Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in dianemdavis' LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
9:48 am	RSS Feeds and me OK, I've heard about this for years, people talk about RSS feeds and my mind goes "bla bla bla" and waits for something it comprehends. But last night, my beloved son taught me about them and my world is so much better. I've been making my own version of these by keeping my favorite blogs in my bookmark bar. But my bookmark bar has gotten so long now, that even by clicking on the overflow, I need to scroll down to see them all. But now....at last, I have all my favorite blogs (those not already in my LJ friends list) right next to my mail. No need to keep jumping between mail and safari. I am in bliss. Also, it makes it easier to procrastinate when I need to. Right now, I am avoiding finishing raking out the leaves around the front garden. Yes, it is July, and I haven't raked out the front garden yet. The perennials are growing through the leaves where they can....But hey, the back yard looks great. And we can't do everything. Wait, was that a new entry on one of those blogs? Gotta go.... (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
10:25 am	Last day of hometown images This has been a lot of fun. Thanks Cindy again for starting this. If it were to continue, I'd probably start taking details of images, tiny things overlooked when trying to give a big picture. But for now, I'll share this tiny spot from my yard. We have slowly developed sections of our yard. We've added a pergola and covered it flowers and wisteria, we've added a shed, an herb harden, and this little zen corner. We love to sit out with a good book, watch our fish and listen to the water gurgle as it falls into the little pool. It is very peaceful. Not as good as a real stream with a real waterfall....but this is suburbia, and we have to make do sometimes. It's a good spot for thinking about my writing. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
10:53 pm	Day 5 of Hometown Pictures The fourth of July is the biggest holiday the town celebrates. Everything is decorated, even this out of the way gazebo, tucked in a park behind the church. Flags are stuck in the ground and hung from all the homes. The town square becomes a party with game booths, lots of food to eat and community bands that play all day. We have a big road race followed by a parade to end the activities. My kids marched in this parade with either bands or scouts for years and all sorts of friends ran in the road race. The park fills up with thousands of people and it feels as if you are trying to walk out of a rock concert (wall to wall people). My husband avoids this like the plague. The most fun part, is watching people claim their spots to cheer on the parade. By July 2nd, chairs are beginning to line up along the parade route. By the night of the 3rd, the roads are lined completely and it looks spooky, like something out of a Stephen King book with all these empty chairs. By the morning of the 4th, people have filled their spots and make curious distractions along the roads leading to the center of town. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
9:33 am	Day 4 of hometown pictures Thanks Cynthia Lord for starting this week of sharing hometown photos. This is my favorite store in town. It is filled with unique art items, mostly made by local artists. It is my first stop when looking for birthday gifts or special thank yous. Usually the door above the sign is open and a giant grizzley bear stands there, holding many of the artsy crafts they sell. They sell practically everything, like: homemade soaps and painted pitchers and glasses, unusual teapots, paper mache fairies to hang from your car mirror or handmade clocks in the shape of funky dragons, cats or dogs. I even love the way they wrap items to take home. I always leave the bag (paper bag stuffed with tissue paper and wrapped with curly ribbons) exactly the way I bought it because it looks so pretty. A far cry from the Walmarts, etc. on the other side of town. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
12:02 am	3rd Day of Hometown Photos Thank you to Cynthia Lord for hosting this. This is where you can see we are no longer just the small town. We have several sections of very heavily congested homes and apartments in town. But we try very hard to keep the small town feeling alive with festivals, concerts in the park and parades on the fourth of July, only now we plan for thousands of people to come to them instead of hundreds. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
10:49 am	for Slatts Finally found a permanent home for this picture. We've moved it all over the house, and wasn't happy with how it kept fading into the backgrounds... Now we've made a photo wall, and put it front and center. Isn't it handsome? We love it! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
