Year End Updates

I have concluded my semester of Beginning German with flying colors, an A+ no less.  Kirk was disappointed though; he thought I should have gotten an A++, if such grade exists, considering the numerous advantages I have over the other students.  Towards the first week of November my life got considerably busier when, out of the blue, I was called to help out with a project at a small, local architecture firm here in Bloomington.  Having to juggle a first-period class four days a week and then go to work for 9 hours straight was no stroll in the park, but I'm glad to have the opportunity to get involved in some architectural design work and get paid for it!  I don't know how long this gig will last; the plan was to resume work after the holiday break with the hope this might herald more opportunities to come.   

I used my first paycheck to buy a new refrigerator, and as a result, was called "white trash" in jest by a friend.  (The reference takes some explaining, which I'm not sure I can do convincingly.)  The truth was that the ice-maker of our vintage fridge which came with the house built in 1966 broke during Thanksgiving week and leaked water on the floor; it would have had to be replaced anyway.  This winter will be our fourth in Bloomington!  We have been slowly replacing our kitchen appliances in the past couple of years; the changeover is now complete for the kitchen.  We will be working our way to other parts of the house in the coming years.  My inclination is for small, piecemeal improvements, while Kirk favors large-scale overhaul.    

The followings are some computer renderings of the interior renovation of the Monroe County Library Teen Center project (in the Design Development Phase) which I participated in -

Floor Plan

Longitudinal Section

Lounge Area

Radius Bookcase

"floating" Graphic Design Space

Quiet Reading Area

Here's to you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!  

Pool House

Site Plan

For lack of a more poetic name, I call my new house design, "Pool House."  The central feature of this design is a lap pool embedded on the basement floor, which is illuminated for full length of the pool by natural light through a skylight at 2 feet above the ground level.  I finished the design using Revit 2013 a long while ago, though I encountered some difficulties, apparently having to do with Revit 2013, in rendering it as I normally would do.  I had thought that my powerful new iMax desktop would let me zip through the rendering process but that did not happen, unfortunately. There were several reasons for it, not the least of which was that I have less time now to try it get it to work.

In this design there are basically three interlocking volumes forming an elongated rectangular block with the long sides facing south and north, intended to fit into a not uncommon lot shape in most US cities or suburbs.  The middle and tallest volume is 3-story high, one below ground and two above, while the two smaller and shorter volumes are located at the front (west) and back (east) ends.  Let me walk you through the floor plans -

    

Basement plan

The basement consists of an open space for exercise and entertainment with a kitchenette and the staircase on the north side and a lap pool on the south side lit by skylight. There is a mechanical and storage room directly below the garage, and a bath/changing room opens to the pool.  

The ground floor consists of the main living, dining, and cooking areas in the middle with an open stairwell on the north side illuminated by skylights on the roof.  The garage is located in the west end while the vestibule and a guest suite is off to the north/east end.  The living room and guest bedroom open out to a terrace in the back.  A utility room is situated between the kitchen and garage.  

The second floor contains the main bedroom suite, two offices, and another bathroom. The office facing west has a roof deck above the garage.  The bedroom in the back opens out to a balcony facing south.  

Ground Floor plan

Second Floor plan

West Elevation

East Elevation

South Elevation

North Elevation

The following are some section cuts, both longitudinally and transversely, and some semi-rendered interior perspectives -

Living area

Dining area

Kitchen

From Kitchen looking toward Living area

Guest Bath

 

Laundry Room

2nd Floor Hallway

West facing Office

Next are some rendered images; they are supposed to look more life-like, however, they take forever to do and the results are not necessarily more appealing -

Driveway

Back Terrace

Skylight to Basement Pool on the south side

Basement 

Roof Deck

I haven't had the chance to do some walk-through movies like I did in the past--my German class has been keeping me very busy.  I hope to do them over the Thanksgiving break though.  As you may have noticed, the plantings in these images are mostly in the fall colors of red and gold.  They are, of course, stock photos incorporated into Autodesk's 3D rendering library and a far cry from the burst of autumnal colors that are daily transforming our landscape.

