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Corvus
I spent part of a long weekend looking for Corvus corax. I was told by my aunt that one come visiting. They feed the birds and chipmunks. Today I was delighted to inform them that they actually have two stripped little friends eating the seeds by the door. But despite vigilance, I had only seen the crows. Until this morning. The birds get specially bought, stale glazed donuts. My bags and phone were in the car when my aunt told me he (she?) had arrived. I managed to snap a picture when the crows chased it off into the trees, but not until after she got her share.
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Iris
For years now I’ve been using the PlantNet app to identify plants that catch my eye. I don’t have the books to key them all myself. I need to refresh myself on how it does its identification many of the pictures seem to be from citizen science efforts. It may not be completely accurate. This one is from a few weeks ago. It matches with Iris sibirica at 36%. Not enough for me to confirm.
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Mindset
I seem to be consistent with only posting annually. Not the schedule I had planned or anticipated. But life more consistently had other plans than I could make time here. There has been many family hospitalizations, ongoing cancer care, a death — none related to one another. And that’s just the healthcare related items. The consequence is that there is a lot of mental, emotional, and physical work that just haven’t made it possible for me to be here. The other issue is that I keep wanting to make this space “a thing.” I have kept this space for myself because the Internet is important and I believe that individual…
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An Experiment
2024 so far has a rough start. My brain feels like it’s thinking constantly but there’s no cohesiveness or through line. Last year, I had hopes of being systematic and methodical in order to clear out a backlog of “work” that has been hanging over my head. A clutter of thoughts and tasks that was “preventing” me from spending time on activities that I truly wanted to do and working toward a daily life that reflected my interests rather than others. This plan was in both my personal and professional life. What happened was the opposite. My dad asked for help recovering from surgery and I was thrilled to spend…
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Strike care
Yesterday was day one of UIC faculty striking to get a contract. This is the first I’ve ever felt secure enough to participate in. The specific issues can be found at https://uicunitedfaculty.org/. We are moving into an era of common good bargaining that deserves more time later. For now, many of us have will be facing situations that require collective action in one form or another in order to get the support that we need to live our lives and do our work. Strikes are a part of that. While I am very new to this arena, I am noticing similarities in this activity to others. One of my two…
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Elements
If I were to write a story, and someday I may, what are all the delights that I would want within? It would have to have animals. Mysterious, dark ravens or other corvidae. Wolves as friends or foes. I like the ideas of bees as they were used in The Starless Sea, industrious and inquisitive. Foxes as either trickster or guide. Observing but silent mice. It would have to have magic, probably the vague and ill defined kind. There would be seers and rituals and prophecy. Omens and portents, cryptic pieces of folklore in hidden places. Superstition. The mysteries and lore and rituals would wind themselves around herbs and parchments,…
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Meals – a case study
One of the most difficult things about being human, or any living being, for that matter, was how to solve the problem of feeding ourselves for the duration of our lives. Providing meals is a laborous process. It was when we were threshing our own wheat. It is now despite convenience “food” and take-out. Many people have discussed the cognitive load, unpaid labor, and disproportionate burden this places on women. I’ll dig up those more articulate commentaries and link them later. What I wanted to do here was lay out a specific outline and time of what that has looked like for me. If it’s useful as a reference for…
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Visible lines
My favorite art movement is impressionism and Paul Cezanne is often associated with it. While I did enjoy the exhibits, my take away from it was more personal then I expected. Cezannes work is full of inconsistencies, illogical constructions, and things that generally “don’t make sense” to us now and to his contemporaries then. Examples include differing visual perspectives, object lines that don’t meet, and incomplete sections. And yet, he was a master — a master because of these not despite them. What I choose to take from this is that, while I may never claim to be a master, I can reject the “rules” that culture, art, society, and…
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Voice
I started this site when I was in grad school as a semester-long project in learning to code HTML. I kept it, initially, because I was job searching and needed somewhere to showcase project work and also to create a separation between my future career and my current job and social media. I also wanted a little piece of the internet to myself. It’s been been ten years now and I still haven’t done much with it. I’ve had plans for board game review pages, data management annotated bibliographies, creative projects, all of which languish as random pages mostly unpublished. Some of this is because I feel that I’ve lost…
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Influence
This transition to deep midlife Brene Brown has called “unraveling.” It’s an apt description. I’m doing a lot of deliberate mental and emotional work. I’m only starting to see now how much work OS still ahead of me. A few books that have opened that path. Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. Clarified the difference between guilt and shame and gave me questions that allow me to examine these in my own life. The Joy Diet by Martha Beck. I only read this recently, but it outlines steps to find joy in everyday living. Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. This reminded me the exact scope of the responsibities of my life…