Posted by amy at November 20th, 2007

Just one of the things I miss most about the television show “Friends” was their annual Thanksgiving episode. There was little sentimentality, lots of acknowledged dysfunction, and I tended to laugh my ass off when I watched. While I love my family, and enjoy spending other holidays with them, the process of reclaiming my thanksgiving as a day of choice and not obligation has been wonderfully liberating. We’ve been trying to talk our children out of the big “turkey with all the trimmings” propaganda, proposing a menu of foods were thankful for but they will have none of it. When I read our shopping list to my 4 year old today, he circled “lobster” and wrote “NO” - he learned to write his own name a little over a week ago, so I took his objection seriously and left it off the final list. I’m willing to bet lobster was actually on the first thanksgiving table, but I won’t press the point this year.

After the feasting has finished and our guests have returned, I thought I’d head out to two exhibits on Saturday. The first is LEDs Are Pretty at Greylock Arts in Adams. I’ve seen a couple of pieces from the street and it looks really cool. The first (and only?) LED exhibit I ever saw was a Jenny Holtzer (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Jenny Holzer, Dec. 12-Feb. 25, 1990.) Holtzer opened a new exhibit at Mass MoCA this past weekend, so a trip to the big museum will round out my afternoon. There are giant bean bags to sit on while watching the projection, which is a great way to view modern art, don’t you think? On place you won’t find me this weekend is at the Mall.

I usually put off Christmas shopping to the last day, not because I’m lazy or procrastinate, it just seemed more efficient. This year though, something shifted and I wrote out my recipient list - I think the sheer length shocked me into action - and after a night of online credit card abuse, I’m almost done.

How are you with your list? Haven’t started? Haven’t a clue? Looking for ideas? I’ve got a few.

Starting close to home, Danny-O is having a sale on his 2007 Red Sox prints. If you aren’t familiar with Danny-O’s fantastic collages, please click on over and just browse. Most are done on album covers, are inexpensive and easy to frame. He has a huge collection (regional, holidays, seasons) so if heaven forbid you have a Yankees fan on your list, you could cross the divide and offer up a memory of better summers in the Bronx.

I think I’m going to splurge on at least one of these new flip video recorders this christmas. This looks like a great present for the technically challenged (but not phobic) grandparent on your list.

I fell into a really cool site the other night and took care of most of my shopping. ETSY is a site for people who hand make things, and before you roll your eyes and click away, trust me on this one. My biggest caveat with the site is that I found it really helpful to look with a person or an object in mind. I found myself browsing and liking a lot of items with no idea who to give them to. If you are willing to dive in, start with the homepage and their list of hand picked items, want to shop locally, try the geolocator or search by color. The variety, quality and price will surprise you.

Once inside, I needed to work pretty quickly through my list - I like giving fancy soap, and pairing it with a hand made dishcloth, because if it isn’t your cup of tea, you can easily regift it and if it is your cup of tea, then you’ll appreciate it. Shine Your Hiney Soap Company had a beautiful collection of holiday inspired soaps.

Despite living in the digital age, there are still times when I want to send a real card. I’m hoping other people on my list feel the same way and have selected a couple of hand crafted card sets.. Pick a complete set or work the category sidebar and give someone a backup collection of cards for when they get caught off guard without a graduation or birthday card. Practical, fairly inexpensive and not more plastic crap made in China.

Have a Martha Steward wanna be on your list? How about a beautiful apron with matching tea towels. They have camouflage ones for hunter on your list, which in the Berkshires could be half your family. If they are better with a fishing rod than a riffle, this mousepad may be more fitting.

There is always one drunken uncle who can handle a mildly inappropriate gift, how about a bb game?

If your wife is in my knitting circle (or wishes she was) don’t miss the selection of hand-painted sock yarn. Maybe if you pick a color you like, she’ll even make them for you.

Finally, I’ve been told that there are people who still listen to cds, for those people on my list, I’m planning on burning a show or two from the Internet Archives.

So how did you do? Are you close to finishing your list too? Please leave a comment if you found something to share!

Posted by amy at November 6th, 2007

Posted by amy at November 2nd, 2007

Oh faithful readers, please join me in celebrating my triumphant first-place-in-my-division 5k Sam Gomez race last weekend. The more observant reader might notice that I actually came in dead last, a good 15 minutes and 86 seconds behind a gentleman competing in the 75 + division, but you would be the same people who see the glass half empty. Running a 5k on a Sunny afternoon in October wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but running it over the age of 75 in under 40 minutes just might be, we’ll see.

