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March 31, 2006
A taste of spring
I've heard a joke about the seasons in Vermont, that there's winter and the Fourth of July. But the end of March has been balmy and everyone's enjoying it (global warming or no). I've been making some visits in Vermont and New Hampshire, but hear that Jenn organized a frisbee game on the lawn behind Town Hall yesterday, and that there were nude male sunbathers on another building in town. An exciting day at Berkshire Publishing, and an interesting day for me, visiting YBP, the major academic library supplier based in a small town in New Hampshire. They were the first supplier we started working with, and they've always been helpful and collegial. The company's full name is Yankee Book Peddler, and it's fun to think of their tremendous reach today, distributing nationally and internationally, from a start in a town even smaller than Great Barrington.
The students in Hanover (Dartmouth College) were wearing shorts and sandals, though they may be back in ski jackets tomorrow (I talked to a woman Wednesday who had been skiing in Great Barrington). It's going to be six weeks or more till the trees are in leaf, and we may well see another snowstorm or two. But this is a time when everyone agrees that we should seize the day.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:24 AM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2006
Waking up to global warming
From the Worldwatch Institute this week: "In a remarkable shift with far-reaching policy implications, prominent U.S. news organizations are declaring the debate on climate change '"over.' This week's cover story in Time magazine and all-week coverage by ABC News' 'World News Tonight' both acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. As the Time story says, 'By any measure, Earth is at the tipping point…. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.'"
As it happens, Berkshire is working on an Encyclopedia of Sustainability, due out next year, and I'm writing a new environmental book, The Cool Planet Guide. People often ask how we do market research to get projects like this into development at just the right time. It isn't complicated or expensive (we have to keep things simple); we turn to our networks of contributors and library supporters for ideas, and we pay close attention to what's happening in the world.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:36 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
A Novel Way into History
My wonderful local library, The Roeliff Jansen Community Library, wanted to begin a book group last fall. To start the group, they'd already approached my neighbor and close friend, Sheila Moss, who'd been in book groups in New York City, for more than a decade. Sheila was willing to do it if I would "co-facilitate" to get things going, but little did we know that Sheila would have to be out of town for our second group meeting. So I led the discussion about Bette Bao Lord's book Spring Moon (1981), a novel covering 80 years of crucial Chinese history, from the 1890s to the time of President Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972.
The novel portrayed well the lives of an upper-class Chinese family, who slowly find themselves with integral roles in revolutionary changes, from the time of Sun-Yat-sen through Mao's Long March and then into the the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. As high school English teachers hope when they assign historic novels, I felt a close connection to these historical periods through the characters. But I wanted to know more about the actual history. And (warning: shameless plug ahead) I found what I needed, not online, but in our own Berkshire works, the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia and the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, where I read great overviews of China, and specific articles on all the key topics and people. Although I'd probably looked over all those articles before they went into publication, I don't think I really appreciated their value until I really needed them for reference. Belated kudos to all our scholars and copy editors who made these entries so rich and accessible.
And one other nugget from my reading that I wanted to share. Bette Bao Lord has one of her main characters reflect (in a 1912 letter),
"Sometimes I wonder if a republic can be made to work at all where old ties cannot be denied and news laws are not understood or respected. I fear that when change comes to ancient ways, no matter how long in the making, no matter how fervently wished for, chaos follows." In one of those "Aha!" moments, I realized that it's all too easy for those of us in the U.S. -- a country started without old ties and ancient ways -- to misunderstand how and why such chaos can follow having a new type of government imposed (however great we may feel it is).
Posted by Marcy Ross at 8:28 AM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2006
Questions of quality: Google, Wikipedia, and traditional reference
It's good to see some serious discussion about the quality of information, about how facts, and scholarly agreement or the lack thereof, about less-than-certain topics should be presented. I'm not sure it's wise for Encyclopedia Britannica to undertake its current campaign to prove its superiority, given that it isn't quite the standard bearer it was in years past, but I guess that that position is what EB is about, and the 7,000-word rebuttal to Nature magazine is very much an EB response. (You have to be a subscriber to see the article: "In a War of Words, Famed Encyclopedia Defends Its Turf," Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2006. Not even the first few sentences are free! BTW, I've switched to the Financial Times because it's more international, and less blindly conservative.)
