I dithered back and forth about what new yarn to use and what new stitch pattern to try, until I drove myself nuts. Stephanie’s not feeling well, and I don’t feel great either, so I opted for comfort, and grabbed scrap yarn and the Roku remote. I’ve been watching Season 2 of MI:5 and knitting away on a easy project rather than stressing about creating some fantastic new thing.
We had a pretty calm but eventful year in 2009. I spend a chunk of January getting our staircase room painted, and we also stripped the wallpaper and painted a bedroom at Stephanie’s rental house. I also went back on a walk through of my former home at 2165 N. Penn. I discovered that although I love the house, I don’t miss it at all.
New paint at our house
At the end of February, we visited our friends Daniel and Melissa in Michigan while Stephanie competed in the Deborah Burgoyne North American Invitational 2009. We had a wonderful time with our hosts, and I discovered I had no idea how to take good photos of skating with my camera, as you can tell.
Stephanie on the ice.
In March, we planted lots of flowers in containers on the porch and in flowerbeds, and we built new bookshelves from Ikea for Stephanie’s books in the dining room — a much more pleasant space now that we’ve rescued all her books from boxes and organized them.
In April, I started taking more photo walks around Indianapolis, and began a much-needed photography class.
In May, I worked on my photography at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and by snapping lots of images of flowers and of friends.
In June, I turned 41 and we had a pizza picnic in our backyard to celebrate.
And at the end of the month, we joined the Eastern Caravan with other New Beetle owners to Roswell, New Mexico for the Return to Roswell car show. It was a nice long, fun trip and a a great time to see lots of Stephanie’s friends (both human and VW).
During the trip I took one of my all-time favorite photos of a ragged man with a three-legged dog:
In July, I got way behind in my photo editing because we were so active, and I still haven’t edited all the photos from Stephanie’s visit from her niece Raven, or from our trip to Moline, Illinois for my cousin Katie’s wedding. I participated in the Scott Kelby photo walk along the Canal in Indy, though, and took a few other nice photos:
in August, we bought a scooter, so we spent a lot of time studying for learners motorcycle permits and learning to ride it.
We also spent time with friends and visited the State Fair.
Stephanie and I both started a knitting class in mid-May of this 2009, but it wasn’t until August that I really had any pictures of projects to show off.
In September, I continued to lag behind on the photos. We had a Labor Day cookout, and spent more time with friends.
October was another busy, busy month. My sister had a new baby – Penelope – over in England, for one thing, so I have four nieces (Erika, Riley, Annabelle and now Penny).
We attended the IndieHandicraft Exchange:
Went to a friend’s solo photography show:
Went to a progressive mystery play at a mansion in our neighborhood:
Hosted a praying mantis on our porch:
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Went to see They Might be Giants at the Vogue:
Decorated for Halloween:
Took lots of walks around the neighborhood before it got too cold:
And then drove to Durham, North Carolina to see our friends Lisa and Jason get married:
Took lots of photos of Fall Color:
And attended our friend Garrett and David’s Halloween party:
November was equally busy. We attended Johnathan’s birthday:
And spend weekend after weekend raking leaves. And raking, and raking, and raking…
We went to a Naptown Roller Girls double-header bout:
And went out to eat a few times:
And at the end of November, we drove to Iowa to visit our family at my grandparent’s farm for Thanksgiving.
In December, we kicked off the holidays by baking cookies for a White Elephant gift exchange hosted at our house, after decorating.
We also did a lot more knitting:
Went to a birthday party:
And we went to several Christmas gatherings both here in town and up north with Stephanie’s family and friends.
2009 was a productive year for us. I learned some new skills and honed some old ones, and spent quality time with family and friends. I’ve done a lot less writing this year than in past ones, and taken a lot more photos instead. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad one – I’m fairly happy with what I’ve accomplished.
I also have about 10 years of photos on Flickr now. I took my first digital photos in 1999, bought my first digital camera in 2000, and have gone through three cameras since. I’d do a retrospective of the whole decade, but I’ve already made this post much longer than I ever intended to.
I think the first decade of this millennium was a really unfortunately one in many ways, and I have hope that the next will go much better. I plan to spend the next ten years writing about and photographing it as well.
And of all the photos I’ve taken this year, this is a gallery of my very favorite ones.
Finished my striped scarf, and am working away on a Santa hat at
Stephanie’s dad’s house while Stephanie and her dad fix dinner.
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale
Wow – time to wrap up the year, and I’m utterly at loose ends with various projects. I’ve been working steadily on knitting projects, and organizing the house, two areas where we’ve made some pretty big gains. We’re steadily getting through the mounds of papers that need to be filed or thrown out, with the help of our organization lady. The room is becoming what we want it to be – a guest room where people can visit from out of town, and a crafting room where we can sit and work on craft projects. Don’t get me wrong – it still needs LOTS of work – there are still tons of boxes to go through and purge, and we’re in danger of acquiring new crap to replace all the old, but it’s starting to look more like what it should look like.
