Happy New Year!

My blog has gotten a face lift. I don't really want to spend that much time on it, but there are lots of bits that could use improvement. If you think of any good links, comment.

I expected to be blogging from a boat floating in the Gulf of Mexico, but it seems we've brought colder weather with us. It's been windy here, and it rained yesterday. We're having a good time anyway. Patrick's dad, George, and his stepmom, Susy, are taking good care of us. We went to Susy's graduation from massage school today. She already has a promising interview lined up. Exciting! And she's still enough in learning-mode that she doesn't mind giving free massages to family. :)

Back in the Bay Area, we saw a lot of friends and family, not spending quite as much time as I would've liked with everyone I like but also kind of overwhelming ourselves with engagements. It was nice to see more of Patrick's family, though; his aunt Theresa and her partner, Cal, just moved to Oakland this year--well, last year, as of today!--and we had a delicious and delightful dinner with them. I enjoyed seeing George, Maria, Sophie, and Annie, too. Annie was sick, but her increasing proficiency in the English language was still discernible. My cousin Caitlyn is still quiet, but she is way less shy and consequently a lot more fun. Ian discovered that I am strong enough to toss him but not to sustain it for an hour straight, so he's made friends with Patrick. I missed Matthew, since he's down in LA fulfilling childhood dreams of conducting the Disneyland Train (it's been a multi-year climb up the theme park ladder); soon, he'll be in Edinburgh, another long-time aspiration. I'm proud that he's stuck with this stuff.

The nuculer family had a good time watching Ratatouille on DVD; Jarrett and I made a very tasty apple cake from the Firehouse Cookbook; and I tried to deftly maneuver my way into winning a game of hearts, only to have Jarrett stick me with the queen of spades in the last hand, leaving me trailing behind my dad by a number of points too trivial to calculate yet too tragic to ignore.

Food highlights included sticky rice, a very creative curry+fried tofu+mushroom+miso soup, more sticky rice, a surprising cole slaw, AMAZING cookies (Auntie Lorna only baked how many, somewhere around 1,500 this year?), pear ravioli, pear and squash soup (vegetarian! yay!), the best chocolate chip cookies, battered crab, veggie chicken, quesadillas full of black beans and sweet potatoes, homemade rice porridge, oh I could go on but I won't.

I have a few pictures to post, but they'll have to wait until we get back to Chicago. In the meantime, I have lesson planning to do!

Fun Bits

Patrick found this geography game on some blog. We played it obsessively all through Thanksgiving at his mom's. I pass it along to you ... It's screwing up my links, but who cares, no one uses those anyway!

I beat the game. Hahahaha ...

Mary is off in India now. Well, her flight left this morning, going through Minneapolis and Amsterdam to Hyderabad. 30 hours???

I really have been knitting less. It's just that my friend Michelle had a party and everyone had to bring a purple tree ornament, and I had this purple yarn lying around, so obviously it was going to be better to knit a little purple stocking than to run around looking for a purple ornament. (Filled it with Smarties! Yay!) And then my advisory (homeroom) is having a Secret Santa and I didn't want to buy Amber something, I wanted to make her something, and she loves black and yellow and Winnie the Pooh, so you know ...




And then there are my old projects from before I said I was going to start knitting less, which I want to post because I don't really have another way of keeping track of my knitting, especially the stuff I give away. And it doesn't even matter if I knit more or less anyway. But I am spending a lot of time trying to figure out what the deal is at my school, and what the best way for me to contribute in these last six months is. Some good things are happening. Some other things are crazy. It's hard work, just sorting it out, let alone doing something about it.

I have some catching up to do with posting. In October, I knit this dopey sweater for Don's baby. The yarn is too crazy. I love the fish buttons, though. Don loves to fish. I hope it fits Dino. I have a pretty limited sense of how big babies are and especially of how fast they grow. At least the proportions on this one seem all right. The sleeves were too small, I think, on the fuzzy one I knit for Riley last spring ...

Then I knit this hat for Mali. Learning to make bobbles was cool. It's still kind of dopey-looking though. It started as Norah Gaughan's Droplet Hat, but the "droplets" looked like poo in the brown yarn I was using, so I ripped it back and modified it some. At least the photo is mildly interesting. I made a hat for Denali, too, basically a large version of Coronet on Knitty, in a color Patrick chose called "black cherry" or some such thing. I didn't photo it though. Too bad!

I am really looking forward to the break, less because I want a rest from school than because I really want to see my folks. My brother just turned 22--happy birthday, J!!--and my cousin is just getting her BA--happy graduation, Can!!--and my littlest cousins are getting bigger by the minute. The biggest ones just seem to be getting more sleepy. I had a conversation by phone with one of them over Thanksgiving:

me: hey, how's it going?
"johnny": zzzzz
me: OK then! Happy Thanksgiving!
"johnny": zzzzz
me: love you, man. see you soon!
"johnny": zZzz [snort]

I hope that wasn't too embarrassing. I'll use a pseudonym. Now no one will know who it was. Teehee!