I was even more intrigued by yesterday's New York Times op-ed about Google and information illiteracy , because the author's test search was for "world history." Wikipedia had a weak article, and EB had nothing. The problem here, not addressed by the author, is that the best content on the subject is not available free, and isn't even searchable at the moment (though various people, Berkshire included, are working on that).
Here's the opening of "Writing World History" by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, a tremendous and unique overview article included in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (about which the Booklist reviewer wrote, “A masterful title that weaves together social, scientific, anthropological, and geographical influences on world history, the [Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History] will be the benchmark against which future history encyclopedias are compared...[and] belongs on the shelves of all high-school, public, and academic libraries.” We're also working on a way of getting it into the hands of students and general readers, in print and on the desktop. Professor Hughes-Warrington sets the stage in this way:
"The term "world history" describes one of the oldest, most persistent, and most pliable forms of history writing. No simple methodological definition is possible, for world histories vary widely in style, structure, and scope. Furthermore, a wide assortment of labels have been used to describe them, including "universal history," "ecumenical history," "regional history," "comparative history," "world systems history," "macrohistory," "transnational history," "big history," and the "new world" and "new global" histories. Despite terminological differences, however, world histories share the purpose of offering a construction of and thus a guide to a meaningful "world"-a "realm or domain taken for an entire meaningful system of existence or activity"-by historians or people in the past (Hughes-Warrington 2004, 4). Thus in this sense all histories are world histories. Where histories differ is in the degree to which the purpose of world construction is explicit." Email me if you'd like a copy of the whole article.
Another fascinating and important form of world history is "Big History," a subject closely associated with our friend and editor David Christian, author of the remarkable Maps of Time.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:31 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
Time to have a life, off-line
I'd read something about Virtual Sticky Notes before, but just came across this post in a little morning browsing (I have marketing, and technology, on my mind). I love the fact that community--social networking--is such a conversation starter in the business world now, because of interactive media. But is this a dumb idea or what: having my phone alert me to virtual stickies posted by just anyone, anywhere and everywhere?
I brought up *time* at the wiki panel in New York and got nods from some in the audience. Who has time for all this interactivity? Life is too short. I don't want to spend a spring afternoon at the computer reading blog comments; I want to be raking flower beds with my kids.
I want less distraction, not more, so I want the new technologies to help me find great stuff and avoid the junk (what's junk to me may be treasure to someone else, but I don't want my life, mind, or phone cluttered with it).
Same thing goes for information in the office, and as I plan an article on wikis I'll be thinking about that, too. Please send me your ideas--I feel certain I'm not the only one who wants to turn off the computer to watch the robins and feel spring sunshine on my face this weekend!
Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:43 AM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
The dangers of technology
Blogging is dangerous. In January I was in New York for a two-day conference run by an organization I had just joined, the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). I blogged about the conference and happened also, about that time, to mention that I was experimenting with wikis.
A topic, I noticed, that that SIIA was planning to cover at a lunch session in March. I thought I would try to attend. But a week or so after the conference, Ed Keating, the Content Division VP, called, said he’d read my blog, and wondered if I would be on the wiki panel.
On the one hand, I knew very little about wikis. On the other hand, it was quite possible that I knew more about them than most other people. I am guided in these situations by some advice I got from a documentary film maker in London, a friend and neighbor whom I turned to when the BBC asked to come to my flat to interview me about my first environmental book. I lived in a tiny basement flat and had a toddler and a three-month old baby. The kitchen was in the entranceway, the furniture was secondhand, and there were endless undone household repairs. “Take every opportunity,” she said.
I agreed to talk about wikis.
In the month since then I have talked to a lot of people about them, in London with Lucy Hooberman who works in New Media at the BBC and with my new friends at the Society for New Communications Research in Palo Alto, CA. I’ve talked with someone involved in founding Wikipedia. What comes in handy in all these conversations is the fact that I grew up in Minnesota and the Silicon Valley with a father (and friends with fathers) in the computer business. I feel no awe: I know they’re just code. But I’m not resistant either. I enjoy diving in, figuring out how to use Flickr or write XHTML or set up a wiki. And that’s what I encouraged everyone at the SIIA brown bag lunch to do (no one in the audience had, or had edited, a wiki).
