3347 Becs and her feline family are fine...

Sunday, August 28, 2011

[T]he interaction between students and teachers has become one of "intellectual hide and seek." The students try to match what they think the teacher wants to hear. If you can do that, you can be "successful" in school.
-- Ron Beghetto, an education psychologist at the University of Oregon --

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Just talked with Becs by phone. She and her entire feline family are alive and coping. She's been getting requests for assurances, but can't respond to all of them, so she asked me to let y'all know. (It's nice so many are concerned. I'm impressed with you all.)

Her electricity is out, which means no sump pump, so the water in her basement is about 18 inches deep. She's afraid her furnace, washer and dryer are kaput, and she's sadly lost some things, like journals and yarns.

The fire department arrived while we were talking - they'll pump out her basement for her.

Estimate for return of her electricity is this evening, so by tomorrow she may be back in the blogosphere.
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3232 This one's for Becs

Saturday, January 15, 2011

“Immature love is wanting the other person to be happy with you. Mature love is wanting the other person to be happy. Period.”

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Becs will understand this.

Almost alike. Same style, same fabric, different color, different print. I always shorten the sleeves to 3/4 length.
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2446 The lure of the kurta

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Michel de Montaigne: “Life in itself is neither good nor evil,
it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.”

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Another blogger (you know who you are...) mentioned having worn a beautiful sparkly kurta to a sort of country-style old-time-religion-y event, and seemed to have caused quite a stir among the other very plainly dressed women there. Their reaction confused me. I often feel like I'm dressed "wrong", too, even though what I'm wearing is chaste and good, and I'm seldom sure why. I had to think about it a while.

I think it has to do with sin. Fundamental types get all upset about sin.

To sin is bad. But to tempt another into sin is worse.

To feel envy is a sin. To cause another to feel envy is a worse sin.

I suspect the other women were envious, and to them it was a bad thing, and it was blamed on the lure of the kurta.

Likewise, to lust is a sin. To tempt another to lust is a worse sin, and that's why in older cultures and fundamentalist religions, women either cover their hair or otherwise make it ugly, and wear concealing clothing.

And that's why my mother wanted me to cut my hair when I became an "adult".
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1259 More Manhattan Meanders

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Today I met a Fellow Blogger in Manhattan. We had munchies in a deli, and visited the Museum of Modern Art.

That was funny.

We both said "I don't get it" a lot, and the final straw came when we stood in front of a small piece of ordinary graph paper glued to a sheet of plain white paper, framed, and hanging on the wall as "art". We looked at each other ... and raced each other to the nearest exit.

We had more fun in the museum shops, that one and the folk art shop next door.

I got to see Rockefeller Center (that hole in the ground looks bigger on tv), a big gingerbread cathedral where something significant was going on, and Madison Square Garden (which is round), and we visited the wonderful chocolate shop, where the hot chocolate is thick and rich and makes life worth living.

I walked with FB to Penn Station at about 5 pm, and then I headed back to Grand Central Terminal all by myself.

I found out that if you saunter at exactly the right slow speed, you can hit every crosswalk on "walk".

It started raining, but I had an umbrella, and the drizzle didn't last long. I found the NYC Library, and walked around two sides, but didn't see anything that looked like a welcoming door, and didn't find the lions. Wrong sides, I guess. I would have liked to have gone in. My right hip was getting tired, so I figured I ought to keep moving GCT-ward. I wandered around in Bryant Park, which is very pretty, with lots of tables and chairs, (and free WiFI), and I got to Grand Central 2 minutes after the hourly train to Poughkeepsie left.

That's ok - that gave me an hour to visit shops in the terminal. Some of them are really nice. I could have spent more time there. I bought a tiny "keychain" digital camera (pink!) for a few dollars in the Discovery store. I hope it takes decent pictures.

The train going home was actually crowded. I got home at 9:30 pm.
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1147 Small World

Monday, March 05, 2007

[Later edit - I remembered the name of the religion with the eternal flame - the Zoroastrians. See http://webzc.com/webzc.com/about.htm for a description of Zoroastrianism. It resonates with me in several ways (though not in others).]

In my usual time-unconscious way, I headed out Friday just in time to get to the Garden State Parkway at the beginning of rush hour. On a Friday. But it wasn't too bad, and I made it to the gathering hotel in enough time to register, sign in at the Mensa desk (I was a little embarrassed all weekend by my name tag - the woman at the desk had been into the wine, I guess, and tried to get fancy with "Silk", and it was almost unreadable), and meet a NJ blogger at 6 pm for dinner.

