8 State Hurricane Kate July 29, 2008

My friend Jenny Pavlovic recently published a book entitled 8 State Hurricane Kate: The Journey and Legacy of a Katrina Cattle Dog and I wanted to put out the good word for her and her book.  I just ordered the book, so I haven’t actually read it yet, but it’s a story I know well.  She and I got to know each other through a list-serv devoted to Australian Cattle Dogs (also known as Blue Heelers or Queensland Heelers.)  My dog, Jazz, is an ACD-mix (adopted from the Atlanta Humane Society) and I joined the list to learn more about their quirky, yet lovable ways. 

After Katrina tore through Louisiana and Mississippi, Jenny heard about the plight of the many dogs who were abandoned by their owners in the wake of the hurricane and felt strongly compelled to go there to see what she could do to help out (she lives in Minnesota.)  She was already active in ACD rescue, but what she experienced there changed her life and became her mission.  She shares the story of how she came to know Kate, a dog she took home from the Lamar-Dixon Animal Rescue Center in Gonzales, LA and recounts their journey together.

Jenny and I had a series of e-mail exchanges after she brought Kate home and tried to rehabilitate her.  Later, when she was writing her book, she asked if she could share some of our discussions.  I’m honored to be included in her and Kate’s story. 

I encourage you to read 8 State Hurricane Kate.  She was a once-forsaken dog who now symbolizes the heart of disaster animal rescue.  At least 50% of the book’s profits will go to the 8 State Kate Fund, which provides financial relief for animals in desperate situations.

Poem thing (language) July 29, 2008

“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.” – Gertrude Stein

It’s been a while since I actively published my work, and I’ve written only sporadically in the last year or so, but I decided to put up a page on this blog linking to my poems.  It will also feature some newer poems, including my occasional work-in-progess, two for one night at the blue dragon.  I’m hoping that public flagellation, er, display of my work will encourage me to write more frequently again. 

The first poem I’ve featured on the page is what I’d like to call a “reading through” of a poem by Sharon Olds.  I don’t recall the original poem’s title at present, but perhaps someone will remind me. 

More to come soon.

Unplugged – the Danatopia story July 14, 2008

My husband, daughter, stepson and I came back last night from an eight-day trip to California.  We spent some time in L.A. with my father, drove up to Monterey and back (detouring around the wildfires in Big Sur,) visited friends of mine in Orange County and spent the day at Legoland in Carlsbad.

I decided from the outset of this trip that I was deliberately going to “unplug” myself from email and the internet as much as possible.  I still had my cell phone so I could receive text messages, but I turned off my Twitter updates and did not access my email from the web browser functionality on my phone.  The only time I got on the internet was to double-check our return flight information yesterday morning since I forgot to print out our itinerary.  I could have used my father’s laptop anytime to check email, but I decided against it.

So, what was it like?

It was actually kind of liberating.  I realized what a junkie I am about having information available to me all the time.  There was a laptop within reach most of the week and I had to tell myself, “No, you are not going to check your email!”  I even had the opportunity when I was at my friend Laurie’s house, because our friend Christina was online looking at real estate listings.  (I admit it, I looked at the listings, but only because she was.)  Wanting to know what’s going on at all times is addicting.  Yet, it was also refreshing and less stressful to be disconnected from it too.  Besides, we were busy enough driving all over CA without me having to concern myself with the latest Facebook updates. 

The only time it was a little frustrating was when we were driving up the coast and had difficulty finding information about road closures near Big Sur.  I couldn’t get any information by phone.  Once you get to a certain point on U.S. 1, there are few, if any, roads cut across to Hwy. 101. Fortunately, when we approached San Simeon, there were signs on the side of the road telling us that the road was closed about 47 miles ahead. 

That’s when our trip became more about the journey than the destination.  And I think that’s what I’d been wanting all along by deliberately staying off the internet and email.  I wanted that feeling of not quite knowing what was going to happen next and just going with what the day brings.

