While the Internet Was Down

The internet stopped working today with no explanation and no warning. And it happened at the most inopportune time!

It stopped while I was in the middle of micromanaging my tribe of shipwrecked islanders via Facebook’s highly addictive MyTribe game (in summary: it’s a free game where you start with 7 tribe members and guide them through technology and skill developments as they age, have babies, specialize in skills like agriculture, fishing, and construction, and the goal is to build a Great Ark to one day leave the island). My tribe is up to 15 members, the oldest at 49 and the youngest is 3.

I have given my tribe members ancient Greek names (like Gaiana, Helarios, Lysistrata, Leonidas, Kallisto, Demosthenes, etc.) because one of my favorite websites, www.behindthename.com, gives me millions of names organized in lists by region, language, time period, popularity, and religion. Without perusing those lists, I wouldn’t know that Demos is Greek for People, or that Kallisto (meaning “most beautiful”) was a young woman fancied by Zeus, so Hera turned the beautiful girl into a she-bear and cast her away into the night sky to be a constellation. (Just another example from ancient times that illustrates the frustration of watching your husband as he watches younger nymphs.)

How pathetic I am, and how very tired I am becoming, every few seconds looking at the bottom-right corner of the screen, hoping that the little network icon will indicate that I am once again connected to the World Wide Web and all it has to offer.

Dusty and I were marveling just last night at the volumes of books that were published by great authors long ago, in the days before we could type 75 words-per-minute. How did Shakespeare do it? How many rough drafts did he have to painstakingly write by hand before he came up with the final Romeo and Juliet? And even after type-writers were available, how did H.G. Wells manage to write so many thought-provoking works in his lifetime without the ability to copy and paste and spell-check and cross-reference with other sources at the click of a button?

I am going to assume that growing up with computers and the Internet has made it difficult for my generation to memorize and think for ourselves...  Where are the Tolstoys and the Cathers and the Poes?  Will there be anymore of them now that our lives have been made so easy?

How does a stay-at-home-mom suddenly write a book that appears in the top 10 for young adult readers, and then gets a movie deal within a year? Twilight isn’t the best book you’ll ever read, but it’s fun and the people like it, and the movie is gorgeous (although I refuse to comment on its horrible sequel).

I know the internet will return one day. But until it does, I have no way to obsessively-compulsively check my email, or manage my tribe, or lookup information to help me study for and write my final exams. I can’t go to www.dictionary.com or www.thesaurus.com to quickly copy and paste a word from this document to find one that sounds better than horrible.

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Hey, guess what? The internet just came back into my life. It was down for a little more than 2 hours, and in that time I was able to put a 3rd coat of red paint on my front door, write this horrible article, and do a load of laundry. Oh, the marvels of technology!

2nd Coat of Red

The front door has its second coat of red paint on today.  I'm still afraid to paint around the three cathedral arches at the top.  I will get my courage up sooner or later.  But for now, here's what she looks like:

My Summer is All Planned Out

As much as I'd  LOVE  a summer break, I could get some credits out of the way and see a little bit of the world if I don't take a break at all.

The Spring Semester is over on May 17th.


May 22 - June 5:  I'll be earning 4 credits and spending 2 weeks traversing the country of Guatemala with 7 other students and a professor who's been there 30-something times.

June 6 - June 27:  I'll be earning 1 credit by continuing my internship with the Heller Center for the Arts and Humanities.

June 28 - August 14:  I'll be living with a host family in Costa Rica and attending a Spanish course at the Universidad for 6 credits.


Classes at UCCS resume on August 23rd.


And I was really hoping to get some things built and repaired this summer (I need to build a desk and some end tables, the back door needs fixed, and the bedroom needs insulated, the bathroom needs painting, etc...).  There just isn't enough time in this life of mine!

Red

I'm painting my front door red.  It's supposed to symbolize good luck or friendship or something, but that's not why I'm doing it.

Our front door is a solid-wood piece of artwork, probably as old as the house itself (50+ years).  It needed to be showcased somehow and I thought either red or blue would do it.  I ultimately chose red because blue is so... common.

And as always, I have posted about a project without having finished the project yet.  Here is what the red front door looks like with part of the first coat of paint.

P.S.
As with the bookcase project, this is my first ever like it.  We'll see how it goes...

The Predicament of Women These Days

Oh, feminist movement of the previous generation, what have you done to us?

All you wanted was gender equality, but is there such a state of being?  Can men/women do anything "just as well" as a woman/man?  I know it's the law, but we have so many unnatural ones anymore.

What if a woman doesn't want a career but would rather get married and be a wife and mother?  Why is SAHM (stay at home mom) considered less honorable by our silly society?  

This song makes me think about the plight of women today.  It is written and performed by a young woman from the UK named Lily Allen.  

She sings about a modern woman who isn't necessarily interested in a career, but can't seem to find a mate.  She's nearing 30 and still single, and she's stuck in this strange predicament where she's getting rather old to be settling down in the traditional sense, yet that's all she's been wanting to do.  

