Amazing Places, Amazing People

It's only taken three days to get me addicted to Pinterest. My friend Jennifer, who used to live in Davis and work with the SPCA, now lives in Colorado and she joined around the same time I did. She and I have been busy filling up pin boards with things like Favorite Restaurants, Products I Love, Bucket List, Fun Foods, Animals I like, etc. (some of those are hers, some of those are mine).

So today, when the site has been spotty it has been very difficult. Every time I thought of another thing I wanted to "pin," I would rush to find a photo and then try to pin it to one of my boards and get that dreaded 404 error message.

Fortunately, at the same time, Pinterest was leaving messages of apology in Facebook. People would hear that the site was back up and running again and I assume we'd all rush to pin something new and then it would go down again.

This may be suffering Twitter syndrome, with more people knowing about it, it may be overwhelmed with new users, like me.

However, in the times when I was able to access the board, I put together a list of "Amazing Places I've Visited" and when I look at it it makes me feel good...I've been to a really impressive number of places in the world (everything from the Great Wall in China to the Beer Can House in Houston!). There are those who have traveled a lot more than I have (I'll never go to Petropavlovsk, for example) but I'm no slouch in the "amazing places" department any more.

I also have a board of "Places I Still Want to See," most of which I never will, but it's nice to dream. If you'd like to check out all my boards, this is the link. You click on a photo inside the board you're interested in and it brings up all the photos in that board. If you want to see things in larger size, then click on a specific picture. There are lots more things I want to add to these boards and more boards I want to create, but it's just entirely too much fun. And some of the people, like "OhJoy" and Mary Beth Burrell (who has GREAT board names!) have absolutely fabulous boards. Check 'em out!

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In other, more serious and more meaningful words, the Compassion Philippines bloggers have returned from their week in the Philippines, all of them profoundly changed by the experience.

Stefanie went home with a renewed sense of content that the money of Compassion is being well spent, that this was a good financial investment, and human investment.

Every dollar is audited on at least 3 levels, including an external audit by KPMG. For example, when you give a gift to your child they record it in their books, keep a copy of the receipt (which the child signs), and a picture is taken of the child with their gift.

I've learned that Compassion has quite the reputation for the financial integrity. They are held up by non-profit watch dogs like Charity Navigator as a standard of integrity.

Lindsay, who made this trip at 30 weeks pregnant says,

There is no doubt in my heart that this is a good work. The eternal difference made by sending our resources on ahead to our eternal home by loving on little children. It’s beautiful. The transforming affect of the gospel is taking place through the ministry of Compassion and the power of Jesus’ love.

Tsh writes,

I found it hard to tell my story in the Philippines. The pixel-formed words you saw on this blog didn’t adequately infuse the smell of the slums we puddled through, the eerie green glow of the water growing in the neighborhoods instead of grass. We all returned from our days in order to write to you, and by 11 p.m. or so, when I finally hit “publish,” I was beat.

It’s important to tell an important story well. There’s an injustice, I feel, when something as hauntingly wrong as poverty goes untold to those immersed in wealth. (That’s one of the reasons these Compassion blogger trips happen — so that more people know, and then hopefully take action.)

Michelle sums it up:

I desperately pray that the stories from this trip have changed you in some way. That you’ll live differently now that you know.

The children we’ve met don’t need pity. Pity is worthless and doesn’t accomplish anything.
People in need…need people of action.

Maybe you’ll write a letter.
Maybe you’ll look at your budget.
Maybe you’ll download the Compassion Magazine and look at it with your family.
Maybe you’ll commit to pray for 5 minutes every day this week for the children.
Maybe you’ll eat rice one night a month and talk about those in need.

On the heels of all of this, I discovered that Pedro, my sponsored child in Brasil, has left the program and they are offering me a 4 year old Brasilian boy to take his place. I haven't seen his photo yet, and don't know if I will take him or take one of those >900 children in the Philippines waiting for sponsors.

The need is so great....

Sunday Stealing

Well, I said that Kwizgiver has good memes and I liked today's so I decided to do it:

Sunday Stealing: The Team Jeffie Meme

TRUE OR FALSE

Q: Kissed someone on your friends list? true (my children, some of my friends...or do you mean "that" kind of kiss, in which case, false.

