Happy Anniversary to Me!

Hmmm...I know what you're thinking: what on earth is this girl talking about? Allow me to explain.

Today, May 22, is my 26th anniversary of being adopted. I was born in March and was adopted two months later. So this is the anniversary of the big day, and it's right up there with celebrating my birthday in terms of big deal-ness.

I celebrated the big day by purchasing a snazzy green dress ("but not a real green dress, that's cruel" hehe), and a magazine containing photos of Prince William. The green dress is for upcoming end-of-year fancy events - I'm getting so tired of the same black dress, over and over. I was also going to add a bottle of Pimm's with free jug to the lot, but it was pouring out and I hate lugging things in the rain. Oh well, that will be for another day...;)

Some people think it's weird to celebrate adoption days. But in a family of adopted kids, it is very special. Ask your parents if they remember the day you were born. Well, this is "that day" for my parents. A lot of the same things happen: you wait, you have showers, you pass out cigars, you go around telling people, "It's a girl!" And babies are babies no matter how they get to your family, so all new parents face the same issues of learning how to care for a child.

One of the best, most truthful, nicest, most non-stereotypical stories of adoption is the story of how Harpo Marx adopted his kids, which can be found in his autobiography, Harpo Speaks! He once said that he wanted to adopt as many children as he had windows in his house, so he could look back and see all of his kids waving at him when he left the house in the morning. Here is a nice story from the book about Harpo's daughter, Minnie, and her reaction to adoption:

"A year or so later Minnie came home from school one day very amused. A girl friend had asked her what it felt like to be adopted. 'Of all the silly questions!' said Minnie. At first she'd told her friend that there was no 'feeling' about it. Then Minnie corrected herself. Yes, there was. You felt you were the luckiest person in the world, if you were adopted. You hadn't just happened to your family, like most kids. You had been picked, out of hundreds of candidates. You were somebody very special. 'Gee,' Minnie said to us, 'I hope I didn't make her feel bad. I certainly didn't mean to.'"

Isn't that a nice story? I think I'll end with that.

Have a great day, everyone!
Me

PS - A shameless bit of unrelated promotion: my friend Mark is running the British 10k and is looking for sponsorship. The money he raises will go to the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust, a very good and meaningful and worthwhile cause. Why not check out what the CWMT does, and then mosey on over to give Mark a donation? The donation amounts are in pounds, so the corresponding US dollar amounts would be about double. (A donation of £10 would cost you roughly $18.50, for example.) Cheers!

Kicking it up a notch

May I take a moment to direct your attention to the Dissertation-o-meter at the right of the screen. Take a good look at it, as I expect it to fill up before this weekend.

Now is the time to send things into high gear. Please harass me about my dissertation. Ask me how it's going. Accuse me of not having an argument. Tell me to get off the damn Internet and get back to work. (This especially goes for anyone who has been lurking around and has never commented before.)

Greg has been especially good at this. Yay for Greg, he is awesome. Go check out his blog, say hello to his beautiful daughters (Mia and Norah), and then get back here and continue to harass me about my dissertation.

Tomorrow is big-deal-draft-deadline. The full-scale D-Day is Thursday, June 1.

Hang in there, folks, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Edit, 5/21/06, 2:21 p.m.: I handed in 9,669 words to my supervisor on Friday. I still need to make some brief formatting corrections, change one or two citations into Latin, and elaborate on something I neglected to mention. This is all on top of whatever corrections he asks me to make. So we have until June 1 to see the dissertation-o-meter's final result. But the word limit was 8,000-10,000, so technically I have met the goal...

Teaching Online

Hi folks,

I'm going to cross-post this on both of my blogs for maximum chance of reply. I'd like to ask the teaching-folk out there for your opinion:

I'd like to get into teaching online courses. Remember that one of my fields is communication, which lends itself very nicely to an online environment. (Spanish? Not so much.) I've played around with the virtual classroom feature with my classes in Blackboard and was quite successful, and have no problem using discussion boards, email, or even voice chat. But the thing I don't know is how to get started.

