text:
Administrators at Columbia??s Harry S. Truman Veterans Hospital said they have no connections to recent scandals at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The most recent was a report that a Colorado clinic allegedly falsified documents to make it seem like patients got their care very quickly.
Investigators said hospital workers changed records so it appeared patients were being seen within the required time of 14 days.
Columbia hospital administrators get feedback from veterans to make sure they are helped as quickly as possible.
Hospital spokesman Stephen Gaither said, ??Historically at Truman V.A., the veterans who get care here are more satisfied than their peers in other facilities. We have that kind of track record with customer service. That doesn??t mean we can??t do a better job because we know we can.??
Several Veterans organizations are calling for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki and other top V.A. officials to resign over a series of scandals.
President Obama is standing by Shinseki and remains confident in his ability to lead the department.


text:
Rooms were clean. Front desk woman was very nice. But it's a shabby looking place. The property is needs to be tended to. Our room door stuck- it took a tremendous effort to get it open, which is dangerous both for our shoulders and arms, and in case of emergency. The man (who I assumed was owner) was serving breakfast... More
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
The post Announcing the Winners of the Bellingham Review's 2015 Literary Contests appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Bellingham Review 2015 literary awards— the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction—selected by contest judges Bruce Beasley, Suzanne Paola Antonetta, and Kristiana Kahakauwila, respectively. The winners will each receive an award of $1,000 and will be published in the Spring 2016 print issue of Bellingham Review.
Ming Holden is the winner of the 2015 49th Parallel Award for Poetry for her poem "For My Aspirated." Contest judge Bruce Beasley said, "'For My Aspirated'" stunned me every time I reread it for its collision of mystery and absolute clarity: emotional urgency, imagistic precision, sonic exuberance combined with syntactic slipperiness, its insistent repetitions and piled-on rhetorical questions pounding against the unplumbable mysteries of loss."
Winner of Chattahoochee Review's Lamar York Nonfiction Prize and Glimmer Train's Family Matters Fiction Prize, Ming Holden was invited by the United States Embassy to Suriname on a diplomatic speaking engagement under the U.S. Speakers Program for Women's History Month in 2014. Her work has also appeared in Alchemy, Arts & Letters, Cerise Press, Crab Orchard Review, The Best American Poetry Blog, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Huffington Post, Passages North, and others.
Leigh Claire Schmidli is the winner of the 2015 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction for her essay "This Sonata, into the third movement." Contest judge Suzanne Paola Antonetta said, "Piercingly lyric, haunting in its details, "This Sonata, into the third movement" demonstrates how beautifully a skilled writer can unite in a few pages all of the things that stay with us."
From Bangkok to Den Haag, from the Midwestern U.S. to the South, Leigh Claire Schmidli thinks of many places as home. She writes fiction and essays, loves braided narratives, and lives with a man who calls her Lucy.
Eric Roe is the winner of the 2015 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for his story "Notes from Lazarus." Contest judge Kristiana Kahakauwila called it a "lovely meditation on love, devotion, and hope."
Eric Roe worked and wrote at the Oscar Mayer packing plant in Madison, WI, for most of the 1990s. After that, he went back to school, eventually earning his MFA in creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he now teaches in the First-Year Writing Program and directs NCSU's Young & Teen Writers' Workshops. His work has appeared in the Best American Fantasy anthology, as well as Barrelhouse, Redivider, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Midway Journal, and others, and it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The entries for this year's literary awards were outstanding and we wish to congratulate the finalists in each category:
49th Parallel Award for Poetry
Runner-Up: "Paschal Triptych" by Kim Garcia
"Angelus" by Allison Adair
"Sestina for Travelers" by Sarah Black
"Heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed" by Erin Hollowell
"Culture and Anarchy" by Anna Leahy
"The Cow's Eye" and "Grackles" by Jennie Malboeuf
"An Admonishment of Boys" by Berwyn Moore
"Tremble Island" by John Nieves
"Chiaroscuro" by Stella Reed
"Song of the Jet" by Ralph Sneeden
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
Runner-Up: "The View from the Crowd" by Amy Anderson Guerra
"Sandhill Cranes and Wine" by Thomas Conlan
"On Redemption" by Steve Fellner
"Walking the Tortoise" by Judith Hannan
"Inside the Labyrinth" by Kristin Leclaire
"Under Silent Moon" by Gregory Ormson
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
Runner-Up: "Heliciculture" by Lisa Nikolidakis
"An Offer of Hari-Kari" by Elaine Crauder
"Nature" by Karen Ford
"Can't Even Superman Lift That" by Barb Johnson
"The Naked Mole Rat Experiment" by Nicole Idar
All of the 2015 contest entrants will receive a subscription to Bellingham Review's Spring 2016 print edition, Issue 72, which will include the 2015 contest winners.
Thank you, again, to all the entrants for giving us the opportunity to read their work. The contest submissions were especially strong this year, and we enjoyed reading them very much.
We welcome your work when our general submissions reading period re-opens on September 15, 2015.
Next year's contests will open for submissions on December 1, 2015.
Bellingham Review accepts all submission via Submittable.
The post Announcing the Winners of the Bellingham Review's 2015 Literary Contests appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post In the Raw: Skates to Skin Collaborative Photography appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
An Interview with Kim Lincoln and Amy Woodward
Jocelyn Marshall, creative nonfiction editor and a Bellingham Roller Betty, continues our interest in collaborative artwork by interviewing Kim Lincoln and Amy Woodward, two local artists who specialize in photographing roller derby. Here, they discuss their collaborative process and their development as artists.
Jocelyn Marshall, Bellingham Review: Can you tell me a little bit about how you two began working together?
Kim Lincoln: In 2010, I started photographing the Bellingham Roller Betties. It was my sister's freshmeat year[1], and she asked me to photograph. I showed up, but I was very overwhelmed. I had never shot sports. Ever. I had interviewed athletes before, but had never photographed them. After a few bouts[2], I thought, "I need somebody that I can count on, who I click with, who can help me."
I didn't even know Amy, and I just saw her with a camera at a Scout meeting, the Pinewood Derby Race, because we both had little kids.
Amy Woodward: And we both had our cameras there and went, "Oh, there's a kindred spirit."
KL: Yes, so I'm taking head shots of little kids and Amy's sitting there, and I said, "Hey! Would you be interested in helping me with roller derby? It doesn't pay anything, but it's a lot of fun." And she just said, "Sure! Get ahold of me, and let's make this happen."
JM: Amy, had you been to a derby bout before?
AW: I had been once, and I didn't know anything about it. My husband and I went on a date night, and I found it extremely fascinating. I wanted to be one of those people, but I have yet to try out because I want to know the rules better. I try and follow the photos to figure it out, but I still can't do it.
I figure I'm a portrait photographer that now shoots derby; I'm not a derby photographer that shoots portraits. And I think that's what makes us interesting. We started out—
KL: —doing portrait photography, personal photography—
AW: —and learned sports photography without intending to.
KL: You have to learn how to anticipate action. You have to learn when to shoot, when not to shoot.
AW: The whole culture of it.
JM: What do you think cultivates this draw to derby or derby culture (wanting to photograph it and maybe even become a part of it)?
AW: The draw, for me, was my happy space. Taking pictures of people, of families, is fun, but you don't get to be creative with it. And when you get to derby, you have all of these people that are special, somehow. When you go to a hockey game, you're going to get hockey players. When you go to a volleyball tournament, you're going to get volleyball players. When you go to derby, you get the full gambit. And that's what appealed to me. I thought, "I want to be a part of this," because it was so diverse. That's what drew me in, the diversity of it.
KL: For me, my sister and I grew up skating. We'd skate in our garage to the Top Gun and Dirty Dancing soundtracks. I thought this could be where I use the skills of skating and photography together. Derby is just so fascinating and so much fun to photograph. And for the most part, derby bouts are not posed. It's all candid; it's not contrived.
AW: It's a challenge! It's not just that it's challenging. It's that it's a challenge because you want to accomplish it, you want to do it well.
KL: And coming from a no-sports photography background, there's been a steep learning curve for us.
AW: And we've learned together. I wouldn't be doing this if Kim weren't doing this, and I think she likely wouldn't be doing this if I weren't.
JM: How did you get started with this learning process?
KL: The Lynden[3] skating rink is terrifying because the lighting is terrible and the floors are reflective. I came with the knowledge I had, which was the knowledge I learned in school. I had my on-board flash[4] and was trying to figure out how to make this happen. And it was just kind of a wreck.
AW: We had only ever done natural light photography up until that point. Derby was my first introduction to off-camera flash[5].
KL: From there I decided that if I was going to make this good, I would have to step it up and I needed to learn how to do this. So I went from one flash, to two flashes, to three flashes, to four flashes, and modifiers, and stands, and placement to learn what works.
AW: Video tutorials, groups, discussions, classes, books—
KL:—we did a workshop in Canada, and we've done mainly online tutorials.
JM: With this addition of gear, your techniques must have expanded. Can you talk a little bit about how your approach maybe changed as a result?
AW: The gear kind of exploded. The dynamic changes constantly, and I feel like just this year—we can still kind of go crazy—but we're in a place where we can handle it all, we're in charge of it, and can decide if we want a one-light setup, or two, or three, or six. Or, if we'll go with a key [light][6], or with a rim [light][7].
We're constantly learning. The more you learn, the more you realize there's more to it. And we've not only learned about off-camera flash, but have learned about light, period. So even if we look at our natural-light stuff from five years ago and compare it to our natural-life stuff of this year, it's really remarkable. We used to take pictures of people, and now we take pictures of light on people.
JM: You photograph with separate cameras, yet produce the same project in the end. How does that collaborative process work? Do you help each other setup shots, or maybe count on strengths and weaknesses you know about one another?
KL: I think it starts with an idea. One of us will get a light bulb, and say, "Let's try this, let's try body paint, let's do a dancer, let's do a nude with tulle." Something will come to mind, and I'll either write it down or type out a list.
AW: We're in constant communication. We have notebooks, lists on our computers—
KL: —slips of paper everywhere.
AW: And we'll have exploring days and just go explore. One of us will say, "Hey, I've got the morning off. Let's get in the car and go see what we can find." And we make a list of places we want to go to, and then we'll take off and check them out. When we see places, it triggers ideas. We'll shoot the place, we'll shoot each other, and any of our kids who are home sick for the day. It's a really organic process.
KL: It always starts with an idea. Then we think about who would fit that idea, and we just move forward. We book it, we chat a lot online, and maybe we'll bring in images from online to help inspire us.
AW: Because our lives are so busy with families, kids, jobs, it's never the formal thing where we sit down in a room and say, "Let's get to work!" It's a message at one in the morning saying, "Hey, I want to do this."
KL: I think the only exception was when we did bare derby[8]. That was very organized. We had so many people to work with. It was a sensitive and vulnerable project, and we needed to make sure each woman knew what to expect. So we made a storyboard with specific poses for each woman. We gave each woman about a month or so to work on the specific pose. We did a lot of research about how to make sure each woman felt the best she could and empowered. We talked to each of them extensively. We asked, "What do you love about your body? What do you hate about your body? How do you want your body to be represented in these images?" That was a huge process.
AW: Kim and I each have our own visions for projects, but we just work together so naturally and so beautifully. It's nice to have somebody to flesh it out with. Kim and I are happy with the place we are at because we're not competitive with one another. We're encouraging of one another.
KL: I feel like we each have a healthy amount of humility so that we're not competing. I care as much about her creative process as I care about mine. It's important to me. I want her to grow as much as I want to grow.
AW: —to create success in the other. We both shoot different gear; she's Canon and I'm Nikon. She shoots warm; I shoot cool[9]. Our editing processes are different, and we use different software. But, it's just so fun to do it with somebody else. There's no pressure.
KL: Right. This is not paid work. They are completely creative endeavors. This is our outlet. We're moms, we're busy, and we both have an inherent creative nature that has to get out. This is the way that we choose to express it. It's really nice to have somebody else who's on that same page and can understand.
JM: It sounds like this process, free of jealousy, allows for the final product to represent this earnest collaboration.
KL: Yes. Each person we photograph gets a separate album: one from her and one from me because our styles are so different. And then that person can do what they wish with the photographs. They volunteered their time to stand still, for example, and be painted for three hours.
AW: I think having two of us together makes it easier for the person that we're photographing. Because we're going in raw and real—we're trying to find a way to describe it when we talk about what we're shooting—because what we want to do is nudes, and it's helpful to have each other there because it's tough for people to expose themselves. It's your soul and your spirit; it's not trying to put you into overly sexualized poses.
JM: Where does this interest in nudes come from?
AW: Vulnerability. Real. Authenticity.
KL: We want to capture real emotion, real beauty. I don't want the fully made-up hair, makeup. That's not who you are when you wake up in the morning. We're not good at the boudoir[10], which is very stylized. I don't feel like that's authentic.
JM: It seems like you're taking this "raw" concept in both the literal and metaphorical sense, where you literally want your subjects naked and exposed.
AW: —Even if you're not naked, but it takes having to take off your clothes for people to have access to that. Because we're always walking around with walls up, we're posturing. It's all posturing.
KL: And when you put a camera in front of somebody, it's even more so.
AW: So when you take away the posturing, the identifiers, the qualification, what are you left with? And that's extremely difficult. Wrapped in tulle you're not nude, but you're exposed. And not just exposed in the visual sense, but you're exposed in the emotional. This is how we get to see a bit of somebody's soul because you get to understand what's in their soul based on how they're even responding.
KL: We've done sessions in the exact same light and exact same settings, and have had completely different results—
AW:—where one woman is in tears because she is so completely overcome with the fact that we're in our creative process—and we're never going to b.s. somebody and say, "oh, it's beautiful, it's wonderful"—but when we're seeing something in our lens and our eye and go, "That's beautiful! Stop. Look toward me. Look out the window. Go some place in your head that you're able to access," and that transition, and seeing that flood, that's success.
Check your ego at the door.
Yes, humility and ego.
Find somebody who is encouraging instead of discouraging.
Care about each other's growth.
Do the learning process together. Go to classes together.
[1] Freshmeat: a roller derby skater's first year
[2] Roller derby games/matches
[3] Lincoln: I love Lynden Skateway, but for photography purposes it's challenging.
[4] The flash unit built-in to the camera.
[5] Flash units that are either mounted on top of the camera or mounted on a light stand (not built-in to the camera).
[6] Used to highlight form and dimension of the subject.
[7] Used to create backlighting, where the subject is lighted from behind causing facial features of the profile to be highlighted.
[8] A few selected Bellingham Roller Betties skaters were selected to do a derby-themed nude shoot in Spring 2014. Prints were posted in a local Bellingham restaurant during June and July, and much of the proceeds went to the Betties' Season 7 community partner.
[9] "Warm" and "cool" refer to camera settings for white balance, which can be adjusted using degrees along the Kelvin system.
[10] Woodward: Some people are very good at that, and it's authentic for some. And other photographers do a really good job at that. And I could never do that well.
JOCELYN MARSHALL is a creative nonfiction writer and MA candidate in English studies at Western Washington University. Her work features themes of gender and sexuality rooted in transnationalism and women of color feminism. She is a creative nonfiction editor for the Bellingham Review, part-time instructor at WWU, and a proceedings coordinator at SPIE.
The post In the Raw: Skates to Skin Collaborative Photography appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post Issue Release Party and Literary Double Header at the Honey Moon appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The Bellingham Review will celebrate the publication of Issue 70, which includes the winners of its annual literary contests, by co-hosting a literary double-header at the Honey Moon on Saturday, May 16.
Join us as the evening kicks off at 7:00 pm with the Issue 70 release party, featuring readings of Issue 70's contest winners and readings by graduate students enrolled in the English department at Western Washington University. At 8:30 Honey Moon hosts Wild Literarians, vol. 3, a community open mic event where lovers of the written word can share passages from their favorite books. Both events are free and open to the public.
The Bellingham Review 2014 winners are Michael William Palmer, Jackleen Holton, and Tom Howard. In addition to the contest winners, Issue 70 contains stories, poems, essays and artwork by 30 contributors, including artwork by local artist Ron Pattern and a dynamic collaboration between poet Katrina Hays and photographer Steven McBurnett. They comment on their collaborative process in an interview by Rob Rich, a WWU graduate student. Read the interview and listen to Hays perform several of her poems on the Review's blog.
We will celebrate the conclusion of editor-in-chief Brenda Miller's leadership of the journal. Miller has edited the journal since 2001, guiding twenty-two issues to publication. During that time, the journal has received awards and recognition and published work that has been reprinted in Harper's Magazine, Utne Reader and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Join us in welcoming longtime editorial advisor for the Review, S. Paola Antonetta, who will assume leadership of the journal. Her first issue as editor-in-chief is due out in the fall. Atonetta worked with the faculty, including former editor-in-chief Robin Hemley, who helped acquire the Bellingham Review for Western Washington University's English department many years ago. Antonetta said, "It feels like coming home, in many ways, to return to the editorship of the Bellingham Review."
The Bellingham Review is the literary journal produced by Western Washington University's MFA program. Its online home is bhreview.org. For more information about the multi-genre MFA program, click here.
The Honey Moon is an eclectic urban winery, which serves mead and cider, located on the alley at 1053 N. State Street in Bellingham — in the block immediately south of the Bellingham Farmers Market. Call 360-734-0728 or email firstname.lastname@example.com for more information, or to sign-up for the open mic portion of the event. Click here to RSVP on Facebook.
The post Issue Release Party and Literary Double Header at the Honey Moon appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post AWP Exquisite Corpse: Day Two appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
We asked visitors to Booth 1421 to participate in our exquisite corpse game! Visitors contributed one line to our evolving collaborative writing experiment. The one rule is that contributors can read only the line directly preceding theirs. Follow along at #bhreviewAWP and #AWP15, and on Twitter.
Read the results from Thursday's bookfair.
Trying to snow this morning, though it's spring.
White clumps with feathered edges drift down into my eyes,
the difficulty of living among construction of the soul
is that you never know whether death is coming or catcalling.
Snow in April means the hope of spring.
Sunshine in the rain washes away the clouds
with this moment in weather we step away
to the airline dedicated only to poems, not peanuts
because of the allergy that appeared contagious.
I'd be an even better writer and communicator if I used vowels!
But vowels are so much better whenever they are punctuated by consonants and spaces.
Consonants can clog up space, though, taking light away from stars and nebulas.
The light here
not real
something else, somewhere a where that's not here
in the weak light of the moon he found his way
into the world, the blue waters and warm murals of mermaids in Portugal
and then sparrows with their sudden tongues
dismantle the soft orange of the August dusk.
Soft-spun clouds drip molten threads
of burning chocolate
my mouth watered in anger.
And for a moment I plunged into a memory of my long-ago childhood.
I was enjoying breakfast at the Skylark when suddenly
I noticed that I could not taste it.
But I will never be able to forget the texture.
The taste of the pain, the smell of your grief.
Tears like pomegranate, like rubies
like any uncountable cluster of scarlet.
The post AWP Exquisite Corpse: Day Two appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post AWP Exquisite Corpse: Day 1 appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
Thank you to all of the wonderful AWPeeps who stopped by Booth 1421 to say hello and participate in our exquisite corpse game! Visitors contribute one line to our evolving collaborative writing experiment. The one rule is that contributors can read only the line directly preceding theirs. Follow along at #bhreviewAWP and #AWP15, and on Twitter.
Here are the results from Thursday's bookfair.
Her eyes were a stunning blue, sapphires, actually.
His were molten lasers. Robotic. Angry.
My mother spoke of them often, drool pooling at the sides of her downturned mouth.
"If you don't cut them off," she slurred, "You're dead to me. What they did…"
