Weekly Roundup 32: B2S Time

That's right, it's Back 2 School time, and even though this is the first year I haven't had a student since my older son started kindergarten, it's a hard mindset to break. My mom was a teacher, and I remember going to her elementary classroom late in the summer to help put up bulletin boards. Being in a school without students almost felt like trespassing. I can still picture the dim quiet hallways and hear the sound of the stapler we used to affix construction paper to the corkboards. 

Years later came the annual purchase of backpacks and crayons and tennis shoes for my two boys, all of it seeming so important because it heralded the return to school. We would show up at Target, find the supply list for the correct school, and and start checking things off as we dropped them in the cart. This year, 57% of families will forego the shopping trip and buy their supplies online.

If you like to get a little wonky with the numbers, the National Center for Education Statistics is the website for you! That is where I learned that in Fall 2021, 49.4 million children were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools and 5.5 million children were enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools. 

That adds up to a lot of school supplies. In fact, total back to school spending--including everything from erasers to MacBooks--is estimated to hit $81.16 billion dollars this year. To help defray some of this cost, sixteen states are participating in "sales tax holidays" for certain eligible items. Hey, every little bit helps.

(All this talk about back to school is making me nostalgic. I might have to go buy myself a new pen and spiral notebook.)

To all the teachers everywhere, thank you! You make a hard job look easy and do it with love.

 

 

Weekly Roundup 31: Olympic Gold

The Paris Olympics wrapped up on Sunday, and many people kept an eye on which country would take home the most gold medals.

Instead of medals, ancient Olympians were presented with a branch off of the wild olive tree growing in Olympia, Greece. At the first modern games held in Athens in 1896, winners received a silver medal and an olive branch. 

The summer Olympics of 1900 mixed things up with rectangular medals for some sports and various cups and trophies for others. The now-familiar tradition of awarding circular gold, silver, and bronze medals began with the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games and has continued since.

This summer, the United States and China tied with 40 gold medals a piece (though the total medal count was 126 and 91, respectively). That's great, but it's also expected from these two powerhouse sporting nations. Kind of like when Stephen King or Colleen Hoover have another book on the bestseller list.

Since I'm the kind of person who likes to root for the underdog, I'm just as excited for Botswana, whose Olympic team brought back the country's first ever gold medal. Letsile Tebogo earned the top honor in the men's 200 meter race by besting American track superstars Kenny Bednarek and Noah Lyles, and other world-class sprinters.

The president of Botswana declared a half-day holiday on Tuesday, and Tebogo returned home to a stadium full of fans celebrating his victory. Seeing as how Botswana has been competing in the summer Olympics since 1980, this seems more than appropriate.

Although I do everything at a much slower pace than the 19.46 second winning time and will never be in a national spotlight, I'm still inspired by this story. And speaking of inspiration, the Paralympic Games begin on August 28.

Have a great week!

Weekly Roundup 30: A Zen Moment

Well, it's been a week around here. Hot, dry weather, wildfires and smoke in the area. But the forecasts are looking better, and we should actually see some rain over the next few days. 

So instead of a real post today (whatever that means), let's all take a quick moment for a deep breath, a smile, and some gratitude for the good things in our lives.

Each morning, we are born again. What we do today is what matters most. ~ Buddha

Take good care, and I'll see you next week!

Weekly Roundup 29: The Anti-Troll

Over the past couple of years, the iconic Sasquatch of North America has been having a moment. But that one crypid can't really hold a candle to the humanlike creatures that populate Nordic folklore, including elves, dwarves, gnomes, spirits, and of course trolls. 

Living in forests, caves, or rocky areas, trolls are closely tied to the natural world. They might be portrayed as oafish and dumb or cunning and malevolent, but rarely are they kind and helpful to humans. The mountain troll in Harry Potter, for example. (And it's not difficult to understand how the trolls who populate the dark recesses of the internet got their name.)

But Breckenridge, Colorado is home to a different kind of troll. 

Isak Heartstone is a wooden sculpture made by the Danish artist Thomas Dambo. Standing 15 feet tall, Isak is constructed of reclaimed and recycled materials. With one hand around a nearby tree trunk, he gazes down at the steady stream of visitors who follow the short Trollstigen Trail to come and say hello.

