This is the sound of one voice

[updated January 6, 2011]

Hi there! If you've come across this, I'm guessing you might be interested in knowing more about me.

This space
Like many people, I enjoy conversations with new and interesting folks who wander across my postings in some way, and I've chosen to allow anonymous commenting on public entries, and other choices that make commenting easier. Feel free to join in with comment or conversation.

However, please treat this space something like an open house: you are in my online living room, and if you want to have a conversation with me, in my space, there are some simple guidelines.

- Please share a name or online handle I can call you
- I love knowing how people found me (what got you interested?)
- Understand that I probably have reasons for what I say even if I haven't spelled all of them out. Like most people, what I write about online is the tip of the iceberg of my experience, knowledge, or understanding, and of course, online, it's often easy for a mischosen word to cause confusion.
- Asking questions rather than assuming you know all the background is a great way to start.

In other words: I'm open for conversation, but attacks, trolling, and other rude behavior may be deleted or ignored, depending on the details.

What you'll see here is:
Various posts from me about daily life:
I'm a librarian. I geek stuff by nature. Most of what I write is various bits about daily life, books, music, thinking, doing stuff, chronic illness coping, and miscellaneous other topics. I tend not to write about politics and current events.

Lots of people who keep reading me say they really like my long thinky posts, even if they're otherwise not particularly interested in the subject matter: I am most likely to do them about
- sorting out the inside of my head.
- religious stuff (not basics, but how to learn, teach, share, and explore it better)
- music (with which I have a complex relationship)
- things that bug my librarian brain. Bad history and research. Online interactions, especially around privacy and communication.

Samples of long-and-thinky that also give a good clue as to how I work include:
- An exposition on a mix CD I made for a particular trip which is really about bits of my musical history.
- General info about how I handle access and subscription on this journal.
- A post about the movie Agora, about Hypatia of Alexandria
- A deconstruction of the history in a Bones episode that involved a purported victim of the Salem Witch Trials.
- My advice to people considering library school.

Crossposts from two blogs:
- My public religious blog (http://gleewood.org/threshold)
- My public professional blog (which I do not link to this username.)
Both crossposts automatically access-lock, and both have a little header telling you where it came from. The first auto-locks so people can make comments in a non-public space (and sometimes there get to be great points made.)

The second is because I don't make the link between this username and my legal name obvious (because lo, I work in a field where casual Googling of job applicants is pretty common: I'm inclined to be quietly open about my religion, but it's also not a thing I want people to randomly stumble across.

Other places I am online
Generally, if it's me doing personal stuff, I'm Jenett. Or JenettSilver, if Jenett was taken. I also write under that name for Pagan stuff.

I am on Facebook under my legal name, but avoid all directly Pagan (or otherwise personal stuff, like specific health details) stuff in public there (which also means I avoid stuff that adds Pagan fan pages or events to my profile.)

There may be more later, but this is a pretty decent first round.

(If you are, for some reason, going “Yuletide?”, it is an annual exchange of fiction in small fandoms. The stories are released on December 25th, and the authors are not revealed until January 1st, which gives you plenty of time to read and comment and so on without getting caught up in who wrote what. This year, there’s something like 2500 stories, of all sorts of kinds.)

What I wrote:
Not only did my recipient love it, but her favorite paragraph was the one that has my favorite sentence in it. I am so smug! (Much thanks to the friends who gave me advice, which I’ll talk about more when we get to reveals, because it’s the first fic writing I’ve shared with anyone else in more than a decade. Ritual writing, yes. Non-fiction, yes. All sorts of other commentary, yes. Fiction, no.)

My gift:
I got Chalion fic! It makes me deeply happy, because it has lots of awesome bits, and Iselle and Bergon after their marriage, and small mysteries solved improving the world. You can see it at http://archiveofourown.org/works/300197

Various recs and other notes within: recs for 15th Century CE RPF (namely Lucrezia Borgia), A Song for Arbonne, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, A Knight's Tale, Anne of Green Gables, the Chalionverse, Center Stage, Circle of Magic, a Dr. Who/Lord Peter Wimsey crossover, Yuletide Meta, The Mummy movies, Newsflesh, Octopus Steals Camera, Shadow Unit, Tam Lin, Tower Prep, and Valdemar.

( Read within )

So, now seems like a good time to think about plans and potential travel plans.

( Now through summer, sorta )

Apparently, my brother is planning to come up (by himself, sans-family) for Friday's performance too. Which is awesomely handy. (He and I get to fight out who gets the sofa and who gets the air mattress, unless he stays with his best friend from high school.)

