Ten years later

We've been hearing the words "Never forget", and certainly on this tenth September 11th there are many things not to forget. No one will forget the terror of helplessness, the terror of escaping, of watching those firefighters walking into certain doom. Not one of us will forget the thoughts we had of the victims in the airliners and their last terrified moments. Each one of us has our own set of memories from that day we will never forget.

In the past ten years, there are other things we have managed never to forget. We have not forgotten how to send people to wars whose purposes are far from clear.

We have not forgotten how to support and invest in companies who send jobs abroad rather than employ our fellow citizens at home.

We have not forgotten that it's easier to persecute immigrants who will work in low-wage jobs than to persecute the employers who pay those low wages.

We have not forgotten how to mislead homebuyers in order to make a profit.

We have not forgotten that it's easier to ignore political fanaticism/incompentence at home, than it is to demand that politicians make decisions that benefit all Americans, not just the Americans in their party.

We have not forgotten that it's easier to think about a national unemployment rate of 9.1% than it is to think about the 17% unemployment rate among Black Americans.

Paul Simon sang "Sound of Silence" this morning. How sad, but how fitting. Financial services organizations no longer serve their account holders, helping customers and businesses grow and prosper: they only serve themselves. The rich continue to grow rich.  The middle class continues to collapse into the ranks of the poor. Employers have decided that "Unemployed need not apply." We continue to talk without speaking, hear without listening, worship neon gods, and ignore the words "written on the subway walls and tenement halls."

There's a saying that "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Ten years after September 11, 2001, we as a nation are not better, not wiser, not stronger. Given everything we have not forgotten, what in heaven's name have we learned?

Ernie (1995-2011)

The Chief Executive Officer (cats have staff, you know) is no more.  He lived a happy life of 16 years, although this year saw him become an old cat, sleeping more (he would have said "conserving his energy"), less adventurous (he would have said "been there, done that"), moving more slowly (he would have said "What's the hurry?").  A recent cat fight - the first all year- probably overstressed an already-weakened heart (that no one knew about), which led to pulmonary edema and then more heart weakening and more edema - a vicious circle with no good outcome.

I will remember
    = his appearance, from wherever he'd been, to supervise any gardening that took place near the brook
    = seeing him dash across the yard and a few feet up a tree, simply to prove that he still could do it
    = having him lounge on the tarp that covered the stacked wood while I labored to stack more next to him ("Ernie, could you help a little bit, please?")
    = the loud meowing at 9pm, demanding "Where's my ice cream?"
    = his ability to hear, from any part of the house, the sound of cheese being unwrapped
    = having him planted at my feet during dinner, waiting for his teaspoon of salad dressing, and hoping for a piece of broccoli, asparagus, or (believe it or not) brussels sprout
    = right after we moved to Churchill Rd, seeing him leap three feet in the air to take down an inattentive  robin in flight (why couldn't it have been a starling?)
    = and, back in Bloomfield, taking late night walks with Ernie on his leash - who was walking whom?

Ernie's life revolved around food (including the occasional rodent snack) and comfort. His worries were the Churchill's barn cat and cat-chasing dogs.  He was a good traveller (on an empty stomach) and a great companion.

Would that throughout our lives we could always be well-fed, comfortable, with a chance to travel, friends by our side, and only a couple of worries.

Looking back at Irene

There's a hand-lettered sign on a house in Randolph that says "Goodnight Irene 2011."

Vermonters have seen news footage of hurricanes - waves crashing against beaches and beachfront homes - storm surges covering boardwalks - palm trees bent like reeds before the wind - yards and malls  like Willowbrook Mall in NJ surrounded by lakes of water.

What we got with Irene was not like those news pictures.

