Animals

Happy Marmot Day!

February 02, 2010


This just in—Alaska has declared Feb. 2 Marmot Day! Three species of marmot can be found in Alaska (but no groundhogs), and Sen. Linda Menard, R-Wasilla who filed the official bill, hopes that the state will create educational activities around the animal. No weather forecasting duties will be required.


I’m all for any holiday that honors marmots. My family and I came across a number of the cute furry creatures while visiting Yellowstone in 2008, where they are also known as “whistle pigs,” because of a whistling noise they make. A cuddly animal known as a whistle pig? Who could resist?


Punxsutawney Who?



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Books

It's So Random

February 01, 2010

I took this meme from Dani Torres’ blog, A Work in Progress. I’m not going to tag anyone, but if you want to jump in, feel free. I love to hear about what everyone else has on their shelves.

Here are the rules:

1. Go to your bookshelves...
2. Close your eyes. If you're feeling really committed, blindfold yourself.
3. Select 10 books at random. Use more than one bookcase, if you have them, or piles by the bed, or...basically, wherever you keep books.
4. Use the books to tell us about yourself—where and when you got them, who got them for your, what the book says about you, etc.
5. Have fun! Be imaginative. Doesn't matter if you've read them or not. Be creative. It might not be easy to start off with, and the links might be a little tenuous, but I think this is a fun way to do this sort of meme.
6. Feel free to cheat a bit, if you need to...

I had fun wandering through my house, closing my eyes and grabbing books from our many shelves. Here are my 10 books in the order I picked them off the shelves.

1. Fodor’s See It New York City. This is a guidebook I bought before my family and I visited New York City at Christmastime two years ago. I usually borrow guidebooks from the library, but I couldn’t resist buying at least one to have in our travel library.

2. What Is My Horse Thinking? (Lesley Bayley). Bought when I first got my horse and I was trying to learn quickly. Focuses on horse body language and what it means.

3. Sleeping at the Starlite Motel (Bailey White). Starlite followed White’s Mama Makes Up Her Mind (which I also have). My introduction to humorous, essay-type writing. I believe I got this through Book-of-the-Month Club years ago.

4. The Franchise Affair (Josephine Tey). Tey is a mystery writer, and I discovered her as a teenager, after I had plowed through all of Agatha Christie’s books. I haunted the used book store until I found all of Tey’s novels. My favorites featured Alan Grant--I had a literary crush on him!

5. An edition that contains Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood and The Writing Life (Annie Dillard). I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in high school, but I have this book on my “To read in 2010” shelf because I want to read The Writing Life.

6. A Pocket Full of Rye (Agatha Christie). I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for Agatha, and I have some type of mystery-induced amnesia, because even though I’ve read each of her books several times, I frequently can’t remember “whodunit.”

7. Uncle Fred in Springtime (P.G. Wodehouse). I love Wodehouse—also discovered him when I was a teenager, and have read many of his 90-some novels. Funny and clever and silly!

8. The Dance of Intimacy (Harriet Lerner). Also on my “to read” bookshelf. I like Lerner’s books, and haven’t read this one yet.

9. Two-Part Invention (Madeleine L’Engle). This book, subtitled “The Story of a Marriage,” chronicles L’Engle’s long marriage to Hugh Franklin, and his death from cancer in 1987. I read it first when I was working as a temp for a company relocating their headquarters. (I had a lot of free time while I waited for phone calls or mail to open and forward.) L’Engle’s most famous book is A Wrinkle in Time, but my favorites of hers are her nonfiction “Crosswicks’ Journals,” of which this is one.

10. The Mismeasure of Woman (Carol Tavris). This book is on my Mother’s/Women’s issues shelf. It examines how men have been treated as the normal standard and women are “abnormal,” and how that affects things like social sciences, medicine, law and history.


There you have it! Hope you’re having a happy, book-filled Monday.

Achievement

The Six-Year Calendar of Happiness

January 25, 2010


I’m still in the process of reviewing 2009 and planning for 2010…and here it is the last full week of January! No, I don’t have a problem with procrastination, why do you ask?

Actually, what I have is a hard time staying focused on something long enough to finish it. Thanks to Barbara Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose!, I’ve learned I’m not the only one. Sher describes me when she describes “Scanners,” people who are “genetically wired to be interested in many things.” Some of the things Scanners say that could come out of my mouth include: “I keep changing my mind about what I want to do and end up doing nothing.” “I keep going off on another tangent.” “I pull away from what I’m doing because I’m afraid I’ll miss something better.”

In the past, I’d become interested in something—gardening, for example. I’d run out and invest in a flat or two of flowers or herbs and plant them in my yard. Then a few days or weeks later, I’d decide I wanted to learn about Florida history or a foreign language. But if I did that, then I’d be taking time away from learning how to draw and paint! (And don’t ask what happened to the flowers and herbs.)

