Gleanings of the Week Ending November 24, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

Studying Granite At Yosemite National Park - a video from Steven Bumgardener about the dominant rock in Yosemite

Willow the White Whale - video of a white humpback whale

The Big Apple's Mayor Makes a Very Scary Video - Bloomberg’s video to help us understand the magnitude of our Carbon Dioxide emissions

harvest pumpkin scones - a recipe from King Arthur Flour

There’s More To Space Than Freeze-Dried Ice Cream - a panel discussion of why space exploration is important

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #29 - my favorite images in this group are the malachite kingfishers and the robin (reminded me the arrival of flocks of robins that always signal spring in our area).

Four Family Cultures of America Identified - From a 3 year study by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture: the Faithful, the Engaged Progressives, the Detached, and the American Dreamers. A key finding: American parents from all four family cultures want their children to become loving, honest and responsible adults of high moral character (i.e. no ‘death of character’ trend).

Can You Move It And Work It On A Treadmill Desk? - It may not work for a whole day - but what about for part of the day?

Pumpkin Cheesecake - sounds yummy

Women in IT: How deep is the bench? - Not as much as you would think. In 2011 women made up 57% of the US professional workforce but held just 2% of the jobs in professional computing occupations. Women graduates feeding the pipeline for computing professions peaked in 1985 at 37%; in 2010, it was down to 18%.

Thanksgiving Day Past and Present

Food and family are the essential elements of Thanksgiving for me. That does not mean that they are the same every year - far from it. Some years it has 10-20 people in my parents’ house. Other years only 2 or 3 were together and myriad telephone calls were part of the day.

From a food perspective, there have been some changes over the past 40 years as well.

Past	Present
Turkey or roast	Roast
Mashed potatoes	Baked potato
Candied sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top	Baked butternut squash
Cranberry sauce or jelly	Fresh cranberry orange relish
Orange jello salad with carrot and apple slivers	-----
Yeast rolls, plain or with raisin filling	Spice muffins
Green bean/mushroom soup/fried onions casserole	Caesar salad
Iced tea	Iced tea
Mincemeat or pecan pie	Apple chunks baked with mincemeat
Pumpkin pie	Pumpkin custard
Kolache and cinnamon rolls	----

Enjoy your Thanksgiving Day!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations

Back in mid-August I posted about finding things to celebrate each day. It’s been remarkably easy for me. Here’s what I’ve recorded for 10 days:

Sunlight through the trees. Being out and about on a late summer morning with the sun making an ordinary forest of trees look magical.

A family birthday. Not one where everyone can gather to celebrate. This was a savoring of relationships that last a lifetime.

Butterfly stake and solar powered sunflower for the garden…. and the sunflower lit up the 1st night! We had gone to the nursery to buy azaleas; we’d read they could be planted in the early fall or early spring. We were advised that in our area the fall planting is not advised (winter too harsh). While we were there we looked at the various garden ornaments and bought two of them. They’re both visible from the window over the kitchen sink.

Labor day with hot dogs and corn on the cob and watermelon. Food and celebration go together.

Finding treasure under a bathroom sink - a long lost spritzer of leave-in-conditioner. Isn’t it wonderful to find something you forgot you had….and actually decide it’s something you want!

Black swallowtail caterpillars. They showed up on my parsley plant. Earlier in the season, I might not have celebrated. But I enjoyed photographing them and they’ve already made their cocoons --- and I still have about half my parsley plant left.

Getting rid of stuff via donation. I almost filled the porch on the pick up day. It’s good to clean out at least once a season.

Talking to family on the phone. I started out calling one then another called me almost as soon as I hung up from the first call. For a family scattered all over the country - it’s good to catch up on what’s happening in our lives.

Finding out that a friend who had been very ill is better. It’s scary when a friend is seriously ill…and cause for celebration when they improve.

Doodling oninterfacing-like fabric). I have been doodling on scraps of paper but discovered some scraps of interfacing as I was cleaning out. I celebrated the results of sharpie and interfacing doodling!

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 25, 2012

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

The Secret Life of a Cardboard Box - infographic

Developing Economies At Highest Risk of Climate Change Disasters - resilience outranks risk

3D-Printed Exoskeleton - Engineers at the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Philadelphia used a 3-D printer to make a lightweight plastic exoskeleton for a 2-year-old girl named Emma Lavalle.

Slideshow: Echoes of the Ancients - large file but wonderful images of Mesa Verde and other Southwestern US National parks

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #20 - learning about more birds from around the world with each of these postings

Sunflower Party Time - great pictures of the plant and some insects

Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano (pictures)

Easy whole grain pumpkin-banana bread - sounds yummy….but I would just double the recipe to use up the whole can of pumpkin

Make Room for (the New) Daddy - Essay and slide show from Marlo Thomas

Renewable Energy’s Growth Over the Past 15 Years - infographic

Life History Part V - Family and Friends

This is the 5th of 7 posts with prompts to develop a life history. Previous posts in this series:

Introduction and childhood

Favorites

Habits

Emotions

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This fifth in the series is about Family and Friends - these are the most important people in life. Use these prompts to develop a life history section about them. 

• Tell me about your siblings.
• Tell me about your mother.
• Tell me about your father.
• How did your relationship with your parents change over the years?
• Tell me about our maternal grandparents.
• Tell me about your paternal grandparents.
• Tell me about our cousins.
• Do you like young children?
• What do people tend to always notice about you?
• Tell me about your friends.
• Tell me about your work colleagues.
• How often do you host gatherings?
• Where are gatherings you host or attend held?
• How many people do you exchange gifts with (birthday/Christmas, etc.) and what kind of gifts do you give and receive?
• Talk about the people that have known you your whole life.

Topics for the remaining parts of the series: the present, and the future. I’ll be posting them in the next two weeks.

Quote of the Day - 02/29/2012

Everything mourns for the forgotten, For its own springtime dream - Anna Akhmatova in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

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We are forging into springtime (in the northern hemisphere) - the grand reawakening of all outdoors after the ‘sleep’ of winter. It’s is easy to spot something growing fresh and new…to be caught up in the wonder of the present and lean toward to make the future…warm summer fruits and bountiful harvest of fall.

In the midst of this waking dream of springtime, we sometimes have a niggling at the edges of our thoughts for things not quite remembered or maybe not known at all. This brings an overlay of nostalgia to springtime. For me ‘mourns for the forgotten’ does not exactly describe it. It is a savoring of what I do remember and recognition that there are some things I will never know. I’ll never know any details of my great-grandparents relationship or what really happened to my grandfather’s older sister that died as a teenager or my great-grandmother’s feelings about leaving behind all her family in Europe or how my great grandfather’s fiddle playing sounded.