"Janice, you know how I feel about all of this—it's so spirit-crushing. I just have to move on."
But my spirit has crushes on the worst things:
and there are only beds in the sky there
for children who haven't seen mountains
and those who have, but didn't know it.
We provided dioramas of mountain ranges complete with
colorform mountains and goats.
"No one ever talks about poetry on planes," he said. "Who are you all?"
All my paper in one hand,
I resist the urge to chuck it away,
keep it in small pieces until the sky clears.
Make the mists of lake-dregs lumber—
in high and hard words asunder
my grace is summer sunshine
warm on my skin and filling me
with a gigantic stomach, the gut flora of love.
Nothing clever happens in here;
if we're lucky, in never will again
and we'll carry on in the knowledge
that it did, indeed, happen.
We'll collect and wear the knowledge
like pin on a jean jacket, until they fall off, and
drip like oil
slip, lissome, outside
the door with broken panes
where you hid your stillborn heart
rotted out like a glass-eyed corpse.
We can build a house from these remains,
and the door will hang off one hinge like the promise you broke last week.
The promise that you'd always laugh at my jokes and be there for every tear.
All the years to come, collected in the bud of my chest; you are my betrothed.
Nothing can compare to the touch of your hand. Soon you will be mine.
She whispered with a touch of flair,
"I think Homer is sexy."
The post AWP Exquisite Corpse: Day 1 appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post Bellingham Review Publishes Issue 70 appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The Bellingham Review is pleased to announce the publication of Issue 70, which includes the winners of its annual literary contests. The 2014 winners are Michael William Palmer, Jackleen Holton, and Tom Howard.
Contest judge Joy Castro selected Palmer's essay, "A Glossary of West Texas," as the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Castro said, "This laconic, elegiac, obliquely self-probing essay tunnels into the ways landscape shapes our psychic experiences as well as the way our own filters let us see—and blind us to—people and place."
Holton's poem, "Goldfish," earned the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Contest judge Kathleen Flenniken said of the poem, "Doubt gives way at just the right moment, convincingly, to awe. I know I'm in the hands of a craftsman: stanza by stanza we see evidence of an excellent ear, appreciation for language and line."
Shawn Wong, contest judge for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, described the pleasures of reading this year's winner, "Tom Howard's story, 'Temple & Vine,' needs to be read two or three times. It keeps inviting you back because you missed something the first or second time . . . Loyalty rewards the reader."
In addition to the contest winners, this issue contains stories, poems, essays and artwork by 30 contributors, including a dynamic collaboration between poet Katrina Hays and photographer Steven McBurnett. They comment on their collaborative process in an interview by Rob Rich. Read the interview and listen to Hays perform several of her poems on the Review's blog.
Finally, this beautiful issue marks the conclusion of editor-in-chief Brenda Miller's leadership of the journal. Miller has edited the journal since 2001, guiding twenty-two issues to publication. During that time, the journal has received awards and recognition and published work that has been reprinted in Harper's Magazine, Utne Reader and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Miller's esteemed colleague and longtime editorial advisor for the Review, S. Paola Antonetta, will assume leadership of the journal. Atonetta worked with the faculty, including former editor-in-chief Robin Hemley, who helped acquire the Bellingham Review for Western Washington University's English department many years ago. Antonetta said, "It feels like coming home, in many ways, to return to the editorship of the Bellingham Review." Antonetta's first issue as editor-in-chief is due out in the fall.
The Bellingham Review is the literary journal produced by Western Washington University's MFA program. For more information about the multi-genre MFA program, click here.
The post Bellingham Review Publishes Issue 70 appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post "The Spirit of Where We Are" appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
An interview with Katrina Hays and Steven McBurnett
Just as a topographical map offers contour lines and shading to convey the land's relief, the alliance of poet Katrina Hays and photographer Steven McBurnett conjures the experience of place. Their independent creations of word and image respond to a single physical location, but then come together as a "sametime collaboration" of mutually enriching art. While the poems and photographs are remarkable products alone, the process of the artists evokes an uncommon wholeness—not only in the relations of the visual and verbal arts, but in the vital reciprocity of art and nature. After Katrina and Steven visited Bellingham to present their work, I had the opportunity to learn more about why their collaboration is so special.
Rob Rich, Bellingham Review: There may be more photographers and poets today than ever before, but few work together. Where did you meet each other and what brought out the possibility for collaboration?
Katrina Hays: Years ago, a mutual friend suggested I write poems for a book of Steve's photography. At the time I didn't feel I had the poetic chops to match the level of his work, so I sort of skulked away. Much later, we ran into each other again and started talking and the notion didn't frighten me as much. However, he has so many photos, I didn't know how to start. The project overwhelmed me. Steve, who is a physicist and engineer by training, came up with an organized way to approach the project: I would look through a set of his photos to see if any of my existing poems might match; and he would look through my graduate thesis to see if he had any existing photos that might link up with specific poems. In this way, we started to get a feel for each other's work, and also started having a lot of conversations about the nature of collaboration.
Steven McBurnett: One of the things that brought out possibilities for me was when I read Katrina's thesis and found a line from one of her poems that evoked a memory of a place I'd seen but not photographed. I then went to that place (on the McKenzie River in Oregon) and made the photo. When I printed the image and incorporated a line from the poem as the title for the photo, it worked so well that it opened up my eyes to the potential of collaboration.
RR: How could you tell what made a match?
SMcB: Initially, it was a literal matching. Words about trees equaled image of trees, etcetera.
KH: For me it was more ephemeral. I'd see a photo that evoked a feeling. The jagged juniper tree in the Oregon Badlands that we ended up pairing with my poem "Ontology" gave me a jolt of recognition: tree, odd but absolutely of its place; poem, striving to speak of the "is-ness" of the narrator. It matched somewhere in my gut.
RR: So how does this process change when you work with new material?
KH: We talked a lot initially—about the nature of collaboration (I am not natively a person who collaborates; Steve collaborated hugely throughout his previous career as a scientist/engineer/manager) and about the orthogonal differences we have in how we approach our arts (visual versus verbal; male versus female; left brain versus right brain). We also talked about how difficult it is for a single art form to really capture the essence of a place. It seemed to us that attempts to reveal the "voice" of a place are often frustrated by the limitations imposed by the tradition of a solitary artist working in a single medium. We tried to approach that problem from a different direction.
SMcB: We came to think of what we do as "sametime collaboration." What that means is both of us are in the same physical location at the same time, capturing visual and written images while working independently and without much work-related communication during the time of capture. Subsequently, we each refine our individual work and then join the two media into a visual/verbal experience that attempts to give voice to the spirit of where we are.
KH: This really snapped into place for us when we went to Sequoia National Park together in 2014. For days we hiked through these huge trees. I had an enormous emotional response to them—they are deeply moving and humbling—but not one word of poetry was coming through. Steve, on the other hand, was shooting up a storm. Finally, the poem "Lux" just dropped into me, which was such a gift.
SMcB: Meanwhile, I was struggling with how to get a unique image of such a natural and cultural icon as a giant Sequoia, specifically the General Sherman Tree, which is the largest tree in the world. I wanted to capture the tree in a new light, and it dawned on me to literally do just that. I have a camera modified to shoot in the deep infrared part of the light spectrum, and when I saw the first images from that camera, it looked to me as if I had taken a picture of the soul of the tree. After exploring many compositions, I found the one that most clearly spoke to me. I showed it to Katrina and she showed me her poem, "Lux." Instant match.
KH: And really magic! "Lux" means "light" in Latin. I wrote that poem not knowing at all what Steve was doing—and when we put the two art forms together, I felt this internal click of "YES." So, that's when we really began to get excited about our collaborative work, and started planning trips to places we view as sacred—places that resonate for us, places that touch us deeply.
RR: Wow. That is truly remarkable how the place guides the process. It makes me think of what Gary Snyder says in The Practice of the Wild, that "to know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in."
I wonder if you had times where the "spirit of the place" was elusive. Are there any practices you have to keep you attentive to it?
SMcB: We haven't codified it, but now that you ask, there are a number of elements in our emerging practice we use to help us be open to that spirit. One is to seek out times and places where we can have solitude, even if only for a short period of time.
KH: This typically involves alarm clocks (multiple) and coffee. A lot of coffee.
SMcB: For me, it also involves taking time before I set my camera gear to walk around and just look at the place. Not through a lens, but through my eyes and brain. I try to "see" the place rather than just look at it. I clear my mind of procedure and let my attention wander at random through the landscape.
KH: I tend to operate more from a feeling or emotional platform. To attend is, for me, to get very quiet internally and start paying attention to what messages (and I think of them as messages delivered to my conscious self from some other place within) are coming across the transom, so to speak. I listen, and try to catch the odd thought or impulse. And I always, always, have a small notebook and pen, so even if the odd impulse or message comes when we're mid-hike from one shooting location to another, I can capture it while we're underway.
RR: Have you ever found the "spirit of the place" in a landscape that did not at first seem possible?
KH: When we did a collaborative residency in the Oregon Coast Range last fall, I asked Steve to get an art shot of a clearcut.
SMcB: My response was that you cannot get an art shot of a clearcut. Period.
KH: But I had this poem that was starting to take shape, and I needed him to come up with something.
SMcB: Katrina was persistent. So, I hiked up into this clearcut several times, and there was nothing there for me. It was awful. But the last time I went up, I spent time doing the seeing thing, and I had an idea that might work.
KH: Again, the result was magic. Steve created a composite that overlaid a semi-transparent image of an uncut forest onto the image of the clearcut.
SMcB: It seems to me the final image contains the forest as it was before the clearcut, the clearcut as it is, and the forest that would grow in the future.
KH: And the poem I wrote was exactly about that sense of trying to find some truth beyond the ugly slash and apparent desolation.
RR: I can imagine your work would inspire a diverse audience. How do you most like to share your work with others?
KH: Frankly, we don't have a final answer on this. We did a gallery showing of five collaborations last year, and it was interesting to notice that the poetry was rarely read by viewers. The images instantly grab visual attention, but poems require more time and effort.
SMcB: We're investigating a number of methods for sharing the work. The classic approach involves printed coffee table books with image and poem presented together, either in original image, limited-edition handbound versions, or more conventionally-printed volumes.
KH: As poetry is—or in my opinion, should be—an aural experience, we're looking at ways to include the ability to hear the poem while the image is seen. E-books that contain the spoken poem in an audio file might offer this possibility.
SMcB: And we're also moving towards images that have the poem, or part of the poem, embedded in the image, as "Clearcut" does.
This interview was originally published in Issue 70, as well as the poems by Katrina Hays and the photographs by Steven McBurnett.
ROB RICH is a naturalist and writer based in the Padden Creek watershed of Bellingham, Washington. A finalist for the Sierra Club's Wilderness 2.0 Essay Contest, his writing has also appeared with Camas, Northern Woodlands, Adirondack Journal for Environmental Studies, The Catch and High Country News.
The post "The Spirit of Where We Are" appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other Over Time appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
I put off reading Jeffrey Schultz's What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other for a good three months. I propped it up on my desk and looked at it a lot, though. I studied the 1915 line drawing by George Grosz on its cover, titled Riot of the Madmen. It's unclear whether the madmen have descended upon the town or are its usual inmates: One dangles a terrified woman from a two-dimensional window; others charge through the streets with canes and hatchets. Knowing that Grosz worked in Germany during WWI makes the drawing's connection to war unavoidable. Only a book that attempts to look at social cruelty square in its maw would have rape, murder, and war pressed flat on its cover. And I am a coward. Reading the news and sorting through an inbox full of social change petitions make me feel ill most days. A book that looks ready to enumerate yet more ways the world sucks right now inspires procrastination.
And yet, after actually reading Schultz's poems, that tension between procrastination and facing cruelty head-on seems to be part of the point. What I took at first to be a question in the title: "What things could we ask of each other?" instead reveals itself to be a compendium. These poems contain possibilities and observations, askings and responses. They gesture towards infinite moments of requests and multiplicities of answers. These poems scope out a world through its continuities of radios, kitchen tables, morning coffee with subpar rolls, cars with subwoofers, cancerous off gasses, chemical coatings, and auras of substations. They offer us, refreshingly, images of a world not obsessed with the digital, grounded instead in electrical, sensory perceptions. Life in these poems operates in proximity to air conditioners, laptops, and radios, but not within them.
"Power Outage, Fresno, California, August 10, 1996" in particular gives us people physically slammed by summer heat and then dazed by the slight coolness and unaccustomed quiet of a blackout dusk,
Cooler, finally, outside than in, everyone's laid out broken
On the stoop with half-warmed beers or sun tea and what's left
of the ice, or else they wander in dazed pairs on the older,
Tree-lined streets. There isn't a single siren or gunshot,
not the rattle of a distant argument or an air conditioner's hum.
These people are damaged, "broken" and "dazed," by their circumstances, yet they have contact with each other in the unusual malfunction of their routines. Schultz narrates this evening in which he is young, unknowingly walking with his future wife and innocent of the bureaucratic drudgery of his future. The poem ends with a meditation on our intense, human experience of the present moment, its satisfying enormity,
It's absolutely everything charged into absolutely
nothing more than the dulled, relentless fever
Of now, which presses so hard we can't help but feel filled.
I read What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other the first time lying in bed on a rainy midwinter morning when it seemed likely that it would never again be possible to read by daylight without supplemental lamps. The next time that I read back through the book, pausing and lingering over poems for a second or third time, the students in my morning English 101 class were sleepily, albeit good-naturedly, bent over a peer response activity. As I type this, it's Saturday afternoon and there's a bluer sky than anyone has a right to expect during a Pacific Northwest March. Sometimes things progress unexpectedly, and unexpectedly beautifully, for no particular reason. In "The Soul as Episode in the Supermarket," Schultz writes about his soul ascending irrepressibly upward and outward in the middle of the mundane, ersatz signifiers of a grocery store, in the middle of the "plasticized recreation" of the meat department and "piped-in thunderclaps" of Produce. Schultz reports,
He's in the esophagus, a talon lodged
in the trachea. I grin like an idiot, ready to buckle at the knees.
Sometimes the unexpectedly beautiful is sudden and unavoidable. But even then we have to acknowledge that beauty and progressions don't make up for what has gone wrong in the world. "Weekday's Apocalyptic" posits for us the "undocumented workers," "terrified mothers," and a figure of the world as a woman bleeding out in a bathtub, her mind drifting somewhere between resignation and defiance. Even among horrors, Schultz seems to be saying with these poems, a soul's joys are absurd and implacable.
What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other, published in 2014 by the University of Georgia Press, is Jeffrey Schultz's first collection. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and other journals including the Bellingham Review. He has received the "Discovery"/Boston Review prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Schultz teaches at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles.
KATELYN KENDERISH is a poet and MFA student at Western Washington University. She is a poetry editor for the Bellingham Review.
The post What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other Over Time appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post Issue 70 appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
|Brenda Miller
|Saying Goodbye
|S. Paola Antonetta
|Saying Hello
|Joy Castro
|Judge's Comments
|Michael William Palmer
|A Glossary of West Texas
|Kathleen Flenniken
|Judge's Comments
|Jackleen Holton
|Shawn Wong
|Judge's Comments
|Tom Howard
|Temple & Vine
|Katrina Hays
|Steven McBurnett
|Rob Rich
|"The Spirit of Where We Are"
|with Katrina Hays and Steven McBurnett
|Amy A. Whitcomb
|A Body in Motion
|Molly Spencer
|Lynn Tudor Deming
|Rebecca Foust
|Kevin Honold
|Hermit Moon
|Shane Seely
|We Invite the Bees In
|Feeling Good Night and She Is Love
|Janet Norman Knox
|Coursework in Cross-Cultural Relations: The Red Telephone
|Coursework in Cross-Cultural Relations: The Scythe Has Hit a Stone
|Amy Glynn
|June, the Janiculum
|Leslie Marie Aguilar
|Set of Circumstances
|Allison Linville
|Now, Hunger
|Lisa Megraw
|Let Me Tell You
|At Thirty-Three
|Matthew Murrey
|Kitty Hawk
|Leonard Neufeldt
|Alzheimer's Resource Finder
|Jason Olsen
|Nathan Renie
|Green Hall
|Tobias Wray
|Penelope in the Garden Humming Bach
|Paradise of the Senses, St. Petersburg, FL
|Sonja Livingston
|Sly Foxes
|Rebecca Bald
|The Watchman, the Bell, and the Body
|Whitney Templeton
|Body Cavities
|Kathleen Blackburn
|In the Time of Forty Letters
|Siamak Vossoughi
|Back and Forth
|Becky Hagenston
|Big Wings
|Tyler Sage
|Alexis Marie Chute
|Healing #3
|Healing #4
|Healing #8
|Marcus Eckhoff
|Beware of Dog
|Marianna Hofer
|Ron Pattern
|Eagle Tree
Cover Art: "Farewell" by Dale Gottleib
"I'd like to thank the Bellingham Review for the opportunity to have my work on the cover for nineteen years. It's been an honor. Thank you, Robin Hemley, for originally inviting me in, and thank you, Brenda Miller, for the past fourteen years as editor-in-chief."
To order Issue 70, please send a note with your name and mailing address along with a check of $12 made out Bellingham Review to:
Western Washington University
Bellingham Review
516 High Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
The post Issue 70 appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
The post Contributor Spotlight: Lois Marie Harrod appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>
What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to the Bellingham Review?
Novelist Ann Tyler says that she reads so that she can live more than one life in more than one place. I write for the same reason. My character Marlene Mae lives a brash, reckless life, quite unlike my own more careful and calculating existence. I thought I was done with Marlene Mae in 2013 when Dancing Girl Press published the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for the Truth, but she (and her mother) just keep on re-appearing in new poems, including "Marlene Mae Talks About Denial" and "Marlene Mae's Mother Turns Seventy-Six and Her Physician Asks If She Is Still Sexually Active."
Tell us about your writing life.
When I was in fourth grade, I won a prize for a rhyme-driven poem entitled "Courtesy." Ever since then, I assumed I was a poet, but I wasn't really until I began writing almost daily at forty. As I tell students, you have to have the habit of writing in order to be a writer. Obsessions? I want my language to be both accessible and resonant.
What writing advice has stayed with you?
My old professor George Dell first told me "10 percent inspiration and 90% perspiration." Of course, there are many versions of that advice. My best advice: Just set aside time to write on a regular basis.
Which non-writing aspect(s) of your life most influences your writing?
I'm influenced by the science section of the New York Times, visual art, reading—really I try to be open to what I come in contact with.
What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? Favorite writer(s)?
I always hate this question. As I write this, I am off to the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival this weekend, and I am looking forward to hearing Mark Doty, Robert Pinsky, Henri Cole, Eavand Boland, Marie Howe and so many others. I have always liked the work of Stephen Dunn—for its accessibility and wisdom.
What are you reading now?
Richard Power's Orfeo. All of Alice Munro. Best of the Best American Poetry ed. by Pinsky.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I have a lot of writing projects right now—an ongoing series of ekphrastic poems, a series of tight, small poems. I am enjoying writing a series on "The Minor Poet." Of course, Major Poet, as most of us know, is an oxymoron.
Where can our readers connect with you online?
Readers can find me at loismarieharrod.org.
Anything else our readers might want to know about you?
I walk four miles a day—but unlike Billy Collins, I don't compose during my works. I like hiking, too.
LOIS MARIE HARROD's thirteenth and fourteenth poetry collections, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press in 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). She is widely published in literary journals and online zines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches creative writing at The College of New Jersey. Read her work at loismarieharrod.org.
The post Contributor Spotlight: Lois Marie Harrod appeared first on Bellingham Review.]]>