Dambo refers to himself as a Recycle Artist and Activist. A self-proclaimed dumpster diver, he has built hundreds of installations across 20 countries/5 continents and doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon. His mission? "Showing the world that beautiful things can be made of trash."

I didn't know all of this when I visited Isak. And I didn't know he has more than one hundred brothers and sisters around the world. I knew only that this big wooden fella had a kind face, a sweet vibe, and made everyone who saw him smile.

The end of July is upon us. See you in August!

Weekly Roundup 28: Touchstones

During the pandemic, someone in my neighborhood began leaving beautifully painted stones around to be enjoyed by whoever happened upon them. I was always delighted to find one and would often take a picture. 

Not long ago, someone wedged one of the stones between two tree trunks:

and now whenever I pass, I touch it.

Touchstone is a word with an interesting evolution. It originally meant a literal dark-colored stone used to test precious metals. Gold or silver was rubbed against it, and the resulting streak was analyzed for purity.

The word later took on a more general meaning as a criterion for determining quality or legitimacy of goods or services. Flakiness, for example, is the touchstone of a great croissant. A touchstone can also refer to a fundamental part or feature, such as the touchstone album of a particular decade.

And it seems that the meaning has morphed again, to what Urban Dictionary refers to as a person of importance, a significant other, who completes you and offers unconditional love, ie your "rock".

Then there's a cultural touchstone, which is an event or phenomenon that connects people to a certain time or place. 

Or, you know, just put your hand on a stone :-)

Stay safe, stay cool, see you next week!

Weekly Roundup 27: State Flowers

When I was in Texas in April, the wildflowers were gorgeous. After I got home, I bought seeds for two of the iconic varieties: the poppy and the bluebell. I planted them in pots and awaited my own wildflower superbloom.

Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. The poppies sprouted but then sort of disappeared, and only two of the bluebonnet seeds made it to the flowering stage. But it's better than nothing! 

Last weekend, I saw the last of the spring columbines blooming in the Colorado mountains. 

I realized that I know very little about the state flower program, so I did a quick internet search. 

The first state flower was the coastal rhododendron, adopted by Washington State in 1892. Fifteen thousand women voted for it and started a national trend. But it wasn't made official until 1959.

The columbine has been the Colorado State Flower since 1899, beating the Texas bluebonnet by two years. Oklahoma was the last state to adopt their flower, the Oklahoma rose, in 2004.

Flowers are chosen for their regional significance and are often assigned a virtuous quality such as resilience, serenity, or hospitality. They are as varied as the Arizona saguoro bloom, the Maine white pine cone and tassel, the Nevada sagebrush, and the Delaware peach blossom (sorry, Georgia, they beat you to it).

I would imagine that every governor who signed state flower legislation was happy to do it, as a state flower truly is a beautiful (and hopefully uncontroversial) part of a state's identity.

See a list of the state flowers here.

Have a great week!

Weekly Roundup 26: Beach Reads

Odds are slim that I will find myself on a beach this summer, but I still enjoy a beach read. Though everyone has their own preference, my informal survey/internet search indicates that beach reads are usually fiction, either contemporary or historical, and most often fall into the categories of love/romance and crime/mystery. Horror is a distant third, but there are still plenty of readers, me included, who prefer their chills in the summer.

Non-fiction choices span a wide range, from food/lifestyle to history/politics. Memoir makes the list, but some of the most popular non-fiction choices include collections of personal essays, many of them humorous. I can see that. They're short, engaging, cover a variety of topics, and are easy to put down and pick up again without having to remember plot points such as whose great aunt once-removed lived in the groundskeeper's cottage a generation ago. 

Lists notwithstanding, the perfect beach read is one that will keep the reader engaged and invested without making them work too hard. Even grownups who have been out of school forever still don't want their summer books to feel like assignments.

Author Curtis Sittenfeld, who has written seven novels and one short-story collection, has cooked up a fun experiment. Using five reader prompts submitted through The New York Times, she's going to write a 1,000 word "beach read" story. She's also going to feed those prompts into ChatGPT, with the instruction to write a story in her style. 

