Update on iPad giveaway

Oops, forgot to mention in my last post - the giveaway ends at midnight tonight!

Here's a little bit more in the way of details about the fundraiser:
The Dickinson family is adopting sweet little Masha, an orphan in Eastern Europe who happens to have Down Syndrome.  The Dickinsons are no strangers to international adoption, having previously adopted Macey and Marcus from Ukraine.  International adoption is an expensive undertaking, and so this iPad fundraiser generously sponsored by the Cornish family will help raise money to cover the Dickinson family's airfare and other associated costs.  The chip-in for the fundraiser ends at midnight tonight, so hurry on over and enter the giveaway before it's too late!

http://cornishadoptionjourney.blogspot.com/2011/02/todays-tears-ipad-giveaway-and-more.html

Last Day for Ipad Giveaway!

Help the Dickinson family fund their adoption and win an ipad in the process!  See here for more details.  Remember, the drawing ends tonight, so move fast :-)

Paradise

I first read this poem in college during a course about gardens in medieval and Renaissance literature.  The text is particularly beautiful, and involves an interesting play on words; the words at the end of each line are "pruned" much like the narrator himself.  Though he fears the painful act of pruning at the hand of God's knife, he comes to the realization that even fruitful, blossoming trees that might already be considered perfect can be improved by a little paring.  By the end, he welcomes the painful act, concluding that "Such sharpnes [sic] shows the sweetest FREND [sic]; such cuttings rather heal than rend."

P.S.  Embrace the Renaissance spelling :-)  It makes the poem "work." 

 

Paradise.

I Bless thee, Lord, because I GROW
Among  thy  trees, which in a ROW
To thee  both  fruit  and order  OW.

What  open  force,  or  hidden  CHARM
Can blast my fruit, or  bring me HARM,
While   the   inclosure  is   thine   ARM.

Inclose   me   still  for  fear  I   START.
Be   to  me  rather   sharp  and  TART,
Then let me want thy hand and ART.

When thou dost greater judgments SPARE,
And with thy  knife  but  prune  and PARE,
Ev’n   fruitfull   trees   more   fruitful  ARE.

Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND:
Such   cuttings    rather   heal  then   REND:
And  such   beginnings   touch  their  END. 

  

By George Herbert, 1633

 

 

Also, I'm still collecting donations for the Walk for Hunger.  Please consider sponsoring me for this very worthy cause - all proceeds go to feeding hungry families using emergency food programs.  For more info, or to sponsor me, click on this link or on the button below.  Thanks!

Please sponsor me in the Walk for Hunger!

Just in case you don't read my weight loss blog, I wanted to let you know about an exciting event coming up for me this Spring.   This year, I'm taking part in Project Bread's annual Walk for Hunger.  Although I'm using the Walk for Hunger's 20 mile course as a fitness challenge and as a way to celebrate my continued efforts at weight loss, the Walk for Hunger means so much more than that to me. 


Let's face it: the economy has been rough in the past few years.  As someone who recently graduated from college, I spent close to a year being either unemployed, underemployed, or working for free.  More than ever before, I gained an understanding of what it means to live paycheck by paycheck.  While I was fortunate enough to have a roof over my head and food to eat, others are not.  By supporting me in my efforts to raise money for Project Bread, you will be helping those individuals who, due to the economy or other circumstances, are unable to put food on the table.

Please consider donating to the Walk for Hunger using my personal sponsorship page (found HERE).  I've made it a goal to raise at least $500 dollars for Project Bread, and I still have a long way to go.  You can donate as much or as little as you want to - every little bit counts. 


Thanks!

Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.

Just when I thought the weather couldn't be any more irritating, I was proven wrong.  Shortly after I woke up this morning, my downstairs neighbor starts pounding on my door. 

"There's water pouring from my ceiling and it's coming from YOUR room!" says she.

In a panic, I start freaking out.  "What?!?!?!"  I make a mad dash to my bedroom, and find that it is remarkably (gasp, pant, panic) dry.  I run quickly to my sister's room and fling open the door to find that it is remarkably DRENCHED.  There is water pouring from her ceiling, presumably from the roof (which is directly above).  We keep her door closed when she's off at school...it could have been days or weeks until we'd discovered the water, had it not been for our neighbor.