Driving to work one morning…in India July 3, 2008

Just for fun, I’ll let you all hitch a ride for a few minutes in the little white Indica shuttle cab I took back and forth to work every day when I was in Hyderabad.  Believe it or not, this was a very tame ride in comparison to most days. 

My husband loved watching it.  He said, “It’s poetry. So many juxtapositions of wealth and utter poverty. From within the insulations of the car you also feel a tinge of motion sickness. It’s almost hypnotic.” 

Enjoy!

 

It’s all about making connections June 25, 2008

Last night, my colleagues and I hired a driver named Mohammed to take us to do a bit of shopping and out to Angeethi, a restaurant specializing in tasty Punjabi food in Banjara Hills, which is on the other side of Hyderabad from where we are staying.  Mohammed has been a driver for the firm for at least the past five years, so he has gotten to know numerous ex-pats and people like myself who are in India on short-term visits. 

On our way home from dinner, he quickly drove past the cab office in order to pick up something he wanted to show us. It was a business card album and it was chock-full of cards he’s received from all the people he’s driven.  Mohammed also showed us photos he’s had taken of himself with some of these people too.  He was really proud of his album and the connections he’s made.  He had gotten to know some of these people quite well over the course of driving them back and forth to the office each day.  (My favorite anecdote was his description of the female partner who sometimes would “self-drive” to work.  It’s somewhat incomprehensible to the male drivers that women would actually want to drive themselves anywhere.)

We were tickled by this, of course, but it made me realize that the ways in which we connect to each other and establish relationships is less important than the fact that it happens and how we benefit somehow from these connections.  He got to know three more employees of a company he is proud to serve, and we received excellent service from a driver whom we will recommend to others (and call upon again for ourselves on subsequent visits.)  We’re shaking hands and sharing something that creates an impression, whether it’s with a business card or via a Tweet.  I regret that I didn’t have any business cards with me to give him, but at least I’m in the photo. 

Jai Ma and not Ma Bell, or, learning to Skype from India June 22, 2008

Namaste from India! I’m a little bit behind on my blog posts but I have been keeping my tweets relatively up to date. 

You can say “efficient” and “airport” in the same sentence

I arrived in Hyderabad around 11p.m. Friday night.  This is my fifth trip here (which frankly, amazes me.)  For years, I’ve been flying into the rickety and dingy Rajiv Ghandi International Airport, which has recently been replaced with the bright, shiny, brand-new Rajiv Ghandi International Airport nowhere near the former one.  Transfers and transactions of any type usually take an indeterminate period of time in India, but I got through customs within five minutes, all the while marveling at the clean expanses of white walls, white and grey-flecked marble and recessed lighting.  When I got to the baggage carousel, the luggage was already spilling onto the conveyor belt.  That is a benchmark Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport can only dream of replicating. 

It wasn’t anything like what I experienced when I happened to arrive at the same time as several planeloads of pilgrims returning from the Hajj.  That was both a circus and cultural serendipity: the hordes of weary Muslims, jumbled cargo piling up everywhere (often boxes or burlap sacks secured with twine and duct tape) and the maw of family waiting outside to welcome them with flower garlands and gifts. 

This time, the airport was all so clean, orderly and quiet, I was actually kind of let down. 

Indulgences and diversions

First thing on Saturday morning, after enjoying a tasty masala omelette (onions, tomatoes and hot chillies – not for the faint of heart) I headed straight for the hotel spa and had some foot reflexology done.  Our bodies are not meant to travel through space and across multiple time zones at 500 mph.  I have learned that it is a necessity to do things that are beneficial to helping your body get settled once back on the ground.  Lots of water, lots of daylight and lots of bodywork.  (Chilies are optional.)

In the afternoon, I visited Golconda Fort with my co-workers.  Golconda Fort is amazing, just breathtaking in its size and overall preservation.  It also has terrific views of Hyderabad.  The men who were vying to be our paid guides were indignant that I didn’t want to hire them.  “Well, madam, how are you going to know where to go?”  They were disappointed and somewhat suspicious when I said I’d been there before.

