Realistically, I hope to update this page more often (pictures are at the end today instead of interspersed), but sometimes (as the admin at my master’s program says) “life gets in the way” ~ However, this month, I have taken some time away from the education studies to work on my next book, help friends, study some more about other subjects, and spend time scanning and organizing bits of a genealogy project that I’ve been working on back and forth a bit lately.

That’s a lot. Oh yea, and I joined a board of directors for a local non-profit called Ignition Northwest, which is tasked with maintaining the platform for production of two or three large and fun Burning Man adjacent events every year. It’s a three-year term, and the on-boarding is slow, so there’s not much to say about how that is going so far, but it will take up a portion of time in the upcoming term.

So, to back up and explain, for a reader who may not know, I’m well into a program of studies that are focused on getting me back to work, but this time, in the USA. I’ll aim to be complete by the end of the year, but time will tell. I’m enrolled in a self-paced course, a masters program, that I’m well into and ahead of schedule on, hence the break mentioned in the first paragraph. February is not on paper with the uni, but I am still studying materials around it. Everything from why Tennyson is still in conversations, to essay structure, to literary terms; all so that I can do well on some upcoming tests that are coming, which I have pre-tested on with passing grades, but… I feel like I should be more aware of the content of all of it, because if this is the stuff that is what I’ll be teaching in American schools, then I should know it better. I’ll be reviewing later as well, because honestly, if you asked me about Tennyson at the moment, I would have fairly little to say.

So, that, together with a re-visitation of languages, with Chinese and Spanish this season, mostly. Honestly, I’m super basic in Spanish, and that seems unreasonable to my current reality, so I’m doing the Duolingo thing for now and I’ll see how it goes. Chinese is still my edge second-language-wise, so I enjoy the app called Challenges, from the TrainChinese folk. For more on them, you can check out this link from 2019, when I did a thorough review.

Finally, I’ve got the genealogy project based on a set of papers and photographs that I gathered from my mother’s long-neglected storage unit last year. I figure that the best thing that can happen is for the things to be digitized and shared with all the cousins, aunts, uncles etc., whoever wants any of it, and I can ship any of the originals to whoever wants any of it.

For that, I found a great scanner that hits a lot of winning points: the Brother ADS-1700w. It is a fast scanner, can do double sided, is nondestructive and is able to run sets of things, like packs of photos or stacks of papers, through its rollers. It can’t do everything, and that’s okay. Like super-delicate pages, they get snapshots, and I can process the image from that into a useful set for people to enjoy. And sometimes its memory fails with more than one image ( of 1200dpi, double-sided), but it pulls most of what I can ask for for my purposes. And it’s light, so I can pack it to places if I get a nice view for a while somewhere like a co-working office.

What else is going on? The world is burning, people are being born, the ice caps are melting, Covid didn’t go away, but people are going about life in the midst of it, wars rage on, but the population rose by 75million people last year, corporate moguls are adjusting their tax-homes to avoid taxes, so I’m disappointed by their greed, racists are creating more laws to divide people based on arbitrary measures that are born of hatred and greed, people tell me that joining up with public education is a political act… Yea. It is. I believe that children deserve to have tools to succeed in the upcoming adulthood experience explained well and clearly so that they can do as well as possible, even if, or perhaps especially because they are not all able to pay for private educations, tutors, and more. I’ve cashed those checks in Asia for long enough while I was a teacher there from more than ten years. Now that I’m over the hump (it was a long climb), I feel like it’s time for me to work in the public sector. For that, I need new, local credentials – hence the schooling project I’m in – and I can work with that. I enjoy learning and am glad to have the tools I’ll need to succeed in the new environment that I’m entering.

For now, this is where I am.

Moving forward, I’m glad to be capable and tooled up with InDesign and have the time to be able to make this project of images and thoughts, thoughts that I am taking time to organize, create, and set into the pages, the spreads, the chapters, the segments inside the chapters, and with all the photography editing, it’s quite a hoist. Today, I pared down over 2800 photos to less than six hundred and have begin editing for review. I have to get it down by two thirds in volume next, as there is only a limited amount of space in a publishable book, for the sake of sheer dead-weight factor. I’ve limited the book to about two hundred pages since they’ll be larger pages than normal books, and this set is being pressed into one quarter of the whole, as the book’s already 3/4 laid out. There are photos, writing, and blank spaces in the rest. It is falling into place in an organic way, as many thousands of particles of thought are being brought together into the one collection…

Well, I should get back to it. But I wanted to share here since it’s been so long, as well. I hope you’re well.

A few photos to let you know that I still believe in love~