Happier Things Coming

I got a job for the summer! Yay!

I'll be writing an XML database to help preserve the Arapaho language. There's a website about the Arapaho project right here:
http://www.colorado.edu/csilw/newarapproj2.htm

If you go to the 'Language' tab at the top and click around in 'Archives' you'll find exactly what I'll be manipulating: spoken Arapaho conversations, very short ones, that I'll tag by part of speech, link to the sound file, and put in this platform-independent database that anybody can search and use. It's perfect preparation for Adventure Linguist research, the conservation of endangered languages -- yet another fascinating career trajectory. The cool thing about language documentation is that little-known languages in need of rescue are usually in distant, remote places -- so if I get experience at being useful in saving them, maybe I'll get to go to distant places and do interesting things AND get paid for it. Sounds worth trying for to me...

Felgeroth and the Spartans Fly True

It is the end of a tiring week.

With the help of Melissa Dawe, I managed to write a program that makes little birds fly after each other, but not into the sun. The golden leader Felgeroth follows my direction through the mouse icon. The little bird pictures change if the bird is flying left or right, following its leader.
Melissa found the pictures on the web, converted them to bitmaps, standardized the color of the sky and the background of each bird bitmap, made a golden bird by some photoshopish alchemy, made reverse images so the birds could flip around, and gave me a lot of advice and encouragment to do it. It feels like such a triumph.
Kelson named my leader Felgeroth on Saturday morning when I was teaching him how to write in C++. He saw my assignment and asked if I would teach him to program, so I accepted the challenge. It took some swift gymnastics to translate computer programming logic metaphorically into something a 14 year old boy could relate to, process and remember, but it was a great excersize for me. He understood and asked attentive questions, and after a little he sat there and typed in the commands, copying and pasting and paying attention to detail. It was really quite fun. I can't wait to show him the program in action.This is a gorgeous gnarled old tree Brian and I saw on our hike with the puppies last weekend.

Maddy is bringing out a whole new, vicious side of Tucker.

This is a crocus planted in our front yard. Spring is springing -- it even rained yesterday.

Sleepy Sunday with Mom and Kelson

This Saturday I had the luxury of spending the night with Mom and Kelson here in Boulder. It was very relaxing, finally having a chance to play The Farming Game with Kelson and to play double Solitaire with Mom. I am currently showing Mom how to make a Blog, mostly as a means of procrasticanting about the computer programming homework I'm supposed to be doing. It's important in my opinion to keep in mind why we bother working so hard; peace, respect, love -- what makes it all worthwhile. If we don't make time to remember what it's for, our motivation loses fuel, and life becomes nothing but exhausting. Yay for Saturday...

Happy Pi

We just finished the 7th annual Pi Party -- today is actually March 16th, not March 14th, but the party had to wait for a Friday. I've got this weird thing with Pi; the number fascinates me. I first started thinking about it when I read Carl Sagan's Contact, the ending of which differs from the movie version. I think I've sort of misremembered this over time, but the ending of the book involves a message written deep in the digits of Pi, when represented in binary in a matrix of a certain dimension -- something about a perfect circle of ones in a field of zeros. This hidden message in Pi is the alien's real proof that he's telling the truth, because a message in the number Pi would imply an engineer of physics itself. Sagan was an athiest as I remember, but this idea that another species could somehow design and alter the primary rules like that -- that's hard to imagine. Pi is mystical to me because it is an unchanging ratio, continuous, static and yet forever undefined value. I love the fact that it shows up in so many places. Mostly it's a deep admiration for the constancy of it: in a thousand years someone will throw a stone in a pond and the wave it creates will have a circumference equal to Pi times its diameter. That and it's a cool bar trick.

The picture is of Chet, Brian and myself in a chair lift last fall, probably at the Breckenridge ski resort, I think taken last October. We've been up in the mountains tons lately too so I thought I'd post this. I love these two.

Bavarian Postcard to Self

Self-

Remember the lake halfway up the Zugspitze where the mystic fog swallowed up the islands? As you read these words, whatever immediate concerns dictate your mood, remember that they are tiny and brief compared to the scene on the mountainside. Think too on your next journey, but know that the thick of distraction is good solid adventure too. The As on the screen are not worth weeks of wanting to cry, so step it down if you get there, and replaying conflict or hostility just prolong the injury so don't do that either. You have what you have searched the world for right there right now -- peace, respect, love. Value it and enjoy it -- you made your life this way, and it will keep beign satisfying if you keep making it so!!

