It’s the last Monday of 2018! And it’s not so Mundane, since it’s New Year’s Eve. It’s approaching midnight on the East Coast, the ball is dropping. Here I have 3 more hours. I may or may not make it until then. I’m pretty tired and my eyes are feeling dry and sandy.
This week’s theme for the Mundane Monday Challenge is appropriate for this time of year: Reflection. I am starting a new full-time job in January. I will blog more about the exciting changes this will bring to my New Year when I have the mental energy to do it justice. But right now I am reflecting on how my life is going to change in mundane, daily ways after I start working full-time again.
Power Lines, Smoky Sky
I took this picture one day in early November of this year. It was also during the weeks of terrible air quality in the SF Bay Area during the Camp Fire. I was driving home from one of the schools where I worked, and I stopped to find a geocache in a park near the water, as I did many days for my daily geocaching streak. I have been finding at least one geocache a day, every day, since December 31, 2015. Some of these cache stops in parks on the way home from school have been beautiful. This one was too, in a way. But it was also dystopian and strange. I hope it isn’t the new normal for California.
The air is much better now, but I still had a rough day today. Just before Christmas, my husband and I decided to do a 12-days-of-Christmas geocaching challenge and today was day 10. This means we had to find 10 caches today for this challenge. And, rather than being fun, it was a pain in the neck. I’m not going to stop the challenge now that I’m so close to completing it, but I am ending my streak in two weeks, and days like today have convinced me that it’s definitely time for it to end. No regrets!
I am also not making any New Year’s resolutions, other than to survive the transition back to full-time work. Earlier in the year I took Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies Quiz and I found out that I’m a Rebel. Rebels resist expectations, inner and outer alike. (Rebels are also the smallest category, apparently, so I’m feeling overlooked and in the minority.) With respect to resolutions, Rubin has this to say about Rebels:
Rebels generally don’t bind themselves in advance, so a New Year’s resolution might not appeal to them. They want to do what they want, in their own way, in their own time — not because they promised themselves they’d do it.
And I have to say, this sounds a lot like me. If I make a resolution, I may be less likely to do whatever it is, not more. And then she goes on:
On the other hand, some Rebels love the challenge of a New Year’s resolution: “My family thinks I can’t give up sugar for a year? Well, watch me!” or “Starting January 1, I’m going to work on my novel, and I’m going to finish by December 31st.”
BINGO, again. Why did I start this geocaching streak in the first place? I started it because I thought my husband, a serious cacher who was once ranked #10 in Massachusetts, thought I couldn’t do it. But now I’ve been doing it even longer than he has. And I will probably even miss it a little bit when it’s over.
I am celebrating the end of the streak in 2 weeks with a geocaching event at a donut shop. A couple of people have already written to congratulate me, and one mentioned that his streak had become a crushing burden by its end. I’d rather quit while I’m ahead: I’ll make an intentional decision to end the streak on my own terms, surrounded by friendly faces and donuts.
This will be the last Thursday Doors post of 2018. Norm is encouraging us to recap our year in doors. I have been recapping my trip each week as I post a new set of doors, so I will gather all the trip postings together here:
I have 15 Thursday Doors posts from this trip already, and it’s barely half done. I wasn’t kidding when I got home and said I had Thursday Doors for the rest of the year from the trip. I can keep going until the next trip!
In fact, earlier in the year, before I left for Europe, I was still blogging posts from my 2017 Asian trip on Thursday Doors, such as these.
While travel posts are fun, and I like looking at everyone’s from around the world, I also enjoy the posts that just show a little something from daily life, like my new Little Free Library, or the prosaic stretch of El Camino Real that winds through the town where I live.
I’d like to wish everyone Happy Holidays, with a picture of the door to our old house, and our dear departed snowman!
Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post and then sharing it, between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time), on the linky list at Norm 2.0’s blog.
I thought I was done with Brussels for Thursday Doors, but I’m not!