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Texas lawmakers back off concealed carry on campus
Posted: 04/13/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Just two months ago, Texas looked ready to allow concealed handgun license holders to carry their guns in college classrooms.
Posted: 04/13/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Just two months ago, Texas looked ready to allow concealed handgun license holders to carry their guns in college classrooms.
Posted: 04/13/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Texas Gov. Rick Perry is praising a deal that would cut the strings attached to $830 million in stimulus funds for Texas.
Posted: 04/13/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Gov. Rick Perry's emergency legislation requiring doctors to do a sonogram before performing an abortion is moving forward.
Posted: 04/13/2011 - LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) - Firefighters are making progress containing a West Texas wildfire that has consumed more than 100,000 acres and destroyed 25 homes.
Posted: 04/13/2011 - DENTON, Texas (AP) - A North Texas jury has seen a chilling video of a man accidentally shooting his 10-year-old daughter fatally in the head during a drunken lesson on handling handguns.
Posted: 04/12/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A state judge in Austin ruled Monday that State Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin was within his authority when he ordered State Farm Insurance to refund about $350 million to ratepayers for excessive premiums charged as early as 2003.
Posted: 04/08/2011 - SAN ANTONIO (AP) - Officials at Fort Sam Houston are trying to determine which essential personnel will remain on the job in the event of a federal government shutdown.
Posted: 04/08/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The sponsor of a bill to allow guns on college campuses has tabled the legislation until next week.
Posted: 04/08/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Texas Senate approved a program that would encourage companies to switch heavy vehicles from diesel fuel to natural gas.
Posted: 04/08/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - People convicted of human trafficking would face tougher penalties under legislation that has passed the Texas House.
Posted: 04/08/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The state agency in charge of juvenile criminal offenders could be significantly restructured under legislation making its way through the Texas Senate.
Posted: 04/08/2011 - TYLER, Texas (AP) - Police in East Texas say an armed woman disguised as a man broke into the wrong house trying to collect a debt. The woman allegedly bound and gagged a mother and her three daughters before the family escaped through a window and ran for help.
Posted: 04/06/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - State lawmakers are debating how to clarify that landowners have an ownership interest in the groundwater beneath their land.
Posted: 04/06/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A top Republican leader says Texans are "waking up" to the cuts made by the Texas House and vows to add more revenue to the bare-bones proposal.
Posted: 04/06/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A Texas senator wants to cap state spending on tax breaks local school trustees can grant that help attract business relocation or expansion projects.
Posted: 04/06/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A group of Hispanic lawmakers has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the state over redistricting.
Posted: 04/06/2011 - DALLAS (AP) - A man caught in Tennessee has been convicted of the 1992 killing of a Texas woman in an attack that left her three grandchildren wounded.
Posted: 04/04/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Texas House has approved a bare-bones state budget that makes massive cuts to public education and health care programs for the poor.
Posted: 04/04/2011 - DALLAS (AP) - An American Airlines flight from Texas to South America aborted and returned to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport after its flight crew suspected the tail of the Boeing 767 struck the runway on takeoff.
Posted: 04/04/2011 - LIVINGSTON, Texas (AP) - Condemned Texas prisoner Cleve Foster says he's not afraid to die - but he doesn't want to be a guinea pig.
Posted: 04/04/2011 - HOUSTON (AP) - The head football coach at George Ranch High School, a female educator and her estranged husband were all found shot to death at a Rosenberg hotel.
Posted: 04/04/2011 - FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - A teen with a heart condition died after fighting with another student across their high school campus.
Posted: 03/31/2011 - HOUSTON (AP) - Houston police say one person was killed and five others wounded in a shooting at a football field at a Houston high school.
Posted: 03/31/2011 - HOUSTON (AP) - Authorities have added four murder counts to the case against the operator of a Houston home day care center where a fire killed four children last month.
Posted: 03/31/2011 - AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - The Texas House has approved legislation that would require law enforcement agencies to begin standardizing the way eyewitnesses identify suspects in an effort to reduce the number of wrongful convictions.