Check out my photostream on Flickr on this page – I’ve posted a bunch of photos from the fort, including a spectacular and rather fearsome-looking shot of the goddess Kali Ma (Mother Kali) painted on a large boulder at a shrine located near the top.  Those things that are often terrifying in one way can also be seen as liberating in another.

For me, the best part about these excursions are the Indian families who ask you to be in their family pictures.  They walk up, shyly, holding their camera and before you know it, you’re posing with a bunch of people you’ll never see again – but you’re in their family album for life.  I have to wonder at this point how many families in Hyderabad and Delhi have my grinning face in their collection of “snaps.”  It’s like being a very, very, very minor celebrity. 

Ma Bell is not the ill communication…but Skype is

Somehow the international calling feature on my cell phone was never activated, and I’ve had difficulty getting hold of AT&T to get it switched on.  Making a landline call in India is like putting a wastepaper basket in the middle of a dark room, standing in one corner of that dark room with your dominant hand tied behind our back and trying to toss a small rubber ball into said basket.  That’s why everyone here has cell phones. 

Apparently, AT&T customer service doesn’t answer emails either.  (I know, I know.  They’re a phone company.)  But that’s OK.  In another year or so, they’ll be known as something else with the same lousy customer service and life will go on.  You can change your name, but that doesn’t mean you can just change what you are.  I say this with the authority of someone who is on their fourth last name. 

Anyway, thanks to my co-worker, I have discovered Skype.  I used earlier this evening and was really pleased at the quality.  I don’t have a webcam on my computer, so they couldn’t see me (jet lagged and haggard) but I got to see my daughter toddling around, laughing, babbling, getting into things, squirming on Daddy’s lap and blowing kisses to me.  I also got to see my dog’s tail and ears bobbing as she skittered through the room (happy birthday, Jazz!)  My husband and I have sent some emails back and forth for the past day, but it was so unsatisfying.  He’s not chatty on email like I am.  Skype gave me the next best thing to actually being at home – and we talked for an HOUR for free! 

 

 

Today’s roundup, including Flickr feedback June 19, 2008

I deployed a new intranet portal this morning.  This was my first time taking a portal from concept to production and although I’m happy that it went successfully, deployments always leave me feeling somewhat anticlimatic once the site goes live.  No time to rest on my laurels – there’s at least one more percolating as I type this and more to come over the next few months. 

I went to the travel clinic today to update my immunizations and get prescriptions for Malarone and Cipro before I head off to India tomorrow evening.  I had to get a typhoid and second dose of hepatitis B vaccines this time.  Because I do energy healing (Reiki), I feel the effects of these vaccines on my body very quickly.  Within a couple of minutes of the injection, I could feel my body begin to respond to the vaccines. I wouldn’t call it a reaction the way physicians have defined it, but I must have looked really “off” because the nurse asked me if I was OK. 

After months of resisting, I started a Flickr account.  You can see images from my Photostream further down the page.  Frankly, I don’t get what’s so great about Flickr.  Its interface is not intuitive at all and it takes a while to set up sets and organize photos. 

I much prefer Photobucket, particularly since I can quickly share individual photos, videos or albums by copying and pasting the URLs, which are formatted for several different applications: email/IM, direct link, HTML code and IMG code. I don’t necessarily want to inundate everyone with my Photostream; I may just want to show them a couple of pictures or video from an album.  Setting up albums is really easy too.  Flickr has a slick interface and photos take on an almost luminous quality, but Photobucket’s is more user-friendly. 

Now, what did impress me about Flickr is the EXIF data stats it captures from your photo files.  It’s hard not to be awed by that much information, which may or may not ever be of any use to the average person shooting snapshots. 

 

The taxonomist in me couldn’t help but get excited about the organization of so much information!  Of course I was curious and checked out their advanced search functionality to see if it was possible to search on this wealth of metadata, but alas, those fields do not seem searchable, at least not without significant effort.  (If someone has figured it out, I’m sure they will let me know.  It’s a good challenge for my SLA colleagues.)  Still, that was one of those  serendipituous finds that will help me learn more about how my camera works and what conditions to replicate if I want a similar look for future photos.  

