Blogging on the Powwow

Let me just state the obvious: I'm wrong. In fact, I am wrong a lot . For those of you who know my husband, you can commiserate with me, right? Before I get too carried away, the sad fact is that I really am wrong. A lot.  I have a corner on all-things social science, but Neil knows so much more than me about the world, history, and how things work. I chalk it up to being old. But, I digress.  Neil and I are both "never uncertain, but often wrong" people. We were both wrong about our future neighborhood. Thank goodness! We first visited our street about eight months before we made an offer on our house. In fact, it was in large measure the street which deterred us...and an unreasonably high asking price on what is now our house. We visited Amesbury and our future neighborhood in October 2007. We were discouraged at what we could afford, one hour south of Saco -- the only single family home on a small in-town lot, on a beat-up street filled with multi-units, in an old

The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect is housed at Cornell University in the College of Human Ecology . (What is human ecology?  Just think of a modern day perspectives of home economics. What was once cooking, sewing, home finances, and child rearing is now nutrition, textiles/fashion, financial literacy, and child development.) A data archive does pretty much it suggests...this one archives data sets on child abuse and neglect. This means that the data from large, sometimes multi-year studies which are conducted on abused and neglected children, are housed and available for other researchers to use. This is known as "public use data sets." In order to use these data sets, one has to apply to the holder of the data, explain the purpose for use, and provide evidence that this purpose has been approved by one's Institutional Review Board - or, a board of ethics. The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect goes one step further. They provide a week

Neil and I have been planning to have a nearly grass-less yard ever since we moved to our home in 2008 and fell in love with the yard, river, and neighborhood. We have done most of the work between May 2011 and now. In truth, it's a lot of work, but the rewards are endless -- especially when viewed through our wonderful windows. We'll never have a completely grass-less yard, because Drake needs somewhere to romp and roll around, without trampling all of our hard work. But, we are minimizing the grass. The picture below gives you an idea of the current state of our yard. I mapped two pictures onto each other; it's not perfect, but it gives my readers of sense of our progress. Neil's exact phrasing is that he wants a "cacophony" of flowers, trees, shrubs, and ground cover in our yard. It's difficult to be patient, waiting for plants to mature, but we're on our way. The current state of our yard, June 2012 So, here's a little "garden tour&q

Neil and I love to visit northern New Hampshire. As not only a woman of routine (see my previous blog on this topic), but a couple of routine, we've been staying at the same place for 12-13 years - the Town & Country Motor Inn . We love the T&C - on the Gorham/Shelburn line - modestly priced, reasonably quiet, an aging facility with exercise equipment that is 10 years too old, sink and tub drains that are slow to work, and dining room food that meets Neil's rating of " B-flat."  They also allow pets for a mere $6/night while other competitors charge up to $25/night. From what we can tell, the T&C - a family-run business - has been a staple of the social and economic activity for over 50 years in Coos County. It is the kind of place where generations of families have held weddings, class reunions and other "corporate functions." Neil first learned of the T&C because in the 1990s they hosted the "Kinder Konzerts" of the Portland Symp