Tag Archives: San Jose

February 15, 2014 · 3:59 pm

“Positive Women” by Sam Kambali

Last week in Kigali, Rwanda, I was one of the TechWomen delegates who bought a painting at the Inema Art Center gallery. Since my mother, Eleanor Dickinson, and son, Paul D. Goodman, are both artists, I have very little free wallspace. However, I very much liked “Positive Women” by Sam Kambali. The painting is a collage of carefully-selected strips of African cloth forming the bodies of women, many of whom are raising their arms in salute. “Positive Women” seemed appropriate to the subject of our delegation (encouraging women and girls to pursue careers in STEM fields) and to the energy, enthusiasm, and remarkable professional success of the delegation members themselves. Part of its charm is that this painting incorporates the delightful variety and color of cloth we saw everywhere we went in Rwanda.

I had the gallery take the painting off its stretcher bars so I could transport it rolled up. Today, I brought “Positive Women” home from being re-mounted: my new painting is now hanging in WP668 (my office in our backyard caboose in San Jose, California). Here I am in Kigali with Sam Kambali, the artist:

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Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, Eleanor, Paul, Rwanda, San Jose, technical women, TechWomen, WP668

February 14, 2014 · 2:11 pm

Swords to ploughshares, Rwanda

Machete caked with garden dirt, in Kigali, Rwanda

Swords into ploughshares is from the Book of Isaiah:

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. — Isaiah 2:3–4

I thought about Bible verse many times while in Rwanda last week, particularly when watching machetes being used for gardening. I have many garden tools and, despite living on the Guadalupe River and regularly clearing brush as part of my work on the bank, I have never needed a machete. In Rwanda, I several times watched a machete being used as a hoe or to clear an overgrown path, and reflected that it is a good general-purpose implement if other tools are lacking. However, I also remembered Immaculée Ilibagiza writing of her 1994 experience during the Rwanda genocide:

There were many voices, many killers. I could see them in my mind: my former friends and neighbors, who had always greeted me with love and kindness, moving through the house carrying spears and machetes and calling my name. “I have killed 399 cockroaches,” said one of the killers. “Immaculée will make 400. It’s a good number to kill.” (from Left to Tell, 2006)

Rwanda is essentially twenty years old – its remarkable success since 1994 being all the more impressive because of the depths from which the country has risen. Last week, the TechWomen delegation visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre (in which a machete is prominently displayed as the signature weapon) and saw graveyard/memorials along the road into the mountains. There must be few parts of Rwanda entirely free of the memories and events of 1994’s savagery. Yet, Rwanda has indeed turned swords into ploughshares (or, machetes into hoes in their case) and gotten on with the necessary business of making things better.

Some of my garden tools, in San Jose, California, USA

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Filed under Church, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, garden, Rwanda, San Jose, TechWomen

December 13, 2013 · 2:52 pm

Silicon Valley Lines Holiday Party

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.

Thanksgiving in Southern CA

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!

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Filed under Home & Family

Tagged as Eleanor, John, Paul, Pete, San Jose

November 21, 2013 · 6:30 pm

Paul Applying to San Jose State University

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:

Carol Zepecki, Linda Herreshoff and her remarkable and dedicated C-9 (Social Cognitive Class) team at Jordan Middle School
Justin Cronin and the patient support team at Palo Alto High School
The outstanding Foothill College professors and Disability Resource Center staff, especially: Andy Ruble (Ceramics), Joe Ragey (Painting), Simon Pennington (Art History), and Dr. Andrew Fraknoi (Astronomy)

Paul also had more than his share of poor teachers but we survived them. I only ask that they and…

…the teachers who did not want disabled kids like Paul in their class:
…the administrators who told us that Paul would be lucky to get to college:
…the head of school who kicked Paul out because his disabilities were bringing down her scores:
…the career counsellors who took Paul and the other disabled kids on a tour of the sewer plant:

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.

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Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Disabilities, Foothill College, Paul, San Jose, San Jose State University, teaching

November 20, 2013 · 12:15 pm

Blimp Copter Flying High in SOMA

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.

Real and Imagined Halloween

Walking through Willow Glen yesterday, I enjoyed seeing real and imagined Halloween in close proximity. The yard in front of a house carefully draped with plastic cobwebs featured a real spiderweb as wide as my outstretched arms, with a huge spider in the center – much creepier-looking than the fake one tied to the gutter. The inflated hellcat menacing the sidewalk was not so interesting as the green-eyed pet hanging out with a jack-o-lantern on the front step.

Tag Archives: San Jose

“Positive Women” by Sam Kambali

Swords to ploughshares, Rwanda

Silicon Valley Lines Holiday Party

Thanksgiving in Southern CA

Paul Applying to San Jose State University

Blimp Copter Flying High in SOMA

Real and Imagined Halloween

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