Milestones

Graduation is one of them, but it was not the only one on the horizon in my family, who all joined me to celebrate. My nephew Alexandre, I cannot believe it, is 17 and will be celebrating his own graduation next year as well as the Big 18. My nieces, Sarisa and Kianna, are growing up too, both are teenagers now and working hard at that tough thing called middle school... balancing school and friends and sports has been tough for them but they are getting the hang of it! I am so proud of all three them and I have no words for how much it meant to me that they were here. We had an interesting weekend which consisted of stuffing 5 adults and 3 teenagers into our little two-bendroom house (with one bathroom none-the-less!). We had a good time though and everyone had fun with the cramped quarters, including those who 'got to' sleep out back in the tent. It was sort of like musical beds as we figured who would sleep where depending on what was going on the next morning. Good thing we got that new fridge for our wedding to fit all that food!

This is Kianna in our kitchen, she has never liked having her picture taken. I told her it was for me, not for her, and that I love her and want to see her when she is not around. So she was gracious the rest of the weekend and let me get a couple in, what a sport :-)

The day before graduation we went in to San Francisco so the kids could do the touristy thing. We went to Ghiradelli square and ate amazing ice cream sundaes and then went down to the water to put our feet in. The kids wanted to set up camp and spend the rest of their weekend right there!

The first picture (on the left) is me in the foreground, Tammy who is my oldest sister on the left and Korina who is the middle sibling (the three kids are Korina's) on the far right and Alexandre behind me (wearing my Mills Cross Country sweatshirt!). The second picture is Alexandre trying to get his mom (Korina)... I think he had ideas of throwing her in the water. In the last picture are my Mom and Sarisa. Stan is not in most of the pictures here because he was the gentlemen who went to feed the meter (thanks!)

Here is Alexandre upholding a family tradition :-)

Then Alexandre and Kianna getting into a big water fight which resulted in both of them being sopping wet up to the waste. We had to look through the back of my car to find extra clothes for them so we could go out for Chinese food afterward!

This last little series of pictures was just something I found amusing in the moment. Our feet! From start to finish: Kianna, Tammy, Alexandre, Korina, Sarisa, Stan, Mom, and me.

The kids were here from Thursday until Sunday, while my Mom and two sisters came on the same day but were staying longer so we could do an all-girls Trew Camping Trip (pictures coming). So the kids had a great time- it was the first plane ride and trip to CA for both of the girls and I would say they had no complaints! This last picture about sums up how we all felt by the end of the weekend...

(Yes, he actually fell asleep like that... for at least half an hour!)

Graduation

I did it! Here are a couple pictures, more to come from the whole weekend with my family but I wanted to put a couple up before we leave for our little mini-camping trip.

Drama Queen

I planted a Poppy last fall in my front garden. I was not sure how well it would do. The tag said it would grow to around 3 feet. Let's just say that 'doing well' is a bit of an understatement. The pictures you see ... well there is a reason they are taken from the side angle and not the top. They are all at about eye level, over 5 feet tall in other words. Awesome. They make my day. Every morning I go out to cut off any stems that have lost their petals to keep the blooms coming. It started the season in March with one single bloom, which trippled to three, and now it is flowering about 5 at a time! These pics are from my phone, not my camera so the focus is not as great as I would like. Each bloom is bigger than my fist. So as it's common name says, this one is in fact, quite the Drama Queen it advertised itself to be.

On a funny side note, these are technically illegal! As long as it doesnt look like you are producing any illegal substances though, I am pretty sure they do not come pounding on your door, otherwise Long's Drugstore would probably be in trouble for selling them to me :-)
Next year I plan to add a few more, and now that I know how tall they grow out there, I will be able to place them better.

Speaking of drama. My latest personal drama is my new world experienced without coffee. For those of you who have known me long enough, I have rarely been seen without a cup of coffee in my hand, since about the age of, oh say 12? 14? Something like that. It is a family favorite around here. My husband and I even have a coffee roaster that we happily paid the guy at farmer's market to make for us! He has yet to patent it, but I will say it roasts some fabulous beans. And paying about $5 a lb. for fair trade and organic beans is quite a deal.
So in our journey of hoping to have a kid we have embarked on a coffee-free journey to help aid the process. This has been a quirky experiment. My husband is much better at giving things up than I am. We both know this, so he usually ends up being the cheerleader while I moan and groan and try to convince us both that its a dumb experiment. It is not of course, a dumb experiment and I will atest to the fact that I actually feel better and sleep better when I am not drinking it. I would like to thank my husband for being so kind as to not remind me that while I have been breaking this experiment in order to get through my last set of finals and the completion of my thesis, he has been sticking to it and has not complained or pointed out that I am a big cheater :-)

A Thesis

It is supposed to be the cumulation of knowledge that I have gained in my 'field'. It is supposed to be tidy, concise, sophisticated, and unique. I am not sure that mine will be any of those things (though tidy sounds fitting considering I am still finding the 35-45 page minimum a bit daunting). It does not matter here, but I am writing my thesis on Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty. I am supposed to be done by now, with the entire thing, but I have yet to send my professor a first draft. This says much about this last year and my feelings about philosophy at this point. Philosophy feels narrow, a tight squeeze in a big world that requires a wide lens. I feel unsuited for the work sitting in front of me. It requires a kind of focus I find difficult to muster right now. What I want to think about right now is what education is and what it means in our world, I want to write 40 pages about what I have learned as a human being, as an American, as a woman, as a daughter and a wife and a sister- as I finish my B.A. and its 4-college, 6-year journey. I want to write about all that I have really learned: about the creation of life and what that means, how to be a more loving person and give myself 100% to all that I do, how to go through every day and look at the chaos in our world with a little less trepidation, and the understanding that the path I choose does matter to the world.

Those all sound like philosophical questions and realizations don't they? And yet the world of academic philosophy could care less about what any individual philosopher actually thinks, questions, or feels in her own personal life. Academic philosophy is a weird world and one that I am both excited by and also repulsed by. So here I sit, with my wide assortment of study goodys, trying to feel ready to tackle this project, to get as much done in one day as is humanly possible, so that my professor might be fooled in to thinking I have put long hours over the last three months into this. It is not likely he will be fooled. I just hope he spares me the humility of pointing out this obvious truth: I should not have been a philosophy major. No, this is not self-abasement with the hope that anyone will pity me. I love philosophy, I can read it, I can talk it, I can think it, but the particular exactitude required in writing it is not something that comes naturally and is not something I ever wish to perfect. I prefer writing that allows for my personal dramatics and touch of the comic- I am a writer of fiction touched by reality or maybe reality touched by fiction? I know that now, I wish I had known it before, but I am learning that as much of getting your B.A. is about learning what you love, it is also learning about what you don't love. It is also the realization that loving something is not always enough; or maybe it is enough but it certainly is not the same thing as desiring to do it day in an day out for any sustained period of time.

And now that this clever diversion tactic has worn its welcome, I will sign off and actually get to work.

Since I like the idea of sharing my thoughts and the things that happen in my daily life, but do not always get the chance to talk to everyone every day, I have decided to jump on the blog-wagon so to speak. I am not sure if I will be good at making regular entries but I am going to give it a shot. For those of you who already share your blog with me, I like what you are doing and love reading about your lives! I think since I will be done with school next week, I will have time for this. With so many new and exciting adventures going on and coming up, it seems a good time to get in the habit. Thanks for reading!