Fun, yes, but also a little scary because what if AI manages to pull it off? Curtis is rooting for herself--what she calls Team Human--and I am, too. I can't wait to read the finished products later this summer.

Grab a good book, and I'll see you next week!

Weekly Roundup 25: Mid

You cool kids already know this, but "mid" is a slang term that means mediocre, of low quality, inferior, boring. We've reached the midpoint of 2024, and if the first half of the year felt mid, the internet is full of suggestions for a mid-year reset.

If you have a chunk of time and really want to be intentional about the process, this post from Living In Her Moment has a 12-step life-audit plan. Be prepared to spend some quality time with your journal, evaluate your habits and routines, and tidy up your space.

10 Questions to Ask Yourself for a Mid-Year Reset will also get you thinking about where you've been and where you're going. I particularly like "What is the best thing that has happened to me in each month of this year so far?"

If double-digit tips feel overwhelming, 3 Techniques to Regain Motivation and Move Forward is short and sweet but no less helpful. It addresses some of the science behind our often contradictory behavior around setting goals and taking action.

The internet being what it is, there are thousands of books, articles, podcasts, and videos addressing this particular time of year when we might feel at once stuck and re-energized. I had to be careful not to fall down that rabbit hole, because I might not resurface for a week. (It's kind of funny how reading about productivity feels productive in a way.)

I sometimes get frustrated and ask myself how many times I'm going to hit the reset button. I guess the answer is "as many times as it takes."

Welcome to July! I hope the month is fruitful for you!

 

Weekly Roundup 24: Summer Good Things

We're zooming up on July, which means bona fide summer. Here are a few seasonal things I'm into right now:

Outdoor Concerts: It was a big thrill to see the Rolling Stones live. Yes, the surviving original members are in their early 80s and the tour was sponsored by AARP (which sounds like a joke), but they still rock! That was a bucket list experience, but I'm also enjoying smaller, and often free, shows around town.

Spice-d Tea: Harney & Sons Hot Cinnamon Sunset teabags make the best iced tea! I found them at Target. For cinnamon lovers only.

Weed Killer: My husband is a fearless puller and poisoner of weeds. I'm trying to convert him to a home-made weed killer that is effective and non-toxic. Mix 2 cups white vinegar, 2 tablespoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of liquid dish soap in a spray bottle. As with all weed killers, it works best when used on a hot, dry day.

Chiller Fiction: Summer is the only time I read horror, and it's usually Stephen King. Perhaps I will choose If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas that came out in 2020. The title story features the character Holly Gibney, who appears in other King books, including the eponymous Holly, which I read last summer.

June Pride: The end of June marks the end of Pride Month, but there's still time to show off my rainbow-themed tiny garden:

Enjoy the last days of June! See you in July!

Weekly Roundup 23: Submission Summer

Tomorrow is the summer solstice for those of us in the north. Even though we have plenty of long, hot days coming our way over the next few months, I always feel just a tiny twinge of sadness that those days will be growing shorter.

One of my fond memories of having school-aged children on summer break was participating in the reading challenge at the local library. They always had such cool themes, which are selected by an organization called the Collaborative Summer Library Program. Since 1987, they've brought summer fun such as Cosmic Connections at Your Library, Build a Better World, and this year's Adventure Begins at your Library to kids all across the country.

In the same vein, I've given myself a theme this year, which is Submission Summer. As you may or may not recall, my writer word of the year is submit. I'm sorry to say, I've fallen off the pace over the past few months and have some catching up to do. But what better time to do that than during summer afternoons when it's too hot to be outside?

It may not be as fun as Thrills and Chills at the Library or Paws, Claws, Scales, and Tales, so I might just have to think of a cool prize to give myself when it's over.

Here's wishing you a productive summer season!

 

Weekly Roundup 22: String is in the Air

String music, that is. 

I heard my first ever performance by a string octet, comprised of the Dali and Pandan string quartets, brought together by the amazing Off the Hook Arts. The venue (a local car dealership) was a little unusual, but the acoustics were good--and there was a Porsche in the room.