The knitting is fun and very relaxing. I’m concerned though, about what I really want to do with it. It’s enjoyable to make things for people, but it’s not exactly a lever that will move the world.
We’ve spend all the weekends of November bagging leaves for the most part (we really grabbed a lot of time back by paying someone to pick them up last year!) which is really satisfying, until the next round of them fall off the trees. We currently need to redo the backyard. I’m completely frustrated by how much time and energy this takes, and we don’t even have that many trees; they’re mostly from the neighbors.
I’ve lost complete track of what I’ve read and am woefully behind on photo editing.
I attempted a brief stint at NaNoWriMo but gave up after a few days. That seems to happen at the utterly wrong time of year for me. Why don’t they do it in March? Except that’s about the time I’m driving hard to get a painting project done somewhere in the house though; last year in March I was painting the staircase room I’m in now. But the writing – it’s so hard to do, and my life is too chaotic to achieve it, I think.
And web projects. Boy oh boy. I’ve been neglecting this blog, and my photoblog, and several other domains to remain nameless.
I think I need to make different use of my time at times. I’m frustrated with how little time I have to accomplish things I think are important, and how much time we spend doing stuff that doesn’t move us forward. I’m frustrated by the sheer number of projects we have that remain unfinished, as well.
I went with our friend Mike down to Bloomington to visit our friend Joe and to see Richard Dawkins speak at the IU auditorium last night. He was there to read from and discuss his newest book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
I don’t have the book and haven’t read it, but the lecture was interesting enough that I’ll pick it up. Dawkins is a compelling speaker and like anyone who regularly engages in scientific inquiry, he rigorously examines his own ideas and lays out premise and conclusions well (unlike, say ME). An excerpt from chapter 2 the book:
We can turn to the example of dogs for some important lessons about natural selection. All breeds of dogs are domesticated wolves: not jackals, not coyotes and not foxes. But I need to qualify this in the light of a fascinating theory of the evolution of the dog, which has been most clearly articulated by the American zoologist Raymond Coppinger. The idea is that the evolution of the dog was not just a matter of artificial selection. It was at least as much a case of wolves adapting to the ways of Man by natural selection. Much of the initial domestication of the dog was selfdomestication, mediated by natural, not artificial, selection. Long before we got our hands on the chisels in the artificial selection toolbox, natural selection had already sculpted wolves into self-domesticated “village dogs” without any human intervention.
Only later did humans adopt these village dogs and transmogrify them, separately and comprehensively, into the rainbow spectrum of breeds that today grace (if grace is the word) Crufts and similar pageants of canine achievement and beauty (if beauty is the word).
Coppinger points out that when domestic animals break free and go feral for many generations, they usually revert to something close to their wild ancestor. We might expect feral dogs, therefore, to become rather wolf-like. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, dogs left to go feral seem to become the ubiquitous “village dogs” — “pye-dogs” — that hang around human settlements all over the Third World. This encourages Coppinger’s belief that the dogs on which human breeders finally went to work were wolves no longer. They had already changed themselves into dogs: village dogs, pye-dogs, perhaps dingos.
I’ve had a copy of The God Delusion since I saw Dawkins speak on the Bill Maher show in 2006, but haven’t read more than the first few chapters. I have to admit I put it down a few weeks ago because as I was reading it, I became depressed about the fact that there is no afterlife and that this life is all there is. Terrifying to me. And terrifying that the idea of an afterlife is so strongly comforting to me that I was willing to put down a book and turn away from critical examination of an important subject out of fear. The childhood indoctrination of religious belief has a powerful effect on rational thought.
I’ve written critically about organized religion on this blog, and particularly on the religion of my family – Roman Catholicism. All of that writing has been reactionary in nature (like almost everything I write, I admit) in response to news stories and I haven’t explored the topic of religion in any depth – in truth because I haven’t done that for myself outside of the context of blog writing.
I guess there’s no time like the present, is there? (Especially if this is all the time we have.) I’ll pick The God Delusion back up and complete it, and do the same for Dawkins’s new book as well. And hopefully I’ll have something intelligent to say about them after.
A few thoughts on visiting the IU campus – wow, college students are young, given the questions they asked Dawkins after the lecture. Many of them gushed to him and about him because he’s famous, and it seemed to me that few of them had read his books or even had a clear as picture of what they were about. It’s odd that they’re on a college campus surrounded by the tools of learning and yet they’re so full of not-fully-formed thoughts. And yet they get to have Urban Outfitters on campus, and trucks that do “to your door” cookie delivery. How unfair.