A few weeks ago, I gave up my nightly jog for a trip to the attic for yoga. The front of our attic is huge and empty. Earlier this summer, fresh from a weekend visit to a spa with my wonderful mother, I rushed out to home depot and bought a decent sized rug, some candles from pier one and a couple of tapestries later, and I’ve got a yoga studio. I told myself that after the Komen race for the cure, I could move inside.

I didn’t know that I could really make the switch, but one night when I was playing in I-Tunes, I found a great podcast by Hillary Rubin and I’m hooked. If you’d like to try yoga at home, start with one of these. Hillary talks you through each pose with encouragement and advice as if she is in the room with you, watching your body move. “That’s it, now drop your hips a bit, more, that’s it, you got it.”

And yet it is incredibly challenging, both physically and intellectually, because Hillary primarily uses the Sanskrit terms and I just didn’t pay enough attention in yoga classes in the past to match the Sanskrit name to the names I’m familiar with “downward dog” “mountain pose” “wind relieving posture”. I’ve got two yoga books up there with me, one of which is stick figures in poses with names like “bend over” and the other has lots of great images, but is lacking in a Sanskrit index.

Tonight I hit a stumbling block with “Vashistasana to Wild Thing” which brought me down here to my computer, and the urge to share Hillary with you.

I needed a man in my i-pod to get me off the couch and onto a 5k, and now I’m hooked on a woman telling me to drop my heart into my hands and release. I could give up my cell phone today, but you’ll have to fight me for my i-pod.

Posted by amy at October 28th, 2007

“I want to see girls with educations. I think women are the future of Africa,”
Madonna.

I believe this was the first issue of Vanity Fair that I read cover to cover. I had seen Bono on Oprah talking about his crusade, I’d followed Brad and Angelina’s trips and Madonna’s trips, and Oprah’s project to build a school. They made very little impact on me and my first world concerns. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But most of what I knew about Africa was corrupt post-colonial governments, the Mercedes tribe in Kenya - named for the brand of car politicians on the take tended to drive around Nairobi.

But there was something about this issue of Vanity Fair that grabbed me and stuck with me. Again and again, I read different people write about the need to educate women, both to prevent the spread of aids and to invest in them for the future. Have we given up on men, a part of me wondered? Can we raise a continent out of supreme poverty by simply educating women? And if women are the future of Africa, does that mean men remain the future for everywhere else?

I’ve been ruminating on these ideas a lot lately as I prepare to teach my first college level women’s studies course. I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at Women’s Studies syllabi, scanning for books, articles and major points that I need to hit over the course of a semester. But I’ve found that the syllabi haven’t changed in the 15 years since I took an intro course, and they were woefully outdated then. I want to turn my students on to the idea — even if just for just a brief period of time — that they put women at the center of their inquiry and analyze what it means to be a woman at the dawn of the 21st century.

I want to return to Madonna’s statement, and bring it back locally. The regional economy in the Berkshires is one that, on appearance, seems to have a cycle of poverty that traps poor women and writes women off too early in their lives. As the gap between the haves and have nots grows bigger in Africa and in North Adams, one of the questions we’ll be exploring is how can we empower young women to make the transition to the new American economy — one that will require that they be far better educated than most of the women (and men) who came before them?

What do you think?

Posted by amy at September 20th, 2007

Chris Brogan writes a lot. Almost every day he has a post that catches my eye, about two or three times a week there is a post that I drop what I’m doing to read, and then there are days like today, where I spent some time in his archives getting ready for a presentation I’m doing on Tuesday*

As I was researching, I kept coming back to his top post on “100 blog topics I hope you’ll write”. I could probably write a post about 40% of them, but the one that interested me the most was “How Women Use Social Media.”

Do we really use it all that differently then men? Why isn’t one of the 100 topics, How Men Use Social Media? That started me thinking about some of the social media evangelists that I follow - who all tend to men - and the women who use social media to strengthen their community.