The Song of the Lark

The third LibriVox project I worked on was "The Song of the Lark" by an American novelist from the late 19th-early 20th Century era, Willa Cather, depicting the journey of an irrepressible talent in finding her "voice" from humble beginnings, propelled by her indomitable desire, determination, and drive--the magical formula for successful enterprises.  (This was also the project that inspired me to learn German.)  Though there are insightful and lifelike depictions of each of the main characters in the book, they seem to me to be somewhat one-dimensional, even Thea Kronborg, the heroine, seems to be confined in and, as it were, protected by, the bubble of a character type defined by the author.  I thought that my reading had improved a little for this one but it was still plagued by halting diction, which impeded the flow of story-telling.  I'm onto my fourth project now; I'm grateful for the opportunity to work on my speech articulation, something which I wish I had practiced more when I was young. 

   

Wie sagt man das auf Deutsch?

I almost fell out of my chair when our instructor showed this video in class the other day. I've definitely got myself into a totally unfamiliar, parallel universe this time when I enrolled in a German 100 class at IU this fall.  I've been going to class at 8 in the morning, four days a week, since school started.  Learning a new language, from the ABC's like a pre-schooler in a kindergarten, with a bunch of young men and women barely out of their teens, is quite a novel experience for me.  When I went back to Graduate School over a decade ago to study Architecture, I was similar in age to my classmates' parents, now I could be their great aunt.  Thankfully, I am not as prone to feel embarrassed in such circumstances as when I was younger. 

What prompted me to take up German was the frustration I felt when I attempted to pronounce a few German words in a book I was reading for LibriVox in the summer.  Also, I remember feeling very embarrassed and rude when I couldn't understand or say anything in even the barest minimum of German on our trip in the German speaking part of Basel some years ago.

One often reads about how learning to speak a new language or to play a musical instrument can improve the mental agility of older adults.  It so happens that I seem to have been doing all the things that may contribute to keeping my wits about me.  At any rate, I hope my learning German now may have many more benefits than just enabling me to say "Vielen Dank!" when occasion arises.

The Fixed Period

The Fixed Period is the title of the second audiobook to which I contributed in the LibriVox project.  It is a strange story, to say the least, written by the prolific Victorian novelist, Anthony Trollope, and first published in 1882.  Kirk and I, since we joined The Folio Society back in the 90's, have collected all of Trollope's 48 novels and have read most of them through the years.  The Fixed Period, however, was one that I tried in vain several times to read but could not get past the first few chapters.  It was very different from the usual themes of Trollope's stories about love, marriage, inheritance, lawsuits, impetuous and stubborn men and women, greed and ambition in some of his more unsavory characters, etc.  It has been called a dystopian fiction, set in 1980, long since passed without any such event, fortunately, ever having happened.  The story itself, though grim enough, was narrated in a matter of fact tone, mundane and argumentative, though what sends a chill down one's spine is not so much the dystopian society it depicts, but the realization how one can be led astray on a grand scale by mistaken beliefs and an inflexible will.

When I saw the book in the Readers Wanted list of LibriVox's catalog, I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to find out, finally, what the story was about and how it ended.  I actually started reading, my first attempt at voice recording, from the last two chapters of the book.  After satisfying myself that nothing more disastrous happened than the frustration of a misguided idealist, I gradually read my way back up, and eventually recorded six chapters of the book in total.  I'm afraid my reading is rather mechanical, not like story-telling; I've a lot to work on still.   

Opera 101, Re-broadcast

[The following post is for people who may be interested in finding out more about western operas.  If you're well versed in this subject, please read no farther.]

For opera newbies out there, me included, I'd like to bring your attention to a new series of video podcasts this summer by Nicolas Revels of the San Diego Opera Company in which he introduces some of the basic elements of operas.  (Hat-tip to Marija for first telling me about this podcast a couple of years ago.)    

Opera for most people is an acquired taste, like bitter greens that take a little getting used to.  In addition to its unfamiliarity, there are several obvious reasons why it is not a more popular form of music theatre than, say, Broadway Musicals in the U. S.-- e.g., the fact that live operas are not readily available unless you live in big cities, that they are sung in languages other than English about 90 percent of the time, that opera singers do not normally enjoy the same cachet as pop idols, except in their own rarefied world, and that operas can be interminably long, and so on.  It was not until the Metropolitan Opera started showing opera productions live in HD at movie theaters that I got exposed to this musical/performing art form, just a couple of years before we moved from Gainesville to Bloomington. 

