I must have missed the fork in the road.

A friend from the 365 Project group commented on a recent photo: “Lots of inspiration on the morning commute, eh?” To which I thought, “I should take more photos from the afternoon commute!”

So it was that yesterday I found myself taking a lot of photos on the train ride home. It was raining, and I was having fun with the water drops beading on the window. As the train moved, the patterns behind the drops changed. Much of the ride was just a blur of green, as we sped past trees and undergrowth, but as we slowed coming into stations, the patterns would get more varied.

As I’ve mentioned several times¹, I’ve started taking the train into work more often. I really like taking the train, and in some ways it is more relaxing than driving: I can read (or even nap) during a big chunk of the commute, and don’t have to worry about city parking or traffic. On the other hand, it takes longer. When I drive, my commute is about one hour each way to get to work. When I take the train, it takes a bit more than 2 hours each way. A good hour of this each way is spent sitting on the train, the rest is spent driving to and parking at the train station one end, and taking the T and walking on the other end.

Yesterday’s homebound commute took 3 hours and 15 minutes. Because of a tree.

At the station 2 before mine, the train started to pull out of the station, and then stopped again. After a few minutes, the conductors came through to announce that there was a large fallen tree on the tracks ahead, and that it was too large for the train to push through. It apparently fell from one side of the tracks, where the root ball was still intact and partially buried, across both tracks, and smashed into the fence on the other side. We were told that a track crew had to be called to cut through the tree to let the train pass. There were murmurs of passengers volunteering to help move the tree, but the conductors believed the tree was too big², and the passengers were told they weren’t allowed to, anyhow. (I’m sure it was a liability issue.) We were told it would be only about a 20 minute wait. I translated that in my head to mean at least half an hour. Since we were still at a station, passengers were allowed to get off the train, and some probably called to get picked up there. Others waited out on the platform.

I was comfortable sitting on the train, and had my camera, phone and various electronic devices handy to keep me busy. John had already picked up Phoebe and Theo, so I didn’t have to worry about being late. I relaxed and took many more shots of raindrops on the window and rain splashing on the platform.

After about 45 minutes, the official track crew had still not arrived. But suddenly all the passengers hurried back onto the train, and we were told we were leaving. Apparently, the group of volunteers had moved the tree, after all. We got moving again, towards the next stop. Rather than continuing all the way to the end of the line, our train was going to let everyone off at the penultimate stop, and head back to Boston. So, I had an extra 15 minutes waiting for another train at a different stop. Just as the next train was pulling into the station, I spied this along side the curb where I was waiting:

Sometimes, in life, you come to a fork in the road. It is a rare occasion when you come to a spoon.

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¹ Perhaps I’m trying to drive the point home?
² Did I mention that the tree was big? It was, from all accounts, a big tree. Also large.³
³ I should also say that I was glad that the tree, which was quite large, did not fall on the train.

stemming the flood of apathy

A couple of weekends ago I went to New York City for BlogHer, a big conference for bloggers.

That same weekend, in Pakistan, the disastrous flooding that had started a week before was getting steadily worse.

I’m embarrassed to say that over that weekend when I was in New York, the flooding in Pakistan was not even on my radar. While I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t mentioned, I just don’t remember anyone talking about it. Even at the very activism-oriented sessions that I attended. It could be that I was caught up in other things, or it could be that everyone else was, too.

During the 2 days that I was staying in comfortable hotels, and feasting on the elaborate buffets courtesy of corporate sponsors, hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan were already left homeless, and millions more were affected. Over a thousand had already died.

In the following week, I know that I had seen an email come in from UNICEF about the floods, but I didn’t spend much time looking at it. I confess that it wasn’t until I was glancing at a newspaper left on a table at my in-laws’ house last weekend and read an article about US aid to Pakistan that I really became conscious of the magnitude of the flooding, and reflected on how little I had heard about it. I know that some of this is because I was travelling, and preoccupied with personal business. I was too busy with kids and family to spend more than a few minutes a day online, and I don’t generally watch TV. But somehow in those few minutes a day online I read about other things. I read far more, for example, about the controversy about the proposed Islamic community center in New York City. (You know, the one that’s not actually a mosque, nor actually at Ground Zero.) And I can’t help but feel that the lack of widespread concern over the one story and the furor over the other are related.

Now, more than two weeks after the flooding began, the crisis in Pakistan is still growing, with 8 million people urgently needing humanitarian aid.

I know that I am not alone in my concern, nor am I alone in being disturbed by the unimpressive trickle of response to these catastrophic floods. I think it’s important for those of us who do care to do what we can to express our concern, and show the people of Pakistan, and the world at large, than many of us care at least as much about the survival of their children as the fate of a building that once housed a Burlington Coat Factory.

So, you may be wondering why I’m bringing up a conference I attended. Well, for one thing, things that happened there have been on my mind a disproportionate amount of time compared to world events, and that does not make me proud of myself. For another thing, thanks to the kindness of a couple of generous friends, I didn’t need to get a hotel room of my own for the two nights I was in the city, as they let me use the extra beds in their rooms. Both turned down my offers of contributing to the hotel bills. So, I feel like I had a bit of a windfall. And I have decided to donate the equivalent of what I might have paid for 2 nights of hotel in New York City to organizations who are actively providing humanitarian aid to the survivors of the floods in Pakistan.

I donated to IRC and UNICEF, two organizations I have previously supported, and who are already on the ground in Pakistan. I know that there are other worthy organzations at work in Pakistan, such as Doctors Without Borders. If you would like to recommend any others, or any other ways of either helping the situation in Pakistan or voicing your concern, please share them in the comments.

sleeping around

I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight. I realized that I have been in and out of an alarming number of beds the past 10 days.

