Christmas 2011

This year, Mike and I had our first Christmas tree. We loved it, and so did Simone.

This is my beautiful Christmas present -- a used piano, picked up in Utah and delivered by my parents a week before Christmas. I looooove it (and Mike claims to love having music in the house -- I think he'll love it more once the piano has been tuned).

I made several gifts this year, including these six flowered headbands. Cute, huh?

We spent a few days in Idaho with my family. Highlights included:

Getting to know 4-month-old nephew Seth (a truly magical baby)

Snowshoeing in Strawberry Canyon

Bowling at Logan Lanes (Robert is a little bit competitive)

Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

80 Books in 2011

Here's the complete list of the books I read in 2011 (there are two days left, but I don't think I'm going to finish Daniel Deronda or The Remains of the Day in that time). I set two reading goals this year: 1) to read a total of 80 books and 2) to read at least one nonfiction book per month. Mission accomplished! This is a mix of classics, stuff read for work, young adult lit, literary fiction, nonfiction, and a couple of plays. Leave a comment if you want a review or a recommendation.

Note: These are listed in the order in which I read them. Favorites are in bold.

1. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
2. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
3. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
4. "Antony and Cleopatra" by William Shakespeare
5. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
6. The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
7. Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
8. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
9. Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America by Marcia Millman
10. Great House by Nicole Krauss
11. Intuition by Allegra Goodman
12. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
13. An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
14. Cheerful Money by Tad Friend
15. I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson
16. Thanks for the Memories by Cecilia Ahern
17. Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer
18. The Book of Tomorrow by Cecilia Ahern
19. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
20. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
21. Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner
22. Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner
23. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
24. My Life in France by Julia Child
25. Jane by April Lindner
26. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
27. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
28. Juliet by Anne Fortier
29. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
30. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
31. O, Pioneers by Willa Cather
32. Bossypants by Tina Fey
33. Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
34. The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard
35. Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
36. Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan
37. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan C. Bradley
38. Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
39. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
40. Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland
41. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
42. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
43. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
44. Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
45. Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal
46. Riding the White Horse Home by Teresa Jordan
47. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
48. What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen
49. The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley
50. Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen
51. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
52. Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
53. The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
54. “Clouds” by Aristophanes
55. The Lais of Marie de France translated by Burgess & Busby
56. “Germania” by Tacitus
57. The Exile by Diana Gabaldon
58. Voyager by Diana Gabaldon
59. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
60. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
61. Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon
62. The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure
63. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
64. Bonk by Mary Roach
65. The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon
66. Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim
67. Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way by Jon Krakauer
68. The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
69. What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide by Jana Riess
70. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
71. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
72. A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan C. Bradley
73. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
74. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
75. The Magician King by Lev Grossman
76. The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings

77. This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

78. Flunking Sainthood by Jana Riess

79. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
80. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins

Home Improvements

Part 4 of Summer 2011

Since moving into our new house, we've made a few improvements and some exciting purchases.

Our first big furniture purchase -- a dining room table and chairs! Delivered late, but finally here.

Our finished guest bedroom, with Ikea furniture. We haven't yet decided what to put on the walls. As a reminder, here's what the room looked like when we moved in:

. . . a color we like to call "Cookie Monster Blue." It took three coats of primer plus paint to cover this exuberant decor!

Here's the attic loft, which is not quite assembled. It will be our home office, once it's all done. We have made significant progress. Here's what it looked like when we moved in:

Wood paneling from floor to ceiling! We put three coats of primer plus paint on these walls, and we're really happy with the "Mild Lemon" color you now see throughout the room.

We love our house, and home ownership continues to be an adventure. We have many more plans for small improvements, but now that fall semester is coming on, our pace has slowed considerably. Come visit us some time!

Miscellaneous summer stuff

Part 3 of Summer 2011 Coverage

Early in the summer, Mike and I went to Boulder, Colorado for the day. It's a beautiful place, with the University of Colorado campus, downtown shopping, an amazing independent bookstore, and a great farmer's market. Here are a few pictures:

Tulips downtown

Flowers at the farmer's market

Mike at the Dushanbe Teahouse, where we ate lunch

On a different note altogether, one of my library classrooms got new laptops (yay!) and white boards. I'm very pleased and excited to teach there this fall:

For the first time since moving to Laramie, Mike and I were in town for Independence Day. Laramie has a huge celebration called "Freedom has a Birthday." Here's a picture of the main musical stage:

Freedom has a Birthday was really fun -- there were four stages in Washington Park. Also, free ice cream from the Freemasons and lemonade from the Democrats. (I heard the Republicans were giving away watermelon, but didn't run into their booth.)