Luckily for me, Bloomington's IU School of Music happens to be one of the hot beds, and the best schools, for opera studies in the U.S.  Each year they stage seven full-fledged opera productions at the IU Musical Arts Center.  As a result, since moving to Bloomington, though a small town, I've been to see several live opera performances, by semi-professional opera students with all the accompanying fanfare and pageantry  of live orchestra, gigantic movable sets, dramatic lighting, and period costumes, etc.  I can't say that I've now become a bona fide opera buff; my knowledge about operas is in truth minuscule--barely scratching the surface. But I have caught the opera bug. 

I hope that the following introductory podcasts about operas by Nicolas Revels may perchance become the entry point to the world of [western] operas for some, who perhaps think it not to their taste, while providing, for others, an opportunity to dig a little deeper into the subject.  I don't know if there will be more podcasts in this series coming, but the followings are what have already been broadcasted -

1. Summer School for Opera Fans

2. Words and Music

3. What is an Aria?

4. I've Heard this Before!

5. The Duet

6. How do you say "I Love You" in music

7. Homework?!!

By the way, the schedule for the 2014 Met Opera Live in HD season is out; you may catch a few of the performances "live" in the movie theaters near you this Fall!

Happy Trails

We hit the trails, on horseback, one auspicious afternoon when it was not too hot, for an hour's ride in the Brown County State Park.  I vaguely remembered, or perhaps falsely remembered, having mounted once before, but it was probably before moving to the U.S.  I got myself fitted up for the occasion, donning my cowgirl hat and my "fire-engine-red" cowgirl boots, so described by our guide somewhat jealously.  We were told two basic maneuvers - right or left turn by pulling slightly on the rein accordingly, and then, off we trotted in an orderly procession, one horse's nose behind another's butt, so to speak.  I was assigned a horse named Sam; later on I learned that he tended to misbehave by snacking on the greenery along the way.  Sure enough, he would snap some branches off the scrubs once in a while and munch at his leisure.  The trails through the park were not all on smooth turf or gravel, there were some rough patches of mud, steep inclines, and down slopes.  A couple of times, Sam sidetracked us from the trails to get at some juicy bits of leaves in rather precarious conditions.  The guide hollered at me from the front to pull him back, saying with some encouragement, "You can do it, Cowgirl!"  Kirk said that Sam had "got my number" -- and could do anything he wanted with me.  When we got back, no sooner did I dismount, Sam let off a heavy jet of pee -- I barely got away in time.  

Happy Trails

Felix Holt, The Radical

The book, Felix Holt, The Radical, by George Eliot just came out as an audiobook available for free download in the Internet Archive website here or LibriVox's catalog here.  (Both sites have their eponymous free apps for convenient listening.)  George Eliot has such an extraordinary range of observation, power of description, and understanding of human aspirations and foibles that in reading her books one gets a vivid impression of the life, mostly in small towns, in 19th Century England.  I had not read Felix Holt before so it was a real pleasure to get to listen to the book for the first time.  I recorded four chapters for the book, not all in consecutive order.  If you listen to the whole book from the beginning, you can easily pick out my parts; they stick out like sore thumbs.  I hope they don't ruin your listening experience.  These are my first forays into reading for audiobooks; I hope I get better at it with practice.

p.s.: If you can, please consider giving to LibriVox.  Thank you.  

Summertime

And the livin' is easy

Unlike the previous two summers, this one has been especially mild, some hot days in the high 80s/low 90s, interposed with days, in the low 70s, of sustained rain and thunder storms.  All kinds of vegetation in our yard, never before seen, are growing rambunctiously, after having stayed dormant in the ground for the previous two years due to the severe drought we had.

The pleasant weather prompted Kirk to hang up his old hammock in the sunroom, the one he used to sleep in for an entire year when he lived at the dorm at UCSB many, many moons ago.  He bought it in Merida in the Yucatan on a trip, hitch-hiking part of the way, through Mexico, one summer when he was an undergraduate.  (This kind of road trip somehow does not seem very feasible in the present time, at least in the eyes of the older and wiser folks like us.)  

He thought to get another one like it for me so that we could sleep in plein air, as it were. After some searching on the net, he managed to find an outfit in Yucatan that sells almost exactly the same Mayan style of hammocks at an incredibly good price!  He ordered it and got it in no time.  We hung it up side by side with the old one, whose colors are slightly paler than its freshly-minted neighbor.  We've so far spent two and a half nights out there, the half being the one that I called off, rather unnecessarily according to Kirk, due to the severity of the thunder storm we had that night.  

