Update from Alaska!

I know, I know...It has been a while since I have written. I can't say it is because there has really been that much going on...mostly it is because I moved my computer upstairs and don't have it on as much.

A few weeks ago Phil and I went to the opera . We saw Don Pasquale, sung in Italian. This was a light, fun opera and we really enjoyed it.

Saturday we are going to see a Japanese Taiko Drumming group called Shidara. When I was in Japan I stayed with a couple, where the husband was the head of a well known Taiko group there in Obihiro. I really love the artistry--it is rhythmic in both sound and motion. A lot of the groups that come to Anchorage also do school performances and this year we got hooked up with that, so on Monday we are taking the entire school to Anchorage to see Shidara. So I will to see them twice.

(New Years Day in Japan, 2005)

Last week we had some nice weather--it actually got up to 62 degrees. I decided to go on a bike ride. To get out of the icy driveway I had to put on my snow cleats and walk my bike down, but once I was at the bottom I was good to go. I biked from here to the Sea Life Center and back, which is 10.2 miles (I clocked it the next day in my car). It was a good ride. I love my new bike!

Last Saturday it snowed ALL day. It is slowly melting now, thank goodness. Tomorrow I have to get my studded snow tires removed. I went out this evening to put my regular tires in the car and had a bit of a set back. Even though I had my tires under cover of the car port, apparently one fellow over and it was completely buried in snow. Actually, that snow was mostly solid ice as it was snow that had fallen off the roof and compacted there. I spent 30 minutes trying to chisel out my tire, but eventually I had to give up, as I didn't want to actually damage the tire. The deadline for having studded tires off is tomorrow, so I can't really sit around and wait for the thaw. So I am going to have to buy a new tire tomorrow and then I will use that one as a spare. What a pain! At least the tires are all less than 6 months old, so there won't be a big wear difference. Still, it was not a budgeted expense.

Gas prices hit $4.23 today! On Monday I filled up and it was $4.01. This is crazy!

This week PBS has been running a documentary called, Carrier, which chronicles the lives of some of the 5000 plus men and women on a Navy Nimitz Class aircraft carrier. This is the same type of ship that Phil served on when he was in the Navy at the end of the Vietnam War. It has been so interesting watching it with him. It takes us forever to watch an episode as we are always pausing it to talk about one thing or another. Phil has been telling me all sorts of stories about life on the ship (some I had heard wisps of before and some new). I have really liked getting this insight on what he experienced and how the Navy actually did help shape him, in a way, into who he is now.


This is a picture of the ship he served on. It is the Midway, (photograph of the ship in 1979, while stationed in the Indian Ocean). Some of the places Phil traveled to on his tour of duty were Singapore, The Philippines & Hong Kong. They were home ported in Japan, so he got to spend some serious time there. Once he and some buddies climbed Mt. Fuji, in the dark during a typhoon (I think that is right, he'll have to correct me). Phil has decided that Lilly should enlist in the Navy when she is out of high school. We have reoccurring debates on this. I am glad to say that decision will be quite some time away.

The last day of school is three weeks from today! I am excited and ready to be done. That being said, I am going to go back to school a week later as I have agreed to split teaching summer school with the high school math teacher. We'll each teach 8 half days, with one full day of training on the canned high school math credit recovery computer program. This should be pretty easy. My shift is just 4 hours Mon & Tues for 4 weeks.

I am trying to earn all the extra money I can this summer to put towards the China fund. May marks 2 years of waiting! 24 months and still at least another 3 to go until I get a referral. I can't wait until the day that we get that call. I am glad that my summer will be busy (the summer school, a 3-day professional development conference, the cruise ship trip and a 2-day science curriculum meeting), because for once I actually want it to go quickly. I hope that with the Fall comes our Lilly.

my kids & me

I teach a newspaper/web design class (in addition to math and science). This is my staff for this quarter.

They fit!

Both of these shirts were presents from Lori! Thanks girl! I love them.

Golden Lilies

I can feel Spring creeping in. Not that you could tell it necessarily by the snow all day Saturday, but it is now light until a bit after nine and that light is rejuvenating. The snow is melting off the streets and bike paths in town. Out here is it still a combination of ice in the morning and slushy mud in the afternoon.

Our DMV was closed for over a month. Last Tuesday it opened up again, and I dutifully went to renew my license. I probably shouldn't have gone on the first day it reopened, but I really wanted the new, lighter picture of me. There were only five people in front of me, but it took two hours and fifteen minutes! Our DMV office is really small, it only holds about 6 people, and that is with half standing up. The clerk spent an entire hour working with one man, I kid you not. Luckily, I knew the woman in line behind me and we talked most of the time, so that it helped.

This weekend Phil and I are going to the opera, this time it is Don Pasquale,

"Beautifully set in 1950’s Rome. AO’s spectacular production of Don Pasquale is a masterful comedic tale of love, money, and deception filled with delightful music and acrobatic singing."

I have been trying to stick to exercising at least three times a week. Today I did 30 minutes on my exercise bike. I rotate between that, yoga and the treadmill. Each time I also do sit-ups on the sit-up bar--last week I added 10 more sit-ups and today I added 5 more. One day I will really be able to breeze through them, I hope.

Life is pretty common place right now, I must say. Phil is in the middle of a five day stretch (12 hours a day) so barely see him, but for 10 minutes or so while he is getting ready for work.

I have been doing a lot of reading. I just finished the book "Garden Spells," by Sarah Addison Allen and now I am reading "Peony in Love," by Lisa See (earlier this year I read her best selling novel, "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan").

In both novels Lise See gives insight on ancient Chinese culture and practices. I find her description of foot binding especially fascinating and simultaneously gruesome. Did you know that they actually bound the feet over on themselves, waited until all the bones in the foot broke, and then wrapped the feet with the toes tucked up into the arch. The perfect Golden Lily or Lotus foot would be just 3 inches in length. Foot binding usually happened between the ages of 4 and 7. Some girls died during the process, which took at least a year.

















From Wikapedia

Bound feet were considered intensely erotic. Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet. ^[3] Some men preferred never to see a woman's bound feet, as they were always concealed within tiny "lotus shoes". Feng Xun is recorded as stating, "If you remove the shoes and bindings, the aesthetic feeling will be destroyed forever." For them, the erotic effect was a function of the lotus gait, the tiny steps and swaying walk of a woman whose feet had been bound makes the men think that the women are sexy. The very fact that the bound foot was concealed from men's eyes was, in and of itself, sexually suggestive. The other primary attribute of a woman having bound feet was to limit her mobility, altering the means by which females were allowed to be a part of the world at large. It also gave the woman an irreversible dependency on her family. Thus bound feet became an alluring symbol of chastity, as a bound foot woman was largely restricted to her home and could not venture far without an escort to help her, thus denying any advances upon her and ensuring her total devotion to her husband.

The practice of foot binding was eventually banned.