-From Bavaria over my Christmas vacation

Hooky on the Bus

By means of celebration, I am playing hooky while on the bus, going (as fast as I can) from class at CU to my home in Westminster. Normally this time is part of my homework time – I usually edit the very engaging PhD dissertation of my fantastic friend Melissa unless I have some pressing homework which I will have no other time to complete. Point being, this is an hour I spend on obligation, and writing a blog entry is a luxury.

But it’s a luxury I’ve earned.

I just finished presenting my term project for my graduate Linguistic Phonetics class. I stayed up until midnight last night finishing it and had to take meds to get unconscious afterwards, so I am exhausted this morning – which amusingly enough ended up being a good thing, because I was too tired for my autonomic nervous system to trigger the uncontrollable trembling that always accompanies public speaking for me. Translation: I was rather involuntarily relaxed, and I spoke a bit slower. That was a good thing because this was the most ludicrously convoluted system of sound conjugations of any language assigned to students; having finally finished it, I feel it a bit of a complement to have been chosen for this particular presentation. There were about 10 phonological rules, many of which only applied if certain other rules applied, many of which undid (or redid) the action of the rule before... in order to explain it I obviously had to understand it with no human to explain the complexities to me, just a book whose sentences I read again, again, again. I wrote tables of examples for each rule, explanations for each change in each word in each sequence… The fact that this paragraph has become tediously boring is undeniable proof that my fellow students must have been as fatigued as I was by the end. I’m done, though, and I’m certain I did as well on it as I could. It feels like June.

This last week I have not gone to my job, rather only attended classes and done homework every day. I planned to do this as a means of spending as much time as possible with our new puppy, but it ended up being a lifesaver in an unanticipated manner – I had fallen quite behind in homework in the darkness of a brief but incapacitating depression, and I was utterly overwhelmed (and terrified by it) a week ago, but now I feel like I can do it again – perhaps even to the caliber of which I am proud. I need to develop strategies to maintain functionality when the force of fear and sadness derails my ability to think; there is an amazing professor in my department who used her work as a haven from the emotional devastation of her husband’s death, who immersed herself in her intellect to minimalize the inescapable constancy of sorrow, and her example gives me hope I did not think existed.

Real Life and Practice Kids

That last post was, unsurprisingly, nearly a month ago. Life resumed with the furious pace to which I am now somewhat resigned -- I'm taking lots of classes, working a lot, and having a hard time dealing with my Mom's advancing Parkinsons Disease. I've spent a good deal of time unable to function myself, just wandering around trying not to cry, involuntarily composing poetry full of roses and books about dying. Distraction, frequently in the form of a hot tub under the stars, has become a very valuable commodity.
We are considering a new addition to the family whose presence is certainly quite the engaging distraction -- no, not a kid, but another practice one. She doesn't have a name -- we've gone through a number and haven't found the right one yet. She's a mini Aussie like Tuck is but she's bigger -- or she's certainly going to be -- and she's called a black tri, whereas he's a blue merle. We have until Friday to decide whether or not she's our dog waiting for us to find her. It's mostly Tucker who is the problem -- he doesn't quite realize that we're doing this so he can have a friend. He seems to see her in a much more characteristically brotherly way -- as competition. He'll always be my first baby... and the idea of investing countless hours of training in another one is utterly daunting!

Having missed it the first time...

So there's a problem intrinsic to trying to document an adventure while you're having it: time. You can either be seeing things you've never seen or writing about them.