The piece was written by composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1825, when he was 16 (which is like middle age for a child prodigy I suppose). It is written for four violins, two violas, and two cellos. What stuck with me--aside from the spectacular music--was the anecdote about how the acclaimed third, or scherzo, movement was inspired by four lines from Goethe's Faust: 

Trails of cloud and mist
        Brighten from above;
Breeze in the trees, and wind in the reeds,
        – And all is scattered.

From those four short lines of verse, the teenaged Mendelssohn imagined and composed a piece of music which is still being performed and enjoyed almost 200 years later. 

It just makes me so happy to think about how words inspire music as much as music inspires words. I hope Goethe got to hear the Octet before his death in 1832. 

See you next week!

Weekly Roundup 21: June is for Joy

2024 has felt hectic, with some fun stuff but also some stressful stuff. On more than one occasion, I told myself that come June, things would slow down and get easier. And now that June is here, I'm trying to make it happen. 

One thing I want to focus on this month is finding something to be joyful about every day. In 2020, I blogged about my Joy Project based on Ingrid Fetell Lee's book Joyful. But a lot has happened since 2020, am I right? So I need a little bit of a joy refresher. A joy bump. A jolt of joy. Something like that.

June is a wonderful month for joy, mostly because the outdoors is so wonderful. Not to cold, not too hot, lots of things are blooming, and the grasshoppers haven't yet eaten everything down to the stem. Now that school is out for the summer, I see neighborhood kids heading to and from the pool. Baby ducks swim in the canal, people get married. 

So far, I have been joyful about seeing a hummingbird at my flowers, the baby evergreen trees that unexpectedly germinated in my backyard, the Netflix show Girls5Eva, tiny toad tadpoles, and watching my husband rescue two garter snakes from the neighbor's pond.

All month long, I'll be keeping my eye out for joyful things, and I'm also going to revisit the book to see where else I can jumpstart joy in June. 

Have a joyful week! See you next Wednesday!

Weekly Roundup 20: The Corpse Flower

It was an exciting week at Colorado State University's Plant Growth Facility when the resident corpse flower bloomed for the first time in eight years!  

Here's what the plant, nicknamed Cosmo, looked like on Friday, pre-bloom:

The much-awaited event happened on Sunday. I was out of town but am lucky to have a friend who was willing to wait in line for 90 minutes to see this:

When I returned on Monday, Cosmo's spectacular bloom had wilted:

I was also not able to smell the rotting-flesh scent the flower uses to attract pollinators, which my friend described as "nauseating but subtle." 

Nature. So cool.

One of the volunteers told me that some of the pollen will be saved in the CSU Seed Lab, which has the largest collection of its kind in the world.

More than 8,600 visitors came to experience this incredible phenomenon. In Colorado's climate, this rare tropical plant can only survive in a suitable greenhouse environment. And it helps to be cared for by a group of very dedicated humans.

Learn more about Cosmo here. 

Weekly Roundup 19: Sporting News

As my husband could tell you, I enjoy watching sports, but I can't stand listening to people talk about sports. This includes pre- and post-game analysis, interviews, press conferences, radio shows, random speculation, and any casual sports-related conversations that might cross my awareness. 

In general, I feel that sports news should not even be called news.

But when the real news is as stressful as it has been lately, a few nice sports stories aren't a bad thing.

For example, the Women's National Basketball Association--the WNBA, or just W--has instituted a charter flight program so their players no longer have to fly commercial. 

20-year-old US Open Tennis Champion Coco Gauff is preparing to vote in her first presidential election and encouraging young people to do the same.

Grey racehorses are not very common, but Seize the Grey won the Preakness Stakes last weekend. It was the first Triple Crown win for the jockey Jaime Torres, who has only been riding professionally for two years.

And this amazing story of the baseball fan who caught two consecutive foul balls:

 

Be a good sport this week!

Weekly Roundup 18: Aurora Skies

Aurora Skies sounds like a good book title, maybe, or a band name. But last Friday, much of the northern hemisphere was treated to an unusually widespread display of Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights, courtesy of an extreme solar storm.

The sun's activity waxes and wanes over an 11 year cycle called Solar Cycle 25, which is reaching its peak. Here's the nutshell explanation of what causes aurora skies: Coronal Mass Ejections (basically explosions) on the sun blast charged particles into space. If these particles are captured by the earth's magnetic field, they heat up the gases in our atmosphere. Different gases emit different colors, which results in the characteristic waves of blue, green, violet, and red.

