Photography Project

Driving home one night during the last part of 2011, I started looking around my neighborhood. We moved to the east side of Indianapolis two years ago and up until our realtor brought us over to this side of town, I had no idea it existed. The east side is an interesting place. I’ve heard people use the following adjectives when describing it: transitional, run-down, up & coming, forgotten, inventive, new, old, historic, renovate, rehabilitate, poor, economical, creative, friendly, hostile, energetic, and the list goes on. Maybe it is because I have a thing about underdogs, but I really like our neighborhood. I love our cozy, old bungalow, I love Irvington, I love 10th street, I love Woodruff Place, I love the Y, I love the food co-op, and again, the list goes on. Our neighborhood isn’t perfect. There is poverty, dirt, crime, and abandoned buildings but that’s what makes it a real place to live.

I was thinking about all of these things while driving home and that I wanted document this place that we live in. I like to take pictures but I don’t pretend to have any real skills in photography. I just love my Nikon D40, so this brings me to my photography project idea for 2012.

I am going to take my camera out into our neighborhood and take a ton of photos. I don’t know what the photos will be of but I’m not limiting myself, so they could be of buildings, animals, plants, people, whatever. The only parameter for this project is that the photographs will all be from the east side of Indianapolis. I will pick one photograph each week and post it with a location and brief description. My plan is to post these weekly entries on Friday. I hope to stick with it and I hope to learn more about my neighborhood in the process.

The first photo will be posted next Friday. Stay tuned.

Gnomes

I really like gnomes. When I was a kid, my mom owned this book:

To say that my sister and I were obsessed with this book, is an understatement. We read the entire thing cover to cover about a hundred times and then we set out to look for gnomes. Our favorite gnome hunting grounds was at my grandparents house in New Hampshire. They live up in the mountains near the Canadian border and every picture you take looks like something that belongs in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. We used to look for “gnome holes” in the trunks of trees for hours.We would scour the ground for “signs” of gnome activity and every now and then we would swear we saw a flash of a red hat.

Gnomes was not the only source of information for our obsession. We also watched the television program “David The Gnome” religiously. If you did not experience this program on Nickelodeon growing up, you missed out. Here’s the intro to the series:

The second clip is from the series finale. As my sister said, “I wept like a child.” Well, we were children.

After all of this, it seems fitting that for Christmas my sister gave me a giant, red ceramic gnome. We also received not one, but two of these:


We now have three Steeler’s gnomes in our yard.

Finches!

To say that I am an animal lover would be an understatement. I’ve had dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, chicks, ponies, fish and now birds. I started eying the Zebra Finches at PetSmart about a year ago. I love song birds and the busy little finches were really fun to watch. I didn’t want a parrot or a parakeet or a cockatiel. I wanted to little finches, so I started reading about them and talk to RJ about them, and yesterday we brought two male Zebra Finches home:


Welcome Calliope & Humphrey to our home.

As is the case with most pets, birds need certain amenities to make them happy:


Our cart at PetSmart.

Finches like to build nests, so we needed hay and little nesting houses for them. We also had to buy finch food and a cuttle bone. The cuttle bone is literally a bone that the birds can peck on throughout the day. It provides them with calcium. They like to have several different perches at different levels in the cage and they like to bathe, so we bought them a little bathtub. After their cage was properly outfitted it looked like this:

Lucky birds.

While at PetSmart, the young lady helping us made the remark that our finches were “lucky birds.” If you know anything about our dog or cat, you know that we’re professional pet spoilers, so I don’t know why the finches would be any different. We were careful to buy all the necessary accessories, we read up on Zebra Finches online and we chose a perfect spot for the cage. However, we failed to get one key piece of information. How do you get the birds from this box:

Like a mini cat carrier.

Into the cage. We figured we could slowly open the side of the box and hopefully the little finches would fly right into the cage. Well, finch #1 definitely flew out of the box but he thought our kitchen looked much nicer than the cage. After a minute of carefully following the finch around our kitchen, we were able to catch him and coax him into his new home. Learning from our mistakes, we just reached into the cage and scooped up finch #2.

Safely in their new home.

I love to watch them and listen to their little chirps. They seem to be settling in nicely and I’m sure there will be more finch stories to come.

Ringing in 2012

2011 was a hectic year. Here’s a list in no particular order:

I got married.
I went to Seattle.
I went to New Hampshire.
I read more books in 2011 than I did in 2010.
I returned to blogging.
I started lifting weights.
I ran 3 5k’s.
I spent a lot of time in my garden this spring, summer & fall.
I started writing letters.
I worked on my poetry manuscript.
I discovered I love Twin Peaks.
I cooked some new recipes (soup, cookies & pasta).
Our family dog, Basil, died December 23rd.
A friend and colleague died in Madrid a few weeks ago.
My husband found a job & lost a job.
I took my students to the IMA and the IRT.