What has made Vermonters so resilient? Pundits right and left have quoted Coolidge's "brave little Vermont" speech (given a year after the 1927 flood), without thinking about how many more people live here now, without recognizing that far fewer of us are the self-sufficient families that were the Vermonters of 1928.  But that resilience is what has drawn people to Vermont, and we still, as a state, see self-reliance as a virtue.  In rural and even semi-rural areas, we have to be able to take care of ourselves. It's why we haven't yet emptied the buckets of extra water in the kitchen and bathrooms, why we keep an assortment of canned goods in the cupboard, why we put up the food from our gardens, why we always have dry stovewood in the house, why many homes have generators (that's got to go on my list).  And we trust that we can call on our neighbors when we need their help, and that we will in turn help them.

Vermont still has a lot of people who farm, log, and build, and a lot of people in other lines of work who possess many of those farming, logging and building skills. We have businesses who sell and maintain machinery and provide building supplies. Lots of these people have heavy equipment and know how to use it.  We have road crews who are experts at keeping roads open and patching up damaged bridges.  And they have all turned out in droves.  Everyone knows that being cut off, being stranded, can be very dangerous in our state.  Everyone knows that by the end of October  - less than 60 days away - the ground will be hard to work, and that no rebuilding can be confidently started once November starts and the cold weather sets in.

But I think Vermont's biggest asset is its history of Town Meeting.  Many "town meetings" were called: among the homeowners on Riford Brook Road, and in the towns of Pittsfield, Rochester, Waterbury, Wardsboro and others. Today's official Town Meetings  (the ones on the first Tuesday in March) are pretty different from the original ones, but every town in Vermont has that history to draw on - that formal, agenda-driven, Moderator-led, Roberts' Rules-governed, thoughtful process of considering the community's needs and how those needs will be met. Every Vermonter has experienced through Town Meeting how a community can come together, identify needs, marshall resources, and make the decisions necessary to keep people well and to get things done.  And they will do those things they decided on, because the welfare of community depends on keeping its collective word.

Town Meeting and the ethic of neighbor helping neighbor have seen Vermonters through the past week.

Observations on enforced idleness

No, not the enforced idleness of illness or injury.  The enforced idleness of being away from home with a bare minimum of "things to do".

At the church service auction Jeri and Sabine had made the winning bid on a week at a summer house, and they invited me to join them.  I couldn't stay for the week but last Friday I headed for NJ and Saturday Jeri and I drove down to the house, and I stayed until today (Tuesday), when I drove back to Vermont.

Not being a beach person, I was ill-prepared.  Vermonters who go tubing, or swimming at the local pond or lake wear shorts over their bathing suits, and grab a convenient towel.   Beach People, however, wear proper beach coverups. So I  bought one. Actually, two. Because not having a hat as sun protection at the ocean is just plain dumb, Beach People also wear Beach Hats.  I left my hat of choice at home, by the front door.  I had to buy another, the only one in the shop that fit. Kate Estler would recognize it.  It's HUGE, like hers.  Not red, though.  I also do not have a beach towel.  I mooched one from the supply at the vacation house.  I will have to remedy that defect before I get asked to the beach again. And get a second bathing suit, just for variety's sake.

Some of you, who know that I am not really a Beach Person, are now wondering  if I'm suddenly looking forward to another beach vacation.  Well, yes, I am.  Either by invitation or because I will plan such a trip myself.  It was a vacation that I've never had before.  It was agenda-less.

An agenda-less beach vacation goes like this. 

Get up at a reasonably early hour, unless you're Sabine who gets up at 5am and bikes a great many miles to start her day.
Drink some coffee, eat some breakfast. Identify the birds at the feeder.
Put on swimwear and coverup, grab a book, pile the snacks, beverages, and beach stuff into the car, drive to beach (about a mile) by 9 am or so. 
Trundle beach stuff out to the right spot, lay out towels, blankets, set up umbrellas.

Get in the ocean for a bit.
Sit under the umbrellas and read.
Get in the ocean for a bit.
Sit under the umbrellas and read some more. Maybe nap.
Talk with your friends.
Jump up and watch when dolphins begin appearing in the water.
Nap.
Thank the person who went to get sandwiches.
Get in the ocean for a bit.
Walk along the beach.
Sit under the umbrellas and read some more.
Talk about what you're reading.
Have a salty snack, and some water.
Get in the ocean for a bit.