Sleeping outdoors is a little like camping, except that the bathroom facility is close at hand.  One's sense of hearing is especially acute in the dark--kids giggling from somewhere in the neighborhood, probably also camping out, the screeching of cats fighting, the sound of driving rain and outrageous thunder, and the notes of the first bird awakening and the answering trill from another in the early dawn, barely broken. 


07.08.13 Update:

Hostas in bloom

The hostas in the bed by our front walk, which we thought to have been completely decimated by the deer in the neighborhood when we moved here three summers ago, have miraculously revived and re-populated the entire bed, despite my having planted hyacinths there in the fall after we moved in.  And in recent weeks, saturated with rain, they have even pushed out their slender, delicate, lavender-colored flowers to our great surprise and delight.  We have been jealously guarding them from any deer approaching our yard -- that is, as best as we can, for the truth is that there is no stopping the deer munching, en famille, from yard to yard in Bloomington. 

Reading Out Loud

Recording in Session

Earlier this month, I made myself a cardboard sign, which says "Recording in Session", to hang up as needed on the door of my office.  (It somehow seems to remain on the door any time of the day, for days on end, as Kirk soon finds out.)  You may be wondering what it is all about; well, there is a story behind it...

I recently jointed a multi-national volunteer organization, called LibriVox, whose ambition is to record all the books in the public domain and make them available for download for free -- a lofty goal indeed!  As you may be wondering why there are people doing this, here is what they say about it on their FAQ -

Why are you doing this?  What's in it for you?
"We love reading, love books, love literature, think the public domain should be defended and enriched, we like free stuff, we like to hear people read to us, and we like reading to other people.  It's fun, it's a great community, it's a rewarding public service to the world. And "nothing" is in it for us, except the satisfaction of participating in a wonderful project."

Well, it can't be said any better.  I've been listening to their free audio-books for some time and as they always begin and end their recordings with calls to volunteering, I finally decided to give it a try and signed up.  (They are not very particular about signing people up; no qualification is required.)  For the past several weeks I've recorded six chapters, three each in two books, and spent many late-night hours reading and re-reading paragraphs in the books and heavily editing my recording.  Compared to those of the experienced readers, my reading sounds laborious and has a unmistakeable foreign accent but they don't seem to mind it once the recording meets certain guidelines.  (I'll let you know what I read once they publish the two audio-books in question.)  Several of my readers will be a great fit for doing this kind of thing; I won't name names but you all know who they are.    

Reading out loud, though everybody does it, is not as easy as it sounds; to many of my friends who are professional pedagogues, for whom the ability to get their points across effectively with voice is essential, speaking/reading out loud is perhaps as easy as second nature.  Though I've been speaking English almost exclusively for over 30 years, it still frustrates me when I can't speak well, explain myself clearly, or when I feel that I speak with a foreign accent, and I don't mean in occasional episodes of public speaking but just ordinary day-to-day conversation.  As a way to improve my English, I read out loud to myself from time to time just to keep my tongue nimble.  Therefore, to volunteer to read for LibriVox seems like a great opportunity for me to practice my English.  I hope it gets easier as I continue to work on it.                     

Hmm, you may be thinking, "This is another of her early retirement projects, like blogging and learning to play the piano; how fun!"  Well, yes, and many thanks to Kirk that I have been able to do this.  As a New York Times' article asks "What do you want to be, now that you're grown?", I feel like I've been given a second life, to do whatever I like to do, now that I've left off, albeit not entirely voluntarily, being an income-producing adult, whose life is tied to the job that pays.  I have, however, never been at a loss to have something to "do" with my time; quite the reverse, I'm concerned about not having enough time to do all the things I like and want to do. 

Make it Sing

For the last month and a half I've been laboring to coax my clunky, plodding piano keyboard and my aching, rheumatic fingers to cooperate to produce a singing-like quality for a piece of music that I have been trying to learn and commit to memory for our yearly recital.  It was the second movement of Mozart's piano sonata No. 16, K545 -- a perennial favorite for piano novices.

Three days before the recital I went with my teacher to the place, the Fellowship Hall of one of our local UU chuches, where we are to perform for our family and friends.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to test out the piano there beforehand; it turned to be even more unresponsive in certain keys than the one I have been practicing on.  In order to make some of the notes heard, I had to put more weight on my left hand -- basically unlearn the habit I've gradually acquired during the many weeks of practice, that is, to play softly and velvety with my left hand and let the melody sing from my right.  If there was any consolation, my teacher told me that it was something that most concert pianists had to go through, that is, having to make adjustment of their playing according to the idiocyncrasy of the pianos at the venues where they are to perform. 