I am now back at my happy light in the cold den of my sprawling house, having finished not only my entire trip, but the endless trip home and a day of sedentary recovery as well. While I was on the train during travels I did type up some text, and everywhere I brought with my little pencilled journal, so I'm now typing that up too -- but I have no coherent story of the rest of my days. For the sake of efficiency, here's what came after what I've written about on here so far:
1/6/07, Saturday, Train from Paris to Munich, saw historic buildings in Munich, went to City Museum to learn about Nazi Reich history and see a zillion weird OLD instruments
1/7/07, Sunday, Guided bus tour around Munich, rest of the day at the Dachau concentration camp
1/8/07, Monday, used a car in a carshare program to drive to the Real Disney Castle, Neuschwanstein, at the foothills of the Alps (though they're not called foothills and they're not exactly hills -- more like the mountains just START, no transition -- and we hiked around a lake
1/9/07, Tuesday, relaxed and did more stuff in Munich, bought presents (mostly for me), went to see Eragon dubbed in German1/10/07, Wednesday, took train across countryside south to the Alps, took train and gondolas to the top of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany -- saw a disarmingly gorgeous lake in the fog1/11/07, Thursday, took Munich municipal transit as far south as possible to the 550-year-old Andrechs monastery and brewery in a peaceful little town, hiked through wet forests, saw the gorgeous Ammersee lake, bought chocolate; upon returning to Munich went to see the Olympiapark designed 35 years ago for the Olympics; climbed the hill there that is made of war detritus to see the glittering panorama of the city at night1/12/07, Friday, left Bernd's at 8:15 to take subway to airport, flew 10 hours across ocean to Dulles in Washington D.C. -- disembarked to accompany my luggage through customs but they screwed up and the whole flight's luggage took an hour to get to the place where we were supposed to take it through customs, so I missed my scheduled flight to DIA; finally took my luggage through and went to United's next departing flight for DIA, waited on standby, was the last standby person selected, went out to plane -- ended up being the exact same frigging plane I got off of two hours earlier; dozed sorely until Denver where Brian picked me up and brought me home to two dozen roses and a good night's sleepSo we get back to me sitting under my Happy Light, a full-spectrum lamp I use to regulate my circadian rhythm -- which helps to make me tired when I should be so I can sleep without chemicals and wake up with energy. It is wonderful to be back to Brian and free refillable water in restaurants, but I could not be more satisfied with these last three weeks. I'm halfway through typing up my handwritten journal so I'll probably make a long entry with that whenever I finish it. Rupert Brooke wrote a poem a hundred years ago that expresses the feeling of the daily grind when adventure and intensity have become the norm:

A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming at the verge of strife --
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

And then came the puking part

I forgot to describe the sickness part. I only went to one of the famed restaurants in Paris, and Jose ordered something he'd not had before -- boeuf tartar, forgive the spelling -- and it laid him out for two days. I tasted it. It looked like completely raw ground beef marbled with fat and the texture matched that, though it tasted a little cooked. We went there for lunch and we were all happy and healthy until Jose slammed awake at about 2am the next morning and sprinted unsuccessfully for the bathroom. I never had it as badly as he did, and it only got me the next afternoon while I visited Florencia's art studio.
Here is how I spent about half my time in Paris -- on a mattress on the floor of the bedroom of Jose and Florencia, my hosts, watching old movies on my laptop and having interesting conversations. We made it out of the apartment for two sets of whirlwind sightseeing, each set about 3 or 4 hours long, and in this fantastically efficient way we managed to knock out the stuff I really wanted to do: we went to Victor Hugo's house, to the Notre Dame, to the cafe where Hemingway and Fitzgerald hung out (which is now too ritzy to serve coffee in the evening, prefering the wine clientelle), and to the Eiffel Tower. Because we only went out at night, all my pictures of paris, with the exception of the ones at the grave yard I visited alone, are taken without flash, at night. I didn't mind terribly much not being able to spend days canvassing art museums in the traditional manner of a visitor in Paris; traveling necessarily implies digestive upset in life as I know it, and this way that experience was gotten overwith in the presence of a good friend with whom I wanted time to converse anyway. One of his friends, a fellow musician studying at the conservatory for which Jose lives in Paris, brought me roses to make me happy, and I because something near deliriously so.
It was a powerful experience to be around such amazing investments of human effort and time. The Notre Dame took 300 years and legions of architects and craftsmen, but the streets are lined with such herculean achievements. It is very strange as a product of the New World for me to walk avenues that were walked two thousand years ago by consciousnesses just like mine. It gives one a sense of... both of obligation and of meaning; if the people before me had burned their lives just sustaining them like I usually do, then there would be no sculpture, no massive feats of cooperation and resources. If I don't bother doing something more than providing for myself and consuming, then when I am dust, I will have missed an opportunity to improve what the next centuries inherit. The sense of meaning is born because I do have the option of creating something that will last, and affecting a woman walking past 1000 years later.

