That first half hour of the news was nothing but sadness, drawing out a depressive nature in most who watched I'm sure.

So is it any wonder when you meet someone new, who seems to be mostly spot on with all that you've been hoping for, you're a bit skeptical and need to wait for the smoke to clear to be sure it's not just an illusion?

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Friday, August 08, 2008

Has it really been that long?

It's much harder to produce posts worthy of a readership when you're working full time, getting more involved in various outside activities such as pit rescue, spay/neuter programs, YWCA hospital advocacy, trying to have a life, etc. Not to mention I get in trouble for spending too much time on the internet at work.

Needless to say, I really want to get back into this so I'm going to make a concerted effort to post a few times a week at the very least. After all, crazy me is starting grad school in just 2 weeks (hopefully but that's another story for another day).

So y'all wanna see my newest foster baby? Her name is Radar and she's got a lot of terrier in her which isn't bad necessarily, but instead needs a little more attention.


I'm sure you can see from her ears where her name came from. Don't let them fool you either; she is full pit with strong cartilage in her ears hence the sticking straight up factor. I found her wandering my neighborhood with, surprise!, no leash and no collar. And no one, almost a full month later, has come forward to claim her either.

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Monday, December 31, 2007

Behold la Scarf de Boobie

I got the idea from Knitty (.pdf) and gave it to my roommates mom, who just so happens to be a breast cancer survivor, for Christmas.

Isn't it great? It knit it up in only a week and it was so fun. It was great seeing the look on her face when she unwrapped it, too.


I can't remember the exact name of the yarn at present but it was a 50% Llama and 50% wool blend knit on size 6 needles, giving it a softer feel yet hairier (new word) look. The tweed used in the pattern just wasn't calling to me. K's mom has already worn it to various Dr.'s appointments (and of course church) and gotten many compliments on it.

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

We wish you a Happy KwaHanuMas

It's still in between each of these holidays so Happy Holiday of your choice!

Or not at all is what I was (and still am) feeling like this year.

Up next: The Boobie Scarf, : ).

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

The busiest time of the year

If you believe in all this Holiday hullabaloo that is. In light of me trying to go back to posting daily, occasionally life gets in the way, such as a developer trying to put 33 condos in the space of 4 homes in an Old and Historic District, that just so happens to be next to my house. At the end of a street. A street that is stopped because it ends at a bluff overlooking Gillies Creek.

There are already 31 people living on the block where this development is proposed to go and they want to add an additional 33-66 people, complete with the traffic and trash. The density is too much for the area we Neighbors for Appropriate Development believe, and thank goodness the Commission of Architectural Review agrees.

Tuesday the official decision was deferred until the developers could come up with a way to work around the existing buildings and not create quite so much density. Yay! The property has an application to be rezoned to dual family (currently zoned multi-family) by early spring, thus negating the current need for a fight against the developer and her monstrous project.

So now I get to relax a little, help plan more of the Dog Park Kick Off party on the 29th, then settle into the New Year a bit before I cast off to do more fundraising so our dog park can open by spring!

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Friday, December 07, 2007

Working with a bunch of Women

Unless you're all working for the same side and can keep it down to approximately 5 individuals in office, it can really have its downfalls.

Take today for example:

I jokingly said my co-worker could help me find a chart. She said, "Ah, no," and hung up.

Later, when walking up the hall, I heard her rehashing the conversation to her co-hens, except at the end she said I had told her to find it herself.

She then turned and saw me standing at the doorway and I left just as she saw me, which was my intention.

Not long after I got a nasty email telling me not to sneak on up people and the conversations they are having and that if I wanted to know something I should have just asked.

I replied to her email stating that I had actually been coming up the hall when I heard the conversation so decided to wait around and see what she said. Then I added that if she didn't want anyone to "sneak" up on her conversations, she shouldn't have them where others can hear, especially the person of whom she is speaking about (negatively or otherwise).

The pettiness around here can get very, well, petty.

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Thursday, December 06, 2007

What are you reading?

I just finished reading The Golden Compass (an AWESOME book btw), have been reading The Bell Jar off and on (I love the way Plath writes; it's very aggressive and matter-of-fact) and have currently picked up Woman's Best Friend and The Dogs Who Find Me. All equally attention getting, the latter 2 being about humans who are owned by dogs.

It is these books and knitting that keep me away from the computer and housework. But hey, whilst knitting I can at least catch up on That 70's Show, : ). I'm going to visit my local library this weekend to search for some good books on cd so I can "read" whilst knitting, too.

I highly recommend you pick up one of the above books and give them a try.

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Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Oh the weather outside if frightful.....

It's finally dipping into the high 30s and it even snowed for a bit.

And they finally caught the dumbass fugitive Alonzo Logan, who broke out of prison after serving only a fraction of his 45yr term. He was spotted very very close to my house last week as Fulton Bottom is a mere 5min walk from my house, just down the hill. So of course I was freaked out and have been. So much so that I think my housemate and I are going to activate our security system (that and if we're all away and our house catches on fire, the agency will automatically alert the fire department).