Labor Day

We celebrated the holiday by driving to Iowa to see Patrick's mom. We had a wonderful time canoeing and swimming at Lake McBride; visiting with Patrick's friend, Grant, and his new fiancee, Liz (nice Ethiopian dinner at a very traditional restaurant called David's Place); and of course, chatting and eating with Mary and John. Another fascinating highlight was the amateur film of Patrick's great-uncle Tim, which Mary recently got a copy of on DVD. Tim has won awards for his work, which I can easily understand after seeing the Cadillac vs. Rambler short (titled "Beep Beep!" or something like that), the hour-long Yellowstone documentary, and the footage of family trips to the zoo (with voice over from two "sparrows"). So much has changed in the last half-century. For one thing, you don't have to haul as much gear to take video; for another, there are boardwalks now amongst the geysers, so you can't just stroll wherever you please around the crusty edges of the 180-degree water, and it's no longer acceptable, or even legal, to throw food to the monkeys and the polar bears (at the zoo, not at Yellowstone, as a nefarious comment would have you believe!--but the geysers are at Yellowstone. I don't know of any zoos that have managed to simulate those yet).

The best parts of the weekend were outdoors. I love the water. I've been worrying that I'm not really an outdoor person: I have a ten-degree range of temperature comfort, and the sight or sound of mosquitoes sends me running and skipping in a totally crazed way. But the weather this weekend was perfect (especially in the shade), and it wasn't too buggy in the places we went. I like paddling, although paddling a canoe is frustratingly inefficient compared to rowing. For whatever reason, it's important to me to exercise in the most efficient way, even if that gives me less of a workout. Anyway, I like using my whole body, and canoeing is just arms. I've been looking into getting a kayak; Patrick suggests that the two-bladed paddle involves your back more, and a kayak is clearly more maneuverable than a row boat. Places sell inflatable tandem kayaks for about $300, too, so that could be affordable! And an inflatable one would be easy to travel with, even in my Honda. Anyway, we'll probably rent one for a day and paddle around the Chicago River or something and see how we like it. My two kayaking experiences were in California, one in Tamales Bay in a closed-top (I enjoyed the challenge of flipping it over, getting out, righting it, and climbing back in, and it was a really neat thing to do with my dad and uncles), and one in ... what's the name of that estuary, I always forget ... by Monterey ... in an open top. There were lots of pelicans, seals, etc. My arms got tired. Anyway, there are a lot of lakes and rivers in this part of the world to be boating in, and having a little boat would help us take advantage of the most beautiful spots.


This is a picture of a bug. I don't really like insects (a little shiver goes up my spine every time Patrick picks up a "cute" little caterpillar), but you can't deny that they are CRAZY-looking creatures of endless variety. This one was hanging out on a railing at Matthiesen State Park, where we stopped on the way home from Iowa. We had a good time splashing in the creek, with its little waterfalls, and exploring a new place in general.

Vancouver

We had a very nice trip to Vancouver with my parents. My mom's family had their first ever official reunion; I met lots of cousins who I'd never met, and got a chance to talk with people who I've always known but never very closely. The event organizers tried to seat us by generation, splitting up families to get us to mingle. I think it worked pretty well. There was also a fantastic DVD put together by my cousin Graeme, with some of the only pictures I've ever seen of my mom's parents. I loved seeing how my grandparents' generation looked when they were young; a lot of family resemblances that I'd never noticed suddenly started popping out.

I don't really have pictures of all the people. Somebody needs to send me some.

We drove, so in addition to all the extended family, Patrick (who was a very good sport as he was plunged into the Wong family for the first time, 76 at once) and I spent a lot of time with my parents. The redwoods were amazing, so ancient and awesome but also creating shady, almost intimate spaces. Seattle was a lot of fun, too. We went to the Pike Place Market and had delicious fresh cherries, and at a leftie bookstore, I found a good breakfast recipe. I'll have to share that some other time. We also visited the University of Washington. It was pretty. I would be pretty satisfied if Patrick got a job there.

Most of my pictures are on my camera, and I neglected to bring the cord to transfer them to my computer. But here's one that I took on Patrick's camera. Plants are pretty amazing. How do they survive this kind of drastic manipulation? This image is the best thing I've got on America's Best Value Inn in Eugene, OR. I guess the value was pretty good, too, if you don't mind having a bed that spills into the bathroom and peanuts on the floor. Okay, so it was only one peanut. It was still pretty discount.

Now we are in Mexico. My next post will be about that.

Feet

Patrick's mom, Mary, came to visit us last weekend. It was lovely, but so short! We went to the Chicago Botanic Gardens again; the day was perfect, and I was really amazed by how much had changed since we were there last just a month ago. Instead of tulips, all the irises were blooming, and a crazy plant called Tower of Jewels. All the pictures are on Patrick's camera, so you'll have to wait or else visit his blog for that. After the gardens, we went shopping at a mall across the highway with a Trader Joe's (hooray for strawberry popsicles!) and a Loehmann's, which Mary likes a lot and where I tried on almost everything that was white in an effort to find something to wear to the Moving Up ceremony in a couple of weeks. Patrick was a very good sport (I think he has a career as a personal shopping assistant if this history PhD business doesn't work out), and Mary found a few nice things, too.