When everyone agrees, pack everything up and drive back home. Maybe 2pm or 3pm, or 4. Or later.
Shower.
Collectively invent some dinner that is tasty and easy.
Talk about working in academia with another invited guest.
Read some more.
Talk about music festivals with Sabine's brother.
Play a hilarious card game called "Spoons".
Go to bed.

Next day, repeat.
Next day, repeat.

I didn't take knitting.  TOO HOT, and knitting surrounded by sand is a risky business.
I didn't take the camera to the beach. Sand is risky to camera workings.
I did more reading than I've done in months. I was reading for work as well as pleasure but I enjoyed all my reading.

A beach vacation differs considerably from day trips to the beach. On a beach vacation, you're already there. There's not lots of packing, not lots of driving, not lots of traffic (if you're lucky), and little or no worry about what time it is. On a beach vacation, time doesn't march on. It just glides by.  A vacation at the beach means that you intend to spend a lot of time just sitting.

Most of the time on vacation, if I'm sitting, I'm really waiting to get up and do something.  A state park vacation means that trails call to be walked. A mountain vacation means a call to hiking. A visit to a new city or town means a call to sightseeing.  A singing vacation means, well, singing.  These are all fine vacation activities because they aren't work. But at the beach, unless you are a competitive swimmer, or a fisherman, very little calls out "Do me".  



A vacation from doing.  I'm all for it.

what a day ...

Well, as you all know, the day started like this:

and this:

And the farrier came on time (!) to trim hooves and replace horse shoes.

And I went to work.

And it was bright and sunny.

And about 2pm  the National Weather service gave warnings about Dreadful Thunderstorms.

And all the porch windows at home were open, and the door to the porch and the door to the bedroom deck were open.

And the storm was going to start sometime around 4pm.

So I dashed out of work at about 3:45, and the clouds were magnificently threatening, and I tried to use the camera on the phone but I couldn't figure it out on the run (so to speak).

And I got home in time to close the doors and windows, Hooray!

But before I got to the house I saw water across the road - and it wasn't raining yet.

I saw my road foreman neighbor walking toward me. "Ray, what is going on?"

"I think the beaver dam just let go", he said.  "The brook just ran out of the bank into my yard." Oh no.

Oh yes.  Here's what I drove through to get to the house:

Where's the culvert? Where's the bank of the brook?  That's not dirt road you see between the phone poles.  That's water, running down the hill through that newly-reconstructed driveway.

All this happened about 4:15. By 4:30 everything looked quite normal. But like Ray said, when several olympic swimming pools worth of water come down all at once, it's quite a flood.  He gets to pull that tree out of the culvert tomorrow.

My part of the brook stayed in its banks but the sump pump was working like crazy. WHY?  I opened the cellar door.  3 inches of water in the basement. WHY?

There's a drain in the floor.  When I had the stream dredged, the man doing the work remembered that there was a drain pipe from the cellar through the stream bank - he found it and fixed it.   "Remember to cover the end in the fall so it doesn't freeze up." I did that, too.

The cellar floor is maybe 6 1/2 or 7 feet  below ground level. The drain pipe comes out  about two feet above the streambed.  The water in the photo above is about 5 feet deep. So the water backed into the basement through the drain.  If it hadn't been for the sump pump, who knows how much water I might have found?

And now I know why the shopvac and I are about to spend an hour in the basement.

Oh yuck.  When it rains for 3 days and you get runoff water in the basement, you clean up water.  When a flooded brook backs water into your cellar, it's flood water and you clean up MUD.  I used the broom to push most of the muddy water (think "soup") down the drain, but I will have to put fans down there to dry it out and then use the shop vac on the "mud dust".  I will pour a couple of buckets of water down the drain to clear the mud from the drain.  Thankfully the sump pump does not seem to be full of mud, but I may call the sump pump guy to come and make sure.  I think I'm going to have to close the floor drain. Water I can deal with. Mud, not so much.

