My birthday present to myself: One hour a day for me!

So here's my birthday present to myself: an hour a day. Here's my agenda for the hour: I sit for 20 minutes, as always. This sitting, in various forms, has been part of my day since I was 24. Always about twenty minutes, usually less, very near to daily. So that's nothing new. Then twenty minutes of exercise--I've been pretty good with that one for a few years now, lately jogging in my geriatric style with five pound weights strapped to my ankles. So here's the really special part of the birthday present: twenty minutes writing, every day.
I need a structure for this, like the sitting happens early in the morning and the jogging goes with Nellie's morning poop, between nine and eleven. So what is writing time? I'm not sure...but it feels like a good present to give myself.

Reflecting on the NWP Resource Development Retreat

Reflecting on the NWP Resource Development Retreat
What I noticed first the day after my return was how much I missed the silence. Where I live is not that noisy, but it is only a few blocks from Watsonville's Main Street, and a couple of shopping centers, so there's almost constant traffic noise. Very late at night, and in the early mornings, when the traffic dies down, we can sometimes hear the ocean surf from over a mile away, if the currents up Struve Slough are moving the right way.

At the Crossings outside of Austin, we were far away from the city, and there's very little noisy wildlife. So when we left the meetings or the dining hall, it was very quiet. No cars, most of the time, nor planes overhead that I noticed (we live right next to the Watsonville Airport, so we see and hear small airplanes all day long).

Quiet creates peace and fosters creativity.

CommonCare: Medicare for the rest of us

Bill Maher was railing the other night at how bad Democrats are at naming things. "Single Payer" is about the least sexy name for a program ever, whereas "Death Panels" and "Pull the Plug on Granny" conjure immediate, visceral images that everyone understands. I was listening to a BBC program about African development, and someone being interviewed said something about the communal nature of African values, to explain how there is a different work ethic on the continent. :
Hence, CommonCare. It's got the ring of Meidcare, the most efficient and successful government program in US history, and it ultimately means what Single Payer ought to be called: Final Payer, meaning, ya'll go ahead and fuss around with all your complicated insurance plans and whatever, but anyone someone doesn't get the basics paid for through one of those schemes, it goes to the Final Payer, the "public option" [a close second for least sexy moniker] known as CommonCare.

It can even be bundled as part of immigration reform as a way to extend coverage to the undocumented: they can earn "points" towards status normalization by fulfilling Preventive Care requirements, and save money that otherwise goes to emergency room visits.

whimsy, like paisley, is incredibly unflattering on me

From my Google feed on memoir writing, a review on the NPR blog by Linda Holmes of Quinn Cummings' Notes From The Underwire:

Have you ever had the experience of reading a single line and realizing that a book has just won you? That you and the book are now friends, you are on the same side, and you are taking the book with you everywhere until you finish it? Cummings won me on page 16 with this:

At the height of the dot-com frenzy, I took a job in San Francisco. After several weeks of dead ends, I left Los Angeles without having a place to live in San Francisco. I figured I'd get there, stay in a hotel for a few days, find a sublet, and move in. That seemed like the kind of whimsical thing people I knew did all the time, and it always worked out fabulously for them. I had forgotten that whimsy, like paisley, is incredibly unflattering on me.
I read and reread "whimsy, like paisley," rolled it around in my mouth, and gulped the rest of the book. It's a delightful and genuine mishmash in the best way -- a little mom stuff, a little showbiz, a little about how everyone feels cooler at the farmer's market. Again, it's not so much the story you're telling as the way you tell it.

Urban Coyote TeeVee

The Google alert for digital storytelling on my home page led me to Urban Coyote TeeVee, especially his piece on the Canadian Resettlement Schools for First Nations children.

I was struck by his use of a group of children, they alone reversed into negative, for the image to the infamous phrase "kill the Indian in the child." He does a lot of collage, and his video style is collage-like. Here's the original article from the feed about Chris Bose.

Problem: move an iMovie '09 project to a different computer

I'm stumped by what should be a trivial task--taking a project created in iMovie '09 (newest version, 8.0.4) on one computer over to another. Apple's forum pages list a solution with the page closed as "solved," but it didn't work for me...

Our just completed digital storytelling

Graciela Vega and I just completed a wonderful digital storytelling workshop, "We all have stories to tell," at Renaissance High School. One of the stories is already posted at
http://digitalstory.pbworks.com/The-stories-we-told
More to come...