Throwing Marshmallows

I came across this quote in my morning reading and wanted to capture it here:

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we have already. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing.

- Pema Chodron in The Wisdom of No Escape

I have spent much of my life not being satisfied…not being happy with who I am. Wanting to “fix” myself. Because if I fixed myself, that would fix everything around me and everyone (including me) would be happy.

I have been doing a lot of personal work over the past year and one of the biggest changes that I am seeing is that I am becoming more comfortable with who I am, warts and all. Honestly ok with it, not just ok because I am “supposed” to be ok. Which I guess is a good thing seeing as I am turning 40 in June!

It is very easy for us to think that we have control over more than we really do and that is the trap that I found myself in. I somehow thought that I had the power to fix everything and everyone and if things were not working out it was because I was not good enough or had not tried hard enough. Living my life this way finally caught up with me…I was (am!) exhausted from trying to control everything and everyone.

I have been slowly working on letting go. I still have a long way to go. But I am encouraged that the more I let go, the easier things become. This does not mean that life has gotten easier. To be honest, life has stayed just the way that it always has been…challenging, frustrating, difficult, yet also exciting and, yes, even enjoyable.

What has changed is me. It seems counterintuitive in a way…the more that I let go and stop trying so hard, the easier things become. But I am seeing that this is true.

I am most definitely not perfect in this area. But I am finding that the less I look to fix things in my life, the more likely a solution will appear. So I am working on sitting with things that are bothering me rather than trying to change them. Being with them. Recognizing that these problems do indeed exist and that is ok. Trusting that things will work out when they are meant to and that I will be ok. And amazingly they do and I am.

It will be interesting to see what the next year brings…

- Stephanie

where I have been…I have been helping plan this:

VaHomeschoolers Homeschool Enrichment Seminar

Science Museum of Virginia
2500 West Broad Street
Richmond, Virginia

April 26, 2008

There is still time to register online so if you are in the area, be sure to stop by. Walk-ins will be accepted as well.

There is something for everyone for both new and experienced homeschoolers. Speakers will be myself, Celeste Land (VaHomeschoolers Government Affairs Chair), Parrish Mort (VaHomeschoolers Pres) and Jeanne Faulconer (VaHomeschoolers Newsletter editor). I can tell you that my fellow speakers are wonderfully inspirational and definitely worth coming out for.

If you do come out, be sure to grab me during a break and introduce yourself! Most of the fun of these seminars is getting to meet folks in real life. Not to mention the fun we have being surrounded by people who “get” what we are doing and why.

Hope to see you there!

Stephanie (who is still working on getting all her files (including my signature file) moved over to my new laptop and probably won’t have time until after the seminar!)

I think that the message sent out by the Va Tech Alumni Association says it well so I will just post their message here:

Hokie Spirit defines Virginia Tech a year later…

Last April, the world’s attention focused on a campus community ripped to its very core with the grief and pain of a tragedy unparalleled in the history of American higher education. And what they observed was more powerful than they ever expected… they saw a campus filled with energetic students and talented faculty that displayed grace, poise and fortitude beyond all imagination — a community fueled by something we know as Hokie spirit. That spirit reaches deep and spreads beyond the campus throughout our 200,000 alumni, and indeed across the entire globe.

Yes, Hokie spirit emerged from tragedy and impressed a world that was brought closer by the media to witness the strength and resilience of the entire Hokie Nation. On this anniversary our attention turns respectfully to the families who lost their loved ones last April 16th and to the students injured that day who are successfully putting their lives back together. It is a day of remembrance. The victims will be honored at a ceremony that will take place Wednesday on the Drillfield at 10:30 A.M. EDT. It will be televised by various media and streamed through the university’s website www.vt.edu. President Steger and Virginia’s Governor Kaine will make remarks. Other participatory events are being held throughout the day, and a candlelight vigil at dusk will signal the end of the day’s observances.