Knitters took to the blogging world early, I remember reading knitting blogs on 9/11, and knitters immediately finding ways to connect and care for each other. The first podcast I listened to was KnitCast, the first place I looked for in Second Life was a hangout for knitters. And it isn’t just about the yarn or the patterns, but it is an assumed community that provides intimate and immediate access. In contrast to the men’s communities I follow, there is little talk of reaching a new audience, turning people on to what is hip or happening. We seek each other out, pass the word along and network among ourselves, and celebrate when a new member wanders in and joins the tribe. And there is now a huge economic component as well, Etsy - like Ebay for crafters, lists 14,036 different hand dyed or hand spun yarns for sale from individual sellers, who work the social media like seasoned pros, send a skein of yarn to top blogger or podcaster and if she likes it, you’ll find yourself with a backlog of orders, your credit card processing company may even shut you down because they doubt anyone could actually be selling that much yarn.

Right now, I’m on a wait list to get into a group called “Ravelry” - a facebook type site for knitters. Raverly is a closed social network, and to control their growth they are slowly adding knitters from a wait list. Ready for this? They are now inviting 500-600 users a day. I just went and looked myself up on the wait list and this is what they said:

Photo by squirrel cottage

• You signed up on August 22, 2007
• You are #27,685 on the list.
• 12454 people are ahead of you in line.
• 6732 people are behind you in line.
• 43% of the list has been invited so far

Do you think this is just about yarn? I don’t — I think this is about community, and so when I see the question “How do women use social media”, my answer is, how don’t we? Maybe we spend less time talking about and and more time just doing it.

—
*Berkshire Cultural Resource Center’s Nonprofit Management Series - 9/25 Online Marketing: Getting Real Results in the Virtual World

Panelists: Joshua Field, Graphic Designer & Owner, Orbit Visual Communications; Bill Reichblum, Founder and President, KadmusArts.com; Amy Stevens Webmaster, MCLA

Posted by amy at September 20th, 2007

Vandalism is never funny, especially library vandalism, especially vandalism at the Boston Public Library - a fine institution where I spent many an hour trolling for handsome graduate students. And yet somehow, the Boston Globe’s coverage of today’s incident left me in giggles. Located about half way down “Christ statue vandalized at library, Lucifer left untouched” was this gem:

Posted by amy at September 6th, 2007

Posted by amy at July 12th, 2007

I’ve been suffering from olfactory blues lately, an odd affliction, really. It started with a yearning for the smell that greets you when you wake up in forest in the northeast on a summer morning, after a night of camping, with a tale or two told around the campfire. There is a fresh, dewy green smell from the foliage, combined with a damp smoky trace from the embers - the smell to me is happiness, excitement and contentment rolled into one.

I’ve been hinting pushing for a family camping trip, all summer, but I’m getting some resistance. The resistance is entirely realistic and grounded in a fairly correct assessment of our current situation, but that hasn’t dissuaded me. Rather than barreling over my family with bruit force, I am trying to be more subtle. We are starting with day trips to the local state parks.

I believe that there are two kinds of people in this world, river/ocean people and lake people. My father was a lake person, my husband is a lake person, my son is leaning towards being a lake person. If the water doesn’t move, I don’t really want to be around it, and I tell you this because it predisposes me to favor certain kinds of state parks, which will be come perfectly clear.

Several weeks ago, I thought I’d broach the camping subject very carefully by proposing that we go check out the camping sites at Savoy State Part. Savoy is the closest to our house (a mere 1.8 miles from our home, if we needed to break down camp and be home in 15 minutes.) DH summed up the trip nicely on his blog shortly after the event. Savoy may have rivers in the park, but this is a pond campground, so I wasn’t too eager to go back.

Two weeks ago, we strapped the bike, trailer and the wee ride seat on the car and headed downhill a bit to the Windsor State Forest. DH dropped the kids and I off at the top of the road leading to the campground, we rode our bikes downhill and met him at the point where they damn up the river to make a swimming hole. DH and the kids fished while I sat at a picnic table and knit. We then drove up and hiked around the Windsor Jambs, which were just incredible. The park had campgrounds, as well as a fairly small circuit of trails. Being a river park, this one rated much higher on my scale, and I was starting to put together more pieces of the camping puzzle.

Last weekend we met up with another couple we know from swimming lesson and their daughter and at Clarksburg State Park. We got there a little early and drove a lap around the campground, which was much more crowded than the previous two had been. As we drove around, I rolled down my window and stuck my head out like a puppy yearning for the breeze. The smell was dense, musty and green but it wasn’t quite the smell I needed, that I remembered. We met up at the beach on the opposite side of the pond from the campground and had a perfectly lovely day. I knit like a fiend on a sock I was trying to finish, the kids played, the men fished, the moms chatted. And it was a perfectly lovely park, for a pond park that is.

I think my next proposal may have some appeal. DH has consented to consider spending the night in a yurt, and I’ve found a state park with one that still has a few available nights left. October Mountain State Forest, south of here in Lee is the largest state park in the system. It has lakes, streams and more trails than I could hope to cover in one day.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll find a way to cure these olfactory blues before the season passes and I’ll have to wait till next year.

---

*Up until a few minutes ago minute ago, when I searched, I could have sworn that the name of this song was Olfactory Blues. Turns out the name is actually Lawn Boy. Here are the actual lyrics:

Phish - Lawn Boy Lyrics

Throughout the night
when there’s no direct light
and a thin veil of clouds
keeps the stars out of sight

I can smell the colors
outside on my lawn
the moist green organic
that my feet tread upon

and the black oleander
surrounded by blues
I’m soon overwhelmed
by olfactory hues

---

Related Links:
No Child Left Inside - a special initiative designed to encourage Massachusetts families and visitors to enjoy all the recreational resources and outdoor activities that Massachusetts state parks have to offer! From Cape Cod, to Boston to the Berkshire Hills, it’s time to discover the fresh air and fun of the great outdoors!

Department of Conservation and Recreation the state agency that oversees the state parks.

Berkshire Botanical Garden, where the above photo was taken of Alex’s fairee house.

Reserve America an online reservation system for campgrounds in North America.

Posted by amy at July 3rd, 2007

I updated my reading list on the lower right hand corner of the site. You can tell that it is summer by the titles I’ve added. I have no beach time planned in July, but you’d never know it from the books I picked.

Remember last winter when I did the 100 mile challenge? Well, I have identified a trend and my mid-life quest continues. On the eve of my 38th birthday, I completed a high ropes course without crying, and two weekends ago, I managed to not puke during a 90 minute hot yoga flow class in Boston. The next day, I jumped at the opportunity to hoist the main sail on a schooner trip through Gloucester harbor.

My next challenge is a bit less exciting, but just as demanding. I’m doing the Cool Running Couch to 5k plan - as delivered through this amazing podcast. I have one more run tonight to be through week one, and then will start week 2 tomorrow.

Unfortunately, my dear, protective husband has forbidden me from undertaking my next challenge till the kids graduate from college, but I guess that means I have 15 years to prepare to learn how to surf.

Happy Independence Day Everyone!

Posted by amy at June 14th, 2007

Ali, the top chef over at cleaner plate club tagged me for a meme, and so in keeping with the food theme, here are 5 things about me, the culinary edition.

1 - I don’t like mushrooms. I am really good at picking them out of dishes, but I did go through a period of time where I told the waitstaff I was alergic to them, to impress upon them that a mushroom shouldn’t even share the same air with my plate. Last night, I tried to get my 5 year old to try something on the table besides her beloved chicken wings with duck sauce, I even promised her I would eat a muchroom if she did, but alas, she failed to take me up on the offer.

2 - I love and miss seafood. Raw, steamed, grilled, baked in the oven or in seaweed at the beach, I love seafood - but I’m alergic to oysters. I found this out on my first valentine’s day date with my (now) husband. Unfortunately for him, I found this out after he paid the bill. The longer story is much funnier, but you’ll have to buy me a sushi role to hear it.

3 - It is hard to live with carnivores. If it didn’t roam the earth, darling DH doesn’t have room for it on his plate. The sounds of teeth on bones echos through our dining room as I’m constantly casting off my naugthy bits of beef to the ravenous horde. You’d think my husband’s family descended from a tribe of lions instead of generations of Ivy League educated humans.

4 - Until two years ago, I was not capable of eating any food with a hot pepper based spice (I could do wasabi for some reason - mustard based). Then one day, on a whim, I put one slice of a jalapeno pepper on a plate of roased veggies and my tongue exploded. Suddeny I was craving spicy, I suddenly got Indian and Thai cuisine. Life was now in color.

5. At the end of every Grateful Dead show, I roamed the parking lot looking for a “kind veggie bagel” a bagel with a thin smear of cream cheese, cukembers and sprouts, maybe onions and tomato. It was the perfect food to eat while wandering the lot looking for the perfect hair hand or beaded earings. The coolness of the cukember combined with the sweet cream cheese, softened my throat after a night of being in a smokey arena, and the bagel gave me energy for at least an hour of dancing in the drum circle back at the camp site.

I am going to tag Greg, and hope he’ll tell us five things he loves to cook …