Chapter 2 Wordle

The long-awaited Chapter 2 wordle. The larger the word, the more frequently I used it in the chapter. So it looks like this one is a lot about toughness.
There's still no good way to make the image bigger. Just click on it if you want to see it larger.

Tired of Writing

I apologize for my lapse in posting as of late. For the moment I’ll blame it on my recent poor health and the fact that I am just plain tired of writing. All day every day, I sit here staring at my dissertation, which stares back at me from the computer screen. What I want to say is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t come up with a way to write it down. It tends to leave me too burned out blog, but I’ll try to do better, I promise.

One thing I’ve been meaning to post about is a Christmas gift I received from Rob’s brother and his wife, who live in Texas. Here, take a look at it:



When I first opened up the candle, I must admit that I was hesitant to smell it. Much to my surprise though, it actually smelled quite nice. The problem lies in the fact that the label clearly says "monkey" and the photograph is clearly of a chimpanzee.

IT'S NOT A MONKEY!!!

I have half a mind to write the company and respectfully point out their error. Perhaps also mentioning that even 6th graders know the difference between a monkey and an ape. The jury is still out as to whether college students can get it right.

Thanks for the great gift, Andy and Kim!

Chapter 1 Wordle

I recently stumbled across this really cool website called “Wordle,” where you can paste in text and generate a “word cloud.” For someone who loves words as much as I do, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Here is a wordle I made of Chapter 1 of my dissertation. You can click on the image to make it bigger.

Xmas recap

Christmas began, as per usual, at Nana and Grampy’s on Christmas Eve.

Santa gave me some special shoes to help me walk on the ice.

Later that night, we drove on up to my parents’ house in P-town, and on Christmas Day we celebrated with my family.

Logan and Grandma Nan playing

Logan loved his train set, but I think his Da-da and his Unkie Rob loved it even more!

Unfortunately, many of us were hit by some kind of Post-Christmas Vortex immediately thereafter. We’re still not sure exactly what it was or how we got it, but there was a lot of puking going on. Luckily, Rob has remained in good health so that he can sort of look after me (“More Ginger-Ale, please!”). We are back at home now, and for the past couple of days I’ve either been in bed or praying to the porcelain goddess. As I write, I’ve been about 24-hours without puking—even though I don’t feel so great, I really hope I’m on the road to recovery.

Another downside to all this vortex is that I have momentarily stopped being a vegan. This is really frustrating to me, since I worked hard to ensure a Very Merry Vegan Christmas, but after so much vortex, I decided that if something non-vegan sounded good to me, I might as well eat it. I’m hoping that once I get myself back on track, I’ll be able to carry on vegan again. Until then, I guess I’ll just be a vegan, interrupted.

Thanks for reading!

The shortest day

Today is the winter solstice. The first day of winter. The shortest day, but the longest night. It’s my favorite holiday because, among other things, it’s the day beyond which you know things cannot get worse—at least in terms of daylight. Starting tomorrow, the days will become longer. It will be slow at first—tomorrow’s daylight will increase by just 3 seconds—but by the end of January, we’ll have 10 whole hours of light each day, and the sun won’t set until 5:05pm. All that’s left to do is just hang on.

The first day of winter did not disappoint this year. The windchill hovered around 25 below zero all day, and I think the actual temperature made it all the way up to 2 degrees at some point today. As if the extreme cold and 30+ mph winds weren’t bad enough, the entire world is covered in a sheet of ice. Seriously people, I can handle snow and cold to a certain extent, but ice is completely unacceptable in my opinion. And even though today is just the first day of winter, it feels like the city has already thrown its arms up in disgust and given up on even attempting to plow or salt the streets.

Last night was our neighborhood holiday party. It was only a block away, which was good, because I practically made Rob carry me over there. I am terrible on the ice. In the past couple of weeks, two elderly people have passed me when I’ve been out trying to walk on this stuff. I am considering making my own snow shoes by drilling screws into all my shoes. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have the right kind of screws for that, and it’s too damn icy to go to the hardware store.

In true west-Urbana style, last night's party was a real, old-fashioned, neighborhood holiday sing along. It was the kind of thing that belonged in a black-and-white film. Everybody was all dolled up and had brought along homemade Christmas cookies. There was hot mulled cider brewing on the stove. We actually all stood around the piano and sang Christmas carols. I am not kidding. When it came time to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” each guest was assigned a different “day” (I was “nine ladies dancing”). When we sang “We Three Kings,” three of the male guests sang the magi’s verses as solos. Before he realized what he was getting into, Rob was somehow volunteered to sing the part of Melchior. He did so well that he will probably be asked to sing this part again next year. It was fun, it was folksy, and—despite the fact that over 90% of the party guests still have Obama signs in their yard—it was real America.

I’m hoping that when I wake up tomorrow morning, it will be warm out and my knee won’t hurt anymore so that I can go running. Keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

Thanks for reading!

Monkey talk

Today I went to talk to my friend Cara’s 6th graders about howler monkeys. I went to speak to her classes last year as well, and for the second time, I was amazed at their inquisitiveness. 6th graders have so many questions. About everything. At any given moment, there were 25 small people seated in front of me, all frantically waving their arms high in the air trying to get me to pick them next. Their questions were really great, showing that they’d paid attention to the story they read prior to my visit and that they were paying attention to the things I was talking about. One girl asked, “How did the monkeys get to Ometepe Island?” which is a really great question nobody has an answer to. A lot of students wanted to know if I’d kept a monkey as a pet or if I’d brought a monkey home with me. I tried to impress upon them what a bad—and illegal—idea that would be. I explained that monkeys are wild animals who belong in the trees, that they are not happy in captivity. I likened it to trying to keep a squirrel as a pet, and most students thought that was hilariously ridiculous. “But Willie Wonka had a pet squirrel,” one student pointed out. Before I even had a chance to contemplate that statement, another student countered, “Yes, but Willie Wonka is fiction.” Enough said.

Some of my favorite questions actually had nothing to do with monkeys:

• “What is your Japanese sign” one student asked me. My what? I had no idea what she was talking about. “Your Japanese sign,” she said. “Uhh, I don’t know,” was all I could say. “Mine is the rat,” she said proudly. So I guess she meant the Chinese Zodiac. I don’t know what my sign is, but I’ve since looked it up and found it is the ram.

• “Look, I can write in gnomish.” It wasn’t so much a question, but a proud statement and display of a sheet of notebook paper covered in strange and interesting symbols.

And in the last class of the day, as the bell had rung and students were gathering their things and filing out of the room, one particularly energetic boy (who’d asked about a billion questions) rushed up to me, gave me a hug and a handshake, and asked for my email address.

At any rate, I really enjoyed speaking to Cara’s classes. It’s great to be surrounded by students who are still young enough to be excited about everything. The only downside is that, just like last year, my throat hurts from demonstrating howler monkey vocalizations all day. Oh well, I guess a sore throat will be company to my sore knee, which has been bothering me for a while now. As it turns out, my refusal to give myself a break after the marathon has resulted in some nasty tendonitis. It’s not the end of the world—it just means that I can’t run for a while, which is excruciating for me. I’ve been going strong at 30+ miles a week since August. And now I’ve come to a complete standstill. Considering that the world outside is a solid slick of ice and snow and the windchills have been below zero for a few days, I guess a rest will do me good. It’s just frustrating to be immobilized, but I’ll try to hang in there.

Again, thanks to everybody for your get well wishes to my grandma. Please keep her in your thoughts! Thanks for reading.

You're a vegan? What do you eat? (#1)

So a while back, I mentioned that I was thinking of starting a segment on the blog entitled “You’re a vegan? What do you eat?” I’ve decided to try to do this once a week (I’m tentatively thinking Wednesdays). I feel like, for the 11 years that I’ve been a vegetarian, I’ve had a pretty good diet, but ever since becoming a vegan, my diet has improved by leaps and bounds. Seriously, I’ve never felt better. Most people seem to think that eating a vegan diet must be impossibly difficult (an opinion I definitely shared before actually trying it myself), but really, it’s pretty easy.

I’ll start off by introducing a winter staple around the Ragfield house: Minestrone soup. I generally don’t follow a recipe for this (just using whatever I have on hand), but a good template for this soup can be found at Vegan A Go-Go. Some basic essentials are garlic, onions, celery, and carrots. Beyond that you need kidney beans, tomatoes, vegetable broth, and some kind of pasta. I also usually add chopped kale and red cabbage.

The particular soup in this photo was actually proclaimed Melissa’s Best Ever Minestrone by none other than Rob. And it was really great. The thing is, I’m not sure what I did to make it so great, and I’ve never quite been able to reproduce it. What I am sort of suspecting is that in this particular batch, I’d used the last of the garden tomatoes (the ones I’d picked green before the first frost and let ripen in a paper bag in our pantry). Maybe it’s the canned tomatoes that make this soup a little lack-luster. Even so, a sub-par minestrone is still pretty good. And right about now, minestrone is Rob’s favorite thing to eat. He doesn’t mind eating batch after batch of the soup as I try to recreate that Best Ever Minestrone made with the season’s last fresh tomatoes.

Thanks for reading!