Our last night there we went back to the Grand Place and I took some more door pictures. These are of the Guild Halls and the Town Hall. For most of these, I liked what’s over the door as much or more than the door itself.
The Guild Halls:
This looks more like a church than a Town Hall. And this particular door is 3 in 1:
I don’t have a lot to say about these doors. They speak for themselves.
I was there in the summer, but just for fun, and because it’s Christmas time, I’m going to show this video of the Grand Place lit up for Christmas. It’s not Mountain View . . . but what a show! Enjoy!
Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post and then sharing it, between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time), on the linky list at Norm 2.0’s blog.
Follow my European trip with this and previous posts:
On Tuesdays I am reblogging some of my favorite authors. I am finished with the Little Women anthology author series and now I want to highlight my friend PJ Lazos from “Green Life, Blue Water,” another We Are the World Blogger. “How about taking stock of everything you desire and finding a way to acquire it that results in a smaller carbon footprint. The planet and future generations will thank you for your efforts.”
There’s an old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and we know that’s true, otherwise flea markets, yard sales and antique stores would not enjoy the popularity they do, but trash or treasure, the benefits of reuse and recycling are grand, and Craigslist has the statistics to prove it. In fact, areas where Craigslist is active have seen a decline in “the volume of consumer-generated waste” of between 3 and 5 percent.” Clearly, Craigslist is a forerunner of a circular economy where “the goods of today become the products of tomorrow.”
Imagine if we reduced our waste stream to such an extent that we didn’t need landfills anymore. That kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking may get you laughed out of a boardroom, but there’s money in recycling and an entirely new business model developing around circular economies and upcycling. One of my favorite EPA slogans…
Today’s Mundane Monday blogging prompt is “Making a Move.” On Dr KO’s blog, the move involves a cat.
I tried the new Word Press editor last night on my blog. Change is inevitable: even if it ain’t broke, people still try to fix it. So I was planning to “make a move” to the new editor. Use blocks! Paragraphs! Pictures! Galleries! It’ll be so easy, and my blogging efficiency and posting frequency will skyrocket!
Epic fail.
The problem for me centered on the picture galleries and the captions. They don’t work on iphones or ipads (at least). If you put your pictures into a gallery on the phone while you are waiting for a long intermission to finish, when you get back to the computer to finish up the post, the computer doesn’t recognize the pictures as a gallery at all and turns those gallery blocks into lists. In list mode, rather than being under the pictures, the captions were to one side. And there were weird, annoying bullet points next to the text. The placement of the pictures wasn’t right either.
So I re-made all the galleries in the new editor and published the post. It looked fine to me. Then I got an email from a friend. On his ipad, my blog looked like this, with the pictures STILL messed up.
New editor gallery block fail
So I went back to the classic editor. The blog looks fine now. I hope. I’m not making that move yet. But please read the blog–I worked hard on it! Thanks to these editorial snafus, I didn’t get it published until very late, when most people east of me had already gone to bed.
When I first read this prompt, “making a move,” I actually thought of something different, however: a physical move. I am working on my holiday letter, which always puts me in a retrospective mood. I scroll back through most of the current year’s pictures, and sometimes those from previous years too. Three years ago, we got ready to make one of the biggest moves of our lives.
This is our realtor’s gift of flowers and a balloon, congratulating us on our new house (set in front of the door of the old house):
And our cars, on a truck ready to move across the country:
And our empty house:
This post about the move, “Gandalf’s Knock,” is still, more than three years later, my most-viewed post.
Am I glad we moved? Yes. But more on that another time . . .
Yesterday I gave a talk about Little Women at the Mountain View Public Library. It was similar to my presentations about geocaching and Geocaching GPS a couple of years ago.
The librarian was also a fan of Little Women as a child, and she organized the tea party and made the lovely flyer. I set my childhood copy of the book, and my Madame Alexander Jo March doll (in red), there on the table. And I dressed up like a character from the book too: long brown skirt, high collar with a brooch, lace sweater, hair up. (What does it say about my wardrobe that I had all those pieces easily available in my closet?)