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Posted December 11, 2012 on AP on Fox
Nearly two weeks ago, the San Antonio Spurs were fined by the NBA for resting their stars. Now, they own the best record in the league behind a red-hot Tony Parker. Parker looks to build on his first career triple-double as the visiting Spurs try for a season-high sixth straight win and to continue their dominance of the Utah Jazz on Wednesday night. San Antonio (18-4) has won 10 of 11 with the lone loss the infamous Nov. 29 visit to Miami in which coach Gregg Popovich wound up being fined $250,000 for sending four key players home. The Spurs haven't lost since, largely thanks to their point guard. Parker has averaged 23.6 points, 8.8 assists and 4.7 rebounds while shooting 61.4 percent from the floor since his night off against the Heat. The All-Star kept San Antonio rolling Monday, recording his first triple-double by scoring 27 points with 12 assists and 12 boards in a 134-126 overtime victory at Houston. "I was like: 'Man if we lose, nobody is going to care,'" Parker said ...
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We offer discount to nonprofits, government agencies, and federal contractors
Recently the handling of civil immigration detainers by local law departments has been heavily scrutinized.
AILA Doc No. 14012744 | Dated January 27, 2014 | File Size: 784 KDownload the Document
AILA's take on the detention bed quota, an arbitrary number of detention beds set by Congress each year during the appropriations process.
[[To print the PDF on this page please use the print function in the PDF reader.]]
Cite as AILA Doc. No. 14012744.Open the Document
American Immigration Lawyers Association
1331 G Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
Copyright © 1993-2015
American Immigration Lawyers Association.