What, you may ask, is a wiki? Wikis are a kind of software that lets one create editable, linkable webpages. There’s nothing fancy about the pages; this is a designer’s toolset. What they are good for is creating a simple, shared information resource or for collaborative writing by a dispersed group of equals—that is, a group in which everyone has equal responsibility and authority for the work. (Although it is possible to see who made changes, this isn’t convenient for workflow in most situations. My fellow panelist Roddy MacFarquhar from Reuters, is thinking about wikis for editorial workflow, and I can see that it might work in certain situations.)
If you’d like to take a look at the wiki I set up just yesterday, Guanxi Wiki. I got started when my son sent me an article about a gaming community that gathered and wrote as much about an imaginary world as Tolkein had, for Lord of the Rings, in several decades. I saw the link, “Make a free, password-protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich.” I did, and before I knew it I was on a panel in New York. Beware!
Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:57 AM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2006
Our authors and the perspectives they provide
Our contributors are simply amazing. They are what make a reference publishing business possible, and they often make it immensely satisfying. Oddly enough, publishers seldom sing their authors; I've known many in-house editors (and publishers) who think they deserve all the credit. They edit and reedit scholars' work to ensure that it bears the mark of the publishing company, and not the expert. I have heard scholars on the subject, too, angry about the way their work has been mangled. One leading historian told me he hadn't wanted his name attached to stuff he had (originally) written, because it was such a mess by the time the (eminent) publishing company got through with it.
We are a tiny company, with scant resources, and we don't do all that we should or hope to do. But our relations with contributors are generally good, and often warm and fruitful and enduring. Nothing lifts my spirits like an email from a contributor saying something like this, which came from a contributor, Roger Hanson, to our 2003 Encyclopedia of Crime & Punishment: "Thank you for the splendid update on the the pioneering efforts made by Berkshire. Bravo, bravo bravo." Who could ask for more?
Our authors provide us with new perspectives all the time, not only writing from their own countries but often dropping us a line as they travel. Roger Hanson, for example, was the second person to write to me from Afghanistan recently.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2006
En route to Kazakhstan
Some of our friends were worried about our trip to Central Asia in April
2001, so we decided to tease them by emailing this photo (staged in our
barn before the trip). We got some hilarious responses, but one nervous
colleague never said a word!
Posted by Karen Christensen at 3:47 PM | Comments (0)
St. Patrick's Day in Kazakhstan
Nearly five years ago, in April 2001, we were in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and heard a story that we bring up every year on St. Patrick's Day. David and I, and our children Tom and Rachel, were at an Irish pub in Almaty talking to the American manager. He was gregarious. First, he warned us that we'd have trouble getting out of the country without paying a bribe (he was right--but we got away with forking over only about $4), and he told us about his problems with the KGB co-owners of the pub. He complained about communicating with the Kazakh staff, and told us what had happened when he tried to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in proper style.
I hope they have more sense in Ireland, but here in the States green beer is a tradition so our friend was determined to serve the first green beer ever seen in Kazakhstan. He provided the staff with money to buy green food coloring and explained the whole concept carefully. But when he tasted the sample they proudly presented he nearly gagged. Kazakhs use a lot of fresh herbs in their food and they had decided to save money by coloring the beer with parsley and mint!
Posted by Karen Christensen at 2:49 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2006
Techno-overload
I was just wandering, checking out a few friends' blogs, and saw that Alex Pang too seems to be suffering from techno-overload (and if *Alex* can get overloaded, the world's a really wild place today). This came after Skyping with Trevor about the website redesign and both of us checking the computers at the office because there's some problem with the server (he, though, might be able to do something about it--I just whine). Meanwhile I'm listening to Beethoven on BBC Radio 3, online.
