quick update

Quickly, here's what's been going on:

My birthday was almost two weeks ago. I had to work and go to class that day, but they had dessert for me at work and then the Friday night following my birthday Josh and I went to a German restaurant with another couple and we all gorged ourselves on delicious food. Josh also gave me this really awesome shirt he painted that you will have to wait another couple of weeks to see. Get excited.

This past weekend Josh and I went to his grandparents' house over by the bay. We were there less than 24 hours, but we ate good food, enjoyed good company, and even kayaked on a little pond.

Saturday night we joined my family in Richmond for a sushi dinner, and then Sunday was Easter. I went to church with the grandparents and Sunni, dyed eggs with Sunni, and we all ate at my aunt's house, which included hanging out on the porch because warm weather is back!

My semester is coming to a close quickly, and that means a huge final paper is coming up quickly, too....Luckily I just got a new computer (my old one was from 2006 and the guy at Best Buy told me that was like being 75 years old in computer years) so now I won't have to "warm up" my laptop every time I need to use it, and it won't take a billion years to look at anything on the internet. I might even blog more often now that using my computer doesn't make me want to pull my toe nails out, but let's not hold our breath.

exciting Mondays

Occasionally for work I get to go do research away from the office. Last Monday was special because I got to do that at the Library of Congress in D.C. for the first time. My class met there later in the evening, so I went up early and spent the whole day there. Well, really I got into D.C. (after the 2+ hour drive to the metro station and the 45 minute ride into the city) around 10:30 and stopped by the National Archives to copy some things from microfilm, then I walked down and across the Mall to the Library of Congress. I ate my lunch on the grounds of the Capitol. After working and class I even got to hang out a little and have dinner with fellow students. That was exciting since I commute to school and I never get to hang out with other students, which makes me sad. Of course taking the time to hang out meant I got home at 1am, but it was worth it.

Yesterday I also did some research away from the office. This time I spent the day at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. I mostly copied things off of microfilm, which isn't too exciting, but I did get to grab a delicious lunch and eat on the grounds of the state capitol next to a statue of Stonewall Jackson, among the dogwood trees and tulips. It's the little things.

connecting with history

As you know, I like history. I like it so much I'm making it a career and working toward a second graduate degree in it. But just because I like it doesn't mean I always feel especially "connected" to it. Maybe that's part of its appeal--it's like a different world. Like fiction, only more awesome (and sometimes more tragic or unbelievable) because it's not fiction.

Often in my history classes someone speaks up in class with a personal story that is (or at least they think it is) connected to whatever we're reading that week. For example, when reading a book on suburbanization and consumer culture one guy shared that he grew up in the city the book centered on during the 1960s, and remembered learning to drive in the giant suburban mall's parking lot. When reading about mining in the West, a girl from Montana said her family got there back in the day specifically because they went to mine copper.

I've read a couple of books about New Mexico this past year, and they are always exciting because I'm from New Mexico. But honestly, I don't feel very connected to striking Mexican-American miners in southern New Mexico in the 1950s, or to the Pueblo Indians and their Spanish conquerors in the seventeenth century. (Unless you count the that fact that I attended De Vargas Junior High, and our mascots were the Conquistadors.)

But this last week I felt a real connection. We read a book about the manipulation and control of rivers in the American West, and it dawned on me that irrigation and water control had a very large role to play in my family going to and staying in New Mexico. My great grandfather moved his family to Albuquerque during the Depression (or maybe just before?) to work as a dragline operator digging irrigation ditches. And his son, my granddad, was a civil engineer who worked in New Mexico for the Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Agriculture, and finally in the State Engineer's Office managing water resources. Irrigating the arid West has played a pretty fundamental role in the development of the region (and the country), for better or worse, and my family took part. I'm connected.