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New HP8600 ink
Just set up my new 8600 and installed the ink cartridges. The printer gave me an error message that the M and Y were empty. These are new cartridges, how can that be? Is there a way to check to see if there is another problem??
Re: New HP8600 ink
I would remove and reseat the cartridges. If that does not correct the issue I would sugget you caontact HP for warranty service. In the US call 1-800-HPINVENt, elsewhere see the contact information here.
Bob Headrick, HP Expert
I am not an employee of HP, I am a volunteer posting here on my own time.
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Re: New HP8600 ink
reseating didn't work so I will contact HP.
Re: New HP8600 ink[ Edited ]
05-14-2014 07:09 AM - edited 05-14-2014 07:12 AM
Hi I also had the same problem with my HP8600 printer. The head and the screen were replaced and all was working well until the black cartridge run out and I replaced it. The printer would not see it, took it back to repairs people, HP Agents, and the head was replaced again. Let us know how you resolved your problem.
- Printer Prints a Blank Page or Does Not Print Black or Color Ink for the HP Officejet 6500 All-in-One Printer Series
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Discover a selection of top forums (meteorama) girls on the internet. Come to share your passion on forums (meteorama) girls and meet other fans of (meteorama) girls. Then, why don't you create your own forum of (meteorama) girls ?
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Hola! Come join our interNASHional forum for all the international D'Nash lovers!


