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| 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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