Two Thursdays ago I headed down to New York City for BlogHer. I stayed in a hotel with one friend the first night, and with another in another hotel the second. Then I headed home for one night before we went as a family to New Hampshire for a couple of nights. We got home so late on Tuesday night that I ended up sleeping in Phoebe’s bed with her. The next night was back to my own bed, and the following night we hit the road again to visit my in-laws, where we stayed for 3 nights. That makes 6 beds in 10 nights.

Our daycare was closed for vacation last week, which somewhat prompted the trip to New Hampshire. We had lots of fun visiting Storyland on Monday and Tuesday, a theme park that is geared towards younger kids. We even met up with some friends there. Wednesday I managed to get Phoebe off to preschool, and Theo and I mostly hung out and napped for the day until it was suddenly time to pick up Phoebe. On Thursday, Phoebe went into work with John, and Theo and I spent another day together doing largely nothing, while I tried to do laundry, get ready for the next trip, and squeeze in some emails. (Who are these stay-at-home parents who actually manage fun projects with the kids? I think they are myth to make me strive to behave better. Like Santa. But they don’t bring me chocolate.) And then we headed down to the in-laws, where John’s two sisters were also visiting for a celebration of John’s dad’s 84th birthday. The trips and visits were all lovely, but our schedules have been completely whackadoo. And I’m really zonked now.

So if you’ve wondered about the stretch of silence around here, it’s because I’ve been all over the place and haven’t had much time to myself. My “spare” moments have been eaten up largely by work stuff. I’m happy to say that I have managed to keep up with Project 365, though, so if you want to see some of what I’ve been up to, you can see some of it in my Flickr photo stream.

I’ve got more stuff to say (when do I not?), but will have to get to it later. (Yeah, “later.” We know what that means…) For now, I am hoping to get to my bed before I fall asleep here on the couch.

By the way, please check out the July Just Posts, which Holly and I finally got up today. I ended up throwing up my post in a hurry before packing up my laptop at my in-laws. I learned later that all the links were broken. (Throwing up a post, indeed…) The links are fixed now.

The July 2010 Just Posts

Welcome to the latest Just Post roundtable, a collection of posts from the month of July on topics relating to social justice hosted here and at Cold Spaghetti.

Just Posts for a Just World, July 2010.

• Absence of Alternatives with Remember the Gulf
• Citizen of the Month with I Cannot Imagine
• Flying Tomato Farms with Junk Food and Other Magic and Local Food in Vermillion Schools Hurrah
• Cold Spaghetti with No Need for Missionaries
• Fledgling with Hands ON and Get to Know Tim Wise
• Knitnut with What’s Harper Got Against the Census Anyway
• Mary Murtz with I Get a Little Soap Boxy… and The Choices We Make the Things We Hold Onto
• Food Ponderings with Welcome
• ShrinkWrap with Why I Should Not Allow My Dad to Drive Me to the Airport
• Collecting Tokens with Petroleum Junkie Part 3
• Bayou Woman with Gulf Spill Update
• Shore Acres with Galveston Rising – The Trees
• Parenting by the Light of the Moon with Lessons for my Son
• Taco Girl with Global Giving Green Open Challenge
• The Bottom of Heaven with The Bluest Eye Bloggers Roundtable, and participants: Cold Spaghetti with Poverty, Invisibility, and Dignity, Zetta Elliot with Legacy of Colorism, Xavier Passavant with Human Rights and Global Reach, and Claudia with Celebrating Toni Morrison’s TBE

Readers:

• Alejna
• Holly
• Lily

If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.

Worms are overrated.

The early bird catches the worm. But sometimes, the night owl catches the early bird for a tasty midnight snack.

For the past several years, after reading all sorts of hoopla and general excitement over BlogHer, the big annual blogging conference, I have really wanted to go. But the timing has never worked out for me to make the big trip. This year the conference is scheduled for New York City. That’s practically next door to me here in Massachusetts. I was sure I would go.

But then, as it usually does, life interfered. Other stuff distracted. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage the trip, so I put things off. By the time I got around to realizing that I really wanted to attend, the conference was sold out. I put my name on the waitlist, but months later I still heard nothing.

Then a couple of days ago, I really got a bee in my bonnet about going. So I decided to look into it, and found a message board of people who’d registered, but couldn’t attend, and were selling their tickets. I emailed a few people. In the end, I scored a ticket, and managed to get the registration transfered over to my name yesterday, the last possible day to do so.

I am going to BlogHer.

Take that, early birds.

The stack of 'business' cards I made to bring with me to BlogHer. (Calling cards? Blogging cards?)

(Of course, I am still trying to work out the details of where I’ll be staying. The early birds are all now peacefully slumbering in the knowledge that they have already figured out their travel plans. I squawk in their general direction.)

a day at the zoo

Saturday was the sort of summer day that could make me like summer. It was warm and sunny, not too hot, and with no trace of the stifling mugginess that we get all too often these days. It was just the right sort of day for spending a lot of time outside. Almost on a whim, we decided to make a trip to the zoo.

A bunch more photos are in the slideshow below.

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Thanks to my participation in Project 365, I really made an effort to take photos. John even convinced me to switch lenses and use my zoom telephoto, something that in my laziness, I have almost never done. What’s more, I used manual focus a lot. Manual. Focus. I felt so frickin’ badass. Except that, you know, I was at the zoo. Do badasses go to the zoo?