And this comes after a day of almost total absorption in Chinese topics. Ask me about the difference between renminbi and the yuan, the history of China-Russia relations, or Taiwanese government and I might actually be able to tell you something. That too was amazing online collaboration between Francesca, our senior copy editor, and me. I was finalizing the first issue of Guanxi, our new China newsletter launching next month, and there were dozens of small things to check and amend and query. Francesca and I were zipping questions and manuscripts back and forth, making decisions, writing introductions, and fine-tuning articles so they'll all work together well (not something we worry about in creating encyclopedias, but this is a very different type of publication). Liz is away at a squash tournament now (go Liz!). She's going to be amazed at the virtual volleying Francesca and I did in her absence.
Time now to shut down the computer, pick up a book, and stroke a cat.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:46 PM | Comments (0)
Debunking urban legends
One of the subjects that comes up all the time in an enterprise like ours, where we take the work of people who spend their lives studying and writing about particular subjects, is authority. A current fashionable premise is that groups are wise (something I'm not sure historians would be able to verify as a general rule)--that if you pool the knowledge of enough people you'll get information that can be trusted.
It's hard for me to understand this argument. Don't the late night TV shows have fun with the polls showing just how ignorant we are of basic geographical facts? What would the 'wisdom of crowds' tell us about Burkina Faso? Is it a food, a new kind of yoga, or perhaps a country in Africa (formerly Upper Volta, in fact).
And a lot of people, me included, want to get information on anything remotely controversial from someone I trust. I was interested to read this FAQ on Snopes.com, the Urban Legends website, when I was checking the truthfulness of a quotation that's been circulating online (some of the preposterous stories that circulate about Bush and Cheney are true, while others, I've learned, are not).
Snopes is researched and written by two people, Barbara and David P. Mikkelson, which reassures me. I like my sources to give their names, and to know something about them. Here's what they write:
Q: May I reproduce your material on my web site if I operate a non-commercial site, and I give you credit?
A: No. Using our material without our permission is copyright infringement, even if your site is non-commercial, and even if you give us credit. A minimum $300 reprint fee will be assessed for all unauthorized reproductions of material from this site.
Q: Why are you so hung up about copyrights?
A: Because we work hard to keep our information accurate and up-to-date. When you put our material on your site we no longer have any control over it, and our reputation and credibility are jeopardized because we cannot update your site as new information becomes available.
Fair enough, and I hope they're around and researching when the next presidential election campaign starts up, and the feathers start flying. (Wouldn't you love to see one of those pillow fight video clips with Howard Dean and Condoleezza Rice and Mark Warner? I'm sure Tony Blair and Jack Snow would happily join in.)
Posted by Karen Christensen at 4:39 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2006
Blogging about Blogs, and other HCI Wonders
When I was working on the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction in 2004, blogs still seemed like something intensely personal--the equivalent of publishing your diary for all the world to see. And even though blogs are certainly still used that way (see NPR story about bloggers in China who love talking about themselves), blogs are now the niftiest tool to get out a message, whether you're NBC, a school librarian, or a think tank.
As we begin work on the Berkshire Encyclopedia of the 21st Century, I find myself turning daily to the blog of the Institute for the Future, which has one fascinating HCI-related link after another. My current favorites: a story at New Scientist about Wi-Fi drinking glasses that allow long-distance companions to "clink" together (with some much more significant potential uses) and Accelerated Democracy, a project about the far frontiers of digital democracy.
Posted by Marcy Ross at 8:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2006
What cellphones and IM tell us about evolution
I can tell what projects David is working on by the things he notices. He came back from getting the Sunday paper and mentioned that everyone who drove past seemed to be on their cellphones. At first he saw this as a sign of the encroachment of urban life, but realized,he said, that until recently humans have spent almost all their time in close contact with lots of other people. Hunting and gathering in groups, farming and cooking and sewing together, and even sleeping in the same rooms. So the teenage compulsion to IM with a dozen people at once and talk to one friend after another is natural in terms of our cultural evolution. What's unnatural is living in isolation.
