Dinner Together...in the 1950s?

Mama Birthday Guitar Lesson Videos

Lesson #1: Strings of the Guitar:


Lesson #2: Chords in the Key of G


Lesson #3: Four More Common Chords


Lesson #4: C Major and G Major Scales


Lesson #5: Changing Chords Practice 1


Lesson #6: Changing Chords Practice 2


Lesson #7: Changing Chords Practice 3


Lesson #8: Strumming Patterns


Lesson #9: You Are My Sunshine


Lesson #10: This Land Is Your Land

Spectrum of the Sky

I think this image is really beautiful:

From http://thebarracuda57.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/spectrum_of_the_sky-wide.jpg

Blogs here, Blogs there, Blogs everywhere!

So, although my posting over here at Madison in June has been pretty slow lately, I have actually been writing blog posts, just in another venue. Let me introduce my new blog: Dining and Opining.

I've been wanting to focus more on food writing for some time now, and so creating this separate blog gives me the space to focus more exclusively on my food thoughts, activities, and general goings-on, and to share my writing more widely. I still plan to write in this space from time to time, but with a more personal feel and for a smaller audience--namely, all of you who I love!

Oh, and toward the end of not having too many different blogs all over the place, I've decided it's time to say goodbye to my mostly-defunct academic blog, You're the Historian, but I've imported all of the back posts into Madison in June, so that they're still accessible.

But please do check out the new blog, and let me know what you think!

Postcard Wall

One of the main goals of the last week or so in the Zeide-Horn household has been to de-clutter and refresh our home, to embrace our roles as "home-makers" and to make our space feel more like us.  Among the ways that we've tried to reach this goal is new wall hangings throughout the house.  The space above the piano in our living room has long been itching for something new to display, and so we came up with this idea of a postcard wall, where we could display postcards from friends, a few photographs, and other aesthetically-pleasing images from magazines and old calendars, in a grid-work fashion.

And so, this was born:

Some of you are already well-represented on this wall (cards from GR, JB, DJ, CH, and others!), but we'd like to have more of you in our home!  If you'd like to participate, we'd love it if you'd send us a postcard (or a roughly 4"x6" photograph, card, or other pretty two-dimensional item) so that we may add rows and columns and memories of you to our wall... (email us if you don't have our address and want it).


Looking forward to expanding our postcard wall!

Reflection amid song

As this semester comes to a close, with impending flights to warmer, family-filled places and an end to this grading, I've been thinking a lot (too much?!) about all the things that have come together to make this semester feel so auspicious,* so productive, so full of hope. These things are many, and perhaps will be elaborated upon further in blog posts to come, but one of them has most certainly been a return to our roots for both Justin and me--musical satisfaction and conversation/affection, respectively. Interestingly enough, both of these sets of roots have been planted in the soil provided by a new friend, who has brought with him both reminders of Annas and Justins past, and a chance for some guerrilla wassailing.

Guerrilla waissalling, or glorified Christmas caroling,  is a lovely combination of four-part harmony and college spontaneity.  Justin had been practicing a few songs with a group of (mostly) UW undergrads for the last few weeks, which all culminated in several outings to coffee shops and breakfast nooks, pizza places and public buses, complete with vibrant renditions of Joy to the World and We Three Kings.

Here, the waissallers regaled a friend of ours with song. I particularly love the gleeful look on our friend's face (and his thumbs-up!) as he took in the beautiful voices and wondered how he got so lucky:



*I first came to know the word "auspicious" when my high school roommate was studying for the SATs and would go around saying "'auspicious' is an auspicious word." Later, on the first day of training when I worked at Interlochen, the Intermediate Girls Lakeside staff did an icebreaker where we had to go around and say our names along with an adjective that began with the same letter as our names. I said "Auspicious Anna."  The next day, the administrators asked if I wanted to be a unit leader for the summer (which included a pay raise and slightly more prestige). I accepted, not knowing why they chose me even though it was my first summer at Interlochen and I was younger than many of the other counselors. Later in the summer, when I asked my boss why I was chosen for this position, she said it was because I had used the word "auspicious" during that icebreaker on the first day of the summer.  An auspicious word indeed.

Shout Out!

Much-needed appreciation to power me through this end-of-semester grading:

The UW student paper, the Badger Herald, has this feature called "Shout-Outs" where people can give shout-outs (SO, or antishout-outs--ASO) to whatever or whomever they want, in an anonymous fashion if they so prefer. A friend told me that I got my very own SO today! Never have my teaching warm-fuzzies been more strongly felt...