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Giving the Web a sense of scale, a guy named Ruslan Enikeev plotted 350,000 of the most popular websites and 2 million links from 196 countries on a colorful, bubble filled map, forming a giant cluster viewers can zoom in and out of on a whim. As you get closer to any particular bubble, the web address it represents comes into view, or you can punch in an address in the search field and Scotty will beam you there.
For nearly 20 years, Maximum PC is considered by enthusiasts to be the absolute source for the latest hardware reviews, in-depth analysis, and breaking news on the latest PC hardware. Our team of industry experts give you the guidance you need to make the most informed buying decisions and deliver the best guides on how to use and optimize your experience. If you're looking for the definitive reference on PC hardware, you've found it.
Maximum PC is part of Future plc, an international media group and digital publisher.
Visit our Corporate Site.
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|June 01, 2015
Temporary Protected Status Extended for Somalia
Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson has extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for eligible nationals of Somalia (and eligible individuals without nationality who last habitually resided in Somalia) for an additional 18 months, effective Sept. 18, 2015, through March 17, 2017.
|April 27, 2015
Lebanese-Born man sentenced to federal prison on charges of making false statement to a USCIS agent and an unlawful attempt at naturalization
Today U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth sentenced 45–year-old Lebanese–born Wissam "Sam" Allouche to five years in federal prison for knowingly lying to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers on his U.S. citizenship petition about his relationship with the Amal militia.
|April 23, 2015
USCIS Partners with City of Atlanta to Support Citizenship Education and Awareness
|April 07, 2015
USCIS Reaches FY 2016 H-1B Cap
|April 07, 2015
USCIS Assists in NY Case Leading to Indictment of ESL Teacher for Stealing Thousands From Student Visa Holders
Defendant Accused of Falsely Offering Green Cards for a Fee and Stealing More Than $30,000 from Multiple Immigrants from Asia and Europe
|April 01, 2015
USCIS Announces Citizenship and Integration Grant Opportunity
|March 24, 2015
USCIS Posts Updated L-1B Adjudications Policy for Public Feedback
|March 12, 2015
USCIS Will Accept H-1B Petitions for Fiscal Year 2016 Beginning April 1, 2015
H-1B petitioners may still continue to request premium processing together with their H-1B petition. However, please note that USCIS has temporarily adjusted its current premium processing practice based on historic premium processing receipt levels and the possibility that the H-1B cap will be met in the first five business days of the filing season. In order to prioritize data entry for cap subject H-1B petitions, USCIS will begin premium processing for H-1B cap-subject petitions requesting premium processing no later than May 11, 2015.
|February 24, 2015
DHS Extends Eligibility for Employment Authorization to Certain H-4 Dependent Spouses of H-1B Nonimmigrants Seeking Employment-Based Lawful Permanent Residence
USCIS Director León Rodríguez announced today that, effective May 26, 2015, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is extending eligibility for employment authorization to certain H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B nonimmigrants who are seeking employment-based lawful permanent resident (LPR) status. DHS amended the regulations to allow these H-4 dependent spouses to accept employment in the United States.
|February 12, 2015
Celebrating Presidents Day with Naturalization Ceremonies


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Definition: The component of a membrane consisting of the gene products having some covalently attached portion, for example part of a peptide sequence or some other covalently attached group such as a GPI anchor, which spans or is embedded in one or both leaflets of the membrane.
Note that proteins intrinsic to membranes cannot be removed without disrupting the membrane, e.g. by detergent.
Parent Classes:
GO:0044425 - membrane part
Part Of:
GO:0016020 - membrane
Child Classes:
GO:0016021 - integral component of membrane (1014) ,
GO:0031225 - anchored component of membrane (2) ,
GO:0031226 - intrinsic component of plasma membrane (343) ,
GO:0031230 - intrinsic component of cell outer membrane (16)
Term Members:
Cu+ efflux ATPase (copA) ,
predicted flagella assembly protein (flk) ,
nitrate reductase A, β subunit (narH) ,
nitrate reductase A, α subunit (narG) ,
nitrate reductase A ,
succinate:quinone oxidoreductase subcomplex ,
cytochrome bd-I terminal oxidase subunit II (cydB) ,
cytochrome bd-I terminal oxidase subunit I (cydA)
Unification Links: GO:0031224
©2015 SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493
SRI International is an independent, nonprofit corporation. Privacy policy Disclaimer


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Niggas catching hot bullets, you ain't going to war
Lyric Meaning
There's so much shooting, but the people shooting would never fight a real war. On a related note: fuck a war.
Improve the quality of 05 Fuck Em Lyrics by leaving a suggestion at the bottom of the page


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Hibachi HouseMarch 20, 2011Sushi • Kingsburg, United States
Order the las vegas roll, add cucumber. Amazing!!
Order the las vegas roll, add cucumber. Amazing!!
Fabulous brunch & bottomless mimosas, bellinis & champagne! The bread pudding is a MUST!!
They have the very BEST shrimp cocktail you will ever have!
Don't go on a Sunday afternoon!
Wonderful place owned by very nice people! I would recommend to anyone with a backache. Ask for dr.yano!
Very cute boutique & affordable!!
The best mexican food you will ever have! Try the chili verde fancy! Or for somethin a little spicier, try the chili con carne!
Try the fish & chips! They're better than most places in the actual town of pismo!


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There are some good (and some not so good!) books out there about philanthropy. This month we'll feature two that offer practical road maps for new and experienced donors and nonprofit board members: Giving 2.0 and Joining a Nonprofit Board: What You Need to Know. Read More
Recent Posts
- Resources: Philanthropy Bookshelf
- Fundraising Q/A: What advice can you offer an entrepreneur on how to be philanthropic from the beginning?
- Fundraising Q/A: Is Reputational Risk Something Nonprofits Should Worry About?
- Fundraising Q/A: What are your views on professional telemarketing?
- Fundraising Q/A: Are restricted gifts an effective philanthropic vehicle, or an unnecessary drain on organizational resources?


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Buddha takes Beliefnet's Politic-O-Matic quiz …
How would Buddha vote?
How would Buddha vote?
"Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship," he wrote. "Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering - an image of death."
On another occasion, he is recorded saying, "To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him." And at yet another time, he said,"To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear."
Hmmmm. But nothing about IRS enforcement of mandated payments.
Is Technology Making Us Bible Illiterate?We can't deny there's a major Biblical literacy problem. Is technology to blame?...
What is the Great American Smokeout?An estimated 42.1 million American adults smoke cigarettes with over 400,000...
More from Beliefnet


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Email this article from PlasticsNews.com
Uponor taps geothermal energy for new HQ
VANTAA, FINLAND (Jan. 3, 11:10 a.m. ET) — Uponor Oyj is relocating its head office to new premises in Vantaa. According to the company, the facility is a low-energy building designed to combat climate change.
More Events > Upcoming Events
Most Popular
Sabic dissolving Innovative Plastics unit, leaving Pittsfield, Mass., HQ
NEWS Thursday, October 08
The story behind those plastics-eating worms
BLOG10 Thursday, October 08
Plastics News Now: Processors, machine makers open doors for Manufacturing Day
MULTIMEDIA01 Thursday, October 08
North American plastic box makers merge
NEWS Wednesday, October 07
NEWS Wednesday, October 07


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Get the latest Flash player
Date: 2 years ago
Runtime: 6:05
Views: 34,564
Masturbating to Orgasm on New Years Eve
What a way to send off the old year :-) With a bang ... or rather a popping and pulsating wet orgasm.
wet, cumming, milf, shaved, orgasm, masturbate, finger, closeup, rubbing, dripping, soaked, contractions, pulsing, vulva
Top Comments
All Comments
I would love to sink my big dick into you. So gorgeous....
This girls videos are gorgeous. Her cunt is beautiful, and she produces so much delicious cream. She must be a delight to eat, I have never had so many cums watching a girl.
Have just blown my load watching you stroke your BEAUTIFUL pussy! I love the you play with yout wet wet creamy pussy. I would certainly lick it all up, then tongue fuck you. It is a real pity you were alone for New Year's Eve!
Thanks for the show,
Baz xxx
PS: I have added it to my favourites.
just beautiful!
i want lick it
wow, i'd like to taste your beautiful wet pussy!!
omg...id love a lick..
I'd love to have a couple of fingers up your love hole when you orgas' out....feel those pulsations from the inside out and feel your VJ tent out during that fabulous orgasm!!
very sexy and hotttt
thats a meal! feed me baby!
with sound next time plz ! great video !