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Volume I was published in September of 1868, and volume II, originally called Good Wives, was published in 1869. Nowadays they are usually combined into 1 volume and published that way. Louisa wrote the first part–402 pages–in less than 6 weeks. Good Wives especially was written at the request of her publisher and readers. They all wanted to know who the girls would marry. Louisa herself wasn’t particularly interested in this: she said it was better to be an elderly spinster and paddle your own canoe. And she purposely disappointed all the Jo and Laurie shippers and made Jo what she called a “funny match.”
Many modern women writers claim to have been inspired by Little Women and its unforgettable protagonist, Jo March. Among them are J.K. Rowling, Simone deBeauvoir, Nora Ephron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Zadie Smith, Gloria Steinem, and Ursula K LeGuin. Singer-songwriter and punk rocker Patti Smith wrote:
There are some moments within literature when a new character is born, one who sits at the summit with others, emblematic of an age, or steps ahead of it. There have been many high-spirited characters before Jo March, but none like her, who wrote, remained herself. Creating Jo at a time when women had yet won the right to vote was an unflinching move.S he was an activist by example. And standing apart to extend asister’s hand, she has always been there to greet maverick girlslike myself, with a toss of her cropped hair and a playful wink tosay come along. To guide us, provide encouragement, lay herfootprints on a path she beckons us to follow.
Portrait of Louisa May Alcott
Jo March in her “scribbling suit”
Louisa May Alcott was a Unitarian, feminist, and abolitionist living in Concord Massachusetts. She hobnobbed with the Transcendentalists and had a crush on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, when women were given school, tax, and bond suffrage in 1879 in Massachusetts.
As many of us know, Little Women was largely autobiographical. Like her heroine Jo March, Louisa wrote, published, and supported her family with what she called “blood and thunder tales”–gothic thrillers with names like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” and “The Abbot’s Ghost or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation”–before turning to more realistic material. She wrote under the androgynous pseudonym A.M. Barnard.
But when asked by her publisher Thomas Niles to write a book for girls, she acquiesced, writing in her journal: “Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan. So I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.”
Portrait of Bronson Alcott, from the NY Public Library
The Fruitlands Farmhouse, from the Fruitlands museum
Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, was an idealist, philosopher, progressive educator, and man ahead of his time. He was not, however, a practical man, a farmer, or someone who knew how to put food on the table. When Louisa was 10, Bronson moved the family to Fruitlands, a utopian community based on Transcendentalist principles that he founded with Charles Lane in Harvard Massachusetts. This community had high ideals–for example, they eschewed cotton clothing, because cotton was picked by slaves, and they were abolitionists. But Fruitlands lasted only about 6 months. The men were more interested in talking about the Oversoul than bringing in the harvest, and the women and children couldn’t do all the work themselves. Louisa later wrote about her Fruitlands experience in the satirical short story, Transcendental Wild Oats.
Orchard House photos courtesy of Richard Ragan
Orchard House, where Louisa wrote Little Women
After moving twenty-two times in nearly thirty years, the Alcotts finally found their most permanent home at Orchard House, where they lived from 1858 until 1877. Louisa set Little Women there and wrote it in 1868, at a shelf desk her father built especially for her.
When the book was first published, it was extensively pirated, and now it is in the public domain, but it is estimated that ten million copies have been sold, not including abridged editions. It has been through 100+ editions and been translated into more than 50 languages. Her publisher persuaded Louisa to take a royalty rather than a flat fee, and as a result, the book and its sequels supported her and her relatives, plus some of her relatives’ relatives, for the rest of their lives.
My Jo March doll by Madame Alexander
My childhood copy of Little Women, the Illustrated Junior Library Edition
So what about me and Little Women?
I had a Jo doll, whose head and legs I had to reattach to bring her to the library. I was pretty into playing with dolls back then. I didn’t play mother and baby much though; I used dolls to act out stories. Little Women was one of those stories, and the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder were another. Some of my dolls had an elected government, with Chrissy, a tall leggy redhead whose hair grew when you pushed a button on her belly, at the top. It was like a girls’school or a women’s college: girls did everything.