Do schools (either CCs or 4-year colleges) list online course positions? I want to be sure that I am going somewhere credible, and not somewhere where you can "earn a degree from a prestigious non-accredited university in 18 months or less!" Do you have to live in the state/city where the physical university is located? And how do interviews work?

Nels, isn't the U of H starting something with online courses? Do you know anything about this?

I know there are certain things that are obviously impossible in an online course. Oral presentations are out of the question. And I guess exams are open book by default. But other projects could be cool - leading a chat discussion, discussion board group projects, blogging.

And I guess a whole new crop of excuses come up, of the "Blackboard ate my homework" variety. Fun.

But I'm up for the challenge. And if anyone has any advice for how to get started, I'd appreciate it.

Much love,
Me

A Very Potter-esque Day

Being from one of the least typical Oxford colleges in terms of architecture, I love it when I get to have a chance to experience some of the very cool old buildings. Today was a great day, as I got to add two more Harry Potter sites to my list of Cool Things I've Seen In England.*

At about 1:30 I headed over to the Bodleian, which I don't usually get a chance to visit because foreign language folks usually work at the Taylorian instead. I had a date with a 16th century Vulgate Bible, to look up some Latin passages for my dissertation. (At the Bodleian you are not allowed to check out books. You can't even go look for them yourself - you have to fill out a request form online, and they go hunt it down in the miles and miles of storage and deliver it to a reading room.) So anyway, I asked for my lovely 16th century Vulgate Bible to be delivered to the Duke Humphrey Reading Room, which you may recognize as the Hogwarts Library:

I think it shows up the most deliberately in the first movie, when Harry and Ron and Hermione are looking up information about the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone. I sat among the old books and looked up passages in my 16th century Vulgate Bible, and felt very authentic and Oxonian. It was cool. I have to go back tomorrow to look up a few more passages that I forgot about today.

On the way out of the library, I got to take a peek in the Divinity School, which is the site of the Hogwarts Infirmary in more than one episode of the series:

(I did not take either of these two photos, by the way.)

So after all this Potter excitement, I ate lunch in the Covered Market, which is not at all Potter-esque but still enjoyable. But after that, feeling very much like Hermione, I stopped by the Taylorian for "a bit of light reading":

Yes, I checked out this book. Yes, it is for my dissertation. It is the Concordancias de los Escritos de San Juan de la Cruz. When I asked if I could take it out, the librarian actually said, "Are you sure?" I guess I should be glad that I am doing San Juan and not Santa Teresa de Ávila...her Concordancias is twice as big!

So anyway, today has been productive and interesting. I should get back to writing now. Have a lovely day, folks!

Much love,
Me

*To refresh your memory, in addition to the two I saw today, the other Harry Potter sites have been:

• the stairs and dining hall at Christ Church, which inspired the Hogwarts stairs and dining hall;
• the cloisters at Magdalen College, which also appearted in several of the Harry Potter films;
• and King's Cross station, which is the home of Platform 9 and 3/4.
  
  

Beginnings and Endings

I can't believe how quickly this year has flown by. This picture right here was taken about a week into our first term, when we all just met. We were all still getting used to England and to Oxford and all that, and getting into the swing of the Catz social scene - big fancy dinners with the Master mixed in with all the studying and stuff.

Tonight, we had the graduate dinner, which marks the fact that the year is coming to a close fairly soon (a little over six weeks!). It was actually quite nostalgic in a way, and a little sad - some of these lovely people will be going home after this year (and I might be one of them). I never imagined that this year would go by so fast, or be so much fun. A few days ago, I got my Matriculation Class photo, and it feels like just yesterday that we were all lined up for that.

When we met in the SCR for drinks before dinner, Melati, Jade, Chrissie and I posed together again for a photo. I know we'll take many more photos before this year ends, but it feels like now we've come full circle.

I think Kathleen, my colleague in the Spanish faculty, was right - no one ever really comes here for a year. Once you're in, it's impossible to just leave!