Q: Been arrested? false

Q: Held a snake? true (it peed on me)

Q: Been suspended from school? false

Q: Sang karaoke? false

Q: Done something you told yourself you wouldn't do? true

Q: Laughed until you started crying? true

Q: Caught a snowflake on your tongue? true

Q: Kissed in the rain? true

Q: Sang in the shower? false (I'm too inhibited even to sing in the shower!)

Q: Sat on a roof top? false, I think

Q: Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes on? true (at a family reunion ... EVERYONE was pushed into the pool, even the old 80s aunts!)

Q: Broken a bone? true. I dropped a frozen roast on my toe.

Q: Shaved your head? false

Q: Played a prank on someone? true

Q: Shot a gun? false

Q: Donated Blood? true, every 6-8 weeks

LAST PERSON...

1. You hung out with? Char

2. You texted? Tom

3. You were in a car with? Walt

4. Went to the movies with? Walt and Ruth

5. Person you went to shop with? Walt, I guess--he went off in his direction; I went in mine. He found pants, I didn't.

6. You talked on the phone? my "big sister" (from high school), Joycie

7. Made you laugh? Brianna

8. You hugged? Walt

IN THE LAST 48 HOURS HAVE YOU...

1. Sang? no

2. Listened to music? no

3. Danced Crazy? no

4. Cried? no

FIRSTS .....

1.Who was your first prom date? Bill (he's now a Jesuit)

2. Who was your first roommate? Judy (I learned to dislike her quickly)

3. What alcoholic beverage did you drink when you got drunk the first time? probably beer, I don't remember -- it was almost 50 years ago!

4. What was your first job? babysitting

5. What was your first car? I've never had a car of my own

6. When did you go to your first funeral and viewing? My grandparents took me to a viewing (God knows why) for a friend of theirs. I was 5 and it still haunts me whenever I smell gardenias.

7. Who was your first grade teacher? Sister Mary St. Patrice

8. Where did you go on your first ride in an airplane? to San Francisco, coming home from touring Disneyland in about 1957 (we had gone to LA by ship)

9. When you snuck out of your house for the first time? I never had to sneak

10. Who was your first best friend? Gayle Tarzia

11. Who was your first Best Friend in high school? Madelyn Powers

12. Where was your first sleepover? at my grandparents'

13. Who is the first person you call when you have a bad day? My mother

14. Whose wedding were you in the first time you were a Bridesmaid? My cousin Peach

15. What is the first thing you did when you got up this morning? Stumbled to the computer and checked e-mail (addicted? who me?)

16. First time you tied your shoe laces? I can't remember

17. Are you Facebook friends with your first crush? No. He's not active on FB.

18. Who was the first person you met from the blogosphere? I've met lots of internet friends and lots of blog friends. The first internet person I met was back in the 1980s, someone in the Davis area whose name I don't remember. I can't remember the first actual BLOGGER I met in person, but I've met lots and lots of them by now, at JournalCons and other places.

19. What was the first music album that you bought? I think it was the soundtrack to the movie "Calamity Jane" (with Doris Day)

20. Who was your first celebrity crush? Judy Garland

More Time Wasters on the Internet

I'll tell ya, there are more ways than you can shake a stick at to waste time on the Internet. I found a new one today. It's called Pinterest....and if any of the people who read this journal are involved, maybe you can help me understand it.

I found it because Kwizgiver, whose blog I read -- I get the best memes from her -- wrote about it in her "Saturday 9" meme. The question was "What's the best new web site you've found" and then "the worst." I don't generally do a lot of web surfing. I pretty much stick to all of my usual sites, and sometimes if someone has linked to something interesting, I'll check it out.

I couldn't figure out what "Pinterest" was. Was it "Pin - terest?" or "Pint - erest?" or "Pinter est" (what is a pinter? and how do you become the pinter-est?) No grouping of the letters made sense.

Well, what Pinterest is is a place where you keep links to photos of things you like. Technically it's called a "social catalog for things you love." Pretty simple. Straightforward. Or so it looks. They can apparently be pictures you took or pictures you found on the net (when you "pin" your picture to a "board" on your page, it copies with it the exif data, so presumably this doesn't affect copyright laws, though they might be on shaky ground here).

