Next week, I get to talk about my previous life in paleoethnobotany. I'm pretty stoked. I'm giving talks to students at two schools ranging from K to 12. I'll be doing three lectures for high schools students: anthropology, intro to paleoethnobotany methods, and prehistoric agriculture in North America. For the younger students, I'll be doing just the paleoethnobotany intro and the prehistory.
Today, I was trying to figure out what images I have access to without having all the slides I haven't gotten around to scanning. I found a few of the micrographs of my seeds and enough photos of my fieldwork in Mexico to make me happy.
Looking at my seeds and beautiful chapatas, along with fields of huauzontle and trucks piled high with produce in the wholesale street market made me feel nostalgic for those lovely Mexican crops. And that's appropriate, given that one of my dissertation's themes was the role of nostalgia in maintaining traditional foods.
It's possible we are somewhat restrictive parents. Darcy didn't eat cake until her second birthday and then it was an applesauce cake with almost no sugar in the cake or frosting. (We've made up for that -- she's had more than enough sugar in her life, but we started out well.)
But one thing she still hasn't had is gum. I think. Although now that I'm writing this, I think I remember someone saying that she'd had a piece on an airplane at some point? Not sure about that. She got a piece of bubble gum during the trick or treat bonanza last week. Tonight, she got Michael to eat it and blow bubbles for her. She was unreasonably tickled by the whole thing and tried to touch each bubble he blew.
It's worth clicking on the picture to enlarge it to see her tongue sticking out of her mouth.
You probably have noticed the lack of photos (and posts) over the past few months. In part, that's because Michael had both our main computer and the camera, so photo taking and sharing has been difficult. Now the shared computer is in California, so I'm just going to poke through the archives and share a few cute photos of Darcy. I know it's what most of you like best anyway. Also, I spent eight hours at a culinary and agritourism training today, with an hour's drive at either end, so it was a long day and I'm tired.
Maybe not as tired as this pair, though. Darcy and Paige take a nap together (or at least pretend to) on our deck in Pennsylvania. She loves her cat and her cat loves her!
And here she is just being plain old silly. There's a sequence of these close-ups with strange faces involving Darcy and her cousin, so I think it was a Thing To Do during this visit. Silly girl.
That's pretty much the whole story today. Michael rolled into town this morning. We all got to sit down to dinner together tonight and he is singing Darcy's bedtime songs right now.
Life is good.
Look! I managed to add a recent photo. This is our small cowgirl on Halloween. I'm still not exactly sure why she wanted to be a cowgirl, but she was insistent for a few weeks and there she is in her hat and boots.
This picture is brought to you by the wonders of modern technology. A friend took this picture with her phone, sent it to Michael on his phone. He posted it to Facebook by request, and I was able to grab it from there and post it to the blog. Ain't science and social media great?
It's a rainy day out there this morning and I thought I'd get my blogging done for the day before even getting out of bed. I have no idea how I'm going to entertain the girl today and I'm sad because my rain coat is out in the car, which is not helpful.
A few weeks ago was California Indian Day. Darcy had it off from school, but the day before, they had a great day learning about Yurok and Tolowa traditions. The newspaper gave it some nice coverage, including a great picture of Darcy on the front page. It was how a few people learned we were back in town!
As I said last night, Michael's getting closer and closer with himself and access to cameras and such. Maybe tomorrow, definitely early Monday! So you won't have to make do with links to interesting things for much longer.
So I was not planning to do NaBloPoMo this year. I was toying with the possibility of trying to write a novel or even doing the academic version of writing every day for a month, which apparently now exists. But both of those things seem to require more preparation and thought than I've given them, while blogging can be done a bit more on the fly.
This is my lame entry for the first day, just so there's something here.
Michael is currently driving across this beautiful country so he, too, can rejoin the ranks of the westerners. I will have more time AND access to photographs when he gets here, so I'll try to post lots of pictures of our ever-growing girl.
In the meantime, here's some of what I've been doing recently:
We had a great four days of Food Day celebrations last week, ending with this day of DIY Food Workshops, which were a big hit. You can read about the bigger plans and see the great coverage our local newspaper gave us here and here. The first article started on the front page and the second was the front page, above the fold of the B section. It was a whirlwind to put this together in the first seven and a half weeks on the job, but we did it and did it successfully!