9:40 am	A little more town history This is day 2 of a week posting pics of my hometown in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Check out cynthialord's LJ for a list of other participants. This was a satellite church, from the first Episcopal Church built in Lowell MA for the mill girls.(remember your industrial history class?) Chelmsford was a town where richer mill workers built homes and took a trolley into Lowell to work, and where Lowellians went on vacation to the "country". Being farming country, we had lots and lots of rocks that folk took out of their fields each year. These roundish rocks became the basis of our church. Much of New England is built with stone. Besides houses and churches, we have stone walls everywhere. I love how the church gardens look against these dark stone walls. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
5:18 pm	Chelmsford cynthialord.livejournal.com has invited us to join in a Daily Photo challenge to show where we live. Chelmsford considers itself an old country town as it was established in 1655. But the fact is, it now has over 33,000 people, and is a pretty normal suburb. Still, it prides itself on its history, so I thought I'd start with the oldest cemetery in town. My kids used to play here as we used to live right across the street. It was great for hide and seek, and had some amazing hills for sledding. Though we never got too close to these 1700 stones. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
11:26 pm	On Vacation- still taking the poetry challenge Thanks to the challenge at The Miss Rumphius Effect http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/ from the site: "I thought it might be fun to write color poems in this spirit this week. Pick a color and title your poem What is __? It's spring, so are you thinking green? It's raining here, so I could easily pick gray, but the azaleas are in full bloom, so I could also pick pink, red or white." So, here is my poem. Writing from the last day of my New Orleans vacation..... What is Red..... Red is the heat and humidity of an April day, seeping through the stucco of a triple decker. Red is the trill of a jazz clarinet, and the rumble of a blues sax deep inside your chest . Red is a boa on an aging diva, dancing with a hurricane down Bourbon St. And it's the color of tent cities, huddled under overpasses on the way to the arboretum. Red is boldness and bravery, community, rebirth and reconstruction. Red is New Orleans. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 11th, 2008
6:45 pm	I'll miss you all Due to two different family emergencies, I am unable to attend the conference this weekend. I'll miss you all.... Write great blogs. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 7th, 2008
6:42 pm	A image prompted challenge from The Miss Rumphius Effect Eco- friendly , originally uploaded by lijojohnson. Living Graffiti Airbrushed metallic green, this futuristic bug waited long for art to catch up with its pallet. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
8:14 pm	Now I know.....Poetry Friday origins I love poetry Fridays, and they are getting better all the time. But who started this? Is someone in charge of it? How do I get involved? Finally, I found a fantastic article explaining it all. For those who love poetry Fridays, or just want to celebrate poetry month a bit more, head on over to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/feature.children.html?id=179694 to get the scoop. I'm doing my 2nd Annual Poetry Slam at my school this year. Here's hoping we have a fun turnout. I love sharing poems with kids.... (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
12:55 pm	A poetry challenge: Tanka poems A poetry challenge from The Miss Rumphius Effect, http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com. Write a Japanese Tanka poem. Go to http://www.tankaonline.com/Quick%20Start%20Guide.htm to learn how to write a tanka poem. This is a really great explanation of Tanka poems. A lone golden leaf tumbles across the snowbank undaunted by cold through the long winter months it continues to survive. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
10:27 pm	A poetry Challenge A poetry challenge from The Miss Rumphius Effect: Write an Apostrophe poem. Visit the site at: http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/ "An apostrophe is a poem which directly addresses a person or thing that is generally absent." Election Race Election race why do you taunt me so? Surely, you know that I’ve already cast my vote and yet you gloat about how close the popular vote remains. Every night we watch as media and contestants fight over sound bites. Every day we hear how super delegates are swayed from one side to the other. And yet we stay, attached tighter to the news than a 40 year old bachelor to his mother’s apron strings. Oh election race, save me the pain of Obberman and Matthews for two more months. And let Jon Stewart play once again, outside of the political rink, if he can. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
