John Plocher and I again hosted the Silicon Valley Lines Model Railroad Club holiday party at our home in Willow Glen last weekend. Highlights included visits to John’s N-scale layout (in our former garage), tours of WP668 (our backyard caboose), assembling a G-scale train route in the house, a potluck feast, playing with this year’s Conductor Duck party favor, and other delights of the season.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family
The St.Andrew’s Shakespeare Reading Group decided to read Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in honor of the season. Above you can see our hostess, Melita Thorpe, with John Watson-Williams dressed for his lead role as Ebenezer Scrooge. It took about 4-1/2 hours to read the entire short novel aloud (with breaks between staves for refreshments and a potluck dinner). We considered using one of the plays but decided that reading Dickens original 1843 text was better – since the plays both add and remove some of Dickens’ excellent prose. We distributed the text among our dozen readers:
It was a delightful evening! Several of us plan to follow up by going to the Dickens Christmas Fair (at the Cow Palace) and to the ACT “Christmas Carol” stage play in San Francisco.
Image Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Church, News & Reviews
I presented a “Caboose Clinic” to the Coast Division of the National Model Railroad Association on 8 December 2013 in San Leandro, California. The title of my talk was “The Adventures of WP668 1916-2013: Buying and Restoring a Western Pacific Caboose”. You can see additional information about the backyard caboose in which I have my office on WP668’s web page: http://wp668.org. About forty guys and one woman attended my clinic. I was glad that they asked so many questions and seemed to have a good time.
As always, my thanks and appreciation to all who have made WP668’s long adventures possible, especially:
WP668 today:
WP668 in active service, 1971:
Used with permission of Don Marenzi
Images Copyright 1971 by Don Marenzi, and 2013 by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher
Working on my Christmas shopping, late Friday I made my annual trip to the Artifactory Holiday Fair craft sale at Hoover House in Palo Alto. I was touched to see that Inja (of Inja Ink Calligraphy) had stopped her other work to write out a Nelson Mandela quote on the day he died. The new piece was on display for consideration and honor, not for sale.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
I had been feeling sad at the passing of a hero and role model. Inja’s gentle tribute lifted my heart.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under News & Reviews
For the first time in 15 years, our John and I were guests for Thanksgiving. Usually, we host the annual feast at our house in San Jose but my brother Pete and his wife Julie volunteered. After work on Wednesday, Paul and John and I drove from the San Francisco Bay Area to La Crescenta in the mountains overlooking Los Angeles, arriving at about 1 am after 335 miles of heavy traffic. We enjoyed a lovely Thanksgiving Thursday with family, then John and Paul drove home yesterday. Paul has homework and John’s storage software project is in its final test phases, so they had to go back.
I am staying the weekend for more family visit time. Last night, we enjoyed a special tour of the excellent Huntington exhibit “Face to Face: Flanders, Florence, and Renaissance Painting” . The Co-Curator Catherine Hess gave us a tour of the project she worked for five years to create. She explained how the rich of early Renaissance Florence who wanted portraits and opulent religious images sought them from Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, who were developing a new naturalistic style of oil painting. Florentine painters such as Domenico Ghirlandaio (and his student Michelangelo) were inspired to develop the style even further. The small image “Christ Blessing” (dated 1481) by Hans Memling was for me the best of a remarkably-fine show: the direct gaze combined with left hand casually resting on the painting’s edge made the portrait seem alive.
Today, after my nephew Daniel cooked breakfast, I was a Soccer Aunt, driving my niece Lynda to the fifth game of her AYSO Turkey Tournament weekend. Tonight, Pete and Julie have a Charades game night planned. Busy weekend!
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family
I am delighted to write that my son Paul is finishing up his last year at Foothill College and applying to transfer to San Jose State University (SJSU) in 2014. In addition to studying Studio Art, Paul is interested in becoming a credentialed art teacher for children with disabilities. Samples of his art are below – with more in his online portfolio: Paul’s Element.
Raising a kid with disabilities is a challenge and I am proud of Paul and of our whole family for his successful progress. Paul has been blessed with some remarkable and excellent teachers – to whom I am forever grateful:
Paul also had more than his share of poor teachers but we survived them. I only ask that they and…
Please consider this…
Jane Goodall went in the back door to become an ethologist. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, because people with autism usually have to go in the back door. We have a lot of trouble following the normal paths. We don’t do very well in interviews, which are a big problem for us, and a lot of autistic people also have extremely “uneven” academic skills. An autistic person can test at the bottom of the IQ range on one subscale and at the very top on another. For example, I had great difficulty with algebra because there’s no way to visualize it. I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing if there weren’t any back doors.
– Dr. Temple Grandin, 2009
In 2010, Dr. Temple Grandin was listed in the Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world in the “Heroes” category.
Wish Paul luck in being accepted! We will hear back from SJSU by March 2014.
Images Copyright Katy Dickinson and Paul D. Goodman 2011-2013
Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews
The 100,000+ Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference attendees are creating traffic gridlock in the South of Market (SOMA) area of San Francisco this week. I was there on Monday, visiting the Everwise mentoring company at Impact HUB (in the old Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission). Everwise was busy that day converting a shipment of Mentos candies into MENTORS freebies for distribution to the Smurf-blue hordes of conference goers.
I also visited eVault (at 3rd and Howard) where my husband John Plocher is the Principle Architect for Open Storage. Over the Dreamforce installation, the large Engajer blimp copter flew freely, sometimes coming very close to the eVault windows overlooking the Moscone Center. Blimp copters are a fun development since I last wrote about quadricopters in 2010.
Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews
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