As usual, I was the last person on, being the only adult in the group of elementary school children.  While waiting for my turn, I worked myself up with mounting stage fright and cold sweat; I walked up to the piano with something like the resignation of a prisoner walking up to the guillotine.  It was over in a flash though and I pretty much got through the piece relying on auto pilot.  I counted 7+ mistakes on the whole but it was not completely disastrous considering that my fingers were trembling the whole time. 

Here is a YouTube video of Yuja Wang, the amazing flying fingers from China, playing the entire sonata when she was in elementary school.  More about her, here.

Take it to the Max

i-Mac(ed)

Finally, I took the plunge and converted from PC to Mac. (Some of my readers will probably mutter "It's about time!")  People liken the spiritual divide between devotees of the PC and Mac to Protestantism and Catholicism; to me it was more like a spiritual conversion from Christianity to Zen Buddhism. 

What put me over the edge was that the Windows operating system on my laptop, for some inscrutable reason, kept succumbing to the dreadful BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.  (Count yourself lucky if you've never experienced it.)  I put up with this daily torment, plus many other software nightmares, for as long as I could, since last July, until my Dell laptop finally quit for good.

What kept me from making the switch sooner was concern over the compatibility between the Mac and the various Autodesk programs which I'm wedded to for architectural design.  But given that Autodesk has begun to accommodate Mac users and make some of their programs compatible with the Mac OS, and given the availability now of software such as Parallels Desktop, which allows one to work in Windows programs without having to reboot, we were finally convinced that it would be safe for me to switch.  Kirk made the switch when he moved to IU two and a half years ago and has never looked back.

After having gotten over the initial difficulty of transferring the data from my old hard drive to the new iOS environment and installing various software programs for the Mac, I've begun to get the hang of the different terminology and different ways of navigating.  What I like best about this super machine is that the Mac operating system is integrated with the Mac's own impeccable and seemingly indestructible hardware and all its peripherals, unlike the Windows setup where its operating system lives in hardware made by others and which tends to go out of sync with operating system updates or simply fall apart in a few years' time.

I've yet to find out how Autodesk programs work on the Mac; I hope the transition will be seamless.

Tronies

There is probably no face more universally recognizable, with the exception perhaps of Mona Lisa's, than that of the "Girl with a Pearl Earring," by Vermeer.  On our recent trip to San Francisco, that anonymous face with the blue and gold turban seemed to peep out at us on every street corner -- one gets a fleeting glimpse of her on passing buses and trolley cars, on banners and posters at every tourist destination. The painting is currently being exhibited at the De Young Museum.  It has drawn an unprecedented number of visitors to the museum and its likeness has been slapped onto every conceivable type of merchandise the marketing department of the museum could think of. 

One of the interesting things we learned at the exhibition is the distinction between tronies and portraits. Tronies, an old Dutch word for "faces", in art world parlance refers to Dutch paintings from the 17th Century, usually in the portrait format of heads or busts, which are studies of facial expressions (character studies) of unidentified sitters -- to use a condensed version of the definition culled from Wikipedia and other sources.
     
What exactly is so fascinating about this painting, or more specifically, about the young woman's face?  Unlike the forward-facing Mona Lisa, with her placid expression and half smile, Vermeer's model seems to be casting a backward glance at us questioningly through the veil of time.  The 1999 novel of the same title and the 2003 film based on it starring Scarlett Johansson seems to me to rob her of the many other possible readings of the face that a viewer can conjure up when standing face to face with it.

But what interests me most about the painting, is not figuring out what the facial expression--her imploring gaze and parted lips, as some might describe them--of the girl is trying to say, but the painter's ability to make palpable the sense of an arrested motion, perhaps of the girl's slow pacing movement being halted by a summons from behind, conveyed by the just-so turn of the shoulder and the tilt of the head.  

At any rate this is a painting which any budding artist would want to copy, even I.  Below is a picture of my girl with a pearl earring in the intermediate stage of its becoming, next to the original.  I chose to show this here because it seems still to possess the potential of becoming a good copy, while my finished product was completely hard and sterile, incapable of producing any mystery or poetry.        