Another award on my bulletin board

You all know that each year in the first or second week of June I leave the human race and spend the entire week on the Norwich campus (I sleep in my own bed, but my hours are pretty much 7 am to 8 or 9 pm) shepherding students and faculty through a Residency week, which brings all Norwich's online students together for the first time.  Each program creates activities of one kind of another for their students, and the week culminates in graduation.

At the end of June we have an all-hands celebration that brings all the Residency and post-Residency activities to a close.  It's a delicious pot-luck lunch followed by a fun-loving awards ceremony.  The Associate Dean sends out an email requesting nominations for things we've seen one another doing or saying that deserve an award.  Somehow everyone manages to get an award for something.

This year there was the "Mr./Ms Congeniality Award" to two staff members who spent each meal (we took all three meals on campus) with a different group of students, and between the two of them met students from every one of our programs.

My friend Sophia got the "Energizer Bunny Award" because she did everything everywhere. She just kept going and going and going.

One Program Director had to manage activities for and interact with students in three different programs.  He was always on the run, always too busy, always smiling.  He got the "Synchronized Swimmer Award" for smiling above the water while frantically paddling below.

Another Program Director, when in his academic robes, wears three large academic medals on ribbons. They denote his chairmanship of the National Nursing Educators Board, and two other kinds of academic honors.  He got the "Heavy Metal Award". 

Our Residency Director was praised for the vast amount of planning he did, and the vast number of tasks he managed to completion.  The praise ended with "We all knew that, if required, Kevin could leap tall buildings with a single bound." He got the "Man of Steel Award." You see how it goes.

In 2005 SGCS rented cell phones for all the staff, to make it easier for us to communicate with one another.  All of you know that - at least in Vermont - my cell phone is never on.  One day, sitting at the lunch table with MSIA students and SGCS staff, I heard this little musical sound. Several times.  "I wonder what that is?", I said.  And Dr. Kabay (then Program Director) looked at me over his glasses and said, "Elizabeth, that's YOUR CELL PHONE."  Riotous laughter erupted. At the 2005 post-Residency celebration I got the "Alexander Graham Bell Award", and it's still up on my bulletin board.

Today it happened again.  I was sick the first three days of Residency with a horrible cold.  One afternoon I got to that  inevitable "I have to take a nap" stage.  Since I didn't dare fall asleep in a lecture hall full of students and a guest speaker, I left the room by its back door, which leads to a stairway.  I sat on the landing floor, leaned against the wall, and dozed off.  I was awakened by the concerned voice of the Residency Director: "Elizabeth, are you OK?"  Well, this afternoon I received the "Rip Van Winkle" award. Riotous laughter erupted. It's assumed its rightful place on my bulletin board.

Thankfully all these awards are given with humor and in good spirits.  It's good that we can laugh at ourselves as well as recognize and appreciate the hard work that each of us does.

I can use my front door again

This post was going to be titled "Bigger baby birdies", but events progressed at a very rapid pace!  The babies grew by amazing leaps and bounds. (Click any of the pictures in any post, to see them bigger, then use your back button to return here.)

June 27: Baby #1 is getting bigger for sure

June 28:Baby #2 is becoming assertive!

June 29 : Stretching.  Look at the speckled breast

Feed us! Feed us!

I think I'll see what wings are all about.  Besides, it's getting crowded in here!

June 30:

Look how big we are, Mom!  Did you bring enough for both of us?

This nest is SO small! We gotta get out and shake our feathers and do some preening!!

And wing-flapping and leg-stretching!

OK Mom, whatcha got for us now? 

 Forget the nest. We'll just sit here.

In fact, we'll just sit here and take a nap.

I took this last picture at 6pm, and went outside to do some yard work.  When I came back in at 8pm, they were gone.  Yep, fledged. 

The first two robin posts are:here, then here