Wisdom of the Trowel: Swimming in powerpoint slides

Ola!

I feel I've been silent too long!!! Truth is I've been crash prepping for a survey course I'm teaching this fall, still helping with campaigning (it's run-off time), still trying to improve my food storage skills (peak oil can be fun and instructive despite the scariness!), still trying to beat the heat, and still trying to relax after all that. So...my posts may be few and far between (or not, who knows) for a month or so. AND in 3 1/2 weeks my lover and I are taking a belated honeymoon to Greece! Woohoo! I'd feel guilty about the carbon issues except that it will very likely be our last trip abroad (besides O Canada and El Mexico) maybe ever (unless newer, better, cheaper technology develops fast and I don't mean hot air balloons). So it's going to be a busy month!

Tara, at Enough..., gave me an award for my quest for knowledge and frequent invocation of the triple word score - thank you, Tara! Using large words in public makes me feel that my indentured servitude with Sallie Mae is somehow worth it. Some.How.

In kind, here are few fun and random facts about moi:

1) Je parle francais. Au moins, j'ai parlé francais auparavant - which is probably self-evident by the spelling and grammar errors. My folks lived abroad for a little over five years so I spent time in France, the Philippines, Malaysia, and New Caledonia.

2) I spent 18 magical months working with these guys: Pongo and Grub back in 2000.

3) I am a twin.

4) My grandmother's family on her father's side was in the land run. My great-grandmother was an educated well-to-do woman who graduated from Boston College in the early 1900s but found herself a spinster at 28! She decided to make an adventurous trip out to Oklahoma to see her cousins and ended up meeting my dashingly good looking (but illiterate) great-grandfather who roughnecked on oil rigs. They married. They had four kids. She had a stunning nervous breakdown from which she only partially recovered. They never divorced but lived across the street from one another in matching tar paper shacks. Aren't people fascinating?

5) I am distantly related to Edgar Allan Poe but come without the torment or the inspiration.

Some pictures before I go!