I received the Illustrated Junior Library Editionof Little Women as a gift. I read and enjoyed the book as a tween, and my mother also read it to me. One of the things about this book that has stayed with me since childhood is the image on the cover: the family gathered around the piano singing. Even though I’m not much of a singer, I am a musician. I play the violin and viola.
My daughter played a number of different instruments growing up and my son plays the cello. I’ve always felt that was the highest purpose in music, not performance or musical skill or putting in your 1000 hours, but to bring people together.
When I started playing the violin and viola again after a long break, I started blogging at violinist.com. I wrote about reading Little Women to my daughter, and my blog was noticed by Susan W Bailey, author of the blog, Louisa May Alcott is my passion. I started reading and following her blog, and on that blog, I found out about the anthology, Alcott’s Imaginary Heroes, edited by Merry Gordon and Marnae Kelley.
As they explain in this interview, Gordon and Kelley found that Little Women is a pivotal book for many women, one that they return to in different phases of life. “I’m delighted to be part of it,” says Gordon, “and to connect with a community ofreaders who are as passionate about the book as I am.”
I reworked the ideas from my violinist dot com blog and submitted them as an essay called “Finding the Palace Beautiful.” As part of the publicity for the anthology, the publisher asked the authors to send a picture of themselves reading Little Women next to a local landmark. I chose the Googleplex.
Louisa’s grave on Author’s Ridge at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord MA. Fans pay tribute by leaving pens at the gravesite. Photo courtesy of Richard Ragan
One hundred and fifty years later, is Little Women still relevant? I told my writers’ group that I would be doing this reading, and one guy from the group said that he couldn’t get past the first chapter. And some people claim, not without justification, that it’s not a feminist novel. Everyone gets married off. Ambitions get smaller. Beth dies from her own self-sacrifice. Jo marries a man who deprecates her writing.Yet for me the relevance of Little Women 150 years later is captured well in Joan Acocella’s New Yorker article of this year, called How Little Women Got Big.
Notsurprisingly since I also moved to New York and married a German, I’m “team Friedrich.”
But even without that personal analogy, Jo’smarriage to Professor Bhaer isn’t just a funny match to me. It is a marriage of true minds and intellectual equals. Jo asks him to sing,“Kennst du das Land,” a favorite song that at first meant Germany to him, but later meant a purer, higher vision of home and love. The book’s ending is Louisa’s transcendentalist love letter and her philosophical masterpiece.
Louisa’s grave on Author’s Ridge at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord MA. Fans pay tribute by leaving pens at the gravesite. Photo courtesy of Richard Ragan
One hundred and fifty years later, is Little Women still relevant? I told my writers’ group that I would be doing this reading, and one guy from the group said that he couldn’t get past the first chapter. And some people claim, not without justification, that it’s not a feminist novel. Everyone gets married off. Ambitions get smaller. Beth dies from her own self-sacrifice. Jo marries a man who deprecates her writing.Yet for me the relevance of Little Women 150 years later is captured well in Joan Acocella’s New Yorker article of this year, called How Little Women Got Big.
Notsurprisingly since I also moved to New York and married a German, I’m “team Friedrich.”
But even without that personal analogy, Jo’smarriage to Professor Bhaer isn’t just a funny match to me. It is a marriage of true minds and intellectual equals. Jo asks him to sing,“Kennst du das Land,” a favorite song that at first meant Germany to him, but later meant a purer, higher vision of home and love. The book’s ending is Louisa’s transcendentalist love letter and her philosophical masterpiece.
For my birthday this year, I got my own Little Free Library. I’ve wanted one for almost as long as I knew that they existed, but I had been a little intimidated by the cost or by the thought of having to build one myself. Then I was also not sure about how to put it up in the yard. It seemed like a lot of effort.
