Change Is Hard

Wordless Wednesday (aka; darn groundhog)

February 3, 2010 by dawnkinster 5 Comments

Frozen frost walk Jan 17 2009 025

February 1, 2010
by dawnkinster 6 Comments

Avatar

We don’t get out that much but my husband and I went to see Avatar last night. It’s not my usual (romantic comedy) fare, but I thought we should see what all the buzz was about. And the chance to see something in 3D and on an IMAX big screen was too good to miss.

It’s a visually stunning film that just starts. None of the usual title scenes with the names of actors, no lion roaring at the beginning to tell you that the movie is about to begin. In fact I thought at first we were watching a trailer for some other movie. Because all the bits I’d seen on TV were of the blue Avatars and this was some sort of space craft with real actors. But eventually I figured out I was watching the feature film.

Many things in the movie reminded me (and my husband) of other events or movies. When the huge tree which had been their home came crashing down in flames after being attacked from the air, I saw horror in the Avatars’ eyes just like the horror in New Yorkers’ eyes when the twin towers fell. When they rode their horses into battle I saw just a bit of Brave Heart and when the old leader of the clan handed off his bow and arrow to his daughter as he lay dying I saw a piece of Lion King. My husband remarked after that some of it reminded him of the Custer’s last stand, when individual bands of Indians gathered together to fight.

It was a visually stunning film. But I knew I was going to be in trouble early on when the main characters ran and jumped and fell among the jungle and I felt the first twinges of motion sickness. I don’t know if it was the 3D or the IMAX experience, or maybe all that in combination with lots of flying off of cliffs and along waterfalls, but I was swallowing hard and staring at my feet, hand pressed against my mouth, silently counting how many laps I would have to climb over in a rush for the bathroom during most of the movie. And it’s a long movie.

In the end I listened to it with brief peeks from under my eyelashes. Nice music! I got the story, enjoyed what small pieces of it I got to see and would recommend anyone without a propensity to motion sickness to go see it.

And the rest of you? Maybe take a Dramamine first!

January 30, 2010
by dawnkinster 6 Comments

Wanna play Frisbee?

Katie 2274 It’s sunny today and already 13 degrees out! Can’t waste a perfectly beautiful Saturday. So I asked …”Hey Katie…wanna play Frisbee?

Well, like any good young Sheltie she was immediately up for it. She hopped around so much it was hard to put her leash on. And once outside and off the leash…well…it was time for CRAZY DOG! She could hardly stand it until I threw the frisbee the first time. Then she ran as fast as she could, heading across the snow covered yard. With the sun in her eyes she didn’t catch the frisbee, which caused her to growl at it. But she brought it right back to me without her “victory lap” that she usually takes around me before she’ll hand it off. This time she wanted me to throw it right away. So I did.

Do you see her waaaaay out there?

Katie 2283

Here she comes!

Katie 2287

Throw it again Mom! Throw it again!
Katie 2293

Silly girl.

January 29, 2010
by dawnkinster 6 Comments

YES!

It’s 7 degrees out this morning. But the sun is shining and in the front of the house there is little wind. And Katie was going nuts inside. So I got the board out and we started working on getting her to go UP the slope. I started with it flat on the driveway, butted up against the front porch’s two steps. No problem. She’ll run back and forth all happy, eager for her treat.

I slipped one end up on the first step which is really low. No problem, she runs back and forth, leaping up onto the porch and grinning.

I slipped the end up to the top step. She ran down it just like always, turned around and ran back up it before she realized it was higher. YEA!!! I gave her LOTS of treats. She ran back down. Got a treat. Turned around and balked. Silly girl. You just did this!

Finally got her to go up half the board, jumping on from the middle…then a bit later she accidently ran up all of it, eager for the treat. YEA!!!! I gave her LOTS of treats. Then she balked again.

Sigh.

After much tempting she sort of just said “oh what the heck” and ran up the board, turned around and basically said: “OK, is THAT WHAT YOU WANT MOM?!” She got LOTS of treats.

Then we went inside before she had a chance to balk again. And to warm up my fingers. We’ll try again later this afternoon. They expect we’ll get to a high of 17. Heat wave.

