Project 365 - Day 56

Working on wrist warmers again. This time with some pretty variegated yarn.

Project 365 - Day 55

Road trip with my siblings always includes a stop for gas station hot dogs. Yummy!

Fun history fact of the day!

There are only four people who served in all four elected federal offices as US Representatives, Senators, Vice President and President. 

John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon

Project 365 - Day 54

Project 365 - Day 53

Prickly bush in the front of my house. I want to hate it because it tries to eat me whenever I walk past, but it provides such brilliant color (even a bit of red in winter!) that I can't get too mad.

Project 365 - Day 52

Yarn for wrist warmers. I picked them because I liked the colors separately, but they look nice together.

Project 365 - Day 51

Prints in the snow. Cat? Squirrel? The peg leg of a marauding land pirate?

Project 365 - Day 50

Day 50! Yay!
Grace Church sent me a bracelet in the mail. I love getting mail! This is for the Ownit365 reading program and it was very cool to get this today. My desire to read the bible in a year has been...let's say flagging...and this was just the encouragement I needed to keep going.

Project 365 - Day 49

Teaching myself how to crochet wrist warmers turned out to be a lot like Goldilocks & the Three Bears. (except there was no bears, no beds or no tiny blond children...otherwise it's exactly the same)

My first try ended up too short and the stitches too tight. It now has a new life as a bracelet.

My second try actually made it to the wrist warmer stage...sorta. The stitches were loose enough that it's filled with gaps to let air in and make it bumpy.

This last try is much better. It's even without being too small and tight, it's mostly the right size and there are no gaping holes! It's warm and it's on my wrist...therefore fulfilling its purpose. Hooray!

Now, I just need to make a couple more of the good kind and skip over the "this porridge is too hot, this porridge is a mess of knots and tears" steps.

Project 365 - Day 48

I like to call these photos "Cause & Effect: A study in Jen's Frustrating Sunday"

This would be the cause...

...and this would be the effect. *sigh*

The Unthinkable - Amanda Ripley

I have always been interested in reading about disasters. Books about outbreaks and explosions, bombings and plane crashes catch my attention. When I was a kid I cherished a copy of ‘Flight #116 is Down’ by Caroline B. Cooney. The story of a plane crashing on the estate of a teenage girl and how she (and the others in the crash) survive. As any girl, I was entranced by a book that had a heroine and of course there was a bit of a love story thrown in between Heidi and Patrick, the 17 year old EMS guy (…maybe he was a trainee?). But the real appeal to me was the  plane crash and how people solve and survive a problem that big. One of the scenes I remember most from the book was when they tore out the holly bushes. With the massive amount of vehicles that needed to get access to the plane on Heidi’s estate there just wasn’t enough room in the normal driveway. Someone (and it may have been Heidi herself) makes the decision to rip out the holly bushes to give access to ambulances. It’s a pragmatic decision, but the part that sticks with me is Heidi thinking about how everyone gets Christmas holly from those bushes and how that will change now. A plane has crashed into her backyard, her home is being used as triage and it seems like the entire world is showing up on her front lawn and yet her mind drifts off to Christmas decorations. That one instance, where the minutiae of daily life seemed to overshadow the current crisis, has always intrigued me. Just how do our brains cope in a situation like that? How do we think when our bodies are focused on just surviving?

In Amanda Ripley’s book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why”, she attempts to explain answers to those questions. Rehashing several  current disasters through the use of interviews and articles, she combines the personal experience of survivors with scientific research to explain what happens to us during a disaster. Over the course of the book she explores both the physical and psychological changes to the body and mind that occur during situations where our lives are threatened. The ‘disasters’ mentioned in the book range from grocery store shoot-outs to Hurricane Katrina and of course, 9/11.

At times, this book falters, not sure if can be the self-help book it attempts to emulate, wanting to give us steps to follow but never quite staying in that genre. Which is understandable, considering the fact that while you can adequately teach someone to the steps to bake a cake in a book, there can be no easy 1-2-3 of surviving a plane crash or terrorist attack. Instead the book becomes a mixture of information and anecdotes, all told with just enough sensationalism to keep the reader interested and just enough information and facts to keep from being frivolous. Ripley, a magazine reporter for Time, has a unique style that reminds me more of blogs than books. She varies between strictly clinical explanations and personal reflections easily, creating a rapport with the audience that takes what could have been a literary version of rubbernecking at an accident site and turns it into a journey toward preparedness. Remarking how cool she thought it was to wear fireman suspenders or sharing three years worth of meetings with one World Trade Center survivor, Ripley humanizes what could be an otherwise voyeuristic topic.

The Unthinkable isn’t like a manual for surviving disasters. This is not the plane crash version of Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and shouldn’t be treated that way. Ripley herself states that while she has explored types of responses, that no disaster is the same and people won’t respond the same. In reading this book you feel that the key to surviving a disaster is less in learning certain skill sets and more in learning about yourself. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t adapt a few proactive behaviors like learning about evacuation plans for the buildings you’re in, listening to safety instructions on the plane and even just paying attention to your surroundings. But the real point that Ripley stresses in The Unthinkable is that we will react differently in a disaster than we do in our regular life. Those reactions may or may not be something that we can change with prior knowledge, but self-examination, proactive behavior and just the awareness of certain reactions could potentially save our lives someday.

Project 365 - Day 47

It's snowing! Yay! Despite it snowing heavily at times, it was hard to capture on camera. Used the Megan method of aiming up and using the flash!

groan

I don't feel good at all.

Sweet tea overdose. Seriously. So very ill.

My southern ancestors are probably rolling in their graves with shame.

Project 365 - Day 46

It's soooo very cold tonight!

Once upon a dream…

Last night I had a crazy dream that involved FBI agents, a big city and several costume changes. I was kind of sad that it ended, so I decided to doodle.

Follow this link to see the doodles up close in my Picasa gallery. Yay doodles!