Here we are at the base of Mt. Lassen
Howdy folks, November 25, 2008
We are all doing well and chugging right along this fall with our adventures. Our latest big event was remodeling the house (new green siding, wall insulation, and doors to our rebuilt decks) which has just concluded. Its nice to have a quiet house and a clean yard again. It looks like we have a new house and its satisfying to get rid of the old vinyl siding which was unattractive.
We went to California this summer and sampled the wildfire air-pollution. Not bad....not good, but it made for beautiful sunrises and sunsets. I enjoyed sitting at Grandma Kathy's table going through her old photographs and talking about her early life with her, Uncle Bill and my dad. I didn't know that they had an archery store in Berkeley. I also didn't know that Gramma drove trucks, during WWII, full of troops from Oakland to SF, as they shipped out.
I spent the summer selling my beaded necklaces at the local farmer's market. I also did custom work and repairs. One week, a lavender lady set up next to me. She was a hoot. She was from the Cape, but came to Arlington to check it out and visit her uncle. And she smelled good.
For my 44th birthday present, I got to be the shortest member of my immediate family. Daniel (now 13 yrs) is going to go to high school next year in Concord, which has an awesome art department. Adam is now 12 yrs! Where did my babies go?
Our cat family grew to 4. We adopted another sibling pair, male/female. Now, they all entertain each other and us. The young ones keep the older ones on their toes. We can't remember any of their names, so call them, big girl, little girl, big boy and little boy. Their names are Rocket (orange long hair male), Jaguar (black and orange female), Silver (light grey long hair tabby male) and Charcoal (darker grey tabby female, in picture). I also gave them Choctaw names: Hishi (for Rocket, and its means fur), Ahni (for Jaguar, it means wish), Talihata (for Silver, it means light) and Tobaksi (for Charcoal, it means dark).
Then I shortened the last two to Tali and Toba. Yakni Moma Na Yukpali! ("joy to the world" in Choctaw), Love, Cori
Anthony getting ready to paint the trim on the front of the house
Left: after/Right: before
This has been my "Chinese Year". I have been reading books about China, started to learn Chinese (both spoken and written characters) and took a course at Cambridge Adult Education in spoken and written (but pinyin) Mandarin Chinese, which was wonderful. How did I end up into learning Chinese? It was just one of those random things, you know: your son sees a used book on Japanese characters in the bookstore, buys it, loses interest, you pick it up and find it fascinating, one thing leads to another, you switch to another language, and before you know it, you're sitting in a room with 10 people learning the 5 tones of Chinese and the fact that there are no articles, no words for "no" or "yes", no gender forms (he=she=it=ta), or verb tenses (!), etc. When you ask a person how old they are in Chinese, you say: "What animal are you?" They respond with "dragon" or "rat" or "pig", etc. and you would have to figure out how old they would be (it's pretty easy to guess someone's age within 12 years). I have also enjoyed learning the origins of the characters and how they are put together and used.
This summer was also significant in something I didn't do: for the last 3 summers I have gone on 4 or 5-day solo bike trips. This summer I just didn't get around to planning one. I was considering biking up into Vermont from Arlington and camping in various places, and it was a good thing I never got organized, because it seemed like there were thunderstorms every afternoon during the weeks that I would have gone. I will try again for next year. I just got through reading a book called Odysseus' Last Stand, where the author (Odysseus was the name he gave his bike) biked around the world over the course of 7 years. In other words, he spent 7 years living out of/off of his bicycle and 4 panniers. His observations on the cultures of the world from his unique perspective were, for me, spell-binding. His trip was so long (he finished a few years ago) that after biking through Japan, he met a Japanese woman, stayed with her for awhile, got married, they biked together for 3 years, then split up, and he still had thousands of miles and years to go in his trip.
Teaching is still going well and I continue the job of Treasurer of the teachers union. I have recently been re-invigorated by finding new ways to get my students engaged, often getting them up out of their seats and moving around the room to find a similar polynomial, or physically representing numbers in base-2 (binary), or searching for another student in the room that has the same answer as they do to a random problem, then using what's on the back of those problems to answer a third problem, etc. Somehow my creative juices have been really flowing lately and I spend lots of time with colleagues brainstorming about new ideas.
All fall and winter, I have been taking note of the quality of the sky as I run in the morning or go or come from work. It is quite beautiful, the colors that appear and the serenity of it. After the leaves have fallen the contrast of the branching structures with the sky in the background has also gotten my attention. I have continued to run regularly. Three days ago, I was running around Spy Pond, here in Arlington, and looked up at the last minute to see a hawk on a low branch, only about 10 feet up. It was probably 6 feet from my face. It was huge and had piercing eyes staring right at me. It scared me; I had never seen a hawk from so close. I stopped a few feet past and looked back and it hadn't flown away. From behind I could see the mix of different colors in its feathers and appreciated the size of it again. I ran on and enjoyed the morning, but I don't know how the rest of the hawk's day went...
-Anthony
Burnie Falls in California (east of Redding)
This year I have gotten into many events. I started two classes, swimming and fencing. My swimming lessons were on Tuesdays and my fencing lessons are on Thursdays I finished my swimming lessons around October. Spending all that time in a pool reminded me of Summer and I cant wait to get in a pool again. My fencing lessons are very tiring. Because of the face mask and jacket, my lessons are usually spent sweating. In fencing I learned parry (to block), riposte (to counter-attack), double (not sure spelling, deflect and thrust). My brother Daniel joined me in my fencing lessons after a 10 lesson long session. I had my 12th birthday in September. The books that I am reading right now are the books that are based off of the game Halo. They are very exciting and suspenseful. I like them because I play the game a lot at my friend Eryk's house. I just recently went to his Christmas party and we played it a ton of times. I also read many other books in the last year - the Alex Rider series, the Percy Jackson series, the Artemis Fowl series, and some other books.
Our cats are really awesome. My favorite one is Rocket. He loves to push on the door to my room and jump up on my bed when he knows I'm there. He is the biggest of all of our cats and eats the most. Silver likes to jump up on the sink when we are brushing our teeth to try and get some water. He can get really annoying sometimes when you almost spit on him.
-Adam
With Grandpa Chris on the way up to our Cabin in Royalston
Just recently I took a fun drawing class at the Center for the Arts. We learned about contour line drawing, gesture drawing with charcoal, figure drawing, blending cray-pas (a crayon-like pastel) colors to show other colors, and negative and positive space. I made some pretty good drawings I would have never been able to make before the class. I'm definitely better at doing drawings of simple objects with charcoal, showing highlights and shadows. I also read this great book that was the third in a series, about these three British scholars in the 1930's who discover this magical other world called the Archipelago of Dreams where pretty much every myth or fairy tale is true. In this book, one of their friends accidentally steps into a door through time, and gets trapped in the past as well as changing the present into a barren wasteland where England should be that's ruled by their arch-nemesis. So they have to go back in time to try to rescue him and change back the present. They end up going to Greece, then Alexandria (where one of the scholars accidentally sets fire to the Library at Alexandria), then the time of King Arthur. I love the book because it had such a well thought-out story line since it was involving time travel and it had the scholars actually interacting with the past. The book is called The Indigo King, and the first two in the series are Here, There be Dragons and The Search for the Red Dragon, by James A. Owen. I also liked the whole series, especially the part where they reveal that the scholars are J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams (I assume he's another famous writer, but I don't know who he is), who apparently get the ideas for there books from their adventures in the Archipelago. I suspected as much, since the first book seemed strangely like the Lord of the Rings. Anyway, hope everyone's doing good, and Happy Holidays!
- Daniel