{ via Flickr }

Have a happy Wednesday everyone! I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to our Thanksgiving Break. What are your plans for Thanksgiving? Big family dinner, or quiet dinner with friends? Traveling or staying?

{ Jamie and Cory - The two best Wisconsinites I know! }

If there is anything I have learned over the past two nights, it is that Wisconsin is the best place in the world!

Just ask our local experts, Jamie, Cory, and Becca (not pictured)!

They can tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Wisconsin, sing fight songs, recount all the places they’ve gone to summer camp, pull out the great Wisconsin accent, and best of all, they will make you wish you had grown up in the Badger State!

Sing along, even if you didn’t go to the University, or even if you didn’t grow up in Wisconsin ~ U Rah Rah!

{ Cooking Pasta! }

Tonight Joseph made his fresh pasta with the special “00″ flour that Jamie Oliver suggests using for handmade pasta. Joseph does all the hard work - I’m not going to lie about that, but I love turning the handle to catch the little strings!

We first made pasta at Jaren and Patricks house. I think Joseph was inspired because he seems to make it any chance he gets! Merci Patrick! I put together some simple meatballs from Jamie Oliver’s latest cookbook that we got for Christmas. They were fantastic! What a great recipe!

Earlier today Joseph and I did some house hunting, driving endlessly throughout the suburbs, finding the perfect location for the family. After our suburbian safari, I went to Irish dance today from 12:30-3:00. It payed off because I learned 2 new hard shoe reels, practiced my soft shoe reels and slip jigs, and tweaked a more advanced hornpipe that has been stuck in my head for over a month! I have made a lot of progress lately with my hard shoe, which I struggled with in the past. I think I have finally found my groove! Now if only I can keep it up on stage, while smiling, and most times without warming up!!!

{ Bree and me at Justin’s wedding - these drinks are not for me - really }

My BFF Bree sent me this link to the Guggenheim’s video of the exhibition, theanyspacewhatever, which she recently had the opportunity to visit with her classmates. In her own words…

I got a chance to go see the new exhibition at the Guggenheim called theanyspacewhatever when it opened a few weeks ago. I thought you might be interested in learning more about it. Here is a link to a video the museum recently produced. In the first few seconds they show people sitting on the floor in a room with orange carpet watching a taped artists’ interview. Those are my classmates and my professor. When the shot pans out a second later, you can see me and two other classmates watching the TV at left. I’m the one lying on the floor with my arms crossed behind my head. Watch carefully! It goes very quick. Pretty cool though.

Enjoy!

Bree

Joseph has been obsessed with Sicilian Donkeys ever since he saw them on an episode of Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart’s Sicilian donkeys are Rufus and Clive and Billie (not pictured). You can read all about their adventures on her Blog here.

August 14th, 2007

Introducing Clive and Rufus

As majestic as my Friesian horses are, they have nothing on the two newest equine additions to the Bedford stable: Clive and Rufus, the adorable one-year-old miniature donkeys. They arrived at my farm just a few months ago from Harry Witteveen, my horse breeder in Ontario, Canada, and since then they have already logged countless hours of frolicking in their paddock. Native to the Mediterranean coast of North Africa and the Italian islands of Sicily and Sardinia, this breed of donkey has not been bred down in size, as is the case with most other “miniature” animals. They are simply diminutive creatures by nature, standing anywhere from 31 to 38 inches high at full height, as measured from the ground to the withers — that is, the space just above the shoulder blades, where the neck meets the back. Right now, Clive and Rufus, both jacks (male donkeys; female donkeys are jennets), are a few inches shy, but they still have a couple of years to reach maturity, which generally occurs at age three.

Her’s are adorable, as are these Sicilian donkeys via Flickr! Don’t you want one of your own?

Joseph found this great article about Sicilian Donkeys by Jon Katz

They are sweet, powerfully spiritual creatures. Mine have an ostensible purpose: They’r! e my security detail, fiercely protective of my flock of sheep. They r un off stray dogs and coyotes. Since I’ve lost no sheep to these common predators, the donkeys seem to do their jobs well.

But they also—and this is why I have more donkeys than I truly need—attach to people. They nuzzle and lean into humans they like, which can sometimes be disconcerting, but is also touching. They are gentle with children, calm around strangers. They coexist reasonably amiably with my dogs and chickens. My ferocious rodent-massacring barn cat, Mother, sleeps near them often, and last week I came into the barn and saw her curled up next to the baby, both of them dozing comfortably on a pile of straw bedding.

When I come out of the house in the morning, all three girls are waiting at the barnyard gate, wheezily braying for their cookies. Serious about snacks, they’re likely to nose into your pockets if you’re slow to produce them.

But our connection goes beyond food, I think. Almost every day, I sit on a tree stump in the pasture, and o! ne donkey or another—sometimes all three—comes over to nuzzle with me, putting a big furry head on my shoulder or the top of my head. During winter storms, I trudge up to the pole barn and comb ice from their long eye lashes and brush the snow off their coats. They hold still, then nuzzle me in appreciation.

Yesterday feels like Monday! (Mondays = paper jams and cranky people). Where did this week go?

Thursday night means Friday is here - Friday means the week is done for teachers. I love Fridays. I have my smallest class and my funniest class, I have a planning period then I teach at the middle school. After work Jaren and I have Knitting Club (I finally learned how to knit!) and FAC (Friday Afternoon Club), usually at a bar with some drinks in hand. It can be the best day of my work week. Thursday night is like the little celebration that I’ve made it past another week - happily that is to say.

Tonight Jospeh and I had a little tapas party, caught up on our day, watched Gavin and Stacey, and will continue to watch shows like The Office and 30Rock. Enjoy your end of the week and have a happy Friday!

I also love Tina Fey and this picture of her and THE red typewriter…

if you gaze at it for a while it starts to look scary.

You have to love a woman that has sensible fashion - at a good price! I like a woman who can budget, and wear that beautiful color yellow, honey glaze… ah… Let’s update that White House look Michelle O.!

See the full story here at Business Sheet.

READ MORE FROM ELECTION NIGHT.

Nov. 4, 2008–

A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

President-elect Barack Obama

We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose and to bear witness to the process by which this grand achievement occurs.

The first time was New Year’s Day in 1863, when tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The second was the night of June 22, 1938, the storied rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, when black families and friends crowded around radios to listen and cheer as the Brown Bomber knocked out Schmeling in the first round. The third, of course, was Aug. 28, 1963, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to the world that he had a dream, in the shadow of a brooding Lincoln, peering down on the assembled throng, while those of us who couldn’t be with him in Washington sat around our black-and-white television sets, bound together by King’s melodious voice through our tears and with quickened-flesh.

But we have never seen anything like this. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,” as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made.

My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can’t quite believe it!

How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response. What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream. Would they say that surviving these horrors, hope against hope, was the price we had to pay to become truly free, to live to see—exactly 389 years after the first African slaves landed on these shores—that “great gettin’ up morning” in 2008 when a black man—Barack Hussein Obama—was elected the first African-American president of the United States?

I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, “Yes! Yes! And yes, again!” I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay—the price of President-elect Obama’s ticket.

From In Our Lifetime, by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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