Aside: Before you think we’re heathens, we’re draining our pool because we’ve been unable to de-cloud the water this season even though the pool chemistry numbers were right where they were supposed to be. We think a neighbor may have been throwing stuff into it but we don’t know. In any case it’s been 5 years without a major water change. So this is going to cost us a bunch to replace all that water. Before we do it we’ll power wash the surface, patch it up and repaint it. We’ve watered all our trees and shrubs, plus those of our neighbors, with the water we’ve pumped out. It developed algae during the draining because we stopped chlorinating when we started pumping water out.

OK. I stopped by the Biltmore Apple Store to replace my headphones on the way to the airport. This was an essential purchase because I’m on a 14.5 hour international flight. When I saw the blacked out windows I literally gasped. Then I shelled out too much money for headphones at the airport. I would’ve shelled out too much at Apple too, but I’d have had the headphones I wanted instead of sloppy seconds. Apple, you let me down!

in 1955.

As written by my grandmother, Olive Jane Poe Whitmore.

I identify with Bekah’s journal entries. They could almost be mine. We graduated high school in the same year, Miss B and I. We began college the same year. We put ourselves through similar turmoil, and wrote about it with similar alternating sarcastic humor and raw emotion. Our choices were many and difficult.

Grandma lived in simpler times. There was never much question about her choices. She dated one guy before my grandpa, but married grandpa, who was the love of her life. She didn’t have sex before marriage. And her writing is more a record of inevitable events than a tortured exploration of possible life paths.

I find that really interesting.

Well guess what?! They’re here! Right here in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. They arrived Friday April 18, and have already kicked things off to a great start. On Sunday there was a pow wow at ASU. Two Navajo students from our travel group made sure our Maori friends could attend the pow wow. I didn’t get to go, but our friends were given the opportunity to perform at the pow wow after the opening ceremony. From what I hear, the pow wow community opened their hearts to our Maori friends, bestowed gifts during and after their performance, and really felt an instant connection. I wish I could have been there.

This video is from dinner after the pow wow, at the home of fellow traveler Nizhoni and her amazing chef husband Joseph. He fed us a four or five course meal that included a prickly pear cactus salad, his own version of surf and turf which included swordfish steak and buffalo burgers, and a custom dessert creation called “Chocolate Taranaki” in honor of the volcanic mountain dominating the landscape where our friends live. The meal was seriously amazing.

Between courses, our friends taught us a song. You can learn it too, here are the words:

He honore, he kororia
Maungarongo ki te whenua
Whakaro pai e
Ki nga tangata katoa
Ake ake, ake ake, amine
Te atua, te piringa, toku oranga (x2)
Toku oranga

Wendy Lewis is the woman teaching us the words to the song and what they mean. This song is an acknowledgment of ties to Parihaka, a Taranaki settlement whose two leaders drew on ancestral and Christian teachings to organize passive resistance to the colonizing army, and that is now is a manifestation of peace here on Earth.

Sorry for my crappy video & audio recording. I’m not good at both recording and experiencing moments at the same time, and I didn’t have my good mic with me either … so this is the best I and my poor little Xacti could do under the circumstances.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by moving clocks. One of our neighbors had several that were mesmerizing, including one of these. Overall, it’s a great gift and now lives on my office wall, where it can watch over me while I edit video.

I shot this footage on Friday, February 15 and am just getting around to posting it. I’m so glad that with video, it’s never too late to share a beautiful day.

Oh, if you download the iPod version, I inserted the lyrics into its metadata. I think you can read them if you add the video to your iTunes library and “get info.”

I hereby formally and publicly request that links to my Lumiere videos be removed from videoblogging.info/lumiere/, where they are listed as videos by hummingcrow.

I do so for the following reasons:

• I disagree with the Lumiere Manifesto published by Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen & Brittany Shoot in August 2007 and do not wish to have my work associated with it by inclusion at videoblogging.info/lumiere/. While I acknowledge that I could force the exclusion of my work by deleting it entirely, I prefer to leave the work published as part of my body of work. I simply wish to disassociate my work from the videoblogging.info web site. I do not have any interest in engaging in a conversation or debate about the manifesto.

• While I originally felt no need to request removal of work created prior to the manifesto’s publication, I now wish to assist in removing any semblance of speculation from the ongoing discussion, as represented in this message and its quoted posts, over whether videos would be removed from videoblogging.info/lumiere/ if requested.

Sincerely,

Cheryl Colan

Come one, come all, to the first PHXedit! Get the details at node101phoenix.org.

I want to thank my NaVloPoMo pals for being my teachers during the month of November. I learned too many things to list! Heath taught me to open up, and Bekah taught me to make no-knead bread, and Croma taught me to trust my eye, and David Howell taught me that I can change my agenda whenever I damn well please, and Ru taught me not to smack myself around so much, and GoGen taught me baby fingers can be dangerous, and Valdez taught me to sleep less, and I taught me to fear less, and, and, and - I can’t name them all, folks, but it was such a privilege!

Name suggestions are welcome, by the way. I don’t think “Fraidy Cat” is fond of the moniker, and “Ring-Tail White Kitty” is just not a name. Not at all.

Today, I am so glad I made this recording of the birds singing. I still think the crows have an Aussie accent. I know there were magpies around, and a mated pair of beautiful green parrots of some sort. And there was a little bird that looked a lot like a quail, only with the wrong colors. I don’t know all the other voices, but hearing them is still a form of sustenance.

Robert Croma asked if there is more from Australia. I’m actively looking for a few videos I remember making. I’m not sure if they are on tape, or already waiting my attention on a hard drive here in my office. But the travelogue I wrote with my mom still exists: Dreaming Down Under. And so do two photo galleries, one from 2004 and one from 2005.

I tried to record a lot of little moments that recurred daily at Korrawinga. There was a daily ritual the coffee addicts went through involving a personal French press. There was the daily walk down a gravelly, muddy dirt road to use one of the two outdoor showers. We had to watch for poisonous snakes on the way, and kick out the cane toads. There was being awakened at night by the dogs going through the trash, and awakened in the morning by the most beautiful birdsong I could imagine. And, every night, on the way to the toilet, there was the required stop to stand, shivering, staring at the sky, seeking out the new constellations, and searching for the familiar one we had in common, Orion, rising upside-down in the pre-dawn sky.

Good times.