You see my dilemma. Realistically, I don’t have that much time for all the interests I’d like to pursue. I have a part-time job, a family and household to care for, and commitments to a regular exercise program and to my horse.

While I loved Refuse to Choose! from start to finish, one of the exercises I found most helpful was to make a six-year wall calendar with room to write all the things I want to do. (I now call it my “Six-Year Calendar of Happiness.”) Instead of taping typing paper together and using colored markers for each activity, as the book suggests, after a brainstorming session in a notebook, I typed a separate page for each year into a Word document. The plan is, instead of dissipating my energy trying to do 15 things at once, I focus on the four or five items I’ve put on my current year, secure in the knowledge that the other things I want to do or learn are written down, waiting for me in future years. If I think, “Oh, I’d love to know more about birds,” instead of immediately checking a book out of the library or surfing the internet for bird info, I write it down on my six-year calendar.

2009 was my first year using this system, and I did pretty well sticking to what I put on my list. I started simply: learning new things with my horse (jumping, going on more trail rides), studying and writing poetry and essays, continuing with watercolor class, expanding freelance writing, and reading one or two “classic” books. In 2010, I’m going to study drawing and sketching with an emphasis on learning to create an illustrated journal, continue working with my horse (he appears on every calendar year!), learn about Florida (history, ecology, culture) and keep reading classics.

My six-year calendar of happiness isn’t carved in stone. I made some adjustments to it when I reviewed my progress in 2009. It helps me rest easy knowing I won’t forget something I want to do. And I love it because it gives me a place to store my dreams and goals for the future—and keeps me focused enough to achieve them.

Happiness

Happiness is Contagious--Spread It Around!

January 21, 2010

Maybe it’s entered your mind, as it has mine, that pursuing and catching happiness might be just the tiniest bit selfish. Shouldn’t we be focusing on helping others and being responsible, upstanding members of society? Well, yes—but my guess is we are already doing those things. Even if we sometimes fall short in our own eyes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t carve out a little happiness for ourselves. We are each individuals who deserve to be happy. Period. But on days when the feeling of being “selfish” overcomes you, remember this: there is actual scientific research that shows that happiness is “contagious.”

A study published in the British Medial Journal (click here for the entire report) found that “the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends).” That means that if you’re happy, then it is more likely that your spouse or partner, your children, your friends, even your neighbors, will be happy, too. Some statistics from the study: living within a mile of a friend who becomes happy increases the probability that you will be happy by 25%. A live-in partner who becomes happy increases the likelihood of his or her partner’s happiness by 8%; a sibling who lives close by, by 14% and nearby neighbors got the biggest boost in likelihood of happiness—34%! Catching happiness for yourself is almost certain to make others happy, too.

What makes you happy? Is it something small, like having a half hour to read or do a crossword puzzle at the end of the day? Is it something larger, like volunteering for a cause you believe in, or working a job that you love that you feel makes a difference in the world? Take a look at your life. What’s working? What isn’t? What aren’t you doing that you would love to do? What can you stop doing that you hate? Figure out what makes you happy and go for it.

What are you waiting for? Go catch some happiness…then spread it around!

I'm happy

Giving

Just One Thing

January 16, 2010

The photos and stories coming out of Haiti are heartbreaking—how can one tiny country suffer so much? And Haiti is not the only place where suffering seems to be the baseline for living. I sometimes have to put a moratorium on newspaper reading because there are so many big, unsolvable problems, I become overwhelmed. Despite our economic woes, the U.S. is so much better off in so many ways than nearly the entire world.

I’m happy to see the pouring out of support and help for Haiti, but I wonder what will happen to it once this crisis is “over”—or if it ever will, truly, be over. The country was still struggling to recover from the effects of the hurricanes in 2008 before the earthquake. Haiti needs more than donations of money. They need more than bottled water, or food or medicine. Even I can see this, and I am not remotely qualified to determine what they really need and/or how to give them lasting help. Sending a donation to a relief agency doesn’t feel like enough—it feels like a cop out. Does this mean I should do nothing? That’s not right, either.

I believe when any one of us reaches out to help another, no matter how small the act, it sends positive energy into the world. Imagine if every day every one of us helped someone else! The world would be a better place.

So today, instead of being frustrated because my efforts seem so puny in the face of the world’s troubles, I’ll do “just one thing.” Today, I’ll send a donation to a relief organization to help Haiti. Tomorrow, I’ll try to find someone else to help, and hope that that’s enough. For me, some days my one thing might be something as small as looking the supermarket cashier in the eye and smiling at her. Some days that will be all I am capable of. Other days, my one thing will be more substantial.

Like everyone, I have limited time and money to give. I don’t have answers for the world’s problems. But I can do just one thing.