I looked through some of the boards and there are really some lovely collections there, under headings like "little things I love," "perfect California clothing," "cool camera bags," "Places I would like to go," "Delicious" etc. etc. You get the idea. If you can create a grouping, you can post pictures to it on Pinterest.

I liked Food Art for this picture, which I must send to Tom.

(for those who don't play the game, this is
an "Angry Birds" pizza)

I started a board called "amazing things I have seen," just so I could try to figure out if this was something that I was remotely interested in. I wasn't sure I could put a link to it, but here it is.

But the board has mega problems, I think. First of all, there is no "help" feature.

Second, you can't find anybody. Ashley is on there, I discovered, but if I search for her, I can't find her.

You can't find all the people who are interested in the same things you are. There is a search feature, but I tried a couple of search terms and got nothing, then decided to try one of their own labels, travel, and it yielded no response.

I posted to Facebook that the site had problems and got back a snippy message saying that the problem was probably me. But then I went to the discussion board and found other messages complaining about the same thing.

The message saying it was me also gave instructions for how to solve my two main problems, but when I tried those solutions, I still ended up with the same frustration.

So I don't know if I'll check in on it very often, but it was an interesting little stroll today, and I can already see that it has the potential of being addictive!

(But I just found out that every time I post something on Pinterest, it reposts to Facebook and I can't find out how to turn that function off. Until I do, I won't be posting anything else--I HATE people who flood Facebook like that!)

On the other hand, if I hadn't been mucking around on Pinterest today, I would never have found this picture of Yangshuo, which we visited when we sailed down the Li River... and I had no IDEA it looked like this from overhead!

Spit Spot

This is one of those times when it's good to be a reviewer.

It was opening night of Mary Poppins, the touring Broadway production, in Sacramento. I wasn't as excited about seeing the show (ho-hom, another Disney musical) as I was about debuting my new Chinese coat. Only my mother had seen me in it since they packed it up for me on the ship. (Walt saw it when I snuck it off the rack and showed it to him after hours one night when the tailor had gone to bed.)

I planned what I was going to wear with it and I promised several on Facebook that I would be sure to get a picture of myself in the coat.

Then, around 4, I heard a weather report that a storm was expected to blow into Sacramento in the evening and I chickened out. The last thing they said to me was "NO WATER" and told me only to have the coat dry cleaned. I wasn't going to take it out to get rained on. So I decided not to wear it...but I did put it on for a photo.

When we emerged from the Sacramento Community theater at 11 p.m. tonight and the ground was dry and not a cloud in the sky, I was sorry I had left it at home -- but at least you can now see me in the jacket after all this hype the past couple of weeks.

So that leaves the big story of the day the opening of Mary Poppins. As I said above, I really wasn't all that excited about it; I'd seen the movie and knew what to expect. I figured it would be good. But...oh my was it good!

First of all, our seats were 6th row center, better than I usually get (usually we are farther over on the side). Second, the people sitting next to us were the parents of Nicholas Dromard, who plays Bert in the show. He played the role on Broadway and payed Fiyero in Wicked in the San Francisco production for a year and a half. He's done 17 shows in New York and he has the proudest mother in the world. She told me his brother is also on the stage, but in dramas rather than musicals.

Fortunately he's great in the role. A more believable accent than Dick Van Dyke (but then that's not difficult!) and just as lovable.

Stefanie Leigh is also excellent as Mary, though I suspect that any competent singer/actress could do as well.

But the sets and the special effects were in some cases jaw-dropping. They give the critics a sheet of "fun facts" and here are some that I know Jeri will appreciate:

• The roof and nursery together weigh about 7,000 lbs.

• The Banks House weighs about 11,000 lbs.

• It requires 14 trucks to move the show from city to city.

• It takes 2.5 days to load the show into each new theater

• There are over 250 different props used in the show.

Some facts about lighting -- the show uses 174 moving lights, 576 dimmers and 270 lighting fixture. It has >350 lighting cues.