Mike's mom visited us this summer, and we had a great time introducing her to Laramie. We went up to Vedauwoo for a walk around and to the Snowy Mountains. It was mid-July, but the Snowies still had tons of snow that shut down our attempts to go on a hike! On our way down from the Snowies we stopped for pizza at the Bear Tree Tavern and noticed this sign for the restrooms. It made us giggle.

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series of books, visited Laramie for a lecture and a reading. I went with my friend Kennedy and met the author. I'm reading the series now, and it's pretty entertaining. Her books include time travel, romance, and historical fiction, set (at first) in the Scottish Highlands.

Me, Kennedy, and Diana Gabaldon

Finally, a few food highlights from the summer. Mike and I have a share in Community Supported Agriculture, and every week we receive a box of vegetables and fruits from a farm in northern Colorado.

Here's a zucchini quiche, right before I popped it into the oven. It was delicious!

Pad thai, made with lots of the vegetables from our CSA share

This raspberry freezer jam does not represent produce from our CSA, but is actually made from Mink Creek raspberries given to us by my mom. It was my first-ever time making jam, and it's totally delicious.

Our pretty yard

Part 2 of Summer 2011 Update

Mike and I have spent a little bit of time working in our yard this summer. Luckily, it's fairly low-maintenance! We both enjoy having our own little piece of Laramie to take care of.

Here's our front flowerbed

A rosebush -- we just had 3 or 4 roses this year, but hopefully there will be more next year!

This lovely hanging basket was a house-warming gift from a good friend. (Also note the bright blue porch swing.)

I don't know what these purple things are called, but they're pretty, growing next to our garage.

Columbine at the back of the house

Lilac trees on either side of the bay window

Bright pink daisies in the front yard

Trip to Vancouver

I'm going to do a series of posts to wrap up events from summer 2011 -- I can't believe it's coming to an end! Here's Part 1 of the series: American Society for Engineering Education conference in Vancouver, B.C.

At the end of June I traveled to Vancouver with the engineering librarian from University of Wyoming to present a paper that we wrote about our assessment of information literacy skills among freshman engineering students. The conference was fine, our presentation went really well, and we had some time to explore Vancouver, which is a beautiful city.

The Olympic torch, right next to the conference center on the harbor

We rented cycles one morning to bike around Stanley Park, a small peninsula that protrudes from Vancouver

The temperate rainforest of Stanley Park

One of the beaches in Stanley Park

Totem poles in Stanley Park

While in Vancouver we also visited Granville Island (which is a lovely, though tourist-heavy, place) and I spent some time at H&M. I find that almost every time I leave Laramie I need to do a little bit of shopping!

The paper I presented in Vancouver is published online in the ASEE proceedings. If you're dying to check it out, go to http://www.asee.org/search/proceedings and search for bowles-terry.

Homeowners!

Mike and I bought a house in Laramie, and we just moved in two days ago. We love the house, the neighborhood (we're across the street from a city park), and the yard. My amazing, fantastic parents came from Idaho and spent two and a half days working their tails off to help us get moved in. Seriously -- they put in two 10-hour days and a half day today, and the place looks awesome. I'm so blessed to have two very healthy, energetic, and generous parents. They scrubbed the floors and the stove, hung light fixtures and shelves, pulled weeds and mowed the grass. Plus dozens of other things -- my dad even put in an electrical outlet outside the house. I think Mom and Dad know how to do just about anything.

World's Best Parents

So here are some photos of the process. The pictures don't quite show just how charming the house is, so you'll have to come and visit us to get the full effect.

Here's the dining room on Day 1.

Here's the living room and dining room today (our dining set has not yet been delivered, so you're seeing a temporary set up here).

Here's the kitchen on day 1

Here's the kitchen today. It's back-lit, but as you can see, all the boxes are gone. :)

Here's the entry on Day 1, with plastic on the floor and lots of furniture.

Here's the entry today. We still have lots of books to unpack.

Our bedroom on Day 1.

Our bedroom today -- box-free, and the cat is making herself at home.

I'll post some photos of the yard later, once we've had a chance to pull more weeds and do some planting. Here's one final photo. This is the view from our dining room window -- we have lilacs framing the window and it looks out on one of the city parks. And yes, we have a white fence around the yard. We're living the dream.

Chicago, June 2011

Last weekend, Mike and I made a quick trip to Chicago. I got to speak at a library instruction assessment symposium at University of Chicago, and we were able to spend some time in our favorite Chicago places together and we visited some new places, too.

As you may know, Laramie is a somewhat remote location and it takes a while to get from here to . . . anywhere. So on our departure date we drove for two hours to Denver, parked and took a shuttle to the airport, had a two hour flight to Midway, took the train into the city, dropped off our stuff at a downtown hostel (more on that later) and THEN took a bus to Chicago Pizza Kitchen and Oven Grinders, home of the best pizza we've ever eaten (and we go there every time we visit Chicago). In other words, we left home at 8 a.m. and made it to dinner at about 5 p.m. and we both agreed that it was totally worth traveling all day long to eat that pizza. Yum!

After dinner we saw the play "The Gospel According to James" at Victory Gardens Theatre. It was a fantastic show, and as a bonus one of our friends from Utah State, Chris Martin, was in it. We got to chat with him a bit after the show.

We stayed two nights in a hostel near the downtown public library in Chicago. We had never stayed in a hostel before, but our funds for the trip were limited and this hostel was less than half the price of a downtown hotel. It was also recommended by the librarians at University of Chicago, so we went for it. Here's a photo of our room:

It was narrow, to say the least, and kind of like staying in a dorm room, since we shared bathrooms with the other people staying in our suite. Overall, it was not bad. The location and the price were definitely right!

My presentation at University of Chicago went really well. I won't bore you with too many details, but I presented on a mixed methods study I'm still working on this summer that attempts to measure the impact of library instruction on student achievement through focus groups with graduating seniors and a transcript analysis of a large sample of UW students. There were some great presentations at the symposium and a keynote address by my librarian hero, Megan Oakleaf.

The University of Chicago campus is really beautiful. Here are a couple of photos:

This is the Quadrangle Club, where we ate lunch during the symposium. (This is the fancy faculty clubhouse. Feels like a men's club, with lots of dark wood paneling and tweedy professor types.)

This is the reading room of the Mansueto Library, which is a brand new robot-powered library. It looks like a greenhouse from the outside, with that glass dome, and 3.5 million books are stored in the basement. You can call up a book by typing your request at the front desk, and a robotic arm gets the book for you. It's pretty cool, and obviously a popular space for students to work.

While I was conferencing, Mike went to the Adler Planetarium and to Millenium Park:

Here's a view of the museum campus, which includes the Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, and Adler Planetarium. Maybe you can tell, we had beautiful weather for our 3 days in Chicago. It was warm and humid, but overall pretty nice.

Millenium Park

Mike and I met up at the University of Chicago and had a refreshing beverage at a cafe just off campus. All the servers were wearing t-shirts that said, "Obama Eats Here." The Obamas do, in fact, have a house in Hyde Park, which is the University of Chicago neighborhood. We went from the University to Navy Pier specifically to see the stained glass museum there. (I really wanted to go because I recently read a historical novel about the women who worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany in the first years of the 20th century, designing and creating stained glass windows and lamps. The book is Clara and Mr. Tiffany and I highly recommend it.)

Here's a stained glass window designed for a Chicago home, meant to go in a staircase.

And here's a Tiffany window. Honestly, the room full of Tiffany windows made all the others in the museum look a little bit dull. The colors are so brilliant and the landscapes so evocative.

Also at Navy Pier we enjoyed some Garrett's popcorn and the view of the city skyline.

If you visit Chicago, you must visit a Garrett Popcorn Shop and order the Chicago blend. It's caramel and cheese popcorn mixed together, popped fresh, and it's sooooo delicious.

On our last day in Chicago we visited the Art Institute, which is another of our favorite places. Last time we were there (two years ago), the modern wing was not yet open, so we were excited to have a chance to see it. The new space has an awesome, open design created by architect Renzo Piano. Here are some of the interesting pieces of modern sculpture we saw there:

Venus de Milo with Drawers by Salvador Dali

A set of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi

Chicago is our favorite city. Public transit makes it easy to get around, the architecture of the place is fantastic, and the Midwesterners who live there are pretty darn friendly. It's a fantastic place to spend the weekend.