#4 An Important Book

What book made the biggest impact on your life?

My first impression of this question was...yikes, I read all the time. How in the world can I pick one book that was the most important to me? That's a near impossible task! Yet when I actually sat down to write this, it became very simple. It would have to be a book I read over and over again as a child. It would have to be the one that instilled in me the love of reading for shear pleasure and enjoyment. The one where the words just danced off the page and made me smile. The one that called to me every night...pick me up...read me aloud..listen....there is magic on the page...

Christmas morning 1961, my parents gave me a small book of poetry called Silver Pennies by Blanche Jennings Thomson. She was the head of the English Department at Benjamin Franklin High School in Rochester, New York and she edited this anthology in April, 1925. It was illustrated in black and white by Winifred Bromhall. Nothing fancy here, just a gathering of absolutely wonderful poems.

Thomson wrote in her Preface, "You must have a silver penny to get into fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find and it isn't everyone who knows where to look for them, even if he has time: so it is for such people, the mothers and the teachers who want silver pennies for their children that this volume is prepared. It is my hope that no child will be left out of the fairyland of modern poetry for the lack of a silver penny."

It is here I discovered Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Hilda Conkling, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, and Edna St. Vincent Milay. I read about the moon and the stars, fairies, dancing potatoes, griffins, cats, camels, elves and Joan of Arc. Everyday things became magical and the magical became real. My imagination soared as the words took me on faraway journeys or caused me to look at things in a slightly different way. This book sat beside my bed and I read from it daily. Where is this little book now? On a shelf in my office, still close at hand.

Here is one of my favorites. Doesn't it sound just like me?

I Meant to do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today-

But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field,

And all the leaves were calling to me.

And the wind went sighing over the land,

Tossing the grasses to and fro,

And a rainbow held out it's shining hand-

So what could I do but laugh and go?

Richard Le Gallienne

#3 My Life as a Mathematician

OK, I must confess, I have always loved math. All the way through school it came easily and I always made good grades. I actually enjoyed solving all types of problems. There was always a correct answer even if there were several different ways to find it. Just follow the numerical path and solutions appear.

Two things I remember about math class.....

Every Friday in the 4th grade we had a test that consisted of ten word problems. After the test we swapped papers, used our red pen and graded the papers as the teacher told us the answers. When our papers were returned, the teacher then called out our names in alphabetical order and we had to tell her our test grade out loud in front of the whole class. Even with a good score, this was mortifying to me.

In 10th grade I fell asleep in my favorite math teacher's class and he threw an eraser at me. I was totally embarrassed, but his class was still one of my favorites.

My love affair ended my freshman year in college with calculus. The first few weeks seemed to be a review of things I already knew and I was still easily completing my assignments. Then my professor gave us a placement test and I scored very well. I was put into the "advanced" group. After my first hour in the advanced class was over, so was my understanding of calculus. I never grasped another concept, try as I might(oh that pesky little sigma). I went to individual tutoring, I studied for hours on end, nothing helped. The only thing that made the class bearable was that the professor could roll a cigarette with one hand while he taught which was interesting to watch. And he was the head of the Canoeing and Outing Club, so we had adventures together outside of the classroom. This professor passed me with a D, which was higher than my earned average, but he knew I was trying as hard as I possibly could. The D was a genuine gift and Calculus was the last math class I ever took.

I will still tell you today that I love math. Even Calculus did not stifle the romance.

I use math daily in my job as we use data to justify all of our placement and intervention decisions. We discuss things like the bottom quartile, class averages and graphing. It comes in handy when figuring out sale prices, and I always like to find a bargain. I am in charge of artist merchandise at two music festivals a year. I have to keep track of things like CD's, DVDs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers as sales can total up to $25,000 over a three day weekend. Accuracy is important when dealing with other people's money! I also use math to take care of my own finances.

Yes understanding and using math is a daily necessity. Thank goodness I always had knowledgeable and interesting and caring math teachers. Hats off to you Mr. Hazen and Dean Puckette. Your math is still with me today.

PS-I know maybe you probably don't believe me. After all this is blog challenge #3and I never did blog challenge #2. Perhaps I can't even count! But it's like this, I have no class, so I have no class poll. Simple, but true, and a true cop out...

#1 My Life as a Reader

Already I am late in posting.....but this is in response to Melanie Holtsman's fall blog challenge.

Reading is one of my favorite pastimes and I am never without a book. For as long as I can remember (and it seems that my memory starts in about third grade with chapter books), I have been a lover of books and a lover of libraries. In elementary school I liked nothing better than going to the library to pick out my next book. I read every biography at my school and I can still remember how all of the covers were just alike. From Amelia Earhart to Babe Ruth, people and their lives just fascinated me. Today however, I do not read very many biographies.

