Crystal’s Neighborhood

If you read the comments on yesterday's post, you'll know that today leaves the bonobos in the dust for VOLES!

Voles are a small rodent and are often confused with mice, moles, and rats, and are only found in the northern hemisphere. There are 155 species of voles (although these guys say 124), including pine, water, mountain, etc. They will eat a wide variety of food, from bark to dead animals and insects. They are quite fond of roots and bulbs, often killing the plant before the gardener realizes the animals are even there.

And hey, voles even have their own website! I think they should send one of their own out to design classes, though, to spruce the page up a bit. They're small, they could sneak into class in someone's backpack.

Apparently voles deserve more attention. Purdue University states that they are the fastest evolving mammal and are a bit of a genetic enigma.

Today's final vole lesson is taught in pictures:

Mole not vole

Vole not mole

1 comment

So, who wants to throw out a topic for tomorrow's post?

Nablo1109

• Ben and I rode our motorcycles south and east through a bit of Amish country. Hills and curves OH MY!
  
• Finished painting front door "wild currant" - but still to tacky to hang back up.
• Finished painting the halls, the guest bedrooms, the offices, the kitchen, the sun room and entry. (thanks to Pat, Carol and Pete)
• Ordered new office furniture for Ben - I'll be pulling pieces from his office to make mine work better.
• Wired more of the house for TV cable and internet (thanks to Andy and Steve).
• Tomorrow I pick up the last of the family room furniture and talk to the carpet folks about new carpet for Ben's office and all the bedrooms (Ben gets brown, bedrooms get beige)
  
• Put together one of two side tables for our bedroom (they match patty's lights) and have another for living room
• Have an order holding on Overstock for the "couples" guest bedroom - holding out for the bed frame I want.
• Cleaned up the kitchen from the 4 days of painting and home projects
• Fixed the lighting in the entry, sun room

And when all done, I was able to cook dinner and eat with Benny! I have decided to "master" the electric cooktop before pulling it out and replacing it! I did not burn dinner! Hurray!

So you know, I miss

• My kids
• My girlfriends
• Whole Foods (especially the soaps and salad bar)
• Sushi
• Trader Joes (especially the frozen foods)
• San Francisco (in general)
• The beach (even through I did not get there often)
• My kids (again, because I really really wish they could come visit my new home!)
• And all our CA friends - Too many to list y'all - but you know who you are.
  

Asheville is really a cool funky small city.  It's more or less a smaller version of NYC but full of hippies and weird things.  "Keep Asheville weird", so say the bumper stickers everywhere.  We have fallen in love with this area and we just found our "vegan's heaven" - Earth Fare the healthy supermarket.  We found a few different vegan cakes, all kinds of vegan eats and treats ready to go, and even baked vegan pot pies.  The prices are rather reasonable, but I know that's because we just left Vermont not long ago where everything seems so dearly priced.  I still have no time or will to cook, but Earth Fare is going to sustain us in the meantime besides hubby's decadent pastas.  Until then, life is good, and I wish all of you well.

How It Is

At the far end of the enormous Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern is a correspondingly huge metal box: thirty metres long, thirteen metres high and sitting on two-metre stilts. One end of the box is open with a metal ramp leading up to the pitch-black interior. The artwork entitled How It Is by Miroslaw Balka is said to allude to the Holocaust, whereby the huge metal container is akin to the trucks that took the Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz.

Walking up the steel ramp towards the vast dark opening of the box is certainly unsettling. Even the sound and vibrations of footsteps on the metal ramp feels cold. Once you are inside the structure it gets progressively darker as your move further in. People beside you become less discernable and those at more than an arms length away cannot be seen at all. Were it not for the cheerful and exited chatter of most of the visitors the experience would have been decidedly eerie.  

I went in with my sister while her boyfriend remained outside taking pictures. Once we had gone in some way and I could no longer make out or hear any people in front of us I stopped so that my sister’s boyfriend could catch up with us. While we waited for him we simply appreciated the odd sensation of being in a dark box. Before long my sister’s boyfriend appeared beside us. I was surprised that he managed to find us so quickly but also glad because I was eager to step into the absolute darkness that lay ahead. As I took a step forward though I came smack up against the back end of the structure. The wall was lined in soft black velvet, which felt nice to touch and was as unexpected as the wall itself. Turning around I was surprised to see how much more brightly lit the box now seemed and how close the entrance actually was. I had expected it to be further away.

For me the experience of walking into the box was comparable to ones journey through life: as you move forward you don’t actually know what is coming next or whom you will bump into. You might link arms with someone and walk beside others but most of the people you see or hear you’ll never know. When you reach the end it comes as a surprise, it’s disappointing, although you knew it was coming all along. Like the unexpected touch of velvet on the box however death is probably comforting. Our lives will also most likely seem like a much quicker journey than we imagined when we look back on them. Even at this point my life seems to have passed by ever so quickly. Lastly, I imagine that our lives in retrospect will seem far simpler than we experienced them to be, just as the box was much brighter looking back towards the entrance where we started out.

