New Years Goals; 2011

Happy New Year from Circleville, Ohio! :) We arrived two days ago and we have a lot of work ahead of us, but isn't work what life is all about? Not only about work though, life is about enjoyment and happiness. To improve my own happiness and encourage personal growth, I've created the following goals for 2011:

1. Post these goals on my blog (first week in January)
2. Give an update half-way through the year
3. Get a job!!!
4. Enroll in a fitness class or join a gym
5. Go on 12 planned dates with Dusty
6. Travel to a unique park or national forest or historical site or museum each month 
7. Walk 500 miles outside of regular daily activities (2.35/500)
8. Begin to play the banjo
9. Learn to identify 20 new species 
10. Write in my journal once per week (1/52)
11. See five musical performances live
12. Buy a used bicycle
13. Visit my sister Jennifer in Hawaii
14. Fly my sister Melanie to Ohio
15. Plan a road trip to Maryland
16. Go camping
17. Fly a kite
18. Write ten more blog posts than I wrote last year (1/65)
19. Read two books of poetry
20. Read ten novels
21. Learn 12 new songs on piano
22. Grow ten new species of plants
23. Try a new recipe each week
24. Invite others over for dinner six times
25. Practice with Rosetta Stone once per week
26. Attend the Feast of the Flowering Moon Festival in Chillicothe (May 27 - 29)
27. Attend the Southern Ohio Storytelling Festival (September 9 - 10)
28. Attend the Circleville Pumpkin Show (October 19 - 22)
29. Learn about this year's issues and vote on November 8th
30. Reach pre-wedding weight

My Happy List

Following the example of a friend I have put together a list of 100 Things That Make Me Happy as an exercise to help me write my New Year's Resolutions.

1. watching the sunrise
2. going to an orchestra performance
3. discovering a new song
4. seeing a chipmunk dart across the road
5. vising museums
6. my shiny kitchen sink
7. singing with the radio
8. playing the piano
9. snuggling
10. sitting by the fire with my hunny and a steaming mug of something
11. speaking Spanish
12. dressing for cold weather
13. uncluttered surfaces
14. clean windows
15. writing essays
16. wearing skirts
17. a neat and tidy house
18. touching handcrafted objects (wood, stone, metal, cloth)
19. stimulating conversations
20. walking in the forest
21. clean hair
22. taking photographs
23. discovering someplace new
24. recycling
25. instructing others
26. tending plants
27. chopping vegetables
28. skipping
29. whistling/humming
30. hiking
31. camping
32. identifying flora and fauna
33. reading poetry
34. clean floors
35. making charts, graphs, spreadsheets, lists
36. losing myself in a great novel
37. clean teeth
38. being under budget
39. performing music
40. taking a walk by myself or with someone else
41. hearing birds chirping
42. hot springs in the winter
43. swimming in the ocean
44. building sand castles on the beach
45. watching monkeys in the wild
46. riding a bicycle
47. getting a bargain
48. watching the full moon rise
49. an intricate murder mystery story
50. dancing in the rain
51. donating 
52. chopping wood with an ax
53. using power tools to create something
54. vibrant colors
55. fresh air
56. autumn leaves crunching under my feet
57. the smell of earth
58. building a fire
59. massages
60. warm socks
61. soft skin
62. incense
63. candles
64. kittens
65. Indian food
66. laughing
67. snow
68. being early
69. trying to take photos of butterflies
70. hot tea on a brisk day
71. comfortable shoes
72. building a snowman
73. the smell of flowers
74. walking tall
75. the taste of cold water
76. the smell of pine sap
77. making someone laugh
78. getting a phone call for no reason but to chat
79. matching colors
80. receiving a compliment
81. finishing a project
82. singing in the shower
83. dancing (alone or with someone else)
84. singing karaoke
85. trying new recipes
86. bird watching
87. journal writing
88. meeting up with friends
89. seeing a live musical performance
90. learning another language
91. doing an assignment well and on time
92. learning something fascinating and telling someone else
93. being a good listener
94. having people over for dinner
95. the smell of fresh herbs and spices
96. libraries
97. big city lights
98. climbing trees
99. road trips with the windows down
100. talking with my professors

We Will Move 1200 Miles

I have never lived more than 26 miles from where I was born, so I am very excited and a little nervous to be moving over 1,200 miles away. How does one prepare for such a big change? I always research a destination and try to imagine it before I see it, but this time I am not researching a vacation. This is the place where we will make our new home.

Instead of seeing the Rocky Mountains our relief will be the foothills of the Appalachians, the Allegheny Plateau. We will share the same zip-code with everyone in town. I will struggle with pronouncing the town's name, Chillicothe (Chill-uh-kawthy), and always wonder how the Shawnee said the word. I will hope to meet one of the rare descendants of the Hopewell culture, 0.34% of the Chillicothe population today, and ask them to teach me about their ancestors.