Well, time to stop procrastinating and start packing.  Thursday will not end for me until sometime after midnight on Saturday morning India Standard Time when I touch down in Hyderabad.

See you on the other side of the world!

Today’s quote June 18, 2008

…is from Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, Middlesex:

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words.  I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.”  Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.  I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.”

Ah, that’s just lovely.  That makes me want to write poetry again.

 

My Web 2.0 mantra: ease of use, ease of use June 17, 2008

So, I followed Chris Brogan’s advice  on personal branding tactics and set myself up a profile on Technorati to build my ego searches for my blogs. 

Maybe I should not have picked the day I’m scheduled to deploy a new portal to embark on any new social media activities, but I was intrigued by Chris’s list and wanted to start working my way down.  And besides, as anyone knows, the final piddling tasks related to portal deployment always have to do with fixing mundane content management issues (in my case, realphabetizing an entire directory of practitioner biographies) so I needed something else to distract me momentarily besides gripe about my day on Twitter.

I have to say setting up my profile on Technorati has been an absolutely frustrating experience.  I had to verify my email address three times before it would recognize me as a user, and for some reason I cannot fathom, their application has yet to validating my authority for this blog!  Oddly enough, it had no problem validating my Dragonfly Reiki site, even though both of them are on WordPress.  I don’t know if that’s an issue with Technorati or WordPress, but it concerns me. 

I’m a busy woman.  The key to social media for me has to be speed and ease of use.  I should be walked through set-up of my profile first thing.  If I have to go back and hunt around to find my profile to edit it, that’s a bad sign.  If the site doesn’t even recognize me after I’ve validated my identity three time using the code they’ve given me to do so, that’s another bad sign.  I’m more patient than most people but in order for me to sing the gospel about social media to friends, colleagues and the practitioners at my job who use the portals I manage, it has to be quick, easy and seamless. 

Now, back to alphabetizing. 

Another twist on “equally-shared parenting” June 16, 2008

Patti Ghezzi, an education reporter and one of the women on my local mom’s group lists, sent a link to a really great story in Sunday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution about Clifton Green, a father and Emory University professor, who washes, twists and braids his adopted daughter Miriam’s hair.  Miriam is from Africa, and he and his wife finalized her adoption about two months after their son was born.  Clifton saw that his wife had her hands full taking care of a newborn and a toddler, so he decided to take responsibility for caring for her hair.  Judging by the photos accompanying the article, he has done a fabulous job. 

As someone with ethnic hair, I can personally appreciate his efforts.  I’m half Puerto-Rican and I inherited my father’s coarse, tightly curled hair.  My parents divorced when I was very young and I had very little contact with my father’s family growing up, so I lacked a cultural point of reference where my hair was concerned.  My mother, with her fine, stick-straight hair, had no idea what to do with it.  Ponytails and barrettes were out of the question, and this was in the days before gels and pomades were widely available on the market.  So, my trips to the hairdresser meant getting my hair shorn short with clippers.  There was no attempt at style.  I remember feeling like I wanted to cover my head up afterwards.  I was tall, thin and athletic so I was often mistaken for a boy until I was a teenager.  No lingering trauma there, eh? 

My daughter’s hair right now is mostly straight, but curls are appearing at the nape of her neck.  It’s hard to know if she will end up with curly hair or not.  My mother said my hair didn’t start to curl until I was two years old.  I found myself musing recently that if Ahleia’s hair stays straight or wavy that I will need to learn how to do things like pin back sections with barrettes or make ponytails and braids!  I may need to give Clifton Green a call. 

The article touches upon the cultural significance in the African-American community of caring for hair.  And once again, we invoke Brangelina, who, according to the article, has been criticized for not doing more with their adopted daughter Zahara’s hair.  Cared-for hair is a sign of status – and more importantly, devotion.  It’s a tradition passed down the matriarchal line from generation to generation in African and African-American communities.  Grandmothers’ hands guide mothers’ hands, who guide their daughters’ hands. 

Clifton Green is doing no small thing.  Not only is he crossing racial lines, he is crossing gender lines by using his hands to weave love into Miriam’s hair.