The Harnation

Before Thanksgiving, I drove over to the University of Virginia (UVA, or U.Va.) and did the campus tour offered by their University Guide Service.  It's similar to Auburn's Student Recruiters (which I tried out for but didn't make, sniff), but with a LOT more history to share.


The University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson after his retirement from politics.  Mr. Jefferson first wrote about his desire to found a college when he was Vice President of the United States.  Although he was a graduate of Virginia's only university at the time, The College of William and Mary, he thought that the level of education there was diminishing and that his beloved home state needed an institute of higher learning more centrally located, unaffiliated with any religious sect, and one that taught more of the sciences.  It was one of the earliest colleges in America, and the first school founded without religious affiliation.

Mr. Jefferson's college came about years after his first musings, and Jefferson was involved in just about every aspect of its inception.


The layout of the college, the "Academical Village", was based on a large terraced lawn with the Rotunda, which served as the library, on one end, and a series of ten pavilions along the sides.  The pavilions were each the home of a professor, who lived on the top floor and taught classes on the main floor.  The pavilions are connected by a series of students' quarters and have their own gardens enclosed by a serpentine wall on the back side.  Behind the gardens are six hotels (dining quarters and service rooms) and more student housing.



Jefferson disliked the single building structure of William and Mary (where all of the dorm rooms, classrooms, and everything else were all in a single building) and thought it was not conducive to the learning environment.  His design afforded more privacy and quiet for study, while still providing an intimacy within the campus.



The center of campus, the Rotunda, was based on the Pantheon and is half its width and height.  The main room is the domed room in the center of the building.  There are two oval rooms flanking either side of the domed room.  One of them was Jefferson's office.


The Rotunda was originally used as the library, but is now used as a sort of meeting room.  Since it was the largest room of the small campus, it had to be fairly versatile.  Dances were held in the Rotunda, and the side bookshelves were designed so that if you are standing in the middle of the room, they are hidden from sight.


The upper story of the dome carries sound surprisingly well.  You could whisper a secret on one side of the circular floor to someone on the opposite side of the room, who would be able to hear everything you said.  Upperclassmen would have unsuspecting first year students take their dates up to the second floor and then listen in on the private conversation from the opposite side of the room.  They would then have sufficient ammo to embarrass them at breakfast the next morning.

In 1895, some of the outbuilding and the Rotunda caught fire.  The students mustered together to save this statue of Jefferson, which had been in the dome room.  The statue was thought to be one of the best representations of the third President, and his granddaughter nearly fainted upon seeing it because she said it was an exact likeness.  The statue is in excellent condition and only suffered a small chip on the bottom of his coat as the students and faculty hoisted it out of the Rotunda as the building was burning down around them.


The ten pavilions of the Academical Village are all unique.  Jefferson had the construction begin on the "seventh" pavilion.  He frequently skipped around during construction, starting one section, putting it on hold, and then progressing work on another area.  Since most of the funding for the school was being provided by the state, he feared that if the school was to have a couple of initial buildings completed, someone might decide that was sufficient and cut off funding for the remainder of the project.  He wanted to ensure that the entire design would be completed.


Many of the pavilions still house honored faculty and professors.  Larry Sabato, head of UVA's Center for Politics, author of Sabato's Crystal Ball, and a renowned expert on American politics, lives in Pavilion IV. 

 

About a week ago, Amanda asked me if I was sorry that I wouldn't have all of my usual Christmas decor up this year.  Matt and I don't go all Griswold, but do have the normal trimmings that we put up each year (tree, garland, wreaths, nutcrackers, lights on the house, etc.) and I always look forward to it.  I love coming home to a lit up house with a decorated Christmas tree after work and the gym, and I hadn't even really considered the fact that I'd be in a un-Christmased apartment all by myself for most of the month.

Christmas is the bright spot in an otherwise dreary season.  I know some people love winter, but to me it means darkness, cold, desolate flower beds, and sadness.  I don't know why I equate winter with sadness, but it seems I'm happier the rest of the year.  I think regular sunshine has a lot to do with it, and during the winter, I leave for work when it's dark and come home when it's dark.  That's depressing.

Christmas brings warmth, joy, color, and the most wonderful reminder of how much we are loved.  It brings people together and always makes me thankful for God's countless blessings in my life.

Growing up, we had two kinds of Christmases in terms of decorations... when we were younger, we always went to get a fresh-cut Christmas tree (usually cut ourselves) and decorated it with our colored lights and assortment of handmade ornaments.  Some years, we procrastinated and didn't get the tree right away (even going on Christmas Eve one year), but we had a tree and always watched our taped (off of the tv) copy of the Seattle Ballet's The Nutcracker soon after decorating it.

As we got older (and busier), my dad took on a new perspective: no decorating.  We used to tease him about this and he even has a "Bah Humbug" flag that he occasionally displays on the mantle in lieu of the other festive decor. 

I don't think I'll ever be a "Bah Humbug" kind of girl.  Every year, our Christmas decor gets just a teeny bit bigger, and every year I chomp at the bit to put it up.  I promised Matt early on that I'd never be one of those wives that forces her husband to hang Christmas lights, endangering his livelihood by making him hang perilously off of the steep inclines of the roof,  and have therefore never told them to put them up, but every year I secretly hope deep down that he'll do it anyway so that I don't have to suffer through the month without lights (an insufferable fate, I know). 

I realize the decorations aren't what make up Christmas, but they sure do bring with them a festive way to usher in the celebration of our Savior's birth!  To be quite honest, I was starting to feel a little sorry for myself seeing everyone's Christmas tree blog photos or the cars driving around town with their trees on top.  Even the single guys next door have a tree and fresh wreath up. 

And then on Friday, as I was checking the office bulletin board, I saw that someone had a Christmas tree stand free to a good home.  Hello?!  I figured I could decorate a tree on a small budget this year.  I don't need my stash of Christmas goodies.

So I claimed the stand and spent Saturday running errands.  I picked up about $12 worth of cheap glass bulbs and ribbon and then grabbed a couple of strands of lights.  I picked the smallest size of (real) trees that Lowe's had - still > 6' tall - and even loaded that sucker onto the truck all by myself.  I didn't realize how much I relied on Matt for the simplest little things until I got home and had to untie it, take it down, haul it up the steps, and put it in the precarious little stand all on my own.  (Thank you, honey, for always helping me out with things around the house!)


I spent last night cheering the Tigers on to a major victory and decorating my own little Christmas tree while it snowed outside.  By the time I was done, the lawn was covered in a beautiful white blanket and my living room faintly smelled like a Christmas tree. It took some of the edge off of being away from home during the holidays.

Merry Christmas!

editor's note: I found this as a draft in my blog posts, dated 10/6/09.  Better late than never, right??  Also, it is with great sadness that I tell you my mom is currently on a knitting hiatus... hopefully she'll start back soon so that I can add to my wish list.  (Mom, I want something cute and fuzzy to keep me warm up here!)

You know your University of Alabama Alum mother really loves you when she knits you an orange and blue Auburn sweater because you can't find one you like in the stores!

My mama is a knitting fiend.  We joke that she asks us to drive her places just so that she can knit in the back seat.  She's made all sorts of beautiful skirts, shirts, sweaters, and shawls for us over the past couple of years since picking up the hobby.  I always get lots of compliments whenever I wear one of her creations.


I wanted a simple Auburn sweater to wear in the fall during football season, and Mom really delivered.  I was so pumped about it that I had to get some game day jewelry from Auburn Art to go with it.



This super cute bangle is fun.  It's plain enough to be able to wear with non game day apparel too.

Last weekend (and this week, for that matter) was non-stop and a lot of fun.

After saying our goodbyes,  Matt and I departed ways until Thanksgiving.  Amanda, Amy, and I piled back into the truck and started our remaining drive to Virginia.

It was a long drive, especially since I had to do all of the driving, but of course the girls kept me entertained the whole way.  We got into town around 7 o'clock and after unpacking the truck and realizing we didn't have immediate internet access, we were both starving and ready to get online.

Against our better judgment, we stopped and ate at the first place we found, Taco Bell.  About an hour later, we were all regretting the decision and I subsequently made Larry and Shemp undertake a solemn vow that we would never commit such a cardinal sin again, at least not in one another's presence.

Using my GPS (and a lot of U-turns later), we found a Walmart and grabbed the essentials.  (You know, cereal, fruit, milk, cinnamon rolls, and a wireless router).  I had done some basic research on the things we wanted to do Saturday, but had counted on using the internet that came with the apartment to do some final checking upon our arrival.

... Of course, you can't get online with just a router.  Rats, foiled!  I think Wade may've laughed at our web access ignorance, and I felt stranded.  What is it about being able to check your email and look up the weather online that makes being away from home more bearable?  I don't know what it is, but I can tell you that I went up to Comcast and picked up my modem as soon as the apartment office told me where to go!


Saturday, we toured the beautiful Monticello.  This time, I actually got to go into the house.  Let me just say that if you're ever in the area, I really think you should take the time to tour Thomas Jefferson's estate.  It's really beautiful and the guides do a very good job of bringing it all to life by giving you some of the history of the house and the man who built it.

Jefferson was a brilliant man.  Like many literate people of the age, he was mostly self-taught.  He had an enormous library (and even sold it to the US government at one point to dissolve some of his enormous debt).  He was an academic and founded the University of Virginia so that others could have a higher education.  He was a brilliant writer, politician, botanist, student of architecture, and much more.  He was also an extreme micro-manager.  He was obsessive about everything on his estate, taking scrupulous notes and monitoring every single tiny aspect of the entire enterprise.


The two things I cannot admire about Jefferson were his lifelong indebtedness and ownership of slaves.  Even though he was in debt, he kept remodeling his house and spent according to the lifestyle to which he was accustomed.  After he died, his slaves were sold for much more than the value of his entire property.  He only freed five of his slaves in his will.  Jefferson was strongly against slavery, calling it, an "abominable crime," a "moral depravity," a "hideous blot," and a "fatal stain" that deformed "what nature had bestowed on us of her fairest gifts."  However, he owned them his entire life.  I think he viewed them as essential for his survival.  He was so deeply in debt that he probably never freed them all because of how valuable slaves were.  Why he had this lifelong conflict of conviction and personal reality, we'll probably never really know.

After Monticello, we stopped for a quick wine tasting at Jefferson Vineyards, just down the road.  Perfect weather for a tasting and tour, too!


Since the weekend, it's just been me and the "boys".  I think they're adjusting to being apartment dogs.  It's been a big change losing our large fenced in yard and resorting to leash walking, something we're learning how to handle as efficiently as possible.  We're all three also learning to get used to all of the creaks and movement noises associated with living in an apartment.

The only times I lived in an apartment were our stint in Japan and the first summer Matt and I were married.  In Japan, it was especially hard to get used to being quiet all of the time as a family of five that had always had our own (separate) house.  You could hear the neighbors practicing the piano or a wife fussing at her husband for coming home too late, so I know they could hear whenever the three of us girls became embroiled in a cat fight.


The apartment is pretty nice though.  I really don't have any complaints about it.  It's more space than I need (room for visitors!) and is pretty new.  It's up on a foothill with a beautiful view and lots of amenities. 

My first week on the new job went pretty well.  Thankfully, they were able to get all of my paperwork done and accounts set up moderately quickly and I even got time to dig in and start doing some things.  The people are all pretty friendly and I think it's really going to help the time fly by quicker staying busy and being in a work environment with good people.

The biggest adjustment for me has been getting used to being on my own.  I've never lived by myself, let alone lived completely separated from friends and family.  It's been exciting and scary all at once.  I'm not so much feeling lonely yet because I haven't had any free time on my hands, but I am definitely having waves of homesickness.  I've noticed that I have gotten choked up or teary-eyed in the afternoons or on the drive home a few times, for no apparent reason.

I really think I wouldn't have any issues if I had been able to bring Matt with me.  It's been hard being apart, and it's just a week in.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?  :)

Helllooo.  I'm safe and sound in Virginia!

I don't have time for a long post, so this will just be a quick update.

My sisters, Amanda and Amy, rode up with me and spent the weekend seeing some of the sights.  We left Thursday after lunch and stayed the night in Atlanta with my roommate from college and her husband.  


We went through Atlanta because Matt had a track weekend with his brother and we needed to drop him off on the way since  I was stealing his tow vehicle for three months.  We towed the track car behind our packed-to-the-roof SUV, loaded with all of my clothes, four people, two dogs, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Friday morning, the girls and I all headed the rest of the way up to Virginia.  What a gorgeous drive!  I wanted to take photos out of the windows a million times, but I was the only one able to drive a manual transmission.

We ran around Charlottesville on Saturday (more on all that later) and then shopped till we dropped in Williamsburg on Sunday.  I dropped the girls off at the airport in Richmond on Sunday evening and headed to my apartment for the start of my stint flying solo.

On Monday, I started my temporary work assignment.  There were some problems with my paperwork and access to the building, so I will go back over this afternoon but can't really start until (hopefully) Wednesday morning.

That's okay though, since I have four homework assignments and plenty of missed class to catch up on.

I quickly realized that our 400 (shared) minutes/month cell phone plan is not going to cut it for the first time since we started sharing a cell phone plan when we first got married six and a half years ago!  I updated my plan, but unfortunately it doesn't take affect until December.  They really know how to get you on that, don't they?!

In the mean time, I'm trying to figure out how to set up skype.  I've got to get a webcam and microphone since my work laptop didn't have one.  Anybody else use skype?  Is it pretty straight forward?

I'm slowly settling in and have a constant shopping list.  I think I've been to Walmart three times already and need to go back again today. My furnished apartment came with dish detergent, but not a chopping board.  I had spare light bulbs, but no modem. Just those mundane tasks associated with moving into a new place.

So, I have a million things to do, and will have to post a more thorough update later.

Until then, here's the beautiful view from my front porch...

...Don't Know When I'll be Back Again.

Well, I'm not really leaving on a jet plane, and I kind of know when I'll be back again.


I can't sleep and so I figured the best cure was to get up and actually write a blog post.

What's keeping me from sleeping, you might ask?  I found out today that I'm going to be moving to central Virginia for two months... in two weeks.

Yikes!

(Yes, I really used the word yikes.  I actually use it all the time.  Lame, I know.  I hope you can overlook it this once.)


I'm trying not to freak out.

My job is sending me up there to be one of our on-site people until the permanent guy is able to move in January.  I've got to find an apartment, work out the logistics of getting up there, finish all the projects I'm involved in at work right now, figure out puppy custody, arrange for class notes for grad school while I'm away, and rent someone to feed my husband while I'm gone!


There's a lot for me to get done before I go but even more for me to do once I'm there.  I'm so pumped about all of the things there are to do and see in the area.

I want to go back to Monticello, tour D.C., visit Colonial Williamsburg/Mt. Vernon/UVA, and a whole list of great ideas provided by Dr. Charles and E. Fulcher.  I'm trying to talk my family into making a road trip and crashing at my place.

Start planning your late fall/winter trip to Virginia and come visit me!

Today would have been my Aunt Sherri's 52nd birthday.

I miss her.

I debated back and forth whether to write something here about the recent passing of my dear aunt.  I thought what Amanda wrote was perfect and don't really know that I could do her memory justice quite as well as my sister did.  On the other hand, there are so many good things to remember, and I don't want to let some of those cherished memories slip away.

A couple of months ago, while my Aunt Terri (Sherri's identical twin) was recovering from some type of a brain hemorrhage, our family was on edge.  We were sick with worry.  Sherri called to update us and to request extra prayers when things weren't looking good. Sherri always made sure the doctors were doing their jobs and was the constant vigil whenever anyone was in the hospital.


Aunt Sherri was the medical expert of the family.  She told me once that when she was growing up, most women who worked outside of the home were either teachers or nurses.  She became a nurse.

I remember visiting her once or twice in the Emergency Room where she worked when I was a kid.  She really seemed in her element - she had lots of friends that she worked with and was well respected.  My general practitioner used to moonlight in the ER with her on occasion, and he still asks me regularly how my Aunt Sherri is doing.

Sherri told me that she knew she'd never be able to advance in her career if she didn't continue her education, and as a result, she once again put herself through school.  This time, she completed her nurse practitioner's degree as a single mom while working full time all at the same time. 

For the last several years, she has served as the nurse practitioner for an HIV/AIDs clinic.  It was extremely emotionally demanding, and I don't know how she did it.  It was a hard job.  But, it was a job that someone had to do, and I think Sherri really felt a calling to serve in this way.  She talked about how she couldn't have done her job without knowing such a loving and forgiving God... it would have been too difficult.  She felt like she was called to love others in that clinic and saw it as a ministry.

While the job was extremely hard at times, I hope she knows that she was making a difference.  For 7 years, she had a 100% success rate in protecting new babies from contracting HIV from their mothers.  At the time that she had her first patient to deliver an HIV-positive baby, another mother named her healthy child partly after my aunt.  I don't know how she did it.  I can't imagine how hard that job was on her.  At the same time of devastation, she was also honored in another situation.

I really looked up to Sherri.  I had originally enrolled in college as pre-med, but Aunt Sherri gave me some really wise advice.  She told me that I should think long and hard about going into the medical field if I wanted to be able to have a family.  Doctors have long hours.  She suggested I apply for a medical shadowing program.  I did, and was accepted (I wrote my application essay about how I looked up to her as a nurse).  I shadowed a local doctor and by the end of the program decided that she was right.  I wasn't willing to dedicate the next ten years towards school to pursue a career that would demand so much of my time.

I switched to engineering.


About two years ago, out of the blue, Sherri called to see if I would like to have my grandparents' wedding china.  She had decided that she had "too much stuff", and wanted me to have some of it.  I was absolutely thrilled.  She gave me the china, along with my grandfather's pipe and the first photos of him that I had ever owned.  She spent a good bit of time talking with me about him, about how much she loved him, how much he doted on me, and told me stories about him I'd never heard before.

Since then, I really felt like she became much more than just my aunt.  We had girls' lunches with my sisters and my Aunt Terri, and also with just the two of us.  I attended church with her this past winter, and we spent the afternoon together.  I loved seeing how she, a Catholic, worshiped, and she equally enjoyed explaining the rituals and theology to me.  We talked religion, love, and life.  She helped me through a really tough winter and gave really good advice about all sorts of things.

I don't know why she was taken so young.

What I do know is that she had a lot of trials and sadness in her life, and I have no doubt that she is now joyfully singing praises in her Heavenly home, free from pain, sickness, disappointment, and sorrow with only eternity before her.  

I really miss her.

 Happy Birthday, to my dear Aunt Terri.