Blog, do as i say!

Post! Why won't my last post post?

Oh well - if it doesn't show up soon I'll write another.

Great News!

Karmyn was accepted to the full year program at San Francisco Ballet! Next year, she'll live in the Bay Area, dancing every day and pursuing her dream!!

Pictures!

Inspired by Elizabeth, I've opted to finally post some pictures of these summer months. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the cabin, where I've spent a week now this summer, but they'll just have to wait. I miss you all!!!!!! And I'm counting down the days till I'm in DC saying hi to at least a few of you :) HUGS!

So, to start out with, here's a picture of Martha Markuson, my mom and Karmyn in her Swan Lake costume. I got back just in time to see her perform in May, it was beautiful! Martha, to the left, is a most amazing woman, my mom's college buddy. She was the first female President of a major law firm in Greater Minnesota (aka the Minnesota not centered around the Cities). She also reads super fast (like Elissa) and is now retired, working on healthcare policy stuff as an advisor to political folk. Super cool.

Yes we can! Yes we can! My mom and dad got in line at 3pm the afternoon of Obama's winning speech. It was /amazing/. My dad, always enthusiastic, teemed up with some people who were sitting to our left to start a wave - it traveled across about half the Xcel center before dying out. Awesome!


Almost as thrilling as the Obama speech, we watched this giant coal stack topple like a tree (and towards us!). I think it was 554 feet. To zero feet. In 20 seconds. At 7:30 am.


And, to close: cuteness.

Dianne left me this Friday

...to go to Paris. She'll be back in the middle of August, but until then, well, it's going to suck. I've got a lot of time to kill, and rather few ideas about what will be the proverbial murder weapon in this uncomfortably-extended metaphor. I could post here, perhaps, but Heather hates it when I do that. (Sorry, Heather.)

One thing that I will do is play a lot of ultimate frisbee. I just joined a summer league in addition to my two-a-week pickup games, and I also discovered a pickup game that plays behind my house on Sundays. There's a big field behind my house and I've seen them there in the past three Sundays, but this was the first time that I had time to come down and ask if I could join in. They were a friendly bunch, though not very skilled or well-organized; they didn't even use a stall count (for the few who would understand what that implies). All the same, it was good to get the exercise and I'd be lying if I said I didn't also get a kick out of being the best player there. Anyway, I could potentially end up playing frisbee three or four times a week for the rest of my summer in Delaware.

Yesterday, I received a check for $475 in the mail the proceeds of the little YDN contact form escapade to which I alluded in my most recent post. The signature on the check was a rather large stamp in garish hot pink and purple, which I suppose serves me right- the few (two? three?) of you who know the story will probably agree.

In other colorful developments, these past two weeks have seen the introduction of a new garden into my life, albeit one considerably smaller than the Hagley garden whose passing I lamented so lugubriously two posts ago. As those of you who have seen my dorm garden can attest, I'm a rather prolific herb gardener- and this summer, I've expanded my collection, covering my family's backyard deck railing with potted oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme, spearmint, peppermint, basil and sweet basil.

I've had a chance to broaden my gardening focus this summer, due to the death last year of the large maple tree that had loomed over my backyard. Before then, there had been a raised bed under the tree that we had used for shade gardening, and boy does shade gardening suck- all you ever seem to be able to plant is impatiens. But now, in that raised bed, there was only the butterfly bush that my dad had planted to replace the tree, surrounded by mulch-covered emptiness. So one day I decided to plant a butterfly/herb garden.

That's exactly what it sounds like: many herbs, especially ornamental ones, are highly attractive to butterflies. Moreover, I'm a fan of the French kitchen gardening technique (similar to what was employed at Hagley) that mixes culinary plants with certain flowers that, in addition to being aesthetically pleasing, attract pollinators and repel some pests. Below are some pictures of my garden soon after it was planted. Since then, everything has grown rather nicely, with the exception of the dill, which was eaten by a Jewish rabbit. I've also added a few additional flowers and herbs since the time of the pictures.

For anyone who might be interested, here's a list of what I've planted- I've separated out the stuff I've added since the pictures were taken.
Flowers: nasturtiums, scarlet sage (ornamental), marigolds, creeping thyme (ornamental), butterfly weed, New England aster, giant hyssop 'Acapulco Rose', coreopsis ADDED SINCE: orange cosmos, penta 'butterfly blush', plumbago, lantana
Herbs: lavendar, dill, bronze fennel, sweet basil, thyme (culinary), parsley ADDED SINCE: sage (culinary), oregano

Life In Kanazawa

Hello ya’ll~

Sorry for the late start on the blogging—a combo of spotty internet access and having to navigate blogger in Japanese slowed me. But ultimately, nothing could stop me from writing to ya'll, and now I am here—fiercer than ever! Ah the wonders of finding a building with free wireless…

My life in Japan is as follows:

I live here:

This is my room:

In my spare time, I read, do puri kura (make photo stickers), and hang out with my host family:

(That’s a puri kura with me and one of the other interns—and the Brother’s K—thank you Martha)

I am eating lots of good Japanese food. But I have not yet tried this:

(Yes…that’s a shrimp burger! From McDonald’s!)