Mom's calendar presents no complication with a) my acquiring keys (since I cannot find the other set of hers I have) or b) my plans for Saturday (or Sunday morning). Which is also excellent.

She is, however, still without Internet after the weekend storm, though she has power.

So, I have gotten far enough in the packing process to have ye list of things looking for new homes.

[Also: my landlady is still looking for someone interested in renting this place: it is small, but lovely, and has an awesome clawfoot bathtub. Her post about it is over here should you know someone looking for somewhere to live in Minneapolis.]

Things to know about this list:
- I am mostly not up for shipping stuff, but might be talked into it in some cases. Feel free to propose something.

- Except for the larger technology items, I'm generally thinking yard sale prices. And even with the tech stuff, feel free to propose anything reasonable.

- Feel free to pass on to other friends/lists/whatever in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro. This post is public to make that easy.

Timing
My hope is for items to leave here between August 25th and August 29th (pickup to be negotiated at a mutually convenient time), but in many cases, I'm up for some negotiation.

Also available: lots and lots of books (mostly Pagan materials I'm no longer using, mysteries, SF and fantasy, but a smattering of other non-fiction). Feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular you're looking for. These will be going to used bookstores early in the week of the 18th otherwise.

( Read more... )

As part of my (very belated) 3 Weeks for Dreamwidth plans, I wanted to talk about my experience over the last year taking Feldenkrais lessons. (I've talked about this in locked posts in my journal on and off, but I keep hearing people go "Huh, what?" for whom it might be a useful modality to consider, so here's your one-stop shop of what I know and think about it.

My goal here is to cover some background, link to some resources, and then spend a bunch of time talking about my personal experience of it, since that's the bit that's sometimes hard to get from other sources.

What is Feldenkrais?
The official answer goes something like this:
"The Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses gentle movement and directed attention to improve movement and enhance human functioning. Through this Method, you can increase your ease and range of motion, improve your flexibility and coordination, and rediscover your innate capacity for graceful, efficient movement. These improvements will often generalize to enhance functioning in other aspects of your life." (As taken from http://www.feldenkrais.com/method/frequently_asked_questions/).

My answer to it is more like:
"It's a geek-friendly way to learn more about your body, your mind, and how they interconnect, in a setting that gives you new puzzles to solve and challenges to stretch you, while rewarding you for learning in ways that are both immediate and long-term. It's also about doing more with less - less exertion, less effort, less discomfort."

Some people try out the method because they've got an immediate injury or something they're trying to figure out how to deal with better. Some come because they want to improve their performance (in music, athletics). Some people want to solve daily movement issues or challenges.

I started (for reasons I'll explain in more detail later) as a way to get my brain and my body reconnected after a really lousy health year, to find ways to conserve my energy so I could do more with less of it. What I've gotten out of it is *far* better than that: lots of feedback that I could learn and grow at a time I felt pretty hopeless about that for quite a long time, ongoing feedback from someone who saw me regularly, but wasn't entangled in other parts of my life, and a lot of other stuff I find somewhere between congenial and awesome.

I also really really like having a modality to work with where health is not about numbers and mechanics, but about how I'm able to live in my body. Feldenkrais wrote two definitions of health that I've really taken to heart. One is that "health is the ability to live out an individual's unavowed dreams" (see it in context over here) and the other is the idea that health is about the ability of the body to recover from shock or trauma (or other kinds of challenge).

Both of those are much more useful definitions for me than ones that have to do with numbers, statistical probabilities, or anything else like that. And I like stuff that has to do with my body that my brain can actually help with.

I talk more about this below, but one of the things I really appreciate about it was that it gave me a way to feel more in control of my own body (and brain) and to get feedback about what was working in a way that helped me do more of the things I wanted to do, with less stuff that was a problem.

I am definitely glad to talk about questions/etc. with the understanding that I'm informed lay person, not a practitioner. (Also, while I think it's a system that lots of people might find useful, I am not trying to tell any individual person what they should do - because that sort of defeats the purpose of having more control over what you do with your body and time and energy. I'm laying it out here so there's a nice public reference for people who might find it handy, basically.)

( More within )

I have managed to take *and* upload photos of knitting, as well as woven in the ends on the scarf. They're up on Ravelry (for people on there who don't know this, I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, Jenett, and you can see them on the project page there: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/Jenett)

But there might as well be photos here, too:

This is a scarf done in alternating double rows (one knit, one purl) alternating Noro Silk Garden #8 (which is blues and greens and purples) with a really really dark navy worsted wool. It's about 5 feet long, and about 8 inches wide.