In the US, the Northern Lights were seen as far south as the Florida Keys. And they were seen less than an hour from my house. But I missed them! For no good reason other than I was tired and didn't want to hop in my car and drive around in the dark.

This is a decision I regretted first thing the next morning when the pictures began popping up all over social media. I mean, people travel to the top of the dang world to see the Northern Lights. I just had to drive toward Wyoming.

Saturday night, we had cloudy skies, so no second chance.

Oh, well. Life is full of missed opportunities, and this was one of them. I can only hope the sun decides to put on another show before Solar Cycle 25 winds down.

If you saw the aurora, I hope your experience was magical!

See some of the gorgeous photos from around the world here.

Have a great week!

  

Weekly Roundup 17: May Is...

2024 is moving along pretty quickly, and we're already a week into the fifth month of the year. I appreciate that May brings flowers and greenery into my life, and more opportunities to be outside in the spring sunshine before the heat of summer kicks in.

But May is also a great month to focus on physical and mental health, as it is...

• Mental Health Awareness Month
• Better Sleep Month
• National Walking Month
• Women's Health Care Month
• Blood Pressure Month
• Arthritis Awareness Month
• National Salad Month
• Lupus Awareness Month, and
• Bike Month

May includes these notable health and safety weeks:

• Nurse's Week
• National Police Week, and
• Emergency Medical Services Week

And as far as special days go, I am looking forward to:

• Eat What You Want Day (May 11)
• Mother's Day (second Sunday in May)
• National Chocolate Chip Day (May 15)
• Love a Tree Day (May 16)
• Lucky Penny Day (May 23)
• World Turtle Day (May 23)
• National Wine Day (May 25)
• Water a Flower Day (May 30)
• National Macaroon Day (May 31)

The world is hectic and stressful, and I encourage you all to set aside time to care for your physical and mental health this month. Additionally, take a second to thank the people who help keep you healthy and safe, and who bring joy and fun (and macaroons) into your life.

May is also Graduation Month, and I'm so happy and proud that son #2 will be graduating from university on Mother's Day. (The day after Windmill Day.)

Be well! I'll see you next week.

Weekly Roundup 16: Dandelion Season

April showers bring May flowers. And also dandelions aplenty. A few years ago, I started hearing about how important dandelions are for the bees, providing them with early season nutrition before other flowers and trees come into bloom. From this came the "No Mow May" movement, which encourages people to leave their lawns wild to help the pollinators get a good start.

Now, the prevailing opinion seems to be, well, dandelions are fine for bees if there's nothing else around, but they're not really a quality source of pollen and nectar. If you have other food sources for the pollinators, don't feel too bad about mowing your weeds. (Chemical poisons are another story, however. Please try avoid those.) But if the yellow dandelion flower is the only meal around, consider leaving a few for the bees.

I don't know who needs this, but dandelion seeds are available for purchase online.

Mayday vs. May Day: Mayday is an internationally recognized distress signal which comes from the French M'aidez, which means "help me". The May Day holiday is a melding of the ancient Celtic Beltane and Roman Floralia celebrations of spring. Traditional activities include exchanging flower baskets or wreaths and dancing around the may pole. It is also associated with the deadly Haymarket Riot in Chicago and subsequent criminal trials, which is definitely less cheery.

I hope your new month gets off to a great start! 

Weekly Roundup 15: The Broken Precious Things

Recently, my sister and I were sorting through a couple of large boxes of Christmas decorations, one from our grandmother's house and one from our mother's. In our grandmother's box, we found a smaller box containing a nativity scene that had definitely seen better days:

We rolled our eyes a bit and laughed about it, calling it Nativity Apocalypse and wondering why anyone would have kept it for all these many years. Then I turned one of the figurines over and saw the word "Germany" stamped on the bottom.

My maternal grandfather's family was from Germany, and it was easy to imagine that at one time, this set had been very precious to them. Taken out every Christmas and lovingly packed away after. Maybe as a child my grandfather had looked at it under candlelight and felt a sense of holiday wonder. 