Or this:

(Yes…that’s a shrimp wrap with Thousand Island dressing! From McDonald’s!!!)

Sometimes, on my commute home, I watch these on-the-fringes-of-society-people dancing at the train station:

(They use the window like it's a mirror at a dance studio. Some people watch them with curiosity; others watch them with a mix of disgust, lust, or admiration.)

I work here:

During the day, I go out in this car, sometimes with these people, and interview people in the area:

No, my Japanese is not really good enough to interview people, but I’m a novelty so they’re ignoring (/laughing at) my poor grammar and limited vocabulary. And going on interviews is fun! We’ve been to shrines, eel stores, mountains, water purifying experiments, museum exhibits, a place where fireflies light up in daytime too…there are many stories. I will write more in here shortly. Also, if you’d like, write me! I am happy, but somewhat lonely. The other interns are nice but we do not click so much and the people at work are older than I although they’re good company (ha—and they’re people at the company…so it’s a pun…ha ha……

Anyhoo…here’s the recording studio I’m in when we’re not doing interviews from the car.

Signing out for now & miss ya’ll,

Elizabeth

Great News!

I have a driver's license!

I'm working on women's outreach for Franken!

I have a new Minnesota Political Hero: Arlen Erdahl (former IR congressman from Minnesota)!

Life is great!

The Yale Daily News Contact Form

Friends,

Since its inception last semester, the Yale Daily News contact form has been a source of near-constant amusement to me. I had expected that the activity on this front would taper off as summer drew on, but so far, it's shown no signs of doing so. Consider the curious e-mail that I found in my inbox upon returning from Longwood Gardens, where I had been celebrating my three year anniversary with Dianne de la Veaux:

"This email has been sent from the Yale Daily News contact form:

Sent To: Michael Zink

Sent From: Frank Henrich (redacted)

Message: I have written a devotional book using 10 of the images in your book Le Moyan Age. I intend to print 250 copies of the book that contains 40 medieval images and give it away free to those in need. All my efforst to obtain a response from Tallandier Editons have been fruitless. Can you assitme on obtaining permissions, if so I will identify the pages. The collection of images in your book are outstanding. Thank you for writing the book. Frank Henrich, author and poet, Modesto, Californis USA. I am sending this email from a friends email so pleass respond to the emial listed above. "

An online search confirmed my suspicions: Le Moyen Age had been written by a Zink...Michel Zink, pictured at left: a rather well-known French scholar of medieval history. As it turns out, he also guest lectured at Yale at least twice during the 80s and 90s. In the past, some of you expressed surprise when I claimed to have a fairly common name; I can now definitively say that it is common enough. My reply to Mr. Henrich:

"Dear Frank,

I believe you have me confused with Michel Zink, a scholar of medieval history and actual author of Le Moyen Age (he's a professor at College de France, and his personal web page URL is http://www.college-de-france.fr%2Fdefault%2FEN%2Fall%2Flit_fra%2Fbiographie.htm if you haven't already found it). By contrast, I'm a student staff columnist with the Yale Daily News whose name contains the letter "a".

Aside from the fact that Michel Zink has been a guest lecturer at Yale from time to time, I'm perplexed as to the reason for this mistaken identity-nevertheless, thank you for your interesting e-mail. If you can't find a way to contact M. Zink directly, perhaps you can try to reach him by way of College de France. Good luck with your search.

Best,
Mike"

I have also made $500 this summer from the YDN contact form, which is a far more interesting story, albeit one for another time. If you would like to contact me via the Yale Daily News contact form, go here. Or you can log onto mail.yale.edu and send me an e-mail. Seriously, I've heard more this summer from some guy who thinks I'm an eminent French scholar of medieval history than I have from some of you. This is not acceptable.

Moreover, if the rest of you do not post here more often, then I will have no choice but to turn this into my personal blog. First, I will replace Martha's quirky, upbeat blog design with red text on a plain black background. I then intend to fill this space with minutae about my personal life, minutae which will be so unfathomably tedious, and which I will catalogue in such painstaking detail that you will begin to wonder how (and why!) I even find the time to blog between all of the trifling events happening in my life. If all goes well, I hope to progress to writing long free verse poems about how the rain outside my window makes me think about the currents of despair that have filled my heart to overflowing. I will spell "despair" d-e-s-p-a-r-e. Consider yourselves warned.

Mike

The death of a garden

I've told many of you about the three summers that I spent working as an assistant to Peter Lindtner, the horticulturist in the French Garden at Hagley Museum in my home state. Some of you (and I won't name names) may have thought that I was fibbing when I told you about it; a position which, though incorrect, I can entirely understand.

Anyway, I went to visit the garden two weeks ago, and everything seemed amiss; many of the once beautifully-pruned Espalier fruit trees were overgrown, denuded by deer, or were blackening with fireblight. The four planting blocks seemed unusually sparse, empty spaces that ought to have been filled with billowing sunflowers, tobacco plants, artichokes and zinnias.

It was the opposite problem in the herb garden, where the mint had made a rapid conquest, choking its neighbors beneath a mound of strongly scented leaves (Mint tends to do this. Friends, do not plant mint in your backyard, unless you want to have a mint lawn in a few years).

There was no sign of Peter. I found a groundskeeper (a new guy, since I didn't recognize him) planting a row of cauliflower in one of the blocks- unheard of; it took me almost two years before Peter trusted me to plant a row. But Peter, he told me, had retired a month ago. There was a story about it in the Delaware News Journal. Dazed, I started telling this groundskeeper about how I used to work for Peter and about all of the places in the garden that desperately needed tending. Look, I said, there's fireblight on all of these fifteen year old dwarf pear trees and if you don't prune them soon they are going to die. Make sure that you use clippers soaked in rubbing alcohol or you're just going to spread the disease. The groundskeeper was a well-intentioned fellow and followed me around the garden and promised to do what he could to take care of things.

Then I found a couple of people on the staff that I knew and spoke to them about Peter; the feeling was that he had left because was tired of being underappreciated by the management, who had for years ignored his requests for more assistance in tending his garden. It's an impossible space for one person to take care of, very difficult for two, but in the summers when I worked there I was essentially the only help that he had.

Peter gave a month's notice before he retired, and in that time, museum management made no effort to find a successor for him to train. So at the beginning of May, Peter left Hagley a garden in good shape, but took all of his expertise with him. The tour guides still bring groups through there, and they talk in vague terms about how Peter prunes the dwarf pear trees, as if he still does it.

I hear that he's home working on a book about local wildflowers. I know that it broke his heart to leave. He loved that garden.

Hagley still has no candidates for his job, and the deer, seeming to sense that the garden no longer has a guardian, have moved in. The day after I visited, I came back and planted a row of tobacco, and did a little bit of weeding- the first time I've volunteered for anything out of grief. But now I'm working 9 to 5 at DuPont and I don't have time to go back there, so I suppose it's time to accept that the garden that I've loved for five years and that Peter Lindtner loved for thirty five years is gone.

-Mike

Hello from D.C. :)

My friends! I miss you! And this blog is wonderful. Marth, you always have the most fantastic ideas. Maybe, under your guidance (benevolent obsession?), my morose claim of a few weeks ago - that the Family of Joe will continue to stay in semi-contact but will only come together physically for funerals, and maybe marriages - will indeed be proven false. Actually, since I said that we've talked about it - I hope we'll all talk about how to stay in touch post-graduation over the course of the year, because...it matters. :)

So the big news for me today is that this bill that I've spent all summer working on, the one that prevents credit card companies from exploiting consumers too badly, went to markup yesterday - that's where the Committee debates and changes the bill - and passed! So it's on its way to the House floor. It's unlikely to become law, but it's still incredibly important. Due to this bill, the Fed has proposed new rules about unfair and deceptive acts and practices (UDAP - D.C. is obsessed with acronyms) that will accomplish a lot of what the bill would have, assuming the army of lobbyists employed by the banking industry doesn't convince them to back down. Anyway - the bill got out of committee, which wasn't expected, so I was excited. :)

In other news, my life is a little nuts at the moment. Lots of emotional stuff latedly - the big one was that my grandfather passed away last week, which was confusing and sad - and also, this is my last weekend in DC. After this I am off to Colorado, where I will hopefully do lots of outdoors things (although I just sprained my ankle, so we'll see - it's been a heck of a week). Then I'll be back in Kansas for two weeks. I'm actually scheming to find a way to go to the Democratic Convention - so that might happen too. And then....drumroll please.....YALE!!! I can't wait.

I don't know if this is what a blog post is supposed to be, exactly - I've never written one before, and I'm used to operating in the personal-email form rather than the broadcast-for-everyone form, but yes. I'm done now. I'm going to go wade through a crate of insurance papers for one of my bosses. Woohoo....

Lots of love,

April

Dearest Family of Joe,

So far the summer has been both relaxing and stressful, productive and lazy, and all sorts of other opposites simultaneously. Which has been more than a little confusing, to say the least.

It all started with a most fabulous four days in DC. MyJoe mixed me G&Ts every night, we got up early every morning to coffee and a bagel, and I spent the day surrounded by lovely: reading and writing in majestic buildings.

On returning home, however, I found myself both high on Minnesota and in a state of complete collapse. I slept /tons/ and let myself ride the waves of family-ness more or less completely passively. By the second week, my guilt at not doing anything and paralyzed fear of not doing everything I needed to do this summer took hold, and I managed to get some things done: finalize my two internships, call a former governor, finish a couple books, get my bike out for a spin, look up gym and climbing memberships.

Last week then flew by, spending time with my sister and the returned MyJoe. Oh! I almost forgot! I also had an amazing first meeting this summer about my senior thesis. That was exciting, and made me feel productive for the first time this summer. I'll have the opportunity to sit in the Twin Cities Public Television station crash lounge and watch all the old politically related episodes of my favorite show ever: Almanac, a weekly news show begun in 1985. That'll be amazing. Oh, and last weekend I went down to the convention and watched Franken's acceptance speech. I'll be working hard for him this summer (I hope - 'nother thing to make happen).

This week, I've been working at a place called WAND: Women Achieving New Directions. It helps low income women find jobs which pay them better, thus allowing them to support their families. My task has been to organize binders filled with information on community resources, from child care to housing services. I'm now compiling that information in an easy to use (and pretty) packet so staff can quickly find organizations which can help these women with whatever they're facing. It's also allowing me to gauge how much communication happens between non profits here in the cities, and to think more about one of my crazy ideas: a plan to improve communication between organizations and create a true safety net for everyone in this community - as well as make volunteering easy and integral to the Minnesota lifestyle. In other news, I've started contacting women leaders in the community to 'put myself in context'. I want to know how it is that I, as a young woman, have had the opportunities I've had by learning what the women who came before me have faced. I also want to know what they think of my generation: what they think are the challenges we face, and how we should go about fighting them.

Which brings me to the crux of my confused-state/jumpiness. I realized the other day that I'm in a sort of funny transition area right now. Minnesota has always been the place where I played soccer, went to school, did all that 'growing up'. But now, really the last couple weeks, it's becoming the place where I will /live/. Where I will raise a family. Where I will work and make connections and do the things I will do to make this place (keep this place?) as great as it is in my head when I'm arguing with Bostonians. It's an eery sort of transition, and I'm still trying to figure out what it practically means: in a lot of ways it's a transition that has been going on for awhile....

Anyhoot, this weekend will be a break from all that: Cabin!! We'll be putting in da bOHt and going for a sOWna. Ah, been too long since I've had one of those :) And seeing the grandparents will be a blast!

I really miss you all! Please, let us all know what you're up to!

Love,

Martha

As per usual, my life is and has been ridiculous, but more so than usual recently.

About a month ago I was in a car accident because, of course, as I finish my year of regaining financial stability I must go and undermine all my work by inflicting over $5000 worth of damages to my sister-in-law's car.

On a happier note, I was Meredith Morrison's present to Adam Goodrum on his birthday. The two of us flew out to lovely Lubbock, TX to eat dirty mexican with him and go and see Yale in the new Indiana Jones. We may have each individually had large conniptions as we saw our favourite parts of Yale - Starbucks, Harkness and Saybrook. I also totally rocked life at laser tag. Don't tell Adam, but I think Meredith and I both had more fun hanging out with two of his home friends than we did with him. Kidding, but he did have some pretty cool friends.

Now I am starting my last week of work and summer classes in Wilmington. I am so happy to be so close to going back home to Hatteras and getting ever closer to going back to Yale. I like living with my brother and his family but I am so over Wilmington now that I can hardly stand it anymore. I have escaped one recently, besides the trip to TX, to see Radiohead in concert in Charlotte. It could not have been more spectacular. Not only was the concert itself sublime, but one half of the sky had heat lightning and the other half had a meteor shower (it was an outdoor venue). On Tuesday I'm planning on having a similar experience at an REM/Modest Mouse concert in Raleigh.

There's also only 1 month and 12 days until my 21st birthday!

Yosemite Move-In

Lovely people!

I write to you from the magnificent environs of Yosemite National Park! I've just moved into a lovely house with three other girls, where I have a single and can hear Yosemite falls from my room! Today I went on an amazing 7.5 mile hike to the top of Nevada Falls - it's one of my favorite hikes in the valley. Tomorrow I'm tackling the four-mile trail up to Glacier Point (one of the best views in the park) and then down the Panorama Trail.

The scenery here is unparalleled, but I honestly think my favorite thing about the park is the way it smells......like sun-warmed granite, dry earth, glacial river, cedar, and pine. So heavenly! Every breath is a delight!

Also, I met my boss today! His name is Andy, and he has long red hair and a beard and a great sense of humor. Basically, I am getting paid to hike (and work some at the Visitor's Center). So excellent.

I hope you all are doing well! Come visit me!

Much love,
Ranger Laura

Hullo all!

We can have conversations! We can post pictures! We can stay in touch!