From Noro Scarf

And this is the shawl in progress, using a pattern that starts from the neck down (so the stuff you see at the bottom of this photo will eventually be the long flat edge, and the point is going to come from what's currently at the center of the needles.) I am currently at 76 rows and not yet done with the first skein of yarn (which was 420 yard to the skein), so I am currently planning to on for a fair bit, and make a gloriously huge and drapy shawl.

From Simple but effective shawl - Spinel

This is the Spinel yarn from Blue Moon Fiber Arts - it really is lovely to knit with, and very pleasant to touch, and will be cozy and comfy when done (and quite comfortable on bare skin, if like me, you don't have wool-related allergies.) You can see why I like the color dappling effect.

At 76 rows (where I am right now), it's about 18 inches from top to point, unblocked, and I expect it to gain some in the blocking.

I'm doing this in a numeric pattern: double rows based on Pagan-relevant numbers. (Well, I skipped 9, but 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, and I think I'm going to do 13, because I've got the yarn for it, and it should get me to about the size I want. Going through 12 is going to be 90 rows. We're adding 4 stitches every other row, so that's roughly 180 stitches across at 90 rows, and will be 232 across if I go through 13s.)

I have a plan to do one of the sets of yarn coming sometime sooner than later in a reverse Fibonacci sequence using the same basic pattern (reverse, because if I'm doing 42 rows of something, I'd rather it were shorter rows than longer. 42, 26, 16, 10, 3, 4, 2, 2)

(The numbers have to be doubled, because the pattern requires even pairs of rows so you don't end up with odd wrong side/right side problems.)

My body has declared that we have reached the season of All Dill All The Time. (One of my first personal signs of the coming of spring. I have no idea why, but it's true.)

So, I am making carrot dill soup. It has the benefit of being fairly low demand in the cooking, and freezing well. The same basic method can be used for lots of other vegetables and herb blends (I have plans to try it with beets, and with cauliflower - ok, there I'd add some cheese). And it'd do fine with parsnips or turnips or other root veggies, though you might want to adjust the roasting part.

[and now I want to go to the co-op and buy out their produce section.]

My normal method is fairly simple (and noted within). Today, however, I wanted to experiment.

( Recipes within )

They have released the excellent elisem from the hospital, and more than that, she has posted.

She did, in fact, have a stroke. However, both the CAT scan and the MRI show no residual damage. This is amazingly good news.

The reason why? Very rapid treatment (in specific, a drug called TPA, which to be maximally effective, needs to be given within quickly after the onset of symptoms (a couple of hours). And before that, they have to get you to the hospital, do checks to make sure it isn't something else, and so on.) It breaks up the clot, and does it fast enough that if you are fortunate, there may be no lasting damage. (It is wonderful living in the future, but we have to actually use the nifty technology for it to work.)

The PSA: If you, someone you love, or someone you just happening to be wandering by, are having signs of a stroke, and you're not sure if you should call 911... call.

More at Elise's journal over here: http://elisem.livejournal.com/1661214.html

And more on symptoms of stroke and some of the stuff behind why the rapid treatment works over here: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010240.html .

Signs and symptoms
The most basic bit of info from that link above is:
"Here are the rock-bottom signs and symptoms of stroke:

* Sudden onset weakness, numbness, or tingling, particularly one-sided.
* Facial droop, particularly one-sided.
* Slurred speech, or aphasia, or suddenly using inappropriate words.
* Unexplained blurred vision, particularly one-sided.
* “The worst headache of my life.” (Thunderclap headache.)"

(And if you want a quick commentary from Teresa as to what made her certain calling was absolutely the thing, http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012798.html is also useful, in that way where you wish that no one else ever again needed to have that moment of realisation.)

[post public on Dreamwidth: feel free to link widely, if you wish, or repost the relevant bits]

So, we are just about at the anniversary of my life doing a complete upheaval due to the medical foo, and that makes it a good time to do an update of what I've learned, in case it helps other people somewhere. (In other words, feel free to link to other people who might find it useful or have questions. I don't have all the answers, but might have ideas.)

(So many things are tied into November for me these days: it is a month that begins with my father's death, includes the anniversaries of my 2nd degree, 3rd degree, separation from the ex-husband, and the anniversary of the first month we lived together (our actually wedding was in early December.) And now this. Awfully complicated month.

Anyway: for those who don't remember, a year ago, on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2009, after feeling just as horrible with five days off work as I did when finishing work on the previous Tuesday, I walked into work and said "There is something really wrong." The eventual diagnosis turned out to be hypothyroidism and vitamin D deficiency (after a side trip through "Could it be depression?" and a lot of stuff I wish I'd handled differently at work, sort of, if I could figure out what 'better' would have looked like.)

This is going to get long, but breaking it up in to separate chunks seems less useful.

( Much more within )