In 2012 I’d like to:

Write more poems.
Take up yoga.
Own some Zebra Finches.
Go on a trip with my husband to a state other than IN or PA.
Cook more vegetarian meals.
Plant more flowers/shrubs.
Read more books & magazines.
Complete my promotion portfolio to Associate Professor.
Improve my teaching & be more creative/innovative.
Work on a photography project.
Join a neighborhood book club.
Keep working out & run some more 5k’s.

I’m not big on “resolutions” because I think it puts unnecessary stress on people which sets them up for failure. I prefer to think of my list as an ongoing list of goals that I’m continuously building on.

I wish you all the best for the remainder of 2011 and I’ll see you in 2012.

Letter Writing Kits

This Christmas my family put a spending limit on gifts. I was in full support of this plan because I already had brilliant ideas for Christmas for several members of my family. This idea came to me awhile ago when I was thinking about how I used to write letters as a kid. This particular memory of letter writing happened to coincide with meeting a new friend from Chicago who is involved in something called The Letter Writers Alliance. This all occurred a few years ago and it got me to thinking that I should start writing letters again. However, as usual, life got in the way until a few weeks ago when I could finally start putting my plan into action.

I wanted to write letters again, but I also wanted to people to write letters to, so that’s when the letter writing kits came into being. I thought they would make perfect gifts for my sister, my mother & my best friend for Christmas this year. I would assemble the kits and postmark their first letter on December 22, 2011 so they would receive them in the mail shortly after Christmas. Then they could pen their response to me using their new kit.

What goes in a letter writing kit? Well, this is where the creative side of my brain begins to have fun. Here I give you a list of what I included:

1. Stamps


I bought these little boxes at Michael’s. Digging in the bins to find the right initials was fun.

2. Gold Seals.


The shopping gods were with me. I found all the right initials. Again.

3. Whimsical note cards (whimsical is such a great word).


Who doesn’t like wine or clocks?

4. A membership to the Letter Writers Alliance & a starter kit


Courtesy of The Letter Writers Alliance.

5. Good pens.

6. A beautiful box to house all of these fun items in.

These are the letters I wrote to my sister, mom & best friend

I did the stamping to make envelopes look prettier. I forgot how much I loved stamps. Those are gingko leaves on my sisters envelope. By the time this post goes up, they will have received their letters and hopefully will be writing one back to me.

Christmas Back East

Pike family Christmas tree.

Kit Kat is 17 years old.

One of my favorite decorations at my parent’s house.

A giant amaryllis bulb. I cannot wait till it opens.

Presque Isle.

The is the first time in five years that we have not had a white Christmas in Erie.

We took their bed…

How my husband feels about walks.

A windy day in Pittsburgh.

Beautiful homes in Virgina Manor.

We don’t have these in Indiana. Boo!

For Basil

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean’s spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don’t now and never did lie to each other.

So now he’s gone and I buried him,
and that’s all there is to it.

~Pablo Neruda

Basil during Christmas 2008.

Holiday Greetings from 22 N. Bosart

We’re heading back east today to visit family for the holidays, so I leave you with a photo montage from our home this Christmas. My next blog post will most likely come to you from Erie or Pittsburgh. Stay tuned & save travels to all!

My friend from work made me a snowflake on a particularly gloomy day last week. She rocks.

Zombies love Christmas too. See whose name is on the ornament?

Paperwhites from our wedding.

Fir boughs from our Christmas tree.

This year I kept the outside decorations simple.

Candles and evergreens.


This would look better with some snow…

We did colored lights this year. Again, snow is needed.

The Birds Have Returned…

New bird feeder.

Recognize your birdhouse, Grandpa?

And with the birds come the squirrels. Looks well fed, eh?

Holiday Mail

I bypassed sending holiday cards to the masses this year for a simple reason: I got married. Between my save the date cards, wedding invitations and the the thank you notes (that just went out less than a month ago) I figured that everyone had heard enough from me. However, I did take part in a Holiday Card Swap for fun and this weekend I received my first letter from my pen pal.

Last week I received this in my mailbox:

Hooray!

I sat down right away and penned a letter to my new pal.

A few days later this appeared:

I love Tiger Lilies.

So this weekend, I wrote to my second pen pal. I was full of holiday spirit having just finished a batch of grading, so in addition to to a letter, my second pal received a paper snowflake and a scented pencil that smells like a candy cane.

After receiving my first letter in the mail, I have to say I am completely thrilled with the feeling I get when I get to open a real live letter.

In other news, cards from my Holiday Card Swap have been rolling in:

A sheer bounty of cleverness.

I love receiving mail over the holidays. Support the post office and send letters!