12:59 pm	A poetry Challenge from The Miss Rumphius Effect A challenge poem from The Miss Rumphius Effect http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/ “How's this for a poetry stretch -- could you take the names of a group of, say, 10-20 rodents, or mammals (or even poets, authors or bloggers) and make them into a rhyming chant?” AN ART LESSON (a variation on a rhyming chant (there are only so many elements and principles), based on The Modern Major General from The Pirates of Penzance) A line or shape or color, they are the elements of art you see and texture, space and value, then come principles like unity and balance, then imbalance, movement, pattern and variety proportion and perspective, follow emphasis and harmony. The elements of art, they are the marks you put upon the page in charcoal, chalk or marker, pen and ink, pastel, they’re all the rage The principles connect the marks with how they move within the space from left to right, or in and out or where the nose is on the face. Without the elements of art you can’t describe just what you see it’s kind of like a monster or it’s kind of, sort of like a tree the principles of art connect your eye and make you look around to see what’s floating in the sky or what is lying on the ground. In short, with art vocabulary, elements and principles you now can make them think you are artistically invincible. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
10:04 am	Zombie Idol go on over to Maureen Johnson's page http://www.insideadog.com.au/residence/index.php/maureen-johnson/zombie-idol-round-one/ to enter her Zombie Idol contest. lots of fun. Take 250 words or less of a book, and add a zombie to it. Here was version, just for grossness. With apologies to: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak The night Max wore his zombie suit, and searched for living souls of one kind and another his mother called him a dead thing and Max said, ”I’ll eat your brains” so he was sent to bed without eating anything at all. That very night in Max’s room, a graveyard grew and grew and grew until his ceilings hung with spider webs and the walls became crypts all around and a sewer sludged by with a private death barge for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild zombies are. And when he came to the place where the wild zombies are, they screamed their terrible screams and gummed their terrible gums and plucked out their yellow eyeballs and showed their bloody entrails till Max said, “Be Still” and tamed them with a zombie trick of juggling all their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild zombie of all and made him king of all wild zombies. “And now,” cried Max, “Let the Zombie Attack begin.” (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
5:07 pm	School Blogs I've started two school blogs as ways to communicate with both students and teachers, though at the moment it is a one way street with no comments. Does anyone else do blogs other than LJ? What are their focus? pmslibrary.blogspot.com- blog about books and issues appropriate to library activities parkerartblog.blogspot.com- blog about art, what we do in classes, kid's posting about their work, art stuff... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:07 pm	finally got to reading this... Bread and Roses Too by Katherine Patterson I've joined in with the school librarian to start a blog there..mostly about books we own and to get kids interested in what's happening with books. Thought I'd take a posting from there, and put it here.With a few additions. pmslibrary@blogspot.com Bread and Roses Too by Katherine Paterson This book is about the mill workers strike of 1912 in Lawarence Massachusetts. Thousands upon thousands of people went out on strike, thinking they would be back to work in a few days. But days turned to weeks and months, and all this time the mill workers had no money. Children were sent to the countryside all over New England in order to give them a decent place to live and food to eat while their parents continued to fight against the mills. What I love most about this book is how it shows the ethnic communities of old cities like Lawrence and Lowell. I lived in Lowell for many years and often gave directions based on what the old sections of town were named. Do you know where little Italy is? Go to the big bridge there and..... Do you know where the French Canadian Orphanage is? In this book, we see people divided by language and culture. But the fight against the mill owners brings them together in a universal solidarity. When I read this book, I feel as if I am reading about my own family history as many of my relatives marched in these protests. Today, you can still see ethnic celebrations in Lawrence. In fact, I'm going to a Lithuanian Celebration at the old Lithuanian Meeting Hall today. Here people will still dress in traditional Lithuanian clothing, serve traditional food and sing the old folk songs. I've pulled by crocheted Lithuanian hat out of the drawer, and put on the shawl I bought there. I won't quite fit in without the elaborately embroidered vests and layers of skirts. But I'll do my best. I didn't read this for a long time because Katherine Paterson has been ahead of me on so many issues. I wanted to write about Lowell and "Lyddie" blew the subject away. I wrote about the North/South connections with cotton and she published "Jip". When I decided to write about the Bread and Roses strike, she beat me to it. Fortunately, this book is less character driven than "Lyddie" and more about the ethnicity of the city than I expected it to be. . Perhaps, there may still be more room for Bread and Roses books or books about the mills. I'll figure it out yet. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
6:20 pm	Priscilla and the Hollyhocks by Anne Broyles, illustrated by Anna Alter Anne Broyles has written a wonderful tale, based on a true story, about an African American slave torn from her mother's arms when only four years old. We follow Priscilla's childhood as she is sold to family after family as easily as one would buy new furniture. The only thing that gives her comfort, are the hollyhocks that remind her of her mother. In each new home, she plants hollyhock seeds and creates a refuge to hide in. She makes hollyhock dolls and floats them across the water, dreaming of home. But even when her Cherokee Indian master is forced to leave his own home and travel the "Trail of Tears", Priscilla remains their slave. It is only when she sees a white man from her youth, Basil Silkwood, that she sees an opportunity for a better life. She remembers that he had once told her that she should be in school. She runs to him, introduces herself and tells him, "I still want to learn". Mr. Silkwood buys Priscilla and sets her free, adopting her into his own large family of fifteen children. Anne Broyles discovered the story of Priscilla while doing research for a YA book on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. It’s a story of courage and strength as Priscilla plants her hollyhock seeds as she travels across the country. “Wasn’t much I wanted to ‘member from my first home but Ma. Pink hollyhocks kept her livin’. Surely if I thought on her, she might think on me, too, where’er she was.” Anne has done a wonderful job of capturing a complicated story in simple phrases and uncomplicated language. We fall in love with her character immediately while learning about how complicated slavery could be in America. Anna Alter does an amazing job with the illustrations, creating a gentle folk art style, while still giving illustration to a horrific time in our history. This book includes instructions for making a hollyhock doll and an author's note that talks about the true story of Priscilla Silkwood. To celebrate the book’s release, there will be some partying going on for those of you in the Boston area. Saturday, February 9, 1 p.m. (Anna and Anne) Book launch--Wellesley Booksmith, Wellesley, MA Saturday, February 16, 3 p.m. (Anna and Anne) Book launch--Jamaicaway Books Jamaica Plain, MA Wednesday, February 20, noon (Anne) Boys and Girls Club, Lawrence, MA Saturday, March 1, 12-2 p.m. (Anne) Borders Books, Methuen, MA Tuesday, March 4th, Time TBA (Anna) Valente Branch of the Cambridge Public Library Wednesday, March 5, 10 a.m.-noon (Anne) South Elementary School, Andover, MA--SAIL event Saturday, March 15, 11a.m.-1 p.m. (Anne) Book signing at Annie’s Books, North Andover, MA Saturday, March 29, 2 p.m. (Anne) Multi-Author Book Launch--First UU Church, Belmont, MA Saturday, April 12 (Anna) Foundation for Children's Book's 'What's New in Children's Books' conference, Boston Athenaeum Library Thursday, April 17 (Anna) Winchester public library from 9:45-10:30 Winchester Town Hall signing books from 3:00-5:00 pm. (Comment on this)
4:27 pm	Do Kitties need Comfort Kibble? I know when I have a bad day, the first thing I go to is the sugar foods. Ice cream first, then cookies or cake if no ice cream can be found. But today I wondered, do kitties need comfort food too? Our cat occasionally gets furious at himself, crying and talking a blue streak in plaintive kitty cries. The first time this happened, I was beside myself. What could be the problem? I looked for his toys, I gave him fresh water and food, I checked for injuries. But nothing would comfort him. And he kept looking up at the ceiling. But there was nothing there. What was this cat's problem? After searching for a while, we finally determined that he was furious because he couldn't reach the reflection of light on the ceiling. He'd jump onto the highest thing he could find in the room, but still couldn't reach it. Today he started crying again. His little jaw shook and shivered with frustration. At first, we couldn't find even a reflection. But as we watched carefully, we discovered a faint reflection, shining off the top of the lap top and dancing across the ceiling. The only way we could stop his complaining was to shut the computer and put it away. He sulked into the kitchen, and the next thing we new he was devouring his kibble. I hope it helps him feel better, like a good bowl of chocolate chip helps me. (8 Comments |Comment on this)