January 29, 2010
by dawnkinster 7 Comments

A busy week

Tuesday evening I attended my first in a series of Hatha yoga classes offered by a local community education program. It is taught by a man who has a PhD in pharmacology! He’s given up that career and now teaches yoga full time. He was very accommodating to all of us newbies, telling us (appropriately) that it was all about the breath and not about how we did the poses. Good thing. However I often found myself holding my breath, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what was supposed to be happening! I’ll work on it. I didn’t think we had exerted ourselves too much, but two days later I could hardly move. And I still can’t sit up after reclining on the sofa without pain. Guess that’s the “core” he kept talking about!

Wednesday night Katie and I as well as her dad went to Agility class. We’ve been working all week on “walk it walk it walk it!” across her board, first flat on the driveway, then elevated a bit on bricks and finally sloping down from our front porch. She runs across her board, then turns and runs right back, looking for a treat, as long as it’s level. And she’ll run down the sloping board all day, but wants nothing to do with walking up it! At school this week they didn’t have the dog walk set up. DRAT! They did have the A-frame the and teeter set up, neither of which she initially wanted to deal with. We did get her to “touch!” them and get a treat. Eventually we used Marie’s idea of bringing the tall table over to the A-frame. Katie jumped right up on the table, and with a treat to entice her, stepped onto the A-frame and walked down half of it! Later I got her to put all four feet on the bottom of the A-frame and streeeetch up to reach a treat. But she didn’t like it. She likes to keep her back feet safely on the floor! Finally at the end of the class her dad could pick her up and place her just below the tip of the A-Frame and, with me at the bottom holding chicken, she’d run down the slant.

Katie does everything fast. Jumps, tunnel…and this week, the chute! Who knew! Last week we ran the chute with someone holding open the end, and to Katie it was just another tunnel. This week they dropped the chute fabric on the dogs as they went through. But Katie was always through the chute before the girl let go. So after the second time like that they just left the fabric on the ground. Katie never hesitated, bursting through the chute fabric looking for me and her treat. I was so surprised, because she’s always balked at chute before. But I was also very very proud of her. One of the instructors asked if I had brought the same dog, because she was coming along so well. This week the tunnel was set up at a 90 degree turn, but when we tried it the first time Katie was running so fast I don’t think she noticed the corner, and had no trouble with it all evening. Until we did a series of 3 jumps then tire, THEN had to turn 90 degrees, right at the ring fence, to go into the tunnel. I didn’t have enough room to get her going, and she walked into it, then turned around and walked out each time. A couple of things might have caused that, the slowness of her entry, and the fact that it was the end of class and she had pretty much shut down. So I didn’t worry about it. Everything is fun in agility, and that’s the way I want to keep it for her.

Yesterday morning was our Obedience/Rally class. This week the course was much more difficult, filled with things I had never seen before. The instructor had thrown in a lot of excellent level stations. We bumbled our way through it, but I’m not worried as I’m a long way from competing in excellent! Katie did really well on most of her heeling and of course she was perfect on her sits and stays. She was also perfect on her stand for exam, so I’m happy. I need to get her registered to do a rally trial.

Last night I went to my first Spanish for Adults class. I’ve always wanted to try to learn another language; I took 2 years of French in high school and was terrible at it. Maybe it will work better as an adult, and with no grade! But I don’t know. Most of the other 7 adults in the class had someone in their family that spoke Spanish and they heard it spoken a lot. I don’t, though I heard it at work quite a bit. And it’s clear that I have to think about things a lot longer than they do. And that I’ll probably have to work harder to get it. But that’s not unusual, after going back to grad school at 50 I am used to being slightly behind and working harder to keep up. Which means I need to get offline and start on my Spanish homework. Can’t blame the dog for errors in this class!

My favorite sentence from last night? “El perro es inteligente.” The dog is intelligent. Well…she is… but how did they know?

January 27, 2010
by dawnkinster 9 Comments

Wordless Wednesday

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January 25, 2010
by dawnkinster 12 Comments

Guess that hint of spring is over now

We’ve had pretty warm temps, in the high 30’s and low 40’s…once even into the high 40’s (!) for several days now. Maybe a couple of weeks, but I’ve been too busy to notice. It was just starting to sink in that it was nice outside and Katie and I should get ourselves over to the park. But apparently yesterday was the last warm day. Today was rather warm in the morning and it’s been downhill since. This afternoon it started to snow, bigger and bigger flakes came down.

