(no subject)
I am retiring all my political icons from this election season, and (drumroll) all the Bush icons. Yea! Some old entries that reference the icons won't make sense anymore, but I don't care -- cleaning out the icon closet! Good riddance. Selected Obama icons stay put.
Thursday night Teresa and I down to the Green Spiral meeting to give a presentation on British Traditional Wicca. It isn't a topic we usually talk about to groups, so we just scribbled some notes on the way down and pretty much winged it. We borrowed portions of Adam's essay on BTW to add another viewpoint (he wrote it for A&J, so I figured he wouldn't mind), and stayed away from history because that bogs down any talk on Wicca in general. We babbled for about 70 minutes to about 20-25 people, and heard good feedback from several who said we "dispelled some of their misconceptions". Which makes us to wonder what kinds of misconceptions college students have about trad craft these days, considering we deliberately left out mentioning the usual suspects like skyclad, b/$, GR.
Friday we intended to drive around and start submitting job applications for Teresa, but it was ridiculously cold and windy and both Patrick and Teresa had sinus/ear infections that quickly exacerbated with the wind chill, so that plan was scrapped. We did go to Lansing Community College to submit The Boy's financial aid award letters and get info about his assessment tests. It looks like he'll be able to waive his reading and writing assessments based on his ACT scores, leaving only the math test. I think hanging out at MSU the night before had made Patrick bothered that he wasn't starting off at the university, but walking around LCC seemed to encourage him again, realizing that it does in fact look and feel like a "real school".
We intended to go home Friday night, but soon after we started to get back on the road I realized I was exhausted tired, having slept only three hours a night for the past two nights -- a not uncommon but inconvenient stretch of insomnia for me. Riding in the car was also really bothering Teresa and Patrick's ears, so we turned back and stayed the night in Lansing again. That night, I was finally able to get a solid block of good sleep. Yea for me.
Saturday afternoon we drove around looking at neighborhoods outside of our first choice in Lansing. Ideally we want to find a house in the Old Forest Neighborhood downtown -- next to LCC for Patrick, directly on bus lines for Teresa and close to several of our friends who own homes the neighborhood. The only drawback is the close proximity to the college keeps the rents artificially high for the size and quality of the houses. We found a couple areas we'll consider as second-choices, and eliminated a half-dozen others that were just scary. Orange condemned stickers, pothole paths passing as roads, bullet holes in street signs (when there were street signs). Hey, it's urban -- we're very aware of what we're getting into by moving and actually joining civilization.
Before we left town, we stopped at Gone Wired Cafe to hang out with mehgary for a bit. Word of advice -- skip the white hot chocolate when they're out of regular hot chocolate... unless you're a fan of coconut chunks in your drink. Yeah, I didn't understand that either. We had a nice conversation with the owner of the bookstore attached to the cafe -- a cool guy with some good advice for how to get involved in community organizing and progressive activities in the downtown area. We're looking forward to living where Teresa and I don't comprise exactly half the liberals in the city.
Thursday night Teresa and I down to the Green Spiral meeting to give a presentation on British Traditional Wicca. It isn't a topic we usually talk about to groups, so we just scribbled some notes on the way down and pretty much winged it. We borrowed portions of Adam's essay on BTW to add another viewpoint (he wrote it for A&J, so I figured he wouldn't mind), and stayed away from history because that bogs down any talk on Wicca in general. We babbled for about 70 minutes to about 20-25 people, and heard good feedback from several who said we "dispelled some of their misconceptions". Which makes us to wonder what kinds of misconceptions college students have about trad craft these days, considering we deliberately left out mentioning the usual suspects like skyclad, b/$, GR.
Friday we intended to drive around and start submitting job applications for Teresa, but it was ridiculously cold and windy and both Patrick and Teresa had sinus/ear infections that quickly exacerbated with the wind chill, so that plan was scrapped. We did go to Lansing Community College to submit The Boy's financial aid award letters and get info about his assessment tests. It looks like he'll be able to waive his reading and writing assessments based on his ACT scores, leaving only the math test. I think hanging out at MSU the night before had made Patrick bothered that he wasn't starting off at the university, but walking around LCC seemed to encourage him again, realizing that it does in fact look and feel like a "real school".
We intended to go home Friday night, but soon after we started to get back on the road I realized I was exhausted tired, having slept only three hours a night for the past two nights -- a not uncommon but inconvenient stretch of insomnia for me. Riding in the car was also really bothering Teresa and Patrick's ears, so we turned back and stayed the night in Lansing again. That night, I was finally able to get a solid block of good sleep. Yea for me.
Saturday afternoon we drove around looking at neighborhoods outside of our first choice in Lansing. Ideally we want to find a house in the Old Forest Neighborhood downtown -- next to LCC for Patrick, directly on bus lines for Teresa and close to several of our friends who own homes the neighborhood. The only drawback is the close proximity to the college keeps the rents artificially high for the size and quality of the houses. We found a couple areas we'll consider as second-choices, and eliminated a half-dozen others that were just scary. Orange condemned stickers, pothole paths passing as roads, bullet holes in street signs (when there were street signs). Hey, it's urban -- we're very aware of what we're getting into by moving and actually joining civilization.
Before we left town, we stopped at Gone Wired Cafe to hang out with mehgary for a bit. Word of advice -- skip the white hot chocolate when they're out of regular hot chocolate... unless you're a fan of coconut chunks in your drink. Yeah, I didn't understand that either. We had a nice conversation with the owner of the bookstore attached to the cafe -- a cool guy with some good advice for how to get involved in community organizing and progressive activities in the downtown area. We're looking forward to living where Teresa and I don't comprise exactly half the liberals in the city.