A face that speaks
a thousand words

My attempt at copy

56 Up

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," thus boldly proclaims by an old-fashion, Sci-Fi- movies-kind of voice at the end of the latest - the 8th - installment of the British documentary series, the Up Series.  The films follow the lives of 14 British children, of varied backgrounds, every 7 years from the age of 7.  The first of this series, "Seven Up!", aired in 1964, which makes the subjects of these documentaries exactly of the same age as I, though I don't think I was aware of the fact when I watched the series of films at different time in the past.  It was with considerable interest that I went to see the latest entry "56 Up" last weekend. The fact that this film is, in a sense, also a documentary of the time of my life and that these people are my contemporaries did not come home to me until then.  

What struck me most this time around was how candid, reflective, and articulate all the participants have been, even when they were quite young, and how even-keeled and nonjudgmental, though not everybody thought so, the interviewer and director, Michael Apted, 16 years their senior, who has only been represented by his voice, has been through 49 long years.  As children, these 14 participants of the documentaries could not have had a very clear idea what they were getting into for the first couple of episodes, but their continued participation, with a few abstentions, was undertaken voluntarily in the ensuing years.  I certainly admire their courage for allowing themselves be seen, even scrutinized, however briefly, at the different stages of their lives. And, despite the ups and downs in their lives, through numerous marriages, divorces, children and grand children, and the various economic circumstance each ends up in, they still appear, in their 50's, to be a bunch of contented individuals in their own spheres of family and work lives.  None of them has displayed, at least not so on screen, any trace of envy of their fellow participants of the documentary series, and not all that much curiosity (with a few exceptions) about the others. 

At this time, 49 years later, I'm not sure if the original thesis of the series, that one can get a glimpse of someone's future from what he or she is like when seven, has been borne out.  At seven, all of them, it seems to me, were more or less upbeat, cheerful, confident, and full of hope for the future.  However, most of them seem to have followed the paths which their social and economic backgrounds laid out for them - the kids from wealthy and higher social class background became barristers, those from working class background became construction workers, taxi drivers, and the like.  (Though one boy, Nick, raised on a farm, but not to the manor born, went to Oxford and is now the chair of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin.  Education is the big equalizer, which seems to have been borne out here.)  The same can be said by and large of the gender expectations which these children have grown up with - all the girls (only 4 of the original 14 were females) got married and had children early, none got an university-level education, and some have had administrative-type of careers at one time or other.  (Here is a quick synopsis of what has become to each of the participants.)  The only exception is Neil, whose life did not go as scripted in the conventional way and could hardly have been predicted from what one can tell by his smiley 7-year-old self.  He has endured considerable hardship from his 20's through early 40's.  Now, in his 50's, with stooped shoulders and much weathered mien, he has managed to transform himself into an active church and political figure in the small town where he lives.  Are the outcomes of their lives till now pre-determined, whether by the socio-cultural forces in operation or their views, skewed in part by those forces above-mentioned, of their place in life?  Anyone with a little self-respect would, I think, find it hard to agree with that conclusion, since it would seem to generalize, but there are the facts. 

I cannot say that I have anything in common with these fellows, other than the journey through time which we've all made concurrently.  The trajectory of my life is a bit more unpredictable than theirs, as a result, mainly, of my having transplanted myself from Taiwan to the U.S. when I was 23.  Could anyone, my parents included, have anticipated this when I was a puny little girl in first grade in a tiny fishing village in the south of Taiwan?  It is difficult to speculate what my life might have been like if I had remained in Taiwan; staying, though, did not occur to me to be even possible.  I had never doubted I would leave; the resolve, not out of any privation or unhappiness, was probably made by the time I was in high school. 

Who is that person (aged I guess about seventeen) in the bell-bottoms, tinted glasses, platform shoes, and loud patterned outfit in the picture to the right peering at me across time and from the other side of the world?  Well, she somehow turned into me, and though she didn't know she would find herself in Bloomington, Indiana, she was determined to get there.    

Here are links to a couple of reviews of the film, if you're interested - from the New York Times, and the NewYorker magazine

Happy New Year!

(from Google Images)

If your new year's resolutions haven't quite taken hold after a little over five weeks since the beginning of this year, now is your chance, symbolically speaking, to renew your commitments as the Chinese are getting ready to usher in their New Year this coming Sunday, on February 10.  As the customary Chinese New Year's greeting goes - Gong Xi Fa Tsai - here is to you all, A Happy and Prosperous New Year!