Max and Esme

A long awaited update to my adventures in China. I visited for the Lunar New Year and stayed through the lengthy series of celebrations up until the beginning of Spring Lantern Festival. We're on Year of the Snake already. This is supposedly bad luck for any Snakes (sorry Violet) but intrepid Horses such as myself have naught to fear.   Unless you have a fear of crowds...  The weather in Xi'an was brisk (30s) but this didn't seem to deter anybody from being on the streets at a given time. Lunar New Year is one of the few holidays in China where you don't have to "work back" your time off, and most people get the entire week off of work. I had fun exploring the city and getting groceries and other essentials for our New Year dinners.  Cool architecture in Xi'an Everyone is expected to bring a dish to family gatherings for the New Year. I was asked to bring mashed potatoes (a classic American dish according to the movies that many of the older relatives had ...

 Hi Grandma! At the bequest of my lovely grandmother, here is a *quick* review of my fall semester so far. If I'm being honest, most of my time thus far into 2025 has been used to write papers. (hence the very late blog post ((sorry Grandma!)) 1. Outside of being an academic victim, I started stage managing for Urinetown!!  Do practices and production meetings eat away at any free time I have left? Yes! Do I wake up every morning to a panicked email from the director? Yes! Have the logistics of how to push someone off a 9-foot set invaded my every waking thought? Yes! But also, the whole process has been so ridiculously fun. I've loved being a part of a production this size coming together and am very excited for -- in just a couple of weeks-- when we will have an audience! 2. We are back on our hair-cutting grind! And so very professional with it!  3. We remembered that nowhere does it say you have to hang your hammock outdoors! 4. And finally, The Snow!!-- which lasted ...

I visited Symphony Space in NYC on Tuesday evening with a friend to hear Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author of Americanah) talk about her new novel: Dream Count. The evening opened with Tony Award nominee Montego Glover doing a reading, followed by Adichie talking about writing and then taking Q&A from the audience. My iphone camera isn't great from the back of the room, but she had an amazing presence on stage - she came across as very authentic, funny, honestly interested in the people who asked questions, and of course incredibly intelligent. I am not inspired to be a writer, but I am inspired to read more. 

A home improvement project led to Peter and I solving a mystery this weekend...  When Esme went off to college in August 2023 she left behind 100 notes and small rubber ducks for us to find. While we eventually found all 100 ducks over the coming weeks (months?), we were short one note. On Saturday, we replaced a section of wall in the hallway that had screened vents cut into it. (Don't ask why. We lived with the oddity for 20+ years, but hey, sometimes it's finally time to fix it!) After we cut away the wall we found two rubber balls that were probably pushed through by a Girard toddler many years ago, and this sticky note which had fallen through more recently.  I happen to know that Esme does know how to do her own laundry. But finding this so many months later was a wonderful way to start the day!

Spending a couple of days in Rodman after taking Esme back to St. Lawrence. Mom and Dad have two deer that spend a significant amount of their day (and night) nibbling on the bushes around the house. They come right up to the windows - often getting between the hedge and the house itself. They are skittish if you move quickly, but in general they don't mind the presence of people just a few feet away behind a pane of glass.