Monday, August 18, 2008

What is HOME to you?

While driving through this most beautiful August day and on my way home from work, my thoughts once again swirled around this subject.

What IS “home”?

Is it where you know you can close the doors and nobody bothers you? Or is it where your family is? Is it where people not only talk your language but also understand your viewpoints? Or is it where your heart yearns to be? Or where the memories of the past are more good than bad? Is it the place you are not able to let lose or is it where you grow solid? Is it where you feel safe?

As long as I was living in Switzerland, these questions never came to my mind. But I do remember back when I tested my wings and when I called Paris my home, that it felt like that, like home… yes, I probably would still be living there if it would not have been for the hard to get work permits at the time. Switzerland and Paris, yes, these 2 places definitely where “home” to me.

In less than 2 months I’ll be living for 11 years here in the US. A citizen.

My house feels like “home”. But people here still don’t. New York instantly did. There was a spot on the highway in Minneapolis - when the 2 radio towers became visible - that always triggered that feeling of “coming home” in me, as I knew it would be only another 5 or 10 minutes before entering our garage. Suburbia doesn’t feel like home, no matter how much I love my neighborhood. Family here is now “my family”, but in the end it remains ‘his family’, it can never replace my own, “real family”.

But way to soon I’ll be the oldest in that tribe, and once all my tight, tight ties like parents, uncles and cousins are gone - where then is my “home”? Usually people create their own by having and raising children. Not so here. And even my family “back home” as I remember and as I feel it is disintegrating and a lot of it has gone by age, separation and death.

Switzerland, Baden, Zürich, Wengen and Paris will remain always “home” - but with people gone, a large part of that “home” is solely based on fond memories and a melancholy as these times and people constellations have passed and will be no more.

I do not know where I will feel “home” in 20 years.

One thing though that I know for sure is that I am grateful to have had all these “home”s and that fond memories like that make me suck-in and inhale warm summer days as this one to the last drop.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Sad, not ugly.

ALT

All over the news people go ah and oh, calling it the Montauk monster, and how ugly and how disgusting…

But the only thing I feel is sadness when I see the images, and sorrow for this creature, and this feeling of how far have we come and what have we done.

To ease this dark feeling it does good to read the article of The Real Story which apparently was written by the mother of the original photographer… but then again, also this could be just another story.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

New field.

Due to a project I am working on, I need to familiarize myself with Joomla! and this is what I’ve been doing today most of the day. After all these years of working with WordPress, it is almost a bit odd for me to dive into this world. Thrown out of my comfort zone - creating WordPress templates at this point in time is a breeze to me - I now have to dig into this one. At first the backend seems confusing and unorganized compared to other CMS applications I have looked at, but the fault was mine as I installed the first version of Joomla! with “filler data” and that made it kinda confusing. Once I re-installed an empty version and worked my way through some videos, the concept became clear and understandable. At this point I am not worried about setting up Joomla! nor the content, but the template and CSS is still an unknown, even though I have found a list of all classes used to style the templates (around 280 different ones!!). Hopefully in a week from now I will have it all under control.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Dinner with PeerTrainer buddies

PeerTrainer.com is an interesting place as your peers can be from right next door or from the other end of the world. I’m in two groups, and Sarah, one of them I’ve met already a couple of times because she lives barely 3 miles from here. But Beth I hadn’t met and when she came through town with her husband on a vacation, it was the perfect moment to have us three peers including our husbands get-together and to chat over some good food and to get to know each other a bit better in person. Buca’s was perfect for that and I definitely enjoyed the mixed group.



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