The library at summer camp had creaky old rocking chairs that were a wonderful place to sit and read. Here I devoured all of the Nancy Drew books. Then it was on to the Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twin mystery books. Today my favorite genre is still the mystery whodunits, but I like to shake it up every once in awhile with a little romance, vampire thriller, or science fiction thrown in. Some authors I have been reading lately are Janet Evanovich, James Lee Burke, James W. Hall, John Twelve Hawkes, Carol O'Connell and Dana Stabenow.

My neighborhood library as a child was the Willowbranch library. Isn't the name just wonderful? And the best part was that the children's section was located downstairs. I can remember eagerly holding my mom's hand as we walked down in joyful anticipation of the sights and smells of all the books awaiting me. I still visit there today and check out such wonderful books as A Nest for Celeste by Henry Cole.

My summer vacation consisted of leaving Jacksonville, packing up the car, picking up my grandmother and driving 30 minutes to her beach house at Atlantic Beach. After a morning of frolicking on the beach and eating lunch, my parents insisted we take a nap. We had to get in our beds, but we were allowed to read if we did not want to sleep. I would bring piles of books from the Willowbranch Library and read such classics as Treasure Island, Old Yeller and Black Beauty. This started my love of reading in bed. A good day is one where I can spend all day in my pajamas reading a book. And likewise my second favorite place to read is on the beach. I love the sun in my face, the sound of the surf in my ears, and the challenge of keeping the book dry as I swim periodically to cool off. I also like to read as I travel and I still devour books on my summer vacations. This year I spent a month on the road and made it all the way to Maine. I finished all 3 of the Stieg Larsson Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

I am such a voracious reader that I never buy a book. I still make use of the public library and my favorite one is our new downtown branch. I swing by there every time I leave the beach to go to Hairpeace, my favorite hair salon. I've started reserving books online and it is exciting to get an email letting me know that my request is ready. But this is as much as I involve technology in my reading. I am old school and not yet ready for books on IPads or Kindles or whatever those devices are called. I still like to feel the novels in my hand and and to experience each turn of the page. I was slow to get a cell phone, so maybe this will change as well.

Put a book in my hands, give me a few hours, this is my idea of paradise.

The Last Day of Floydfest

Today our fiend John turned 55, so we had to start the day with mimosas to accompany Herb’s breakfast. After the celebration we headed over to the parkway for the last day of Floydfest.

I spent some time with Denise and Randy as they were leaving around 5:00. I also had fun practicing my new hoola hoop skills. to. I had a few drink tickets left and I used those to drink sangria in the beer garden.

The day ended with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals on the hillside stage. She was high energy and had a rocking female base player. I could not stop dancing and I got her new cd. A perfect ending to a wonderful weekend of music.

Our friends all went home to Bristol, which left Herb and I to enjoy a night alone in the chateau:) We went to a farmers market and got corn on the cob and green beans to cook up with the steak we had left from our first night there. We ate and watched the sunset on the balcony. Ahhh vacation!

Mayhem

The record heat wave is still going on, so we took our time getting to the festival today. We enjoyed a Herb cooked breakfast of eggs and grits and biscuits and ham and bacon and fruit on the balcony. Then we just enjoyed the house and the mountain view.

When we met up with our friends, Emily had a beautiful new hair do. Tony had made friends with the sound crew, with the help of a little Tennessee moonshine. This enabled us to have the best seats in the house all day- right up on the sound board. This was perfect as Saturday was the most crowded day of the festival. We were not only comfortable, but could see over everyone’s head. It was a great place to sit and the absolutely perfect place to listen! We enjoyed the music of JJ Grey and Mofro, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Levon Helm. Amazing stuff!!!

When this show stopped at 11:00, we moved on to the meadow stage and danced until the wee hours to Carl Denson’s Tiny Universe. They had a motown sound complete with a horn section and back up singers.

Woot! Woot!

An Aside

So here is what I have learned about blogging on vacation:

This is the first time I have taken my Mac on a road trip. I worried every time we stopped to hike and had to leave it in the car.

There are still many hotels that do not have wifi.

The hotels that do have wifi are in the big cities. We tend to stay up late and enjoy the night life, So where is the time to blog?

You miss the lovely scenery when you try to blog in the car and then post later.

You forget what happens day to day if you put off blogging for a few days. (At least at my age that's true.)

You really forget what happens when you are back at work and still plan to blog about your vacation. How hard could that be, just do one day in the afternoon and finish out the trip. Yea right!

Even if you tell all your friends that you will blog about your vacation, it is still not enough peer pressure to make you blog daily.

I figured that travel, as one of my most favorite things to do, would be easy to post about everyday. Not necessarily-though I think it's a time issue rather than a topic issue. Herb can pack all kinds of activities into each day!

I am hopeless and so now months have passed and I am not blogging at all. It's hard to start fresh and blog with the lost vacation days hanging over my head.

How to break the cycle? Hmmm.....

Take on the fall blogging challenge only to fall short again? Or maybe just do short blogs on the challenge to dive back in again?

It's a thought....albeit a scary one. I'm not quite ready to commit today. But 10 is not a big number. I think I can do it!