But I really like these little libraries, and I’ve included a few in past Thursday Doors posts, for example here.
This library sits outside the UU church of Palo Alto, which I have attended a few times. There is another outside Brewer Island Elementary School (where I taught about photosynthesis this morning), painted blue like the school.
And I recently found a geocache in this Little Free Library in Redwood City, in a neighborhood near Roy Cloud Elementary, where I am teaching tomorrow. It kind of looks like an elf lives there.
I wish I’d been more systematic about taking pictures of all the libraries I’ve found, especially the ones where I’ve found geocaches.
Because finally, I am going to have my own! I got an unfinished one for my birthday. Right now it is still sitting on the floor in the front entryway, next to the shoe rack.
But it is pretty close to being ready to go. And, because this is Thursday Doors, notice the nice doors on it! My husband ordered it from LittleFreeLibrary.org. The post came the next day. It is extremely tall (I include some of the room furnishings for scale):
I’d like to paint it with some kind of music theme, or space/sci-fi theme. But the picture hasn’t quite crystallized yet. And it looks like I will have to dig quite a deep hole for that post!
Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post and then sharing it, between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time), on the linky list at Norm 2.0’s blog.
This week’s Mundane Monday post from Dr. KO was so cute that I’m just going to copy it. I love sleeping kitties (and non-sleeping ones).
Our cat, Sadie, spends most of the daylight hours lying around and sleeping. We adopted her as an adult from the Humane Society of Silicon Valley. She started out living in our daughter’s room and it’s still her primary residence, even though our daughter is in college in Oregon now. I’ve posted pictures of her on this blog before, particularly this one: Sleeping Kitty. The sunshine comes through the window onto the bedspread and blankets and makes her warm and cozy. So the theme of this blog will be Sadie’s favorite blankets.
She particularly likes fleece, which the Humane Society had already figured out. It took us a little longer. First we tried this maroon cat bed, which she liked for a while, as long as it was under the desk:
Then she migrated to our daughter’s bed, which she preferred, ignoring the cat bed altogether.
She was especially happy and warm with the blue fleece starry blanket.
Our son’s bed was not her favorite, until we put a fleece blanket on it too . . . I got this blanket as a gift from my former employer when I had our son, my second baby (now 15).
Sadie’s other home, besides the kids’ bedrooms, is the guest bedroom, except when I’m practicing my violin in there!
And then there is our daughter’s high school graduation blanket. (School colors: black and gold) Black fleece, for maximal display of cat hair!
“Camp Fire” is a strange name for such a terrible thing. I grew up thinking of campfires as cozy opportunities to gather around and roast marshmallows. But that is the name for the most devastating wildfire in CA history, destroying the town of Paradise, killing 88 people, and causing $7 billion worth of damage. Thanksgiving rains brought relief from smoky skies and a reason to be truly thankful as they helped the fire to reach 100% containment.
This was a semi-final girls’ volleyball game in the CIF NorCal Division VI. The Cougars from Paradise, the town devastated by the fire, still showed up to play the Lady Falcons. They didn’t even have uniforms. But their opponents welcomed them with jerseys, shorts, knee pads, and socks, donated food and clothing, cash, and gift cards collected from the community. It struck me that these young people know better than adults how to treat others who may be their adversaries in one area of life.
These communities will be dealing with the fire’s aftermath for months and years to come. Please consider donating to fire relief efforts.
1. Keep your post to below 500 words, as much as possible.
2. Link to a human news story on your blog on the last Friday of each month.
3. Place the WE ARE THE WORLD Badge on your sidebar, and help us spread the word on social media. Tweets, Facebook shares, G+ shares using the #WATWB hashtag through the month most welcome. The more the merrier!
4. We’ll read and comment on each others’ posts, get to know each other better, and hopefully, make or renew some friendships with everyone who signs on as participants in the coming months.
Yesterday I gave a talk about Little Women at the Mountain View Public Library. It was similar to my 
A Thousand Finds 