Katie and I went to check things out. She was immediately attracted to the falling snow, trying to catch the snowflakes in her mouth. Silly girl. We go through this every time it starts to snow; I have to explain that she can’t catch all the falling snow, or eat all the drifts in her yard. But still she tries.

Katie 2260

January 24, 2010
by dawnkinster 4 Comments

Talent

More than a week ago I was able to attend a collage concert in Ann Arbor; a concert that celebrated the entire Music and Theater departments at the University of Michigan. Bits and pieces of all the works done in the departments were presented one after another with no applause between. The lighting moved rapidly from place to place on the stage and always where the spotlight fell groups of artists or a single performer began to share their talents with us. A concert band, jazz ensembles, a single cello player, a saxophone quartet, the cast of Evita, modern dancers, Shakespearean actors, the university symphony, a chamber choir, a group of woodwind players dressed in big hats and giant bow ties, three marimba players. It went on and on yet it seemed to only last a moment. A minute of this, three minutes of that, classical followed immediately by popular. Talent flowing everywhere.

My favorites? The slim woman who made magic while playing Rachmaninov on a grand piano. The audience gave a collective sigh when she finished. And for sheer fun, the four euphonium players who did a piece in the pitch black of a stage without light. At first I, and probably everyone, thought the lighting people had made a mistake when music began and no light illuminated the players. I worried that they had the beginning memorized but would have to wind down as the seconds passed and still no light appeared. Eventually it became obvious this had been planned to be presented without light. Still I couldn’t relax, worried that somehow this was not right! But before it ended I realized what a gift it was to listen to music in the dark with no distractions from sight.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go back to Ann Arbor and listen to the Ann Arbor Symphony play. It was the tenth anniversary of the symphony’s maestro and a celebration of Mozart. I learn something each time I attend an Ann Arbor Symphony performance. I learned this week that Mozart wrote music for smaller numbers of musicians, so on this evening the symphony was much smaller, more intimate. As usual they played wonderfully, from the first piece, Divertimento No. 1 for Strings in D Major, which was written when Mozart was sixteen to the third and last piece written, but not completed by Mozart because he died before it was finished, Requiem in D minor.

I have to say I enjoyed the first piece the most; it was light and airy and fun and I could envision a young Mozart throwing it together as a kid, proving his genius. I also enjoyed the second movement of the second piece, Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat Major, a piece Mozart wrote for a friend who played French Horn. The second movement is so melodic, and was done beautifully by the guest soloist Andrew Pelletier. I was not looking forward to the Requiem, it’s not my favorite piece. But I have to say I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the choir assembled for the performance. Three choirs, all from high schools sang together. I counted over 130 members and the sound just soared in the acoustically perfect Hill Auditorium. The kids were amazing and the packed 5,000 seat auditorium was transfixed.

Two events filled with talent. You have to have hope for the future when you are priviledged to listen to such beauty.

January 23, 2010
by dawnkinster 8 Comments

Tango…it takes two

Detroit Auto Show Jan 2010 175

There are a gazillion million trillion dollars of beautiful (and some not so beautiful) cars at the North American Auto Show this week. I took over 150 photos of many of them. So how to choose what to show you today? Well, only one intrigued me enough to take home the brochure. And even though I know that the odds of me ever owning it are slim to none, let me show it to you anyway:

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It’s called the Tango; seats two people, one behind the other, (hence the “it takes two” theme), and fits into half a lane. It’s billed as “the world’s fastest urban car” and it’s designed for commuting to work in an urban environment. It is the oddest, cutest looking thing and caught my eye while we were downstairs watching people ride electric cars around a course lined with magnolia trees and daffodils in full bloom. Sort of a garden/auto show event.

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The car is 8 feet 5 inches long, 39 inches wide and 60 inches tall. It weighs 3,000 pounds and goes from zero to 60 in about 4 seconds. It can accelerate from zero to over 130 mph in one gear. (Not that I ever envision going 130 mph in this or any other car!) It’s range is 60 miles on inexpensive lead-acid batteries and up to 200 miles with lithium-ion batteries.

Detroit Auto Show Jan 2010 157 It’s built by Commuter Cars Corporation in Spokane Washington, and they are presently taking orders for kit cars to be delivered within six months. Supposedly you will be able to assemble them in 8 hours. Put tab A into slot B? Somehow I can’t quite imagine building my own car out in the garage.