Back at the condo, Patrick and I discovered that all our futon-moving--what with Mary's visit this weekend, my dad's visit two weeks ago (I have to blog about that, too. It was a great visit), and the normal sliding around when we sit on it--has been scratching up the floor! There was only one thing for it: the futon's wooden feet needed socks. So I knit some up with size 5 needles and a ball of KnitPicks Wool of the Andes, a 100% wool yarn that I got pretty inexpensively online. The corners are kind of messy looking, but oh well! The color is Hollyberry. Yay!

It's gotten hot here. You came at just the right time, Dad. Luckily, while I have several more days with my girls working on final presentations and ceremonies, I have no more formal class! Summer, summer, summer!!!

Oh and by the way, I added some labels to my posts. If you click on "family," for example, you'll see all the posts I've ever made with that label. :)

Names

Can anybody update me on the name-to-be of Kaitlyn's little bro? Here's an interesting website to check out: you type in a name, and it gives you a graph showing the popularity that name over the last 120 years. "Nicole" became common around 1950, and peaked in the 1980s. "Mattie" was really popular in 1880--yes, 1880--but it declined over the last century. Though it's climbed back a little, in the last 15 years. It ranked as the 777th most popular name in 2005! That's not bad.

for my family

and in honor of my aunt



Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awake in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I do not die.




-Mary Frye, 1932




l

Hello from the Pit

I'm not sure what I mean by that subject line, but I feel obligated to say something.

There never seems to be enough time. Lately, I find myself routinely leaving school at 6 o'clock with very little to show for it; when I get home, all of my personal work--planning for my classes, grading--still has to be done. I guess the job of leading the Middle School Academy is sinking in, although the reality of it hasn't. I guess I didn't do this much for the school or for the MSA last year, but at the same time, I still don't feel like I actually do a lot more than my colleagues on the team, I'm just technically responsible for more, responsible for providing oversight and remembering what we have to do and when, but not for actually doing much more; anyway, I surely don't do 2 more hours of work a day, which is the extra time that I have from 8:30-3:30 (I taught two more classes last year). On the other hand, I guess I must; where else could the time be going??

I definitely prefer this position to the one I had last year, teaching full-time; but on the other hand, it's hard to say, because even the teaching part of this year is a lot better than it was last year, in large part due to the fact that this is my second year and I'm a little more together. Actually I'm not sure why my classroom experience is so qualitatively different, but it is. And it's much better. But anyway, although it was never my goal to be an administrator, I enjoy being an effective administrator, and my colleagues give a lot more recognition than my students do. ;) It is still not a goal of mine to continue in administration except insofar as I am also able to teach, or pursue other academic work (research, I suppose).

So, I come home later, I bring more work home, I have made only a very small dent in the grading that I have to complete by the end of tomorrow. But I am blogging to let you know that I am still alive. :) And not that unhappy, just a little overwhelmed and a little tired. But not unhappy, really.

I can't wait for December and returns to California. I get to visit twice: once at the very beginning of the month, for a math training in Monterey, and once later for Christmas and family reunions. For Thanksgiving, we're heading to Indiana to spend some time at Patrick's paternal grandmother's house with that part of his family (his dad and stepfamily are flying in from Florida) ... I'm sure it will be a good time, but I'll miss the no-mai-fon. Maybe I can get some sticky rice in Chinatown and make my own. But it just won't be the same. Especially since I don't think I could bring myself to buy and cook laap cheung (being vegetarian and all).

Yeh-yeh, I'm sorry I'm missing your birthday. I made you a card and I'm putting it in the mail tomorrow.

As if he reads a) my blog, b) anything on the Internet, c) English. Well, please pass along the message, wonderful family o' mine.

Love ya!

More photos

Here are the rest of the noteworthy photos from my most recent expedition West. A moving train; a roast turkey; Dad and Kaitlyn; more roast turkey (yes I did eat a slice); the ferns at the back of the house; scarabs at the De Young's Egyptian exhibit (Patrick is blurrily mirrored in the right corner); and an interior passageway at the De Young, with their ferns in the background. All of the images will blow up if you click on them. (ka-boom!)

I'm home with a cold, but that never stopped Napoleon! Well it might have, I don't really know ... anyway, onwards and upwards ...

Nuculer family at graduation, June 12, 2005

Thanks for the schnazzy photos, Uncle Darryl! There are more online at ofoto.com. Let me know if you want me to send you a link to the album, everybody ... I'm not sure how to do it without going through their site.

Babies

Here's my littlest cousin, Ian, reading What Makes It Go? with my mom. His vocabulary is growing fast. Soon he won't be the littlest any more! Congratulations, Auntie Therese and Uncle Dennis!!