New camera (now charging)
Mar 26, 2008 Uncategorized
Found it on clearance while I was picking up a steno pad for note taking. Boy, prices have come down, haven’t they?
We’re at Brett’s brother’s house here in the Mississippi District. For those who know Portland, it’s near the rebuild center. They have a cottage out back that they rent short-term (they built it almost entirely from rebuild stuff) and the tenants left early so we’re getting to save a bundle on hotel costs.
Tomorrow the conference starts with a keynote by Sharon Roszia. She’s the person who inspired me to start OpenAdoptionSupport.com so I’m really glad I’m not going to miss it.
Being back in Portland is bittersweet. It’s changed a lot since we were living here over a decade ago and one of our old apartments has been eclipsed by a high rise. Here where we’re staying is part of a neighborhood I used to bike through to get to one of my jobs. Nostalgia is one of those emotions that I find particularly challenging; I never know what to do with a feeling that demands no action. (Whenever we have any sort of vacation I’m reminded of how much I dislike being idle — I don’t find it relaxing at all. In fact it makes me pretty tense.) Even writing about nostalgia doesn’t help because it just makes me feel more mired in it. I mean, at least feeling lousy and writing about it usually gets me to the next step towards feeling less lousy.
The cottage, though, is beautiful and much more spacious than a hotel would be. Wick and Karoline have done an amazing job fixing up their house, too. It’s going to be a very nice play to stay and it’ll be easy to get downtown to the conference from here. (We thought we wouldn’t be able to stay here for another couple of nights so this more than off-sets the cost of the new camera!!!)
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Tags: AAC, openadoptionsupport.com, Portland
A viral promotion I can get behind
Feb 26, 2008 Uncategorized
Like coffee? Sign up for the Joffrey’s Java Beta Test and they’ll set you up with a sample and link to your blog. I like their twist on beta testing!
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My old house (emphasis on MY)
Feb 5, 2008 Uncategorized
The current owner of Dawn Friedman’s childhood home recently painted the front door red. When Friedman spotted the change during one of her regular detours down her old street, she called her sister to discuss it.”We approved,” said Friedman, of suburban Columbus, Ohio. “We liked that.”Friedman, 38, and her sister, Erica DiPaolo, 40, routinely drive past their old house to relive good memories, check on the neighborhood and see what has changed.”My sister and I are kind of obsessed with it,” Friedman said with a laugh.
The writer was going to see if we could tour the house but alas, we didn’t get to. Rats. I can’t wrap my head around the thought that the current owner probably feels as attached to the house as I do, which just feels plain old wrong. Anyway. More here. And two pics of the dear old thing. (The window for my room was above the front door there.) Click to make big! (These are off the auditor’s site so not when I lived there.)
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Tags: Erica
African American History Month
Feb 1, 2008 Uncategorized
Originally published at this woman’s work. Please leave any comments there.
I’m going to be hanging out at Deesha’s place this month so I can learn something.
I first met Deesha virtually at Literary Mama where she wrote The Girl is Mine column but then I met her in real life at the adoption conference last October. Happily, Deesha is now blogging! Thank goodness! And she’s blogging the heck out of African American History Month along with her friend Yvette. There’s so much I don’t know that I appreciate having not one but two well-written, insightful blogs to turn to.
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Tags: Erica
Finally done
Jan 31, 2008 Uncategorized
Originally published at this woman’s work. Please leave any comments there.
I’ve had SO MUCH WORK the past two days and now I’m done but my eye has been twitching since yesterday morning and it’s still going strong.
I want to learn Flash — it’s on my to-do list and I just reserved Flash for Dummies at my library. I need to start thinking about what in the hell I’m going to say at the end of March for the AAC conference. This is the description for the workshop:
Dawn will address the challenges of building a virtual community to meet a real-world need for post-adoption support. She will talk about what inspired the site and the ongoing process of bringing it together, specifically the difficulties of creating community in the often tumultuous online world of adoption.
(As an aside, there’s a session going on at the same time as mine that I’d love to go to. Rats.) Any of you in Portland who want to come in and be part of a roundtable about it? I’m thinking that what I want to do is talk about the challenges in building it and then solicit thoughts from people who are members and then open it up to the floor. It may be that no one will come to my session in which case we can just chat and brainstorm amongst ourselves. I’ll solicit on the Open Adoption Support site, too, of course. In fact I’ll go do that now.
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Tags: Erica, open adoption, Portland