For my husband, this will be like going home. He hasn't lived so close to his birthplace in almost two decades. He has a dozen known relatives nearby, and likely a hundred more, for many of the Bishops have lived in Ohio since their arrival in 1807. This will be a good time to visit courthouses and interview great-aunts and uncles to learn more about my husband's roots.

All I know about the area through facts and maps can be learned remotely, visually. I've visited Ohio a handful of times, but I have never been there long enough to learn how to recognize the special flora of the region, to know what the seasons will bring from one year to the next, to estimate an early frost or the coming of rain. It will be a pleasure to embrace this new place with all of my senses and to continue my learning and growth in southern Ohio.

Neat and contained

I finally found a good setup for the dining room. Yes. While thinking of how we might be moving away in a few months, I thought of the perfect way to align the furniture. What is most important is this: notice how everything is neat and contained versus the previous setup here.

One Step at a Time

Two years ago this song came into the world and its inspiring message became part of my personal anti-stress arsenal. I love this song because it reminds me to relax and to be patient with myself and to live my life for the love of the journey and not for the love of success.

When I finally graduated from Pikes Peak Community College with an Associate of Arts Degree, which took me eight years to earn, this song was performed at the graduation ceremony. It was a perfectly appropriate choice for our group of graduates: non-traditional students living life above and beyond college. Most of the graduates were parents and employees as well as students.

I certainly was never alone in the challenge of balancing work and family and school and sacrificing my GPA to ensure I had healthy food on my table, an operating vehicle, and a roof over my head. After years of struggling to earn this degree I felt my success wasn't good enough because at 26 I was finishing community college while others my age were beginning graduate school.

"The only way we get there is one step at a time" - Jordin Sparks

Whenever I feel under-accomplished, like I should have more successes in my life than I already do, it is a good time to dig this song out of my music archives and play it a few hundred times. It serves as an upbeat and positive reminder to me that life happens when it happens no matter how badly I may want to be in control of it.

If I am always in pursuit of my next accomplishment without taking time to enjoy living along the way, I take the risk of overlooking life's greatest joys - the simple things that mean so much.

Genius Monkeys and Imported Mound Builders

One of the books I am reading for an introductory level Archaeology class is: Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology by Kenneth L. Feder. The book is like a journey into common misconceptions of science starting with accounts of archaeological hoaxes such as the famous Piltdown Man and traveling to less-known myths like the "mysterious" builders of the earthworks mounds along the river valleys of the eastern United States.

Despite a lack of evidence people readily accepted Piltdown Man because it was more comfortable to believe that the human brain came first, followed by upright-walking. I guess the idea of upright-walking critters with ape-like brains must have been unpleasant to think about 100 years ago. And thus, Piltdown Man was accepted without sufficient evidence for 50 years until further analysis turned the whole story into an embarrassment for the scientific community.

I am beginning to understand that people have the tendency to want to believe things that support their already held beliefs. It is obviously difficult for people to admit that their beliefs might not be true. But being a scientist requires the ability and willingness to recognize that previously held beliefs might need to be reviewed in the face of contrary evidence. A scientist must also be careful not to push agendas by using science as a weapon.

In the early 1800s, as Americans were settling the eastern river valleys in the United States, there was speculation about the great mounds being found in these fertile floodplains. What group(s) of people had built them? Almost everyone agreed that the Indians were far too savage and primitive to have built these marvels of engineering and so the readily accepted belief was that the Indians had killed the builders of the mounds, and that the mound builders must have been Europeans or Asians or even Africans.

Although there was plenty of evidence in support of the Indians having built the mounds, and although there was no proof for any Old World societies to have been the builders, the evidence or lack thereof wasn't considered because people wanted to believe what supported their already held beliefs: that Indians were sub-human and incapable of great works of art or architecture. The mid nineteenth century saw hundreds of faked "artifacts" that contained Egyptian, Chinese, and Hebrew writing, allegedly discovered within the mounds. These fakes served as validation for a continuation of racist ideas.

At the time that Europeans arrived, the eastern United States was full of clean and thriving agricultural cities with pyramids rivaling the largest in the world and surplus and trade across large geographic areas. Were you taught this in public school? What is the result of failure for generations to recognize the American Indians as the builders of such well-planned and elaborate cities?

Poverty Point, Louisiana
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/sassaman/
pages/research/research.html

Cahokia Mounds, Illinois

Mound Builders: Mississippi Valley
http://www.nps.gov/history/delta/concept06.htm

New Auntie Announcement

I am an auntie again! My sister Jennifer gave birth to her son yesterday afternoon. I couldn't be more excited for her and her dear husband, my good brother-in-law. I wish them all the health and love and happiness in the world! (And I hope to see them all very soon!)