He has lost the possibility of parole, dragged his family into his stupid decision to ruin his life time and time again (who will also be visiting the local jail for aiding and abetting a fugitive) not to mention how long he'll spend in solitary.

Anyway, they caught him this morning and took him straight to the hospital as he was unconscious and hypothermia was a cause for concern.

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Monday, October 15, 2007

69th Annual National Folk Festival


I went with 2 friends yesterday from noon until 4pm and it was great. I got to hear such wonderful folk artists as VishTen, some Persian as well as Chinese traditional music, Elana James, Cindy Cashdollar, the Junkyard Band as well as many others as we walked to various venues and checked out the One Thousand Villages Marketplace. There were at least 2 I'm sorry I missed (the other being Linda Lay) but hope to catch them on a cd sometime.

The National Folk Festival will be moving to Butte, Montana next year which is a beautiful place and should make it easier for folks to get into the folksy mood as they won't be in the middle of a very urban city such as this one.

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Sunday, October 07, 2007

Here's what I've been doing lately

Planning for a new dog park. This, along with several other projects, are requiring a lot of my time. Plus Peanut was quite a shithead for the first few weeks at school but now seems to be doing okay.

Surprise here: he's very good in English, History and sort of Science, but not so good at Math.

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Tuesday, May 29, 2007

What do you say when you've been MIA for almost an entire month?

Except that life has been happening a bit too eagerly the past few weeks.

Let's see, Penelope came down with what ended up being a salivary gland infection to which she proceeded to scare the heck out of me since, let's see, a 7month old puppy went from running, jumping and frolicking happily to sleeping 75% of the day and had a swollen neck that looked like she swallowed a tennis ball. She had a fever of 104 degrees and true to what the Dr. said, it took 4 days for it to start showing signs healing but for which I was most impatient and, here's a good technical term, freaked the hell out.

But not before she had scratched the area under her neck causing a weakness so to speak. Thus the blood/puss trying to drain headed for said area and began to leak slowly. Monday evening I came home to find the area filled with fluid and skin that looked like it would die if it sat that way any longer. What did I do? Took my darning needle and poked a hole in the area and out gushed more blood and puss than I ever want to smell again.

I swear only a mother could do something like that.

Tuesday afternoon she awoke to no fever and almost back to her bouncy self, something I never thought I'd be happy to see.

Dooley however is another story. Mid-February I noticed her ears were badly infected and after 4 antibiotics and Prednisone for 2 of those rounds it wasn't getting any better. Then I noticed her stomach area was covered in sores, her eyes drained, her feet were itchy and had nasty sores on them and she was getting more lethargic by the day.

After several tests and no answers from 3 different vets, we finally got an answer and thank heavens the vet is here in the neighborhood because that certainly makes the chronic illness part more bearable.

So it is guessed she has auto immune disease and a severe skin infection. We see a holistic vet Thursday at 5pm and a dermatologist next Thursday at 8:40am. yay. Thankfully the woman who helped with the adoption of Dooley knows a lot of people who know a lot about this type of thing (which together we found is quite common in labs along with hip dysphasia, something else we think she has) and she also found a financial sponsor for Dooley so Lady Eleanor is headed to that very nice lady in a few short days. Without her kindness to send lots of money (I've already spent $1500 in credit and she's sent $750 thus far with another $1,000 promised) to a dog she has never met and a family she's never seen but for the pictures I've sent, Dooley would have had to been put over the Rainbow Bridge before her time.

Through the dog troubles my straight A of a student son has been suspended 3 or 4 times, not including the 2 times he's received in-school suspension. Finally we're gathering (or rather, the school peeps including his teacher) he's doing it on purpose to get kicked out of school. Even after an entire year Peanut remains steadfast in his dislike for this school.

The 6th time he was suspended for 10 days and I'm grateful for my friend L as she came up and stayed with us for those days, watching Peanut and making sure he stuck to the punishment and completed work while at home.

2 Friday's ago we visited a local free Episcopal private school for testing. We're supposed to hear back from them within the next 2 weeks so please keep all your fingers and toes crossed, wishing against all hope he'll get in since it will challenge him more and provide a safer environment for him so he won't feel the need to defend himself quite so aggressively.

Our new mantra is the countdown to the last day of school, with 14 days now remaining. He already hasn't watched TV or played any sort of video game for at least 3 weeks and I told him I had no qualms about pushing it into summer vacation if he couldn't get a grip on himself.

Isn't all that exciting? Between Penelope and Peanut I almost went nuts, quite literally, as they both happened at the same time. Dooley's condition has been chronic and steadily getting worse so that has been on my mind a lot, but not naggingly so.

So you see, the times I did have a moment to relax, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in front of a computer. I've been knitting a lot though as that has helped with the coping process and its better to take it out on yarn than beat someone senseless.

