Little Maggie (and other gifts)



I am an uncle again. Little Maggie Grace Burns was born on Monday, February 18, 2013 weighing 7.12 lbs. Here are pics with my nephew, Sean, and my niece, Emily, holding her. I'm proud of Emily, in particular, because this will be a whole new level of responsibility, having a baby sister!

I can't wait to meet her come November!


In other news, here out west, I've stepped it up and purchased my first adult car. The last one I owned was "Kit," a 1981 cream-colored Buick Skylark that I shared with my siblings during our high school and college years. His days were always numbered. Later on, as an insufferably liberal young adult, I was happy to take 'the T' everywhere around the Boston metro area but was also too eager to borrow the car of anyone close to me, be it my brother, my dad or my ex. Now my name is attached to a machine of financial gravity. Looks like little Emily is not the only one who has to show responsibility!



Daedalus is the name of my 2006 silver and blue Honda Element. He operates with sobriety and intellect and although shaped like a toaster, there's an airy quality to the ride as if I'm steering a cathedral. The first week I burnt out behind the wheel. It wasn't road rage but its cousin road-cockiness. Suddenly all my previous co-passengers on the 49 bus looked like commoners so now I swing between MUNI and driving. Driving an automobile is an entitlement, not a right, and my first love will always be public transportation. Where else can you people-watch or read a good chapter while some magic carpet whisks you away for two dollars?

Lastly, I'm relishing my first real attempt at gardening. It's a human activity "old as dirt" that utilizes all aspects of the emotional and mental spectrum: gathering, preparing, hoping, observing, modifying, anticipating, mothering, fathering. I know it must seem like I never interact with other humans, my dear reader. It's not that I'm anti-people; it's just that I'm pro-spirit, pro-animal, pro-flower. In fact, I feel I meet about five new people a day here and enjoy them all but I'm terribly shy about interviewing people for my blog. Stick with me and discover other life forms.

Below are some up-and-comers:


                                                                            

Hybrid Rose

Butter Lettuce

Peppers

Hibiscus




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Magic of Magnolias

Image
      I worried about being too showy with this post as most of my readers in Boston remain under 7 feet of snow. But the fact remains: Spring does come to California in February! California readers, has this always been the case or is climate change the go-to villain?       We're not immune, in the Golden State, to "Global Weirding." Los Angeles in fact is to receive more rain than San Francisco over the next ten days. Up here in fact it did not rain one drop in January - an almost exact replica of 2014. Business owners and farmers are getting jittery as this drought continues into its 4th year and thus state government is getting creative. Desalination right now is the hot-ticket-idea to secure water flow in California, something that countries like Israel have been investing in for decades.       At least the authorities won't neglect Golden Gate Park, a well-watered oasis that should really be sandy scrubland. These photos were taken at the SF Bot
Read more

Controversy at the BL Symposium on Decorum and the Soul of the Humanities: DITA Assignment #3

Image
Gosh, where do we start with this one?                                                                                                                                      Photograph: Alamy                  Our class had taken a field trip to the British Library Digital Labs Symposium which ended up being like an awards show for the most cutting-edge projects associated with local research groups. There was free food, an explicit call to "network" (a term that gives me the willies when spoken aloud), and a number of creative projects. The keynote speaker who kicked things off at the ripe hour of 10 a.m. was problematic in several different ways. Armand Leroi's talk entitled "The Science of Culture" basically used a number of infometric ways of tracking what lyrics and chords and instruments had been used in American Top 40 charts since 1960. While initially quite intriguing and entertaining, one ended up asking after all his graphs and boasts: &quo
Read more

Thomas's Pandemic Diaries: The Good Ole' Literature Review for the Dissertation

Image
Green and leafy London is affording me a nice atmosphere in which to tackle phase one of my UK Master's dissertation. Its working title is "Gift of the Gab: The Rise of the Audiobook and the Festive Turn in Library Science." The scholars I am reading are quite masterful and eloquent and I wonder if I can elevate my chatty banter in time for final publication. Ironically, what draws me to the subject of the audiobook (and to the podcast) is the approachability and egalitarianism of the medium and subsequently, the literature depicting it. Of course, the one community who would be left out is the deaf community; still I do believe the "A-book" reaches quite a large slice of the population who never "caught on" to SSR (Sustained Silent Reading). We've all have had a bad experience or two in high school English class. So a bit of housecleaning around terminology. A Master's thesis in the U.S. is for an M.A. or M.S. while a dissertation is for a P
Read more