Open Serendipity

I got an email from from my friend Karen Stokes about a travel journal covering her recent trip to a choreography & dance festival in Karlstad, Sweden. I watched the video and subscribed to her channel on youtube. I’d seen one of her other videos before, Framing Dance 2010, about an educational program for 2400 students in February that they plan to repeat in 2011, but I’d never seen this one before and wow, is it a great video!!

I recognize some of the performances that I’ve had the good fortune to attend in person, and it made me wish that I could have been there to see the rest of them. Maybe in 2011…

One thing I love about working in the Energy Efficiency field is that it leads me on interweb walkabouts (ok I used to hate the term interweb, one of many that my son uses for the internet, but apparently it has grown on me) where I learn about new technology.

This morning, learned about chilled beams, which are exactly what they sound like.  What a great idea!  There are three different types, they’ve been used for a few years in Europe with success, as I suspected they would never work in Houston (I was just there on a trip, that is why it popped to mind, and immediately I predicted dripping condensation), but they would work great in most of California and lots of other dry climates.  And some of them can be used for either cooling or heating, though the heating option seems a bit dubious to me since it is up on the ceiling.

Now I have to unwrap my walkabout and make my way back to the point at which I wandered away from the task at hand in my day job.

I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, The Lacuna.  I love Kingsolver, so I had very high expectations, and I was not disappointed.  Besides being a great story that you want to finish, besides the threat of a bad ending and the ambiguously excellent ending, besides the thought provoking bits and pieces of history that make you wish you had the patience to study more history, or that doing so could be as interesting as a Kingsolver novel, besides all that, the structure of this novel is, once again, so very interesting!

It was many years ago that I read my first to Kingsolver novels, in the wrong order, thanks to my friend Krista who discovered (and shared with me) Pigs in Heaven first. A few months later, she called and profusely apologized because she discovered that it was a sequel to The Bean Trees! Oops.  Both are really wonderful novels, I do like Pigs better than Trees, though who knows if that is because I read them out of order or not!  But I cannot remember anything special about the structure of those novels.

The Poisonwood Bible, the darkest of Kingsolver’s novels so far, has a tried and true structure that I do enjoy: each section was narrated by a different daughter, with a short section by the mother in between the larger sections.

My favorite Kingsolver novel is Prodigal Summer: A Novel, for many reasons, including the structure. The structure of that novel is one of the most interesting I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. It is almost three novels braided together, set in the same time and place, but with minimal interaction and overlap between the characters of the three stories. Some of the characters know each other, there is a bit of interaction, but they each have their own stories.

The structure of The Lacuna is sort of letters, sort of diaries, but not in the usual simple straightforward series by one person. The existence and order of the pieces of the story are themselves a minor thread in the plot itself. A detail of that thread proves important in the end. It is not the most important part of the story, but it is delightful in the same way that the two intertwined plots of the present and the past stories are delightful in the childrens novel Holes, by Louis Sacher.

I am so proud of my niece for creating this website, Rivers Edge Stables!  She just did it a day or so ago, but wow, there is already enough there to make it fun to read the entire thing!  I hope she keeps adding to it.  Here are some samples.

Summers Sunshine & Hero

“Shelby Lank bought Sunshine as an easy wanting to please first horse. Unknowingly though Sunshine was in foal. Weeks later she found this out when the vet came to visit. Even a few weeks later than that Sunshine gave birth to a beautiful colt who was named Hero.”

Trouble in the making?