Puking in Paris

1/3/07 Jose’s Apartment, Le Marais area, Paris

Drinking a 33cl Coke in the cold little apartment of my hosts Jose and Florencia, the Brazilians I knew and enjoyed so much in Golden, Colorado. The floor is a red concrete or something that similarly communicates the hard January weather outside, and my native accustomedness to central heating is proving an annoying liability. There are books in four languages about art, music and philosophy lining the walls, and a stained-glass translucent contact paper over the windows that separate us from night on the sidewalks outside. I did not know until this morning that the average height of a building in Paris is six floors, or that the average width of the streets is a third the height of the buildings that line in (or really just seems to be) – for that matter I was expecting to at some point be able to photograph my first step on Parisian earth, but because it is not allowed to walk on grass planted in the squares, I have not yet encountered any earth I am allowed to step on; my definition was going to be ground not placed there, ground not synthetic like street paving or stone – but I think that was a naïve expectation, a result of my having grown up under endless Colorado skies with prairie stretching to eternity.

I am surprised also that I can miss my love so much and still be having such a fantastic time here. The clock on my computer remains trained to the days as they pass for him – it says now 3:51pm, so he is sitting (as am I) in front of a computer screen in a building in a city. I think of him often here – when Jose and I were walking tonight along the stone path that lines the walls of the River Seine, with the Notre Dame towering her impossible Gothic detail into the night above, Brian’s absence was as tangible as his presence should have been. Instead he sits now under florescent light with his charts full of tiny squiggly lines rolled up around him, most probably wishing he weren’t working, but by doing so making it possible for me to have the exquisite luxury of being here. He is the ally I never thought I would have, and that knowledge does not leave me.

Frankfurt to Paris, pictures to come

1/1/07 Von Frankfurt Nach Paris

In the Frankfurt Hauptbanhoff, the main train station, specifically seat 71 in car 267 of train 56 to Paris Est; now rolling backwards as it seems the remainder of my trip will be. The sky is a steely gray and it matches the metal, glass and concrete city to the T. Over the Main River now, pronounced ‘mine’, which is significantly narrower than the New River by Blacksburg. Most of the trees here are deciduous, meaning bare now in early January, and the thick wet air reminds me of leaves on the ground in the Virginia woods. Bernd has made the point that the Virginia climate and wilderness are very like those here in Germany.

The only colorful thing in the city itself seems to me to be the graffiti, which I personally find cheerful – identical in every respect to what rebellious teenagers do in every country I’ve visited. Bernd has told me that all big cities were mostly destroyed in World War II, and that all the ‘old’ city centers were rebuilt to reflect what they originally had been. The history here is simply unfathomably long to my American mind; I just walked out of the cathedral where the emperors of Germany were crowned, the kings of the kings of regions, before the New World was even known to exist by people on this side of the ocean.

The trains are bright red, clean, and very much on schedule. I have not paid for one of the express ones, but nonetheless the houses and woods outside flash by; I’m under the impression even slow trains go 150 km/hr, which at 1.6 km/mile is near 100 miles an hour.

I’ve finished the part of my trip with Bernd’s parents, and I’m going now south to Paris to visit Jose, his girlfriend Florencia, and hopefully Ricardo as well. Perhaps I shall unfold my map of France and guess the cities as they pass. At the moment all I see are fields of close-cut cultivated green on one side, highways with a dotted line separating oncoming lanes (as opposed to the double yellow line with which I’m familiar) and what look like factories, smokestacks billowing white into the slate sky. It is perhaps nearly time to trade my German dictionary for my French one, to get out my Paris guidebook. I’ve six hours on this train, perhaps 3 more with light to see countryside – I suppose I’ll stop writing and gaze out the window for a while…

A new Pledge of Allegiance for the New Year

Today Bernd and I had just finished walking through a castle built (the first time) about 900 years ago, and we were headed down the river valley back to his parents' house when the conversation somehow came around to the American custom of saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools every morning. I personally disagree strongly with the custom, and most people I've known from other countries find it disconcertingly indoctrinating; people from countries with dictators in their recent history have told me that it reminds them of the propaganda and brain-washing techniques used to keep the populace subdued. If you've not been in a school for a while, it might surprise you too to see it -- even in the hallway people walking will freeze, assume a formal position (hand over heart) and stare up at the nearest flag or the blank wall on the other side of it before solemnly chanting the folowing phrases:

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands:
One nation
Under God
With liberty and justice for all.