Oh, did I mention my ex-husband was on my ass, too? He said all Peanut's problems are my fault since I put him in the ghetto-ass school he's in and haven't tried getting him in another one in the area.

Yeah, he's that stupid and the argument quickly degenerated into something even more stupid and unworthy of my time. He is being rather nice and adding Peanut to his health insurance plan since it will only cost him an $64 extra a month whereas it would have cost me $200 extra for a total of $307 monthly. And they expect me to buy groceries with what money again? That's what I get for getting used to Medicaid covering Peanut and food stamps giving us lots of money for food, both of which disappear as of May 31st.

Did I mention my gas was turned off because I was behind on the bill? Yeppers. They needed an appointment to turn it back on, too, though the guy didn't laugh much when I asked him how come they didn't need an appointment to turn it off.

It's been a fun month in the ironic sense I guess.

To prove I've been paying attention through all this, I'm slowly swinging over to Hillary's side more and more because, let's face it, having a woman president would be fucking awesome.

And I have a ton of Peanutisms I must really remember to add to this thing so I'll have them in my possession when he's older and at the point in his life where it could very much embarrass him, :).

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Friday, January 05, 2007

Wish List for 2007

I hopped over to Knit Blue for a moment and discovered that one of the contributors had posted her Wish List for 2007, which I have taken #2 and quoted here:


2. Progress towards universal single-payer health coverage. My SO has a seasonal job, with no health care from January through April. I recently was looking up short-term catastrophic health insurance policies, and guess what? They don’t exist! The two reasonably priced ones I found were from really sketchy looking companies. At a respectable company, the cheapest monthly premium was around $150 but that had a $15,000 (!) deductible! A more reasonable deductible of $2,500 had $300+ monthly premiums. Again, this is just for catastrophic insurance in the event of a major health crisis, with no other benefits. And if we don’t purchase it, I shudder to think of the years and years of debt payments we would incur if he does have an accident or something. Here is one of the best articles I’ve read outlining the advantages of a single-payer health care system. Such a system could actually benefit the economy by taking a huge financial burden off employers, who might actually raise wages using the saved money and even expand their total hiring and capital expenditures. Plus, it would give people more of an ability to take other financial risks in their lives, increasing entrepreneurial endeavors and technological breakthroughs.
In the comments someone linked to Arianna Huffington's Wish List and it consists of what she would like to hear "certain public figures" say at some point during the year and actually mean it. Below are a few of my favorites:

"I will not run for president of the United States. But if I do, I will speak from my heart and not triangulate every issue within an inch of its life." -- Sen. Hillary Clinton
"We will admit that guns, in fact, really do kill people, and lots of them." -- the NRA

"When we hear bullshit, we will call it bullshit" -- The Mainstream Media

"I will pick a hair color that occurs naturally in nature before I pick up Rosie's girlfriend." -- Donald Trump

"When people ask me why I'm gay I will have them watch The Apprentice." -- Rosie O'Donnell
Of course I would like to add the following 3 to the Wish List posted on Knit Blue and I'm sure I'll think of a few others later. I do, after all, have 12 months to figure this out.

1) Men who beat their significant others within an inch of their life (especially with their children watching and/or forced to participate) should be charged with a felony, not a misdemeanor assault charge. Seriously, why does the woman have to almost die to have her boyfriend/husband held accountable for his shitty actions and/or behaviors?

2) That society stops holding a woman accountable/responsible for her own rape since we can't rape ourselves. I've said it many times here: only men can stop rape.

3) I wish we'd stop using the phrase, "But it's just a dog/cat/squirrel/rat/mole...." and peeps are held accountable for the abuse, harm and/or neglect they do to animals. I would also prefer the world to wake up and realize any kind of animal fighting is abhorrent and disgusting, then pass laws reflecting such new insightful genius. Oh, and that banning a specific breed will not fix the reason the need exists to begin with.

That is all.

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Wednesday, January 03, 2007

I have labels and the Dem's get a spine!!

As you may or may not have noticed, since switching to the new and improved blogger, I have labels therefore providing categories you can read instead of scrolling endlessly through archives in a desperate search for the post on, well, whatever crazy randomness I decided to reveal.

Peanutisms are now grouped together if that's all you care about and I think political irony has to be my favorite. I guess I should start including how Democrats fall under that category, too, in order to be fair. It's just harder for me since I agree with most of what their stance is even if I don't like how spineless so many have been.

Until now that is! I just read via Alternet that Dem's plan on using their first 100 hours to pass important bills while disallowing Repub's to get a word in. These bills are things the repub's have tabled for years so it will be nice to see their reaction once the new majority takes over.

House Democrats intend to pass a raft of popular measures as part of their well-publicized plan for the first 100 hours. They include tightening ethics rules for lawmakers, raising the minimum wage, allowing more research on stem cells and cutting interest rates on student loans.
I rather think this is exciting because now we'll get stuff done that will actually help folks from the newer generations coming up - like the X'ers such as myself - and start to take care of those going out, like the Boomers and the Builders. At least I can hope anyway.

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