BLOG POSTS

Thrifting

This past Saturday I went “thrifting” with some girlfriends. It was awesome. We started out by having breakfast at a local east side favorite:

Diners, Drive Ins & Dives visited awhile ago. It is delicious. 

Then we started making our way through some east side thrift stores. We all found some treasures and we all spent under $10. In fact, we all spent more on breakfast than we spent shopping (and breakfast was not expensive).

This is my haul from a day of thrifting.

Materials for a future crafting project.

Awww…

Vintage children’s books.

Why “thrifting” is awesome:

1. I spent $8.50
2. I bought five vintage children’s books for $1
3. I found three tea cups for a future craft project
4. I found a Charter Club Jacket for $5
5. I found a ceramic bunny and squirrel
6. I had a lot of fun with my girlfriends
7. I got to run around the east side

I will definitely be “thrifting” again and you should all go too.

A Few Of My Favorite Things

Delicious & hearty.

I love these crackers with cheese, meat, peanut butter, apples and the list goes on. They are so delicious and reasonably healthy and filling. You should go out and buy some right now.

Vena

Babette

Shoes. I love shoes. These are two pairs I recently purchased on sale. I think the Vena is arriving today. Good times.

Letters!

Receiving and sending letters is wonderful. I love arriving home to find a letter waiting for me and I love being able to sit down at the end of a long day and write to someone.

Good books.

 Right now I am reading this collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates and I’m really enjoying it. Look for a future blog post once I’ve finished the book.

Best show ever.

If you have not seen this show, you need to watch it. It is on PBS Masterpiece Classic Sundays @ 9:00 PM. It is amazing and as my husband says after every episode, “this is the best show on T.V.!”

Warrior Pose.

I started yoga last week and I love it. I take my yoga class once a week at the Y and I always feel 100% better after I complete the class. Try yoga. You’ll like it.

Poetry is good for the brain.

I’ve gotten back to writing after the winter break and I love it. I’ve been waking up with ideas for poems lately and I hope it is a trend that continues.

Five Reasons I Love My Finches

We’ve had our finches, Calliope & Humphrey for several weeks now and they are fun, busy little birds.

Reasons why Calliope & Humphrey are awesome:

1. They like to nest together. We have these two thatched houses that we bought at Pet Smart because the “pet specialist” informed us that finches like to nest. For awhile, our finches didn’t seem too interested in the nests, but then we moved them for better access, and the other night they were both peeking out of the nest. They were adorable.

2. They like to groom each other. Our finches definitely have a morning routine.  I come down and uncover their cage and they begin to chirp and bounce around the cage. After a few minutes of flying about, they settle on a perch and begin to clean each others feathers.

3. They love to play with hay. We have a hay ball, another suggestion from the “pet specialist” and the birds love to pull all the hay out of the ball and they carefully pick specific stalks and use it to pad their nests.

4. They eat together.

5. When they get tired, they sit very close to one another on a perch and snuggle. Love.

Guest Blog: A Letter To My Community College

I’m a guest blogger over at A Librarian’s Lists and Letters. Here’s an excerpt from my post. To read the rest, check out Shannon’s blog.

To My Community College:

If you had asked me ten years ago as a graduating senior from a private liberal arts college what I knew about community colleges, I would have said absolutely nothing. However, this would not have been a true answer because I knew one thing about community colleges: I knew they were looked down upon. How did I know this? Because occasionally when I would tell people unfamiliar with Allegheny College where I went to school they would pause and then say, “Oh,” you go to CCAC.” CCAC stands for Community College of Allegheny County. The first few times this happened, I corrected the questioner but didn’t think much of it. I didn’t know anything about CCAC and I’m not a native of Pennsylvania, so whatever. They were confusing one school for another. Who cares, right? I was quickly set straight when the same mistake was made in the presence of a friend of mine from Pittsburgh. “No, no, no,” she interjected quickly, “we go to Allegheny College not CCAC. That’s a community college.” Then she laughed and made a face, and I started to get the picture.

Read the rest here.

A New Office for the New Year

Over the winter break my community college packed up the Liberal Arts & Sciences department and moved us over to our new building, currently named Illinois/Fall Creek (these are the two streets it sits on). When I arrived Tuesday, things were a bit chaotic. There is still a lot of construction going on, so there was plenty of dust and power tools and men with hard hats. Our offices were in a state of disarray with extra furniture and cube walls that were not in the right spots. Luckily, by Wednesday the extra furniture was gone, our computers were up and online, our spiffy new phones worked and the cubes were all the correct size.

My cozy cube.

My new window! I brought two plants in immediately.

This view from my window shows the front of the new building. If you look off to the right you can see downtown.

I’m very pleased with my new office space. I currently share it with two other professors and they are awesome. There is a lot of natural light and the air quality is much better than where we were before. The building as a whole is gorgeous and will be even more so once it is completely finished. They are letting students in on Monday. Let the spring semester begin.

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.