Summer 14: Grampa's Scallions

Or, as he explained, GRAMMA's scallions.

Because you don't need them a lot, but when you do,

it's nice to have them in the backyard.

He brought them from the house on Downing St.

They used to be his mother's, and we have some at home, too.

What is it with food and plants and this family?

Summer 13: Window to Summer

Gramma and Grampa have these GREAT windows on their porch.

I've always loved these windows-

they open inward and they have screens that open outwards,

and they are long and narrow so you can hang out the wash from inside!

They always seemed magical to me somehow.

Like... I could sneak outside via the window and it was just SO MUCH COOLER than using the door.

You know?

Summer 12: Pilgrimage to Somerville

I only use the word pilgrimage because of connotations of Connor and Chaucer.

Thanks to Liz for driving and Em and Hannah putting up
with us chasing this sunset around Somerville.

I never ended up getting a picture I liked
(or was straight... I took about 8 pictures, all of which are crooked).

But the sky's pretty even if the picture is not.

Summer 11: Another cop-outI took no pictures today. Want to know why? I did work instead. =(
Ugh.The horrible life of full-time employment.(JUST KIDDING. I LOVE HAVING A JOB)

Summer 10: My new best friend
I love Iz.I have a great picture of her and Em together, but this one is better photographically. Which tells you how crappy the other one must be, hahaha. =)
Nice to just play on the quad with my friends sometimes.

Summer 9: Taking advantage of the Farm

This isn't my favorite photo from today,

but it does represent the space well.

I felt a particular affinity to growing things today,

so I went to the farm to just be with them.

Coming from a sleepy seed, eating the dirt,

completely changing your form so your life makes sense,

blooming and pushing hard through the earth to reach the sun?

Yeah. I gotchu, homeskillet. We're speakin' the same language.

Thrive.

Summer 8: Today looked nothing like this

Today was a GROSS June day.

It barely made 60F and it was rainy and wet and dreary.

This picture, however, was taken on a beautiful June day last week.

I prefer this to the sleepy, wet weather.

Summer 7: Willy Wonka, Jr
Peter needed a friend to help with his elementary school's show, so I decided that this would be the year I learned how to use a spotlight!
This spot and I have become pretty decent friends =) ♥

Summer 6: Martin and Moore Center Love
Spent the day sitting in Martin100 today working on all the Moore Center initiatives that I'd been putting off.UGH.
I needed stretch break, so I went for a short jaunt around Martin to see what had changed.Took this looking up in the front entrance kind of foyer area.
I had never noticed this before yesterday.People (myself included!) always forget to look up- they're so busy looking down- but there are so many beautiful things to see if one takes a look above!

Summer 6.5: Martin II

And this is actually the same view,
just taken with different settings and a slightly different perspective.

I love photography.

Summer 5: Scooper Bowl
SURE-sponsored trip to the Scooper Bowl in Boston.It's always nice to be paid for an afternoon of not doing work.
Hannah is the epitome of summer in this picture, and yet still the epitome of herself.She's got sunglasses and ice cream, but not in the typical fashion. An interesting summer living with this one, to be sure.

Summer 4: Beautiful O'Hara Bridge

I've always loved the O'Hara area of campus. I think it's truly underappreciated. But it kind of seems a lot like home to me because it was my first Stonehill home.

This picture isn't from today, but it is from recently when the weather and lighting were very similar to today.

Isn't spring just the best time?

Summer 3: A tea day

"When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss."

♥ Banksy

Working on (only) my second cup for the day.

Have a thought that there will be many more in the few hours left before bed.

Summer 2: I love my Gramma

It was her birthday last week, so mom and dad bought her an orchid.

She turned 82. You've gotta respect 82 years of being on this earth.

Summer 1: Blue Margarita at Coyote Blue with Lyss and Mama Gilbert

♥ ♥

Tequila = not my thing.

Photos? More so.

Painfully nervous to actually write something for Stacy.
Not that it has to be anything brilliant, and not that she is one to judge, and not that what I'm thinking is dumb or unsupported by the text, but...
...somehow having it down in writing, where she can analyze it, and presenting it to her as a sensible idea that she may never have thought of

is just terrifying.

But. I can't just sit here all day.
And this idea is actually kind of cool.

Got to bang it out, Oxford-style.

I'm not going to lie: being here with ~200 people on campus is fricking weird.

It's kind of nice though, because it's causing me to evaluate Stonehill on a less biased level. Well, now wait a minute, I don't know if that's true.
I was going to say that my opinion of Stonehill would be less biased now that everyone is gone for the summer because there is no one clouding my view of what the school is really like. It's like... I can see the school's inner workings, the metal structure that holds it together and keeps it functioning.
But how much of Stonehill/my experience of Stonehill (which is what the school really is to me, anyway) is actually interacting with or affected by this inner functionality?
Stonehill students, staff, ad professors, as far as I'm concerned, are the community. It's these people that make me come back- everything else is just to deal with the logistics (which apparently get really really complicated, given the amount of "support staff" people who are needed to make the teaching and learning and living go smoothly).

It kind of reminds me of when my pastor did this unit at church on the church building itself. We started having worship outside a lot and doing some less typical church activities. He even spent a bunch of nights sleeping in a tent on the lawn, though I forget exactly what that part was proving.
It seems similar, though, because we were learning that the idea of a church community and the physical "necessity" of a church building often get conflated, and unnecessarily so.
I think I tend to do this with Stonehill. It's really the people that I'm here for- the Wendys and the Lizas and the Jamies and the Emelyes andandand- which is separate from the actual place itself, which really has nothing to offer me.

So yeah. It is weird being here with so few people on campus.
It's like Diet Stonehill.

My car broke yesterday.
This is not unusual for my car.

This time, however, my dad told me to take it to L&C Garage instead of our usual garage, which is closed on Wednesdays. I didn't know which place this was, so he described its location-- across from HoneyDew donuts (classy, I know)-- and I immediately recognized it as the place that had repeatedly cat-called my cross-country team and me as we ran by in high school.
I told dad this, and he said, "That's because they didn't know you were mine."

This annoyed me at the time, but I didn't realize why until later.
WHY. Why should the fact that I am the daughter of the man they respect elicit respectful treatment of me any more than the mere fact that I am a fellow human?

I wanted to go on and on about this, rant-style, but now that I've posed that question, I just have no more energy. There is so much that is broken in this world. More than just my car.

Doing work in the place that feels the most like home to me on this campus. 

In the future, I hope that this center can be to others what it has been to me this semester. I want everyone to feel what I feel when I come in here: inclusion and acceptance. Radical acceptance, even. There is no other place on this campus like that, which makes me feel so passionately that we need this.

We need a place where it's okay to be everything that you are all at once, because when you don't feel at home in your own mind, you don't need the outside environment to alienate you. You're doing an okay job of that with your own internalized oppression and ick-factor. 

You just need a place to be. That needs to be this place.

I didn't quite make it, but now I'm done.




I'm proud of what I did, but 2010 is over, and so is my photoblog.
On to bigger and better things, y'all.

Thanks for sharing this with me.















































Fin.