My primary objection is that it's firstly a promise to remain loyal to a symbol and a symbol is objectively meaningless, which makes its connotations variable and temporally weak. Swearing lifelong loyalty to a nation (which is obviously the intent of making kids repeat this statement 5 days of every seven, 9 months of every 12, for 12 years) is a very dangerous act too -- Martin Luther King Jr. stated beautifully that it is our moral obligation to defy those laws which are unjust, so promising to eternally support a human institution implies obeying the corrupt as faithfully as the wise, and blindly following the malevolent into their cruelty just as quickly as the kind into their generosity. The Nazi Reich is an excellent example of why this is such a bad idea -- few Americans remember (or ever knew) that Hitler was elected democratically before his power crept into the bitterest and most dangerous insanity, and the progression was slow enough that the normal people (possibly kindhearted, possibly intellengent, precisely like you in your humanity) simply went on promising loyalty, went on following and supporting the system they'd chosen as it slowly descended into treachery.

I decided to compose a pledge I could support, though of course I disapprove of asking people to mindlessly repeat any statement, whether or not they agree with it, without asking them to evaluate it for themselves first. The rhythm leaves something to be desired but I think I'm fairly satisfied with the ideas. Here's my version:

I pledge allegiance to the ideals
Of the United States of America:
To think before believing,
To consider all consequences,
And to act -- today --
With kindness and respect for all.

By ideals I mean the standards of behavior that allowed our nation's foundation to be as strong and benevolent as it originally was, not -- clearly -- the underlying principles of the choices we make now.

There, then, is my pledge for the new year -- my New Year's Resolution -- and if you do me the favor of holding me accountable for my promise, I will thank you. To think before believing, consider all consequences, and to act -- every day -- with kindness and respect for all.

Happy new year!

To Germany

So... check out picasaweb.google.com/piqueen for the photos of my trip. I've spent one night here thus far and my system is still utterly and entirely out of whack. I left the evening of the 28th just exactly as the second horrible blizzard was moving in. When we boarded the plane the expanse of concrete was still just glassy with melted flakes, but by the time we taxied to position to takeoff, I could barely see out the window -- and what I COULD see was only white. We sat out there for an hour before we took off, which was long enough for the passenger beside me to reveal a large number of personal details whose revelation I intentionally did nothing to elicit. The airport was a miserable cauldron of exhausted and unhappy travellers who had waited too long and who knew they were apt to wait much longer. Here's a picture taken from the line waiting to get into the maze waiting to go through security, which I stood in AFTER I spent an hour and a half getting my bags checked.
This next picture was taken under the Frankfurt Airport somewhere, after the delay from Denver caused me to miss my connecting flight to Munich. In the three hours I had to burn there, I managed to get my passport stamped twice -- one saying I came in and one saying I left again, but I couldn't get the customs fellow to stamp it a third time. My friend Bernd met me in Munich and we got on the Deutsche Bahn (DB) straight back to Frankfurt, then on to Mainz, where it is currently 11pm (or 23).
Today we went to the Gutenburg Museum, where I saw the oldest objects I had ever seen -- handwritten Bibles from the 15th century. Johannes Gutenburg invented the printing press in Mainz in the 16th century -- Mainz has been around since 50 BC, and by the 1400s it was a big place on the map (though Munich did not exist yet at all). After that museum came some bread with cheese, then we walked to see St. Stephan, the church whose stained-glass windows were actually painted by Marc Chagall -- they didn't photograph well, but you can see them here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Chagallfenster.jpg
After the church I saw what now rank as the oldest things I've ever actually seen in person: the remains of Roman ships, unearthed when the Hilton was being built in downtown Mainz. (There are two pictures from that museum on PicasaWeb, but the Gutenburg Museum was very strict about people not taking pictures.) Bernd says that Roman artifacts are underground so commonly in Mainz that construction projects have been known to pretend they hadn't found them, just so the contractors can get their work done.
An hour ago Bernd's dad blew out the candles on their Tannenbaum. I need very much to go sleep now -- tomorrow is Silvester, New Year's Eve, so it is doubtful that I will make a blog posting, but probably I should be able to get some more pictures up. Thanks for reading -- and may your Neues Jahr 2007 be exactly the mix of adventure and peace that you most prefer.