In reality, without expensive fertility treatments (not covered by most insurance plans), a woman older than 30 is less likely to even get pregnant.  What good is a woman who's failed to make a career with her younger years, but can't now find a decent mate because of her age?  What kind of man who wants a family is going to settle down with a woman whose eggs are about to expire?

What's a woman to do?

Create a MySpace Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Zeb Pike - a little history

The tallest peak in this photo is Pikes Peak, named for the explorer who doubted the mountain could be climbed.  If only he could see that people now compete in races on foot to the summit every year.  It is amazing to me that at the base of this mountain lies my home-town, where half a million people live and work and play in one of the sunniest regions in our great nation.

Along with our Pikes Peak, the easternmost 14-er of the Rocky Mountains, Zebulon Pike has a local juvenile correction facility named after him, along with the local national forest, and multiple towns scattered about the mid-western United States from Kansas to Pennsylvania.  Most people don't know who Zeb Pike was, but his name lives on in the places he explored and mapped in the earliest years after the Louisiana Purchase.

Hahnstead Getaway and Discovery

I spent the weekend with my husband and my father in the peaceful serenity of my family's mountain property.  The weather was beautiful, the scenery breathtaking, and the stillness just what we needed.

We were trying to hunt turkeys.  No luck this time, but it's still early in the season and we are going to try again.

There was only one sign of turkey that we found in the dried mud on the road.  No other sign was present, so Dad concluded that we were too early.

While hiking around together, we stumbled upon an amazing collection of fossils in the shale.  These fossilized leaf imprints appear like no native species I have ever seen in Colorado.

In this 10 - 15 square foot area, we could see a leaf, a branch, or a twig impression on just about every surface rock.

And we also found parts of a couple of critters.  Here is what looks to be an elbow of a small rodent or bird, and what appears to be the fin of a fish-like creature.

What we see today in the foothills of the Spanish Peaks: the dry climate of piñon-juniper woodlands, mountain-mahogany, scrub oak, and sagebrush, was once a very wet and marshy area, perhaps a lake at one time, a very different climate.  I can't wait to discover more information about the previous climates of my family's land.

Dusty and I hiked 5 miles yesterday, and thanks to my $120 hiking shoes I received no blisters and no rocks stabbed me from underneath the sole of the shoe, AND my falling arches did not once start to hurt.  I feel bad about spending so much on a pair of shoes for myself, but my feet have problems and I've come to the conclusion that cheap shoes do not make my walking situation any better.  I love my $120 shoes, and I know I will walk in them for many years.  (this is the Targhee II hiking shoe from KEEN Footwear)

My Name

In traditional Spanish culture my name is Maria Elizabeth Thaden Hahn de Bishop.  That's the representation of my two given names, followed by the paternal surnames of my mother, my father, and my husband.  Using this system, the maternal surnames of Bright and Romeo are lost forever, even though those names are just as much a part of me as Thaden and Hahn.

I am not Spanish.  I am Italian-German-British-Syrian-Belarusian-American.  I was born Maria Elizabeth Hahn, and by tradition I was expected to become Maria Elizabeth Bishop when I got married.  I couldn't bring myself to do the expected thing and live the rest of my life without Hahn.  Representing a tiny piece of who I am, Hahn has been with me all my life and I couldn't imagine it being lost forever. 

Dusty didn't want to change his name (because it's not the manly thing to do I guess), and both of us agreed that the hyphen was not for us.  We asked ourselves why I had to change my name at all.  We believed it was appropriate to have the same surname to set ourselves apart as an individual family unit.  In the end, I replaced Hahn with Bishop, but also replaced Elizabeth with Hahn.  I became Maria Hahn Bishop. 

Surnames are a funny thing.  It's natural to assume someone's background by their surname, even though it represents only a tiny part of an individual.  I was born a Hahn, but I am not 100% German.  Dusty was born a Bishop, but he is not 100% English.  If I really wanted to go crazy and represent every ancestor who has in some way influenced my genes, I would have to determine how far back to start the representation.  Fortunately for me, my pedigree is well-researched and backed by evidence.

Using my great-great-great grandparents to represent my background in 32 portions, my name is: Maria Elizabeth Hahn-Harless-Rhoads-Day-Lutz-Younger-Tingley-Johnson-Romeo-Cosentino-Rapisarda-Motta-Motta-Cristando-Chité-Longo-Thaden-Deckner-Meigs-Rowland-Hadadeen-Ladkin-Ladkani-Yazigi-Bright-Crawford-McDaniel-Wilson-Moore-Murphree-Garvin-Madden de Bishop.

Even though Hahn represents 1/32 of my background if my background could be divided into 32 parts, it represents even less of me as the pedigree chart retreats into the past.  My last name indicates nothing about my heritage, except that the Hahn family line always had a son to carry the name since the name became a name hundreds of years ago somewhere in Germany.