I don't know how the set got broken, only that it sat, completely forgotten for decades, in my mother's storage shed. But at one time, someone thought maybe they could fix it, that it meant enough to try.

We humans have such interesting relationships to our possessions. Sometimes, we throw them away too soon when they deserve a second chance. Other times, we hang on too long when they have outlived their worth. 

I have lone earrings whose partners have disappeared, clothes I like the look of but not the fit, a favorite cracked tea mug. I don't know if it's sentimentality or a sense of responsibility that compels me, but I'm trying to be more selective about what I allow to take up physical and emotional space in my life.

It's a work in progress, but I'm getting better at it. Even without reading Marie Kondo. (Which I still mean to do someday.)

Have a great week!

  

Weekly Roundup 14: For Memory's Sake

Hello there, and sorry for the late post. The week has gotten away from me!

Not that many years ago, I had a lot of information committed to memory. Names, phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, passwords. Now, I have technology for that. Like everyone, I store lots of information in my phone. While I still remember my childhood best friend's phone number and address, I sometimes struggle recalling which three items I need from the grocery store. 

One day I wondered if I could memorize a poem, something I haven't done since junior high school. It sounded like a fun challenge, so I chose one I like--For C.W.B., by Elizabeth Bishop--and set about committing it to memory.

And, wow. Starting out was much harder than I anticipated, to the point where I got a little concerned and wondered if I had ignored my memory for too long.

I told myself, well, I don't write poetry. Maybe that's part of the problem. My brain just isn't used to thinking that way. But I kept at it, at an embarrassingly slow pace, and now I have the first two stanzas down. 

What's more, I'm discovering an unanticipated benefit: when my thoughts are stressed or anxious (which happens more than I care to admit) mentally returning to the lines of the poem helps me focus and find a bit of calm. If I'm awake in the night, I can sometimes recite myself back to sleep. 

This is no great discovery on my part--humans have been doing this for millennia--but I still appreciate how grounding it feels. Instead of looking at or listening to an app on my phone, I can turn to these words written in 1929 by a woman who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, and April is National Poetry Month, so if you'd like to memorize a poem, it's the perfect time to start/

See you next week!

 

  

Weekly Roundup 13: Eclipsed

 

In 2017, which seems like half a lifetime ago considering everything that has happened since, I made the trek north to Wyoming in order to be in the path of totality for the Great American Eclipse. From a hilltop in a historic mining village called Sunrise, we had clear skies and a perfect view of the solar show overhead. (The traffic after was apocalyptic, however, as the sleepy two lane roads were in no way suited for hundreds of thousands of visitors, but that's another story.)

Nearly seven years later, we took a much longer road trip to Georgetown, Texas for the 2024 solar eclipse this past Monday, April 8. We chose Texas for its high probability of sunny skies and booked our vacation rental a year in advance. We had our eclipse glasses and eclipse binoculars. We were ready.

A week beforehand, the weather was not looking good. Cloud cover predicted at 80%, a chance of rain, and the possibility of "damaging" hail. Still feeling hopeful, we packed up the car and made the two day drive south. Because what else can you do but hope for the best?

On eclipse day, we made a slight adjustment in plans based on the cloud forecast. As we drove to our destination, I couldn't help but think about how the eclipse itself was a sure thing. Thanks to the knowledge of our solar system gleaned over centuries, this cosmic event could be predicted down to the second with one hundred percent certainty. There was no guessing about where and when it would happen. And yet we humans down below were dealing with much uncertainty.

I'm happy to say that the cloud cover, which had been playing peek-a-boo with the sun all morning, broke just in time to allow us a view of the sun completely eclipsed by the moon. During the four minutes of totality, we saw the skies darken and felt the air cool. We heard roosters crowing from a distance. We were able to observe the eclipse phenomena of Baily's Beads and the Diamond Ring.

In other words, we were very lucky.

And the overwhelming traffic that was expected didn't materialize, perhaps because the weather forecast kept some people away. 

I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been able to observe this awesome event twice in the last ten years, especially because I've been able to share the experience of true wonderment with very special people. 

Be well, friends! Oh, and in the spirit of eclipse week, here's a picture of my space-themed tiny garden: