Up with People

I wasn't a member of Up With People, but a school friend was—Jon Tsosie. His sister, Betty, had been, too, and they toured once and stayed on Mackinaw Island in Michigan. Jon told me it was the most beautful place he had ever seen and he wanted to go back and live there.

Years later, I met (and later married) Keith Dodd, who had been in a local Sing-Out group in Alamogordo. They went on a road trip once to a gathering, convention, or something. He wasn't in a touring group of Up With People, but it seemed all to be the same thing, somehow, musically and as to focus and intention.

The other day in a moment of curiosity, I looked up to see whether the group was related to the Mormon Church. That would not have surprised me, because Jon's involvement started when he lived in in Utah—I don't remember now which suburb of SLC, and he and Betty were recruited as Native American cast members. There were other Indian kids, too.

Jon, middle of five; Betty not appearing in this photo.

By the time I knew Jon after he had moved to Santa Clara (where his mom had grown up), the Up With People participation had come and gone (maybe partly because he was not in Utah anymore—I didn't think to ask more).

It wasn't Mormon, but there was a religious seed, according to this article:
The Hidden Story Of The Up With People Singers. From that article:

Up With People emerged from the controversial religious movement Moral Re-Armament (MRA)—a cult-like organization that preached honesty, purity, unselfishness and love—so it’s no surprise that the groups bore more than a passing similarity. In fact, Up With People founder J. Blanton Belk was heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist who succeeded Frank Buchman as MRA’s leader in 1961. But Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit after President Dwight Eisenhower urged him to distance himself from the dreary image of MRA.

Whatever started it, both Jon and Keith really liked the songs they learned, and they got to travel because of it, too.

An Unschooling Journey

Jessica Hughes has a series of posts on a new site called Steemit, about unschooling. They're interesting, and I want to save them in one place for my own benefit and to let others go exploring! Language warning (the four-letter kind) but artistry promise (flowing prose and some fun little stories).


Our Unschooling Journey - Part 1

When Teens Attack - Our Unschooling Journey - Part 2

Confessions – Our Unschooling Journey – Part 3

Saying “Yes” to Love – Our Unschooling Journey – Part 4

The Entitlement Epidemic 1 - Our Unschooling Journey - Part 5

The Entitlement Epidemic 2 – Our Unschooling Journey Part 6

Shit Parents Say – Our Unschooling Journey Part 7

Fear, the Enemy of Happiness – Our Unschooling Journey Part 8

Horizontal layers

I noticed after the fact that I've taken photos with horizontal layers, and would like to collect or at least cross-reference them. If I"ve shared them before, I couldn't find them, so if you know this to be a re-run, let me know where you remember seeing them, please!


My house, front, 2013:



From the parking lot of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont:



Toward the west from Alcalde, New Mexico.




Stripes in my compost piles. It's not my only repeating-pattern photo, but it's one of them, I see, in retrospect. I did not put that barrel there, but it matches the three layers of compost, too! (Click it to go to its original blogpost.)

Back yard, taken for the shadow of the icicles. Nice shadows! And then the reflection of the icicles, and shadows on the curtain inside. Deep.

Favorite photos of Holly

Holly has been the subject of some photos I really love.



Someone straightened the ground on that one for me, so that more-level image might surface. It was taken at the Rio Grande Zoo. It probably is somewhat a hill, because the manmade lake is to the left, there, but is probably bit more level in real life.



Outside the karate dojo on Louisina Blvd SE. It's fuzzy, but still I love it. Probably it was from a disposable camera.




Riding the Cumbres and Toltec railroad, August 5, 2015.

My best photos

There are half a dozen photos or so I'm really proud I took. Finally (in April 2017) I've collected them all in one place. I you click the image, you might get a bigger one, and more information (or one of those):


One was a wagon that was up by itself on a hill in Shakespeare, New Mexico, when Marty and I went on a road trip to look at ghost towns in [what year? 2004, 2005?].

It was my desktop when I answered a trivia survey, and I described it as "A sheepherder's wagon, with a kitchen in back like a chuckwagon—a photo I took when Marty and I went to ghost towns in southwestern New Mexico. This wagon is in Shakespeare. Behind us were buildings."


My favoritee: Chariot of carousel at Hollycombe Steam-in-the-Country Museum and Steam Fair (they have various names; I combined them all). It's printed on canvas and in the den at my house.



Roof line and houses behind, in Stroud, June 2011:



Bird flying off a Chevron sign at sunup in Arizona the morning before Marty's wedding—printed out on a wide canvas, and in our front room. It's on my website. This was a bird messing up my photo, I thought, until I looked. I took another without the irritating bird, but of course the "mistake" turned out to be the good one. You can click it to go to a copy you can zoom in on.


Airplane over a gargoyle:


Why am I wishy-washy about finding one plae and putting them all there? It's a mystery. If I at least put them all in this blog and label them favorite photos, maybe I can find them and stop saying they're not all in one place. Wah wah wah. Found the last one; brought the others.)

I came back to add Amanda's Cat Simon, in Pilar. Click it for more context:


Unexpected Details in photos

Kirby, a grown man, married

This happened in October, but I'm moving this photo here because things on Facebook are washed away in the flood of words and images.

Marty was married first, of our children. Holly is still single.

Anniversary of my Korean Drama interest

My favorites, in order Healer Faith Secret Garden Warrior Baek Dong Soo My Love from Another Star Personal Taste I also liked: Kill Me, Heal me It's Okay, That's Love Answer Me, 1988

"February 8, 2015, a Sunday, I started watching faith. All day Monday, I watched that show. Keith brought me food. I finished it Tuesday, February 10."

My notes are here, and now that time has passed, I wish I had left clues to myself of which I would recommend, or watch again, but I think if I recommend my very favorites, people who try them can find their own way into other dramas. Sometimes by genre, sometimes by following one actor or writer or director. Sometimes by recommendations from the friends you will find if you start watching them.

The dramas are generally 15 to 24 episodes. Most are 20, probably. I've watched 75 of them.

I don't recommend these to people with young children or busy jobs, because they can draw you in and hold you, but with my kids grown, it has been a very interesting new hobby which has led to learning I never would have expected. I have no interest in Korean food, and I don't want to go there to visit, but still there are connections to things I had known before, and things I'm glad to know now, about culture, religion, language, laws and literature. There are ways in which their cultural expectations are like ours, and ways in which they're as foreign as foreign can be.

Most shows begin with a rough incident or situation, which will be overcome or smoothed over as the story progresses. Most begin with irritating characters, so there can be growth and redemption. Often there's an underlying mystery about the childhood of one character or another that isn't revealed until several episodes in, and the solving of that becomes part of the plot and of the interactions.

Unlike a two-hour movie, a twenty-hour story can give you depth of character and time to think, as novels can. The writing and acting are better than I'm used to from American and British TV and movies.

_____________

I didn't publish this on the day it should've been scheduled. This poor blog! I did post on the korean drama discussion, and on facebook, and I forgot my own once-most-favorite blog. I back-dated it. :-)