Since the box is supported on stilts you can walk underneath it and hear the footsteps of those inside. If the box is symbolic of life then the space under the box could be likened to the netherworld of ghosts perhaps, or the life one leads after we have left this box that we are now in. I don’t believe in life after death mind you, but if there were such a thing I would imagine that it would eclipse life as the Turbine Hall eclipses the box. Perhaps the after-afterlife would be the world outside of the Tate Modern and so on, until such a point that we live a space that is infinite. 

Vox friends & readers:

I feel very bittersweet announcing that I'm another person jumping ship: I'm moving Books, the Universe, and Everything over to Wordpress.

My main three reasons for leaving Vox are:
1. The requirement for people to register to leave comments.
2. The inability to control how much of each post gets published in the RSS feed. (I hate that RSS subscribers can't see my full posts.)
3. The lack of formatting and style control.

As long as my Vox friends are still interested, I will be posting links on Vox whenever I have new posts on Wordpress. You can comment on Vox, or on Wordpress - whatever you prefer.  

Additionally, if you'd like to stay up to date on my posts, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow Books, the Universe & Everything on Facebook. (Links to new posts will appear in your news feed.)

My new Wordpress blog is located here:
http://www.booksuniverseeverything.com/

I have moved all 407 posts from Vox over to Wordpress - and each post links back to the original post on Vox to read the comments.

And while this definitely isn't goodbye, I just want to take a moment to thank all my Vox neighbors. It's been a pleasure getting to know you and to read your wonderful blogs. I look forward to continuing to read & comment on my Neighborhood page, and will do so as long as there are posts there to read. 

I'm excited for Books, the Universe, and Everything's new home, but I'm sad to leave Vox as well. I hope that my neighbors on Vox will continue to follow me at my new location.
 

Links to my first Wordpress posts:
-October's Polysyllabic Spree
-New Home & Book Giveaway

So, I've been using my Typepad account instead of VOX, and whenever I come back over this way I have shit loads of spam comments to delete. Surely, VOX, if you delete a spam account, it should automatically delete all of the spam comments they've left as well?

Automatic posting from my Twitter Account:

• 22:40 Wonderful ballet program tonite. With the bad weather, it looked like a number of folks didn't make it which is too bad.
• 08:12 Slept in & moving slow. More stormy weather on its way. A good day for soup-making and knitting.
• 08:49 Colonoscopy this week. Researching semi-creative ideas for clear liquid diet (required the day before). Maybe some homemade beef broth.
• 09:29 Going to get back into the swing of #BBA this weekend with bagels. Will bake Monday morning to take to staff meeting, assuming all goes well
• 10:49 It's a dark and stormy.... Saturday morning. Amazing how dark it is. I wanted to plant some mums this weekend - crossing that off the list.
• 16:15 This is a potato-soup-and-cornbread sorta day.
• 16:38 Whenever I'm peeling a batch of potatoes, I feel like I'm on KP duty in one of those old army movies.
• 18:53 Getting ready for symphony - all Russian program tonight if my memory serves me right.

San Jose 2008 342

Our nephew Shane and his girlfriend Maggie eloped yesterday in Atlanta.  We are very happy for them and will see them on Thanksgiving at Charlotte and Randy's house.

A year ago tomorrow Kevin's brother Shawn married Kim in San Jose.  Kevin arrived in California the day Proposition 8 passed to celebrate his brother's happiness.  This week we got to watch people a thousand miles away vote on the civil rights of their fellow citizens in the state of Maine.

So, since we have lived in Nashville we have celebrated our nephew Billy's wedding, Shawn's, Shane's, and in June next year Megan and Ryan will be married. My sister and her boyfriend Bob eloped also.

If, suppose, I died tomorrow Kevin would be left alone, lose his Medical Insurance, forfeit my pension, and have to ask my family's permission to bury me. 

Each time we celebrate the union of those we love we quietly get to reflect on just what the implications are for us.  We have only been together for 18 years. Collectively more than all our newly married loved ones combined as far as the time they have been together prior to getting married. There has been no party or anniversary wishes.  No invitations to send out or thank you notes to write.

But we have each other for as long as we are alive and perhaps one day somebody will "allow" us the same basic civil rights as the people in our lives have.

As you know we love our families dearly and support them all and share in their joy each time a milestone occurs.  It would be nice to invite them all to share in our joy but we have decided that we will wait until we can do it legally rather than do something symbolic. They all treat us as though we are married so it would really just be a technicality anyhow. Oh, and then there are the 1,200 legal rights we would enjoy in addition to a new toaster and a few gift cards.