I'd been reading this lady's blog for several months. Her blog is full of atmosphere - she manages to convey mood even when she's writing about, oh, stop signs. I already knew a bit about her daily life, but I found I knew nothing about her. I expected a rather shy, quiet, perhaps indecisive, "gray" personality. Nope. She's decisive, open, confident, even a little imposing in appearance. She'd been kicked around in the past, but I think she's finding her strength now. I'm so happy to have met her. I needed a reminder that reading a blog is not "knowing" a person.

After all the advice I had got when I was planning to go to Manhattan for Roman's parents' memorial service, I vowed to go to NYC on my own this summer. I may now have someone to meet there.

The first Mensa sessions (monster trivia, a talk on lunar eclipses, and a talk on total wellness - pick one) were at 8 pm, but we were having such an interesting dinner, I blew it off. After dinner I went to the hospitality room, and found subs and all kinds of drinks and yummies, and lots of interesting people. There were 200+ attendees. I think I've about convinced half of them it's time to retire. I was also surprised that about half the people there are "in computers", and of those, half work for (or worked for) The Company. Most are now contractors.

I ran into one of the guys I had been playing trivia with, who had moved to Chicago. Another of our Mid-Hudson members moved to Chicago a few months ago, and I asked him if he had seen her at any Mensa event there, and he said no, but that he was surprised to run into her at a store downtown. In Chicago. Neat, huh?

Saturday breakfast in the hospitality room started at 6 am. I was up until 1, so there was no way I was going to make that. Last year, Roman was disappointed because by the time we made it to breakfast, all the lox were gone. Lots of bagels, but no lox. (I had never had bagels with lox and cream cheese, so a few weeks later, he introduced me at breakfast at his house. His were better ... ) I got downstairs at 7:15, and there was still lox. I wandered by at 10:45, and there were STILL lox! (Were? Was? Is lox plural?)

See, Roman? You should have been there. I called him and left a message to that effect.

At 9 I attended a talk and slide show by a woman who goes on archaeological tours. This one was on Iran, her latest trip. We've all heard of the Persian empire, and Alexander the Great, and the Hittites, and all that, but it hadn't occurred to me that Iran is full of ruins, just like Greece and Italy, and that you can, like, touch a door frame that Alexander had likely touched. I like connections like that. A lot of the "ruins" seemed fresher and in better condition than many younger ones I had seen in Europe. She says that Iran is tolerant of other religions. There's a Zoroastrian temple where there is an eternal flame, apricot wood and sandalwood in a bowl, that the priests have kept burning for 2000 years (actually, the number was "since 400", but I can't remember whether it was BC or AD).

At 10:30 a guy compared Tim Burton's movie Mars Attacks with Dante's Divine Comedy, showing the parallels in punishment and reward. The talk was all about the similarity between the two, but that wasn't the real point (which many attendees seemed to miss), which was that you can take any two things, and if you can find a few descriptors in common between them, you can build on them to make it sound like they are exactly the same. The talk was tongue-in-cheek, but some people missed that. Maybe because the two things he chose were very parallel - or maybe he was just good enough at it that he even convinced me, who was aware what he was doing. I wonder if he has any good deals on any bridges....

At noon, they brought in a few hundred pizzas.

I skipped the 1 pm program choices (there were multiple choices in each time slot) as none excited me, and I wanted to meet more people in the hospitality room.

At 2:30 I attended a synopsis of the Cosmology Colloquium held in Albany last fall. The subject was mostly what was before the "big bang", black holes and how they form, dark matter, etc., and the search for what really "fills" space.

At 4 there was a hilarious pun-filled rather naughty performance of the Pungo Players - a "Camelot"-themed musical playlet named "Mensalot", followed by a hotel-catered buffet dinner.

Then of course we all watched the lunar eclipse.

Son-in-law Hercules arrived at about 6. Daughter was attending a weekend Montessori conference in the city, so I had invited Hercules to join me. All the Mensa attendees wore a name tag that allowed them into the programs and hospitality foods, so I took him to the Mensa registration desk to get him a temporary badge, but there was no one there. Undeterred, he folded a piece of paper to the proper size and faked himself one. (People laughed because he had carefully copied, in black pen, the pink spoon sticker on my badge. The spoon was to indicate that I had paid for the dinner buffet.)

I introduced him around (Look what my daughter brought home for me!), and then we went to the 7 pm keynote talk, given by George Musser, a Scientific American editor, on what discoveries he expects will be made in fundamental physics and cosmology in the next ten years. (The particles are getting tinier and tinier, and Hercules and I both believe there is no upper or lower limit in size. When they finally detect what they now theorize are the tiniest particles, I'll bet they'll find hints of tinier. Ho hum.)

At 9:30 we went to the dance. The next morning, everybody at breakfast was taking about Hercules. He shook the place up. Next entry.

[Much later edit - this is the night I first met The Man.]
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