Yellow Wallpaper

When I opened my Christmas letters in December I got a pleasant surprise from my friend Emily--after several years of waiting, she and her husband were able to adopt a baby girl. And then a few months later their baby got very, very sick. She has been diagnosed with a very rare blood disorder that means her immune system is attacking and destroying her blood cells. Right now she is on chemotherapy, and will need a bone marrow transplant. Bone marrow donation works differently from organ donation and you cannot volunteer directly for a specific person. However, you can sign up for the national registry and become a donor. Even if you cannot specifically help my friend's daughter, I want to encourage people to look into donation and sign up. Maybe one of you will be the right match for her or someone else. This issue also feels personal to me because my grandfather died of leukemia and I had a cousin who died of cancer (and received a bone marrow transplant as part of his treatment)....

When I started blogging a few years ago, FoxyJ seemed like a perfectly decent pseudonym--cute and fun, kind of like myself. But then I started meeting people in person and having to say it out loud ; there seems to be something a bit embarrassing about calling yourself 'foxy' in person. I hope that most people realize that at least a bit of irony is involved in the name. I had another great opportunity to meet people and make more connections yesterday at the Sunstone conference. I came home exhausted from travelling and from spending all day listening to and conversing with other people, but it was the positive exhaustion of energy spent on good things. I'm glad I chose to go down Friday night and spend some time with my friend Skylark; she was generous in allowing me to stay at her apartment and talk her ear off, and it was a much-needed break from my regular routine. The conference was also a fabulous experience; I attended sessions on a variety of topics and came away...

How did it get to be Friday already? Well, I guess technically it's not, but still. I thought I was going to have a relaxing week off, but I've somehow managed to find stuff to fill each day with craziness. I've also learned that when I feel bored or stressed I go shopping. I tend to buy food, but that still puts a dent in the budget. Highlights from this week include: I lost a pair of pants. I have no idea where they are. I know that I wore them on Monday, and I did laundry on Tuesday. But when I went to wear them on Wednesday they were gone. Not in the hamper, not hanging on the clothesline, not in my closet, not in Mr. Fob's closet, not in my dresser, and not in our apartment laundry room. I'm afraid I left them in the dryer and someone decided to adopt them. Which is weird and kind of sad. At least they were old. The kids have been getting very dirty every day from playing outside at the playground. S-Boogie went to a birthday party at the park on Wednesday afte...

Did you miss me? I bet you didn't realize I'd gone anywhere, and I didn't really. Just my computer did. Last Wednesday it suddenly started freaking out and acting crazy. We did some investigating on the interent (thank goodness for having two computers) and tried a few things, but nothing worked. It seemed to be a hard drive issue, which is beyond our level of expertise. Thankfully I found a repair guy online who had a lot of positive reviews and took my computer to him on Thursday morning. He called me back right away to tell me that the hard drive was shot. He ordered a new one, installed it, transferred my data and gave me back my computer this morning. The price was pretty reasonable too. It was weird being without my computer this weekend, but at the same time refreshing to have a little break from being so attached to my electronics. It's also disconcerting to get used to my 'new' machine; my documents and pictures were transferred, but none of my bookmar...

....that's an Irish lullaby ! And that's the song I've had stuck in my head all day. S-Boogie has been excitedly counting down to Saint Patrick's day for several weeks now. Grandma got her a magazine subscription for Christmas and it came with her very own calendar, so she keeps us informed about all the holidays. It turned out to be a good day. S-Boogie wore her green shamrock shirt and socks that she got last year (I'm glad they still fit) and Mr. Fob was magically delicious . Little Dude wore a green dinosaur shirt and was mostly uninterested in the holiday until dinnertime when he requested a green plate and a green bib. He even ate a few of his green noodles. As you can see, we had some 'green noodles' (the sauce is pretty tasty--it's a combo of pureed spinach and peas with cottage cheese and Parmesan ), kiwis, salad, and some "Irish-American Soda Bread" as the Joy of Cooking likes to call it (as they point out, the Irish don't put ...

Tonight my mom called while I was making dinner and we commiserated for a while on the fact that the world seems to be going to pot these days. She suggested that we start up my grandparents' farm again and live off the land, but as much as I love Star Valley I don't want to live some place where winter lasts for nine months of the year. The point of this is to say that feeling stressed about the economy and the fact that Mr. Fob has sent out a number of applications with no response whatsoever has piled on top of my end-of-quarter assignments and left me feeling kind of down. So I thought I'd write a few things that I'm proud of about myself and invite you to do the same, either here in comments or on your own blog. 1. By next Thursday I have two big research papers that are due. Today I finished a first draft (it's rough, but there) of one and I have an outline and notes ready for the other one that I'm going to start tomorrow. I haven't always been focuse...

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier This book is a classic of mid-century Latin American modernism, and I found that I enjoyed it about as much as other similar books I have read. In other words: the vagueness and pretentiousness were slightly irritating, the writing was beautiful but stuffy, and the misogyny of the protagonist was blatant. It wasn't a bad read and it's an excellent book, but it's jut not my cup of tea. Night by Elie Wiesel I know I've read this book at some point in the past, but I apparently remembered little of it because it didn't seem familiar. It is in many ways a standard-setter in the world of Holocaust literature, and though short still a powerful and affecting book. I find it interesting after reading it that so much of the literature that came afterward manages to find some sort of redemption, and yet this book (one of the first) seems to offer none at its end. The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald Sebald is the latest in a series of what I l...

This morning the kids got up early (like six o'clock) so we were all ready by nine (we don't start church until 11). I decided to kill some time by making cranberry orange muffins. I finished baking the treats and was prepared to sit down and enjoy a tasty snack with my kids, until they both started howling in protest. "We don't want muffins. I want my own snack. Muffins are messy!" (I think the 'messy' thing was just a ploy to get out of eating a muffin). S-Boogie sat down to eat a granola bar while giving the muffins dirty looks. I felt disappointed because I thought I was giving the kids a special surprise, and they just plain didn't want it. Well, it was mainly S-Boogie who didn't want it and Little Dude just followed along with her. I realized after a little while that her distress wasn't so much the fact that I had made muffins but that she is going through a very independent phase right now (well, she has been for most of her life). She...