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Did you know you have an aura? This isn't, however, the metaphysical variety caused by our electromagnetic energy. This one is entirely chemical in nature and can be detected not by a psychic third eye, but the nose.Read More
Hand Hygiene, Infection Prevention and Food Safety Blog
Social media use has been increasing steadily for a number of years. As the technology evolves, more and more people are embracing it in their professional lives and realizing its benefits in sharing information, networking and advertising. Healthcare professionals and infection preventionists are among those that are engaging in conversations online about the issues that matter most to them in their daily work lives - like infection prevention, improving hand hygiene compliance rates, pandemic planning and patient safety.Read More
Every year, up to 7.5 million Canadians1 and 62 million Americans will get the flu and become sick. The direct cost of all workplace absenteeism is estimated at 2.4% of gross annual payroll.2 As a result, seasonal flu has a significant impact on employers and the general public. Direct medical costs, for example, are estimated in the US at $10 billion annually and more than $16 billion in lost earnings.3 Indirect costs include lost productivity, replacement workers and a reduction in customer satisfaction. Combining both direct and indirect costs significantly increases the financial impact of absenteeism on businesses globally.Read More
Topics: Influenza, Absenteeism, Infection Prevention - Workplace and Public Areas
Based on recent television, films and writing, one might assume the human race's biggest threats are, in some order: zombies, aliens, evil robots and giant asteroids. Luckily, Hollywood often goes for shock value over realism – these threats probably shouldn't keep you up at night. But that doesn't mean there aren't real dangers that could emerge to threaten mankind's existence. If it does happen, it is likely to be something that's happened to the species before.
A nation of animal lovers
It is estimated that 57% of households in Canada have one or more pets with cats being most popular (7.9 million) closely followed by dogs (5.9 million). There is a trend for the more exotic pet such as snakes, reptiles, amphibians, hedgehogs and even pigs. Then of course there are the more common pets such as fish along with the pocket pets (mice, hamsters, rats, rabbits).
There are several reasons why people keep pets with the most obvious being as a companion, reducing stress and teaching children to have a caring nature. However, the negative aspects of pet ownership beyond being woken up with the sun or coming home to find a deposit on your floor, is the potential of contracting pathogens that could lead to potential fatal conditions.Read More
It's the end of summer and back to school preparations are in full swing in most households and schools around the globe. Likewise, educational practitioners are preparing their schools for a large amount of new students to flood the classrooms and hallways. Hundreds of bodies and hands, mean a lot of germs spreading around the school, and a lot of reasons to ensure your school is ready to reduce the spread of infection.
Here is a list of three articles on the topic of infection prevention in schools and campuses that we recommend in preparation for the back to school hustle:
Read More
The practice of hand hygiene is absolutely necessary to prevent the spread of infections. Yet, this potentially lifesaving procedure continues to be left out of the minds of many a healthcare worker. Making the situation worse is the unexpected challenge presented when attempting to improve frequency.
Read More
Have you gone to work while you were sick? I don't mean a little headache, or a runny nose. But really sick: a high fever, vomiting and diarrhea, significant coughing and sneezing? Well, don't feel bad. You're in good company. Doctors do it too! A new study that was just published in JAMA Pediatrics studied why physicians and advanced practice clinicians (APCs) in The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) work while sick (5). The authors administered an anonymous survey in 2014 to 459 attending physicians and 470 APCs (registered nurse practitioners, physician assistants, clinical nurse specialists, certified registered nurse anesthetists, and certified nurse midwives). The main outcomes of interest were: how frequently this occurs, why this continues to occur in healthcare workers, and whether the workers perceive that this may put their patients at risk (5).
Read More
We all know by now that proper hand washing is the best way to stop the spread of bacteria; in fact 80% of germs are spread by hands alone! We do our very best to properly wash our hands after using the restroom, before and after we eat and multiple times in between. We also assume that others are doing the same thing. However, studies show that only 1 in 5 people wash their hands, and of those that do, only 30% use soap!Read More
It's amazing how attached people are to their cell phones. Many people will answer them without any thought of what else is going on. It's something I've seen in veterinary hospitals where wireless or cell phones are the primary mode of internal communication. The natural tendency to answer the phone often overrides the thought process of "are my hands covered in pus, blood or some other gross material that I should perhaps remove before touching this piece of plastic that will spend a lot of time against my face and which may go home with me?" We've grown some interesting things from cell phones and pagers, as have others.Read More
Topics: Infection Prevention in Healthcare, Infection Prevention - Workplace and Public Areas


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Revolutionize customer engagement with SAP 360 Customer – a completely new approach that combines our market-proven CRM software with the latest in analytics, cloud, enterprise mobility, collaboration and social media solutions. Powered by our lightning-quick in-memory platform, SAP HANA, SAP 360 Customer delivers real-time customer insight, real-time interactions, and real-time execution.
Personalization is more than knowing your customer's name, it's about the sweet spot where the right offer at the right time triggers a purchase. That's exactly what the hybris commerce platform from SAP helps companies do.
The fun of selling does not stop once the deal is signed. Choose a sales application that eliminates administrative work – so you can spend more time celebrating your win.
What's life like for an Italian coffee maker with a New York attitude working in an office full of interesting characters? It's pretty boring – until things go horribly wrong and caffeine deprivation sets in. Can customer service save the day? Will Vinnie ever be himself again?
Want to learn more about these SAP solutions?
Create sincere, 1:1 customer experiences with real-time insight into needs, preferences, and predicted behavior – with CRM run on our in-memory platform, SAP HANA.
Supercharge your sales, service, and marketing activities with real-time customer insights – using quick-to-deploy CRM software powered by SAP HANA.
Equip your marketing, sales, and service teams with the tools and insights they need deliver exceptional customer experiences – with these cloud-based solutions.
Drive profitable revenue growth through focused sales execution – with support for everything from sales planning to sales analytics.
Accurately target your audiences and deliver personalized and relevant messages that your audience will find valuable – thanks to our CRM marketing software.
Support all facets of your customer service organization, from contract management to marketing with help from SAP Customer Relationship Management service capabilities.
Bring together people, info, apps, and processes to solve business-critical problems and drive results – with our secure social collaboration software.
Equip your reps with the critical insights and information they need to be prepared for every sales conversation – anytime, anywhere – with our mobile sales apps.
Give your field engineers and service reps quick access to the right resources and information at the point of service – with our mobile service apps.
Visualize and analyze customer value, plan more effective sales tactics – and identify the right target audience for your marketing, sales, and service initiatives.


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Dialogue is an integral part of the Clarion Project's mission. Moderate Muslims, those most affected by Islamic extremism, need to be given a platform from which to explain the issues and challenges from their vantage point. Ignoring these critical voices is as dangerous as it is uncaring. Clarion Project brings those voices here to tell their stories.
- Scientist, Activist, Beauty Queen - Meet Fabiola al-Ibrahim 9/16/15
- Stopping FGM in Somalia, One Girl at a Time 9/1/15
- Fighting to Separate Religion & State in Iran 8/25/15
- Baghdad, Where Officials Fire on Crowds to Move Traffic 8/20/15
- Why Secularism is Vital for the Kurdish Constitution 8/11/15
- Raha Bahreini: Iran is Ruthlessly Crushing All Dissent 7/21/15
- Yahya Assiri: The Saudi Regime Must Change or It Must Go 7/14/15
- From Kurdistan With Luv 7/6/15
- Shireen Qudosi: Not All Ideas Are Equal 6/28/15
- Afrah Nasser: We're in the First Five Minutes of This Revolution 6/15/15
More Alternative Voices
- 1 of 8
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Darlene is a Joplin tornado survivor. She became our friend during a mission trip there and we felt the need to share her story.
Editor,Director and Shooter -Bret Bourquin
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LAUSANNE, Switzerland - Tibetan activists demonstrated outside the International Olympic Committee's headquarters on Tuesday, demanding the Himalayan region and three neighbouring provinces be withdrawn from the Beijing Olympics torch relay.
Protesters handed over a letter from the International Tibet Support Network which also urged the IOC to "make a public statement about the discrepancy between China's promises to uphold human rights... and its violent crackdown in Tibet over the last five days."
"We are saddened and feel that the IOC has failed in its job of telling the Chinese people that this is not what the world expects," the president of Tibet's unofficial Olympic Committee Wangpo Tethong said as he handed over the letter, signed by 150 Tibetan organisations.
Around 600 pro-Tibet demonstrators gathered outside the building, carrying banners that accused the IOC and its president Jacques Rogge of tacitly encouraging the Chinese government's military crackdown.
One banner read "Mr Rogge, your silence is killing the Tibetans", while another asked "IOC, how can you accept the bloodshed in Tibet?"
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao earlier said the riots in the Himalayan region had been incited with the aim of sabotaging the Aug. 8-24 Games and reiterated China's view that the Olympics should not be politicised.
Anti-China protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa turned ugly on Friday and threaten to overshadow the run-up to the Olympic Games, which Beijing hoped would project an image of a united and prosperous society.
The torch relay, which starts next Monday when the Olympic flame is lit in Ancient Olympia, Greece, is scheduled to go to Tibet twice.
The International Tibet Support Network said its letter to the IOC had demanded that the torch relay not go through Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces, all home to ethnic Tibetans.
"Unless the IOC wants the Olympic Torch to become a symbol of bloodshed and oppression, they must immediately withdraw all Tibetan provinces from the Olympic Torch relay route," a spokesperson was quoted as saying in the statement.
The torch relay schedule was drawn up by the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) before being given rubber-stamp approval by the IOC last year.
The IOC still expects the relay to go according to schedule.
"The IOC adds its voice to the world's desire for a peaceful resolution to the tensions of the past days in Tibet.
The Olympic Torch Relay, which embodies the Olympic values of friendship, respect and excellence, is due to travel to Lhasa in June," it said in a statement late on Monday.
"The Olympic Torch is a powerful symbol which inspires people from all over the world to overcome their differences and come together in mutual understanding in anticipation of the Games which it heralds.
"The IOC's expectation is that the 2008 torch relay will go ahead as planned," it said.
Wen earlier accused the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of orchestrating the riots that erupted in Lhasa last week, leaving dozens dead.
"We need to respect the principles of the Olympics and the Olympic charter. That is, we should not politicise the Olympic Games," he told a news conference.
"In fact, you the reporter can see the essence of the incident that recently occurred in Tibet. They wanted to incite the sabotage of the Olympic Games in order to achieve their unspeakable goal."
The Dalai Lama and his supporters in exile have repeatedly denied that they were behind the violence. The Dali Lama has also expressed support for the Games.
Rogge said on Monday that no governments had called for a boycott of the Olympics over Tibet.
The United States, which led a major boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, has no intention to stop its athletes from going to Beijing, according the United States Olympic Committee.
But in Taiwan, which China considers its own, presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou, whose KMT Party has traditionally favoured better ties with China, said on Tuesday he would consider an Olympic boycott if elected on Saturday.
Wen denied accusations China had embarked on a crackdown on dissent in the run-up to the Games.
"As for the critics' view that China is trying to increase its efforts to arrest dissidents ahead of the Olympic Games, I think all these accusations are unfounded," he said.
Wen said China's aim was to "host an even better Olympics, so that the athletes are happy and the people of the whole world are happy.
"But we're still not a developed country so in the work of preparing for the Olympic Games it's difficult for us to avoid all sorts of problems," he said. "But the Chinese people are sincerely heartfelt in wanting to hold a successful Olympics."
Take a look at the Countdown to Beijing blog at http://blogs.reuters.com/china