After a lot of facts about costumes (like there are 250 costume looks, 35 women's hats, and each "starlighter costume" has over 800 hand-sewn crystal stars) it mentions that Bert has a dresser whose primary task is to follow him around backstage with water bottle. Given how much he moves during the show, I'm not surprised.

One of the most amazing numbers is "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (yes, I spelled that without looking it up--and got it right too!), with its mile-a-minute hand, arm and leg movements. The fun facts sheet says "The first thing that the actors learn during the rehearsal process are the letters for 'Supercal...' [sic] Traditionally, they spend several hours per day during the first week to learn the complicated choreography." I'll bet!

The "11 o'clock number" (the one near the end of the show that wakes everybody up" is an amazing "Step in Time," the number for the chimney sweeps. It's dazzling.

This will be a fun review to write. It should write itself, with the help of the fun facts.

The History Channel

Another attack of jet lag today. I had fallen asleep early, so woke up around midnight and ended up writing letters until 3. Then when watching CNN didn't put me to sleep, I fell asleep watching The Mentalist (which I had recorded while we were away).

When I finally woke up around 5, I started writing letters. By 10, I had accumulated quite a pile.

This included a letter to my soldier, Amanda, letters to all but one of my Compassion kids (along with post cards from China) and a complaint letter to McDonald's about my anemic iced mocha yesterdday. Hell hath no fury like a woman deprived of her iced mocha! (I'll bet this is the first complaint letter the manager of that McDonald's has ever received!)

Walt went downtown around 10 and I decided to sit and take a nap. It was 2-3 hours later when I woke up, totally disoriented because I thought I was waking up in the morning after a night of sleep, not mid-day after a nap! God, I hope this thing passes soon.

But anyway, when I woke up a History Channel special on Abraham Lincoln was just beginning--a 3 hour long special, as it turns out. Absolutely fascinating show. If it comes on again (and it surely will, since the History channel runs things endlessly), try to catch it.

(I can only assume the photo at the right was taken when he was a young man, without anybody to give him feedback on his hair!)

The thing that struck me so forcibly is that if you ask anybody in this country who was our greatest president, an overwhelming majority will say Lincoln. Yet, history shows that he was a real loser as a young man, and not all that popular when he was in office. He suffered from great depression and was suicidal at one point. And in today's sexually-conscious society, there would be little question that having slept in the same bed with another man for five years and plunged into depression when they separated, there was little question about his orientation (though the authors like Gore Vidal and others assure that sensibilities and customs were different in those days).

I smiled when I heard about his first debate, where people were turned off by his voice. I remember when I first met future US Representative Ron Dellums, elected for his anti-Vietnam War stance, and later mayor of Oakland. We went to a Dellums fund raiser. I had seen him many times on TV and always imagined that he would speak with the stentorian tones of James Earl Jones or Sidney Poitier.

Imagine my surprise when he had this high-pitched kind of whiney voice. He was a lovely man, but he was no Darth Vader!

Apparently that was Lincoln. A mid-western twang in a higher-pitched voice that people made fun of when he spoke. No Walter Huston, Raymond Massey, John Carradine, F. Murray Abraham or Hal Holbrook (some of the 17 actors who have played the president).

The information about Lincoln in this 3-hour program actually kept me awake (so difficult to do these days). It was followed by a program which lays out proofs for the theory that John Wilkes Booth was not killed after the Lincoln assassination, but got away and lived out a free life until he died of natural causes (well, I think it was natural causes...we had a TV glitch and I missed the end of the show). Lots of documentation and photos to prove that Booth got away with it. I have no idea how credible all that evidence is. They are trying to do DNA analysis but have been denied access by the federal government. It's the Grassy Knoll conspiracy theory all over again,but with better documentation.

So my day has been intermittently filled with history and I was so glad to have it topped off by Sarah Palin explaining Paul Revere's ride in Boston:

...he who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing' those bells and um makin' sure as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that, uh, we're gonna be secure and we were gonna be free and we were gonna be armed.

History lesson from Sarah Palin. I don't expect it to be on the History Channel any time soon.

I hope she hasn't home-schooled her children.