Whole Potter Set

Here they all are. The most recent one is the second row from the top, furthest to the left -- Catalan, brought to me by Ingma, the very generous significant other of a Spanish researcher by the name of Lalo Salmeron. My second most recent aquisition is the furthers to the right, the second row from the bottom -- Vietnamese, brought to me by Aaron Hart as he ventured across the world. I just finished a class in phonetics, the very specific diacritic system of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and Vietnamese uses what looks to me like a fantastically complicated accent system -- it must be a tonal language.

Linguistic Tetris Insomnia

If this blog gets posted, I will be amazed. The amount of time I spend writing blogs compared to the number of postings I’ve made -- it’s nothing short of embarrassing. I don’t know why that should be, given that I write and save files all day long, so one would think it would be no Herculean feat for me to upload a file after writing it, but it’s like the vortex that prevents hand-written letters from being mailed. I swear there’s an unnatural force that prevents me from addressing and mailing letters I’ve written. I have letters I wrote as long ago as high school that never saw the magic of a postage stamp, and it’s become rather an interesting collection.
Point being, I doubt you’ll read this. If you actually do, welcome to finals week.
My brain is utterly fried. There’s a fire in the fireplace and the music playing is the music that played soundtrack to my pledge to love Brian forever. It always derails me, and tonight derailment is a mercy. I keep involuntarily writing grammatical trees for these sentences I’m writing. it’s just like when my brain forces me to play Tetris involuntarily when I have insomnia, staring into the blackness continuing the mental activity (or repetition) that filled my day, same thing with tiny elements of Sudoku puzzles after spending an hour doing them.
Perhaps what I write keeps not getting posted because I read over it and decide nobody should read it, then I never work up the nerve to post it. I’ll bet that’s it. But diagram that sentence, man! Holy smokes! A subordinate clause using a relativizing pronoun, a transitive idiomatic phrase with an oblique locative and a complement clause and can’t o this anymore. I know that’s all wrong and I can’t get my brain straight. I just finished 7 hours of writing a final for my Morphology and Syntax class. It’s totally mad, but honestly it’s a rush. Being a 9 to 5 professional for five years got a tad slow; this is stressful, challenging -- and I’m being asked to describe like why categories should be defined if languages’ most universal trait is their tendency to violate their own rules.
Man, my sentences are long. I try to stck short ones in every now and again so your brain doesn’t have to get all convoluted just like mine is, but I can’t help it -- my sentences are just always long. I have to post this right now or I’m going to get unsatisfied with its quality and never put it up. The thing is that I have this poetry I’ve written in the bus over the semester, a set of poetry about stress and dissolution that I keep trying to type up and post on here, but I keep getting distracted. I have my puppy, my fire, my man in California, and the rest of the night to play Sudoku and eat cookies.
This picture is called Introspection, just in case some Colorado summer could brighten your day. God knows it could brighten mine.

At a coffee shop reading through the thousand pieces of prose and poetry I've typed up already, trying to find some clue as to how to approach the goliath task of getting paid for it, I come across this one in Spanish:
__________
Un arco-iris murmurando en mi mente

Me hace ver que la vida sigue

Respirando

Renaciendo en la sombra del invierno

Y creandose de Nuevo con el camino peregrinado de la tristeza.

-6/7/2002

_______________

A rough English translation, a couple words changed for flow:

_______________
A rainbow whispering in my mind
Shows me that life goes on
breathing
being born once more in the shadows of winter
and recreating herself in the peregrine wanderings of sadness.