We do our best to stop the flow, setting up pots and pans and large plastic tarps, then head up to the roof.  Which is only accessible by a very rickety ladder.  Which doesn't actually go all the way up to the roof's trapdoor.  And to make it those 2 extra feet, you have to fling yourself onto the roof.  Which immediately drops 75 feet onto the ground below.

Generally, I forget about my fear of heights.  Mostly because the opportunity to make itself known rarely presents itself.  As I made my way up the ladder, there were tears in my eyes, and at the top I froze completely.  How I found the strength to get onto the roof, I'll never know, but I did. 

We spent hours up there, shoveling off the foot or so of snow that had accumulated up there, then chipping off a 4 inch thick layer of ice so that the area with the leak had a clear run to the drainage tube.  We had to go slowly, because the only thing stopping the roof from leaking was a thin layer of rubber.  My friends, when I buy a house you can be d*** sure that I won't be buying a house with a flat top roof and inferior rubber sheeting.

The affected room is a total mess and a lot of books in there got drenched.  Books, I can deal with.  I'm a book conservator, for Pete's sake!  Everything else, though...  I want to cry.  I seriously nearly broke down this afternoon.  The ceiling is very water damaged and I'm hesitant to even think of all the work that needs to be done.  We haven't even told my sister about her room yet. 

I hate this weather, I really do.  We've got months of winter left, and I'm horribly depressed about it.  This is too much.  As bad as I wanted to go to somewhere sunny like California or Florida last week, today's events have made that desire so strong that I can hardly stand it. 

Springtime, hurry up!

On a somewhat brighter note

I am making palmiers today!  I'll let you know how they turn out.  I rarely get the chance to make puff pastry from scratch, so I seized  the opportunity when today's snow day offered me a huge chunk of free time.  Sidebar: as a kid, I thought that nothing could be more awesome than a snow day.  Recently, I discovered the perks of a paid working professional snow day :-)

Blizzard season

This has, by far, been the most brutal winter New England has seen in ages.  Not because of the cold - we've only had a day of that achingly cold, dangerous-to-be-outside weather - but because of the snow.

We didn't have a snowfall until VERY late this year - mid-December, in fact.  Some years, it starts snowing by October.  Silly me - I'd entirely convinced myself that maybe we'd have a really mild winter, particularly given the intensely hot summer that we'd had.

Our first major snowfall happened shortly before the new year, dumping 18 inches of snow onto our city.  Being hardened New Englanders (have I ever told you about the time I worked on an organic farm in Vermont for 5 months and it was -30 degrees fahrenheit every single day for the month of January?  No?  Another story for another day...) we made quick work of the shoveling and it was no big deal.  We then proceeded to get a major snowstorm every 5-7 days for the past 4 weeks.

Here's the real problem: 1 foot of snow is a pain, but manageable.  5 snowstorms of a foot+ of snow each week is a major problem.  It simply isn't melting.  There is nowhere to shovel it, and we are quickly running out of space.  Due to a never-ending state of snow emergency, we can't park on half the streets in my neighborhood.  The other half have a few properly shoveled out places, but mostly are filled with parking spots that lazy 30-somethings decided to just drive out of instead of shoveling.  Which is all fine and good, at least until the snow freezes into un-shovelable chunks.  Catch my (snow)drift?  Oh, and the sidewalks are icy and the shoveled paths are sometimes as little as 6 inches wide (talk to those 30-somethings), so people are having to walk down the streets in the middle of traffic.  At that point, the snow becomes dangerous, rather than irritating.

I usually pride myself on being able to get through a winter with cheerful spirits, but this one has been difficult for me.  The cold is awful, the snow is worse.  I spent last night searching for airfares to California.  I need sun, warmth, and flowers, not more of this:

Taken on the way home from work.  That snow drift was about 8 feet high

Happy groundhog day, everyone!