Thursday Thirteen

Things I will remember about China

1. The cruise from Guilin
2. “5 for one dolla...”
3. That exquisite embroidery
4. The welcome we received at the Viking School
5. Climbing the Great Wall
6. The woman exercising in pink pjs with a sword
7. The rugs in the Shangri-La Hotel that changed every day
8. The wonderful unseasonable weather
9. The 3 Gorges area
10. How CLEAN everything was
11. The hanging coffin we could almost see.
12. The friendships we made
13. Jenna

Taking My Jet Lag on the Road

We've been home for several days now and yesterday I was actually awake most of the day, except for falling asleep during a Clint Eastwood movie and dreaming I was his daughter and needed to get a flashlight from him so I could cross a body of water and win $1 million. I couldn't even watch the end of the movie because the DVD stuck and I had to send it back to Netflix.

But anyway, I decided that I was sufficiently recovered that I could take the day to drive down to my mother's, have lunch, and tell her about our trip. It was a lovely day when I started out. The weather report earlier had shown a bit of rain traveling across the state, but nothing major.

So much for weather reporting. I drove into three HUMONGOUS squalls where the rain was so heavy that I could not see the road in front of me. There was lightning and thunder and one was so bad that I got off at the next offramp and just sat there and waited for it to pass (it took about 5-10 minutes for each squall to pass through).

When I got to my mother's house, she was surprised because they had only had sprinkles there. Guess it built in intensity as it moved east!

We had a very nice visit. I told her all about China, gave her the gifts I'd bought for her, modeled my new jacket (which she loved), and we had lunch.

After lunch, I showed her a slide show I'd put together for her. Only about 150 pictures out of the hundreds I took, but I knew that she would be interested in only the VERY highlights. She was impressed with the Terracotta Warriors and I'm sorry I didn't include more of them in the show.

By 2 p.m., I had begun to realize I was going to either have to leave to drive home or take a nap before I left. The problem with taking a nap was that by the time I woke up, I would be right smack in the middle of rush hour, which I want to avoid at all costs (though somehow "rush hour" doesn't seem nearly as bad as it did before we went to China!)

So by 2:30, I was in the car, had my audio book going and I was getting on the road. Midway across the "you can't turn around or get off here" highway 37, which connects Highway 101 with I-80 I realized that I desperately needed something to help me stay awake,

On that drive, I know where all the fast food joints are and I decided to stop at McDonald's in Vallejo, but I still needed to take a break before that, so pulled off at a marina where I saw this sign...

There's got to be a story behind that. How do you lose a boat? You notice there is no description whatsoever. Maybe finding lost boats is a common occurrence among boat people. I don't know.

That stop perked me up a bit and I was able to continue on to McDonald's to get my sure-fire picker-upper, an Iced Mocha. They asked if I wanted chocolate or caramel...well, "mocha" kinda means chocolate and coffee. I like the iced mocha, which almost always wakes me up because you get the caffeine and the sugar and that dollop of whipped cream on top.

Only this was the worst iced mocha ever. Though I had specified chocolate, they put an anemic drizzle of caramel on the top (and no chocolate IN the coffee, so it just tasted like unsweetened iced coffee--and weak coffee at that) and then instead of the whipped cream dome that they should use, they jammed down a flat lid on top of it, smashing what little whipped cream they had squirted on there. If I'd been macho, I'd have gone back and insisted they do it again, but I just meekly took what I had been given and drove on, though without the sugar (this is the only time I take sugar in my coffee), it didn't give me the jolt I was looking for.

So by the time I was about 20 minutes from home, I was really, really fighting sleep. I could barely focus in front of me. In fact, I came home on alternate roads instead of I-80. I knew I needed to stop for groceries, but I couldn't even think of that. I desperately needed to sleep before I did anything.

I practically fell through the front door, gave the dogs their treats and plopped into the recliner, where I slept for about an hour. Then I was OK and went out to the store.

When I came home, the TV was broadcasting news about the raging storm, with funnel clouds threatening to touch down here and there.

It's one thing to live in a tornado area, where homes have storm cellars; it's another to live in a place where all homes are built on cement slabs with no cellar whatsoever.

But the threatened cloud has passed away, finally -- taking the internet with it. My connection seems to be gone with the wind. I have no idea how long it's going to take to get it back.