The university is grateful for the expressions of support that have flowed from loyal alumni and friends around the world since last April. These expressions have come in the form of almost every artifact imaginable. To date, 87,000 different items (some displayed in our Alumni Center Museum on April 16th only). In excess of $9.5 million in memorial gifts. Special appearances by the Dave Matthews Band and the NY Yankees. Plus thousands upon thousands of well-wishing letters, e-mails and phone calls. And perhaps the most recent signal of prevailing Hokie spirit is the acceptance rate by students who have been offered admission to the university this coming fall – already hundreds ahead of last fall, which was itself a record-breaking year.

We see such optimism and spirit in the faces of our students, often represented by the countless hours they have poured into VT-ENGAGE service activities. Similarly, our alumni are honoring the university’s year of renewal with a range of service activities, including participation in our “VirginiaTechforlife” blood drives staged by alumni chapters.

At the dedication of our permanent April 16th Memorial last August, SGA President Adeel Khan summed it up exceptionally well…

Take time to remember the legacies, remember the dreams and remember the talent that our community has lost. I hope you are inspired to work harder to honor the 32. Share you talents with the world for the 32. Achieve your dreams for the 32. Be more compassionate, friendly and thoughtful for the 32. Be better, for the 32.

In 2008, we remember the 32; we are thankful for the survivors; and we are proud we share together that incredible Hokie spirit.

Tom Tillar
Vice President for Alumni Relations

There is more information at the Va Tech Remembrance website.

We are the Hokies. We are Virginia Tech.

Back in November I found out about an online backup service called Mozy. For $5 a month, you get unlimited online backup. The software is easy to use. The intitial backup did take an extremely long time to run (I left it running overnight and even then it took a few days if I remember correctly) but since then the backups have been fairly quick and I have been able to run them in the background.

I realized that with all my photos, I really needed something that was idiot proof (i.e. automatic). I had been doing manual backups to an external hard drive when I remembered (maybe once a month?) I realized that this was extremely risky (and time consuming to do) so the idea that Mozy would take care of all that for me was appealing.

Over the past month or two, my computer has been acting really sluggish. I kept getting disk full errors and it did not matter how much clean-up or compression I did, I could not consistently get enough free disk space. This is not surprising, as my photos take up a lot of room and I have been playing around with Photoshop Elements editing features more lately. This means that I eat through a lot of hard drive storage. I was outgrowing my computer.

To get more room, I moved 4 years of photos (1998-2002) off my hard drive and onto my external hard drive. This worried me, because they would no longer be included in my Mozy backup. But I figured that I did not do much with that drive, so they would be ok. However, I was soon getting Disk Full errors again.

Yup. Time for a new computer, and with my 40th birthday coming up in June, an early birthday present seemed a perfect way to rationalize it. But what kind should I get? I have always been a PC person. No particular reason, probably because that is what I used mostly at work and what I was comfortable using. But back in February (in time for his birthday), Jeff, the ultimate PC and Microsoft guy, came home with a Mac. Seeing as how most of what I do is photography related, I decided to make the switch.

So two days ago, Jeff brought home my very own MacBook. I have been having fun playing around with it, figuring out how to transfer licenses, getting everything set up, moving files. And then disaster struck.

I was using my external hard drive to copy files between my computers and I unplugged it instead of “ejecting” it (this seems to be a mac thing). When I connected it again, it had an error saying that it was not readable! I tried rebooting, connecting it to other machines, to no avail. I have no idea what happened. But it seems to be dead.

Now this would not have been too big of a deal except for the fact that I had not copied over those 4 years of photos yet! Those photos for which I did not have another copy! Jeff said that he would take the drive into the office and see if he could salvage them, but I had no idea if that would work.

But then I remembered Mozy. I was not sure how long they kept copies once files were deleted from your computer, but I figured it was worth checking. And lo and behold, all the photos where there! It was easy peasy to restore them to my PC where they are now sitting while we try to figure out how we are going to transfer the rest of the files. Whew!