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The girls and I left Thursday after swimming lessons to drive to my parents' in Sugarcreek. I forgot to pack lunches (or just didn't feel like it ;-) and so to avoid fast food or save money or something (?) we ran into Target to grab something for lunch, which took sixty-seven minutes and cost three times the fast food. We emerged with three bags of school supplies and two world maps which means that school is in fact going to happen again, somehow, though I am doing a grand job at ignoring reality.
(Also: three processed kid lunches contained within about sixty yards of packaging. My kids got to make their own turkey sandwiches with fake cheese in the car and this was the bestlunchever! and for about ten minutes I was the bestmomever!)
Friday I went to an event to celebrate the The Budget's 125th Anniversary. I write an article for the local section. But there is a second section which is made up of letters sent from 900 Amish communities all over the Americas. The letters share details of their community- the crops and weather, who is visiting, who is sick, etc. It is a way for communities to keep in touch with one another- an original facebook. I just love this paper, and community. I am so glad to be a part of it.
We drove home late Friday evening and I worked all day Saturday. Just enough time to unpack the car, and pack it back up again Sunday morning. Jim had to work Sunday, the girls and I headed to Mohican state park to camp with my family. Stop at the mall to buy my mom a birthday gift. Stop at Wal-mart for prepackaged boxed lunches all over again. (Tell me one quick lunch that is not guilt-inducing? I'm all out of ideas). Stop to buy a birthday cake. Stop for the bathroom. We can make this drive last allllll day.
We got to float down a river and eat burnt marshmallows and do all the summer things within about twenty-four hours. Home again last night, to no groceries and a week's worth of laundry and soggy towels and muddy shoes.
And a broken washer.
That was four trips in the car and one child who has a really difficult time in the car, which makes it really difficult for the rest of us. Four times packing and unpacking, a bazillion soggy towels and a dirty van and too much sugar. Maybe this weekend was all I needed to be almost, just a little bit ready for Summer's end. Almost.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Every summer has a theme and for our family this has been a summer of work. We've worked on the house, worked in the yard, worked on Math, worked on our bad attitudes. I have spent the summer working on the class I'm going to teach for our co-op. We have worked to ready the house for company and worked together cleaning up. I began a part-time job this spring. Summer is Jim's busy season at work and some weeks all we do is pass each other- quite literally- as he comes home from work and I leave for work; I work one weekend day and he works the other.
I like to work. I am glad for all of the ways I need to work right now.
I like my job. It is a good job, the hours are what I need and I am thankful for it. It is stretching me in ways I need to be stretched. I've tried to blog about it but it is too complicated and too boring to tell all the details; what and how and why I believe the Lord led me to it. And because I can be conflicted about everything, I've needed to sort and re-sort it out in my head; is this work meaningful or important?
Jim reminds me that most people don't get to do work that feels all that meaningful. It is the fallen condition of work. For now, my work is to make money and bless my family. I have a new sensitivity for people doing hard, meaningless work forty hours a week. I think a lot about this. There is a great lack of teaching on this subject.
But we can work as unto the Lord. We can offer our work to Christ. We can love our co-workers and pray for them. We can pray always. And Christ is there.
p.s. One night I was lamenting that I don't have contemplative time anymore. I said to Jim,I've not been reading or writing like I used to. My mind is too full of details, I only think in logical ways anymore. I feel shallow. My husband's ever-logical, wry response; Who gets to live a contemplative life all the time? Welcome to the world of the rest of us shallow people who have to go to work everyday to make money. Me, laughing: That's true. Thank you for being an engineer so I can be a mystic. ;-)
Thursday, June 11, 2015
buy yourself flowers
: because I have this habit of questioning every decision I ever make (my life's calling/ where to live/ how to pray/ crushed or diced tomatoes)
: because living on the surface is only floating
: because the one thing I sense the Lord instructing me to do is to lighten the heck up
: because I want a couple more kids and a front porch and fancy Sunday dinner, every week, and to write books and to wander and to live next door to all my favorite people
: because I want my kids to grow up in the city and the country
: because I can't believe my kids are growing up
: because today is only ten days away from the first day of summer and this is the very best time of year
: because I am homesick and content and anticipating, all at the same time
: because the Cavs
: because more and more I see how lost is the human condition apart from Christ
: because it is possible one day to just give up and to quit dreaming and stop growing and you aren't even dead yet, and I am opening all the windows and brewing strong coffee and buying myself flowers because I want to stay wide awake
: because living on the surface is only floating
: because the one thing I sense the Lord instructing me to do is to lighten the heck up
: because I want a couple more kids and a front porch and fancy Sunday dinner, every week, and to write books and to wander and to live next door to all my favorite people
: because I want my kids to grow up in the city and the country
: because I can't believe my kids are growing up
: because today is only ten days away from the first day of summer and this is the very best time of year
: because I am homesick and content and anticipating, all at the same time
: because the Cavs
: because more and more I see how lost is the human condition apart from Christ
: because it is possible one day to just give up and to quit dreaming and stop growing and you aren't even dead yet, and I am opening all the windows and brewing strong coffee and buying myself flowers because I want to stay wide awake
Thursday, June 4, 2015
It has been a long while and there is so much water under the bridge. I've been a bit of a muddle anyway, change does that to me, the new job and end of school, house projects, relatives came to visit- we stretched the little house but we did just fine- and this week I have the flu. Ugh. There is nothing I hate more than wasting time, and the first week of June when I want to be digging or planting or wading or a hundred things but lying in bed certainly isn't one of them.
Well then, a daybook:
Outside my window: I am visiting my parents for the day, so my view today is green grass and trees, a hay field being mowed. Green green grass is vibrant this time of year, and watching my kids run in it one of the best views of summer.
Thinking: about our summer routine and how to make summer somehow fresh and interesting even though we are still at home and doing our thing just like every other season.
: about my parenting, always; what do we need to change, what am I not seeing?
: about the idea of writing your own obituary, how do I hope to have lived and what habits do I need to change that I might?
: about how we construct our own existence, we build the house we live in, by our thoughts, and that by the time one reaches old age we are pretty much settled into the house we've built, we don't want to change, our minds have made us; and therefore how important it is that we take every thought captive, that the most basic habits of our minds are rooted in faith, offered to Christ, saturated in love . . . that I would build a life of faith by a lifetime of faithful thinking. (As a man thinketh in his heart so is he. -Pr.23:7)
Thankful: to be a mom to three funny, passionate, creative, smart, strong girls and to get to help nurture who they will become.
Creating: a basic, easy work wardrobe that I don't have to think about.
Hoping: to feel better soon
In the kitchen: not much. Working evenings means I try to have dinner ready before I leave, and I've been keeping things simple; roasted potatoes and seasoned meat in the le creuset, tacos or salad are staples.
Reading: Motivate Your Child by Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller (I got to hear them speak at the Midwest Homeschool Convention)
In the homeschool room: Math, math facts, and cursive. Hooked on Phonics from the library for Josie for the summer.
One of my favorite things: Last night, after several days of feeling like all I do is repeat myself, all day long; the same instructions, all day long, hearing myself say the same correction over and over . . . I asked the girls to tell me something I say to them all the time . . . their answer was I love you.
The job: is good. The best part? Two hours of cleaning a night = two hours for prayer and solitude. Glory. Plenty of over-thinking thoughts on what I'm learning from the job . . . soon.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
laundry and honey
I was awake in the night and thinking, how beautiful it is to live. This, our little routines and our little sleeps, circling the seasons, taking care of each other. Laundry, three meals and cleaning up, picking up, our daily, gorgeous ordinary. It is honey from the rock, let me tell you, I have been broken and remade so many times on this journey.
I began a job this month and while I keep telling myself nothing is ending, only a beginning, it does mark an end; the end of baby days and baby nights, the end of a child on my hip, needing, always needing. Goodnight Moon.
The truth is I am not ready, not ready to go. Here we are, sleeping all night and in the day on the move, a place for everything, all of the baby things donated, all but the crib, and I find myself awake in the middle of the night asking the Lord for one more, two more? Here, my arms, and here, my hip, my heart, here, these plates, this table, my sleepless nights, this, its what I do, there is more to give.
Another door opens but I'm not closing this one. Even if not my own body which groans and makes room, there is more work to do, a whole lonely world. More circling, more laundry, more honey. Hold the door, my arms have stretched to the moon. Come in, come in.
This ever my true work, this breaking and remaking, this circling. Taking care, picking up. This my heart. It is true, you know, a mother's work is never done.
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