Clearly Carrie and I have been lagging on our blog but incredible things have been happening to keep us WOA (women of action) occupied.
1. Being the very important WOA that Carrie is, she recently took a trip to hotlanta and SC to attend a conference and visit her cousins in SC. Notice how happy they are to see her (well the kids were anyway - I hope this works, I lifted it from her FB page).....
She had a good time at the conference too - learned a lot, gave a kick-ass presentation about eportfolios to 70 or so people and was schmoozed by publishers. Not bad for "First Year Lady".
2. I have been busy conducting a national study on Veterans for Peace which has so far resulted in over 400 surveys (10% of the paid membership) and 27 interviews with female members. The interviews vary from 15 minutes to over two hours - some of these were conducted by my trusty student sidekicks Dovey and Nicole this summer but since fall I've been doing the interviews over the phone in my kitchen. I have an inexpensive little headset that compels me to want to ask "do you want fries with that" which I have to refrain from saying or my participants will think I've lot my mind. I have at least ten to twelve more people interested and will be happy if they actually follow through. My next challenge is to figure out how to download the survey correctly so I don't lose all my data.
3. Carrie's reward for being my bff was to come up to Maine for the second time in two weeks to attend my first dance party of 2011. Her first trip up at the end of January was for our friend Ruth Hill's concert - it was most excellent. In addition to playing some new songs, Ruth had fiddler Ellie Buckland, bassist / guitarist Andy Buckland, vocalist Wendy Oakley and singer songwriter / guitarist / banjo player / mandolin player Jud Caswell performing with her. She had about 170 people at the show here in Farmington - it was pretty awesome.
While Ruth was also one of the people who came to my dance party, there certainly were no where near 170 people at the event. It was a smaller crowd than the last party of 2010 but all the cool kids were here and despite the mini-plague that was settling into my lungs, a good time was had by all. You can tell my immune system had worn me down as I actually was ok with having my friend Kristen take a picture of me and my pal Tom (her hubbo also known as her baby daddy) dancing to a favorite 80s tune.4. Of course Carrie's reward for coming to the dance party was to spend a couple hours helping to demolish Doug and Judy Rawlings sauna which burned after xmas and then she got to buy me cold medicine and 'bad for me' juices (hawaiian punch) to help me get better from the nasty cold / laryngitis I've been fighting for a week now. Thus the blog - I've been housebound and mostly horizontal for two days now. I am feeling better tho'.
Certainly there are a lot of exciting things going on in the world - not just Obama's budget but all the stirrings in the Middle East and the resignation of both the leaders in Tunisia (I believe his title was President aka Dictator) and Egypt in fairly non-violent ways. These protests are largely being organized by the youth in these countries which I think is quite powerful. Hopefully all is well with you on this Feb. 14th - commercialism aside - keep loving people and maybe we can make some good changes in our country as well. If all else fails, just throw a dance party it seems to make things better. - Kristina (and Carrie but she has no idea I've written this....).