Needless to say, I strongly recommend Mozy, especially if you have irreplaceable files like photos. Don’t wait until something crashes.

And now I need to get back to setting up my Mac. It is taking a bit of getting used to…some things are definitely different but so far I like it. And can I say how awesome it is to have a HUGE hard drive again?

Stephanie (who has not copied over her signature file to the new Mac yet!)

When asked why he was sitting on the floor whining, Kyle responded:

It is only because Jason dropped the dog on me…

(and yes, he was talking about Ellie…)

A friend just forwarded information about The Great Sunflower Project which looks like a lot of fun.

By watching and recording the bees at sunflowers in your garden, you can help us understand the challenges that bees are facing.

• It takes less than 30 minutes.
• It’s easy.
• Free Sunflower seeds for planting.
• No knowledge of bees required!

Enter your bee counts online or send us your paper form.

There is also lots of great information on bees and why they are collecting this data.

I had actually been thinking that I want to do a better job at growing things this summer…although I am going to start small. I think that we will do the sunflowers and try maybe some lettuce in pots on the deck down at the beach. I love the idea of having an actual garden, but never seem to get around to actually pulling it off. So I will be more realistic this year and maybe have some success!

Note to Self: Buy jumper cables.

2nd Note to Self: It is perfectly ok to listen to your iPod for an hour through your car radio while the boys are in gymnastics. It is not a good idea to turn on the seat warmer without turning on the car, however.

Brotherly Tolerance Cooperation

I have been meaning to post a link to this podcast of a discussion with Philip Pullman for awhile now:

In this month’s Christmas book club, John Mullan turns his attention to Philip Pullman’s expansive, magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy.Listen to the podcast of last night’s book club event, in which Pullman talked about Milton, morality and heading for the Arctic, and answered some searching textual questions from younger audience members.

At over 45 minutes, there is a lot of meat to this discussion…lots of background including how he came up with the idea of daemons (animal representations of a person’s soul) which was one of my favorite concepts (turns out he needed someone for Lyra to talk to in the opening chapter when she is in the closet!)

His Dark Materials is such a wonderful trilogy and one of those gems that I am so glad to have discovered as part of our homeschooling. Philip Pullman is not only a masterful storyteller, but an incredible writer (these two do not always go hand in hand!) The way that he can build the rich world in which Lyra lives (and the other parallel worlds) and the way that he has with words just amazes me. There were times when I would re-read passages just to hear the words again. The audio book is very well done as well (read by the author with a full cast) and I highly recommend it.

I just got an email from my favorite place to buy audio books, Audible, and it looks like they are opening an separate site just for kids audio books, called…wait for it…Audible Kids.

It actually looks pretty fun…I can’t tell if the selection is any bigger than on the regular Audible site (where you can still get kids books). It does seem as if you have more ways to search for books…by categories, age, grade, series, popular characters and award winners.

And yes, you do use the same account for making purchases for both Audible and Audible Kids, so there is no new fee or anything new to join. If you have credits on Audible, they are available on Audible Kids as well.

I have only poked around a little bit, but it looks like lots of fun stuff. Although I can’t say that I could ever bring myself to buy an audio version of a good picture book (like Where the Wild Things Are)…even though it is not expensive (many are only $1) it still seems a bit of a waste for a 5 minute audio book! Not to mention not getting the wonderful artwork.

But there are tons of other books that I would definitely consider owning. Much of my audio book purchases are kid lit…for both the boys and myself.

I have been a member of Audible for over 2 years now and I have to say that I have gotten some awesome deals. They frequently run promotions and sales (in fact I have $10 waiting to be spent that I got for using 4 credits in March…I had a couple of items on my wishlist that I had been waiting to purchase, including John Adams by David McCullough which was on sale for only 1 credit (regularly $48.96/ 2 credits))