_______________

The Collection Unveiled

So it only took how many weeks to post this picture? It's not even close to complete either; this shows 16 books and I have 25. These things are great; each one (or nearly) had to travel across the world to get to my living room, so I've decided that I'm making it a life goal to travel to the countries from which they come. That means that anyone who sends me a Harry Potter chooses a new country for my go-to list. At first it only mattered the language of the book, but now I don't care if I have duplicates -- the only important thing is the country where the book was bought (and that they're all the first one, the Philospher's/Sorcerer's Stone). Here's what I have now in the order they're on the shelf, which originally did have some systematicity I can no longer remember:
1. Scotland, thanks to Chet N.
2. Malaysia, thanks to Lynn S.
3. Czech Republic, thanks to Diana R.
4. China (Western format, from Taiwan), thanks to Ron C.
5. Croatia, thanks to Gordan and Malia J.
6. United States, thanks to Kelson A.
7. Finland, thanks to Brian P.
8. France, thanks to Bernd O.
9. Germany, thanks to Bernd O.
10. Greece, thanks to Heather and Brian R.
11. United States, Denver -- Greek, before I made the rule that US-bought ones don't qualify
12. Isreal, thanks to Banana B.'s mother whose name I don't know
13. United States, Denver -- Hebrew, before I made that rule, same day I think
14. Italy, thanks to Heather R.'s officemate whose name I don't know
15. Japanese, thanks to Jacob H. His gift was the original book that started the collection.
16. Latin -- bought in US, so... Vatican? -- thanks to Turtle T.
17. Poland, thanks to Brian P.
18. Brazil, thanks to El Pirata in Blacksburg
19. Portugal, thanks to Luis P. L. G. F.
20. Mexico, Oaxaca, thanks to me (and Ivan and Katie for inviting me to their wedding)
21. Puerto Rico, thanks to Maria F.
22. Thailand, thanks to Katie (whose last initial I am never sure of)
23. Canada, thanks to a Canadian fellow I worked with years ago and no longer remember well
24. Viet Nam, thanks to Aaron H. (I just got it this morning! It's utterly gorgeous!)
25. Catalonia (Spain), thanks to the girlfriend of Lalo S. (This book arrives next week with her.)

So! Yay! I'll take France and Germany to their homeplaces in December and 4 of my 22 destinations will have been reached -- the U.S., Oaxaca in Mexico, Germany and France. There are still so many countries out there! If you go somewhere not on here or if you have a relative who lives there, I'll pay for the book and transportation, of course, plus you'll get your name on here and you'll give me another lifelong travel destination. Right now the two I'm really hoping to get are Arabic from any country (which might not exist) and Korean, but I think the easiest ones are English from England or Ireland and all the other European countries not on here (Sweden, Denmark, Non-catalonian Spain etc.).

I'm going to post this before all my work gets erased again. Happy Sunday!

My Harry Potters

On a shelf in my living room live twenty-something versions of Harry Potter, each one brought to me by a friend or an indulgent coworker -- the internet would make it too easy, so there's been a rule that the books themselves must have traveled across the world to reach me. It has become a life goal of mine to travel to the home nations of all my beloved Harry Potters, and I will be shocked if I succeed. I am proud to present...

Tucker Time

This is Tucker, our new puppy. He's a Miniature Australian Shepherd, and he's a fantastic little guy. He just had surgery to be neutered and he's been a serious pain ever since. We found his breeder by googling mini aussie -- we didn't know they'd shrunk Aussies down to minis, but we knew we wanted the intelligence of an Aussie without the exercise requirements.

Maryanne does clicker training because the behavioral modification is fun to watch -- because it's a game Tucker loves too -- and both Maryanne and Brian are about equally disillusioned with electrical stimulation collar work, because while Tucker certainly pays more attention, he also hates doing it, so it isn't fun for anyone.

Tucker obeys sign and spoken commands for the most basic things he does -- Sit, [lie] Down, Come, Place (a command meaning he should go to his bed or another place in the room that is his), Crawl (army crawl), Ring the bell, and to a lesser degree Stand, Say Please (where he sits on his haunches with his paws in the air) and Tippy Toe (where he stands as tall as he can on his hind feet). For some reason Tucker's more responsive to visual gesture commands instead of spoken ones.

Tucker's favorite passtime is trying to get Niko, our 3 and 1/2 year old calico cat, to play with him. He fails. She doesn't detest him, she just doesn't think he's very fun to interact with -- her version of playing is being willing to run FROM him rather than planting her claws and spitting dangerously. I've not yet seen her initiate play, but I think she will eventually.

Brian and Tucker in Breckenridge 10/06