It's no surprise that one of our next big projects is the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Cultures, "A roadmap to the cultural landscape of the contemporary world." But we'll still be trying to drag Rachel away from computer and phone to go for a walk. That's natural, too.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 11, 2006
Kidschorus.JPG
Here are the members of the children's choir at the AME Zion Church,
enjoying cake and soda after the service.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:29 PM | Comments (0)
David, Bob, Bernie.JPG
I'm experimenting with Flickr, in the hope of giving you a look at
life here and on the road, as Berkshire grows and changes. Here's a
trial post of a photo I took at the W.E.B. Du Bois birthday
celebration two weeks ago, of David with a couple of the other guys,
Bob Painter and Bernard Drew, working on the African American Trail
Guide (surprised to hear that they are all academic types?).
Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:59 PM | Comments (0)
Flickr
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:31 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2006
Upside down for a new perspective on the world
This has nothing to do with business but I can't help sharing the news that I did my first handstand today. I still can't quite believe it. Here's how it happened: yesterday morning I woke early, feeling quite jetlagged, so I decided to try the early morning yoga class I'd seen advertised but never tried. It did help, and I decided to go back this morning for another session. As I did a more ordinary practice position for a handstand (that I've been doing for years) the teacher came over and told me I was strong enough to do the real thing. (That's coaching, isn't it?) And, with some spotting, I did it. A completely new experience, something that all of us need more of.
Maybe this does have something to do with business. What better way to get a fresh perspective than turning the world upside down? And trying out new things, that's what we are all about.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)
March 8, 2006
Inspiration for high quality independent publishing
Because David Levinson and I write books as well as edit and publish them, Berkshire Publishing Group might be described as an attempt by two nonfiction and academic authors to create a new, independent path to reach markets, and readers. It could be seen as a kind of expanded version of self-publishing, although our work focuses first on making the work of networks of scholars available, and we do publish with other larger companies, too.
We are husband and wife, or wife and husband, as well as publishing partners, and because of that I've sometimes reminded myself that Virginia and Leonard Woolf also started a small publishing company, the Hogarth Press, publishing VW's work as well as the work of people like T. S. Eliot. Few remember that The Waste Land was originally published by a mom-and-pop shop, as the venture capitalists so kindly describe a business like ours. Small publishing that includes one's own books is not just for autism or aliens or other highly specialized topics.
I have a connection to T. S. Eliot through an early job as editorial assistant on the TSE Letters (see my recent Guardian article, "Dear Mrs. Eliot," for details), and now find that the Woolfs lived in Mecklenburgh Square, where I stay in London, at the Goodenough Club. They ran the Hogarth Press from here during the early days of World War II.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 2:37 AM | Comments (0)
March 7, 2006
London Book Fair and the power of local knowledge
Almost everyone looks tired at a book fair. I know I do. It's a crazy process, frankly. Everyone books appointments at half hour intervals, even though the halls take 10 minutes to walk both because of distance and because the aisles are so crowded. It's really not feasible to meet every 30 minutes (especially given, as a colleague said today, that one needs to make an occasional visit to the ladies' or gents' facilities--not to mention finding a cup of coffee). ExCel, the conference centre, was overcrowded (45,000 attendees for the Professional Beauty conference shared the place with 25,000 literary people), and is hardly a model of British design. But neither is the DLR, the Docklands Light Railway, or what an English friend called the "toy town train." Steps up, steps down, central platforms at one station then a completely different arrangement at the next.
And so far no one can tell me what the slogan LondON (emphasis on the 'on,' which often appears in red or another color) means. London's ON not OFF? It means nothing to me. We were talking at dinner, though, about HSBC (a well-known bank here) and its wonderful cross-cultural advertising, which I'd seen at the airport and are now TV ads about the power of 'local knowledge.' It was hardly surprising we got onto that subject, as our group consisted of my old friend Derek Albiston, a Scotsman, a colleague of his who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the Netherlands, Rachael McDiarmid of InBooks, our Australian sales/marketing representative ("Aussie through and through"), and me.
We've added a forum to LoveUSHateUS.com and look forward to more global debate about the role of the U.S.A. in the world.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 3:08 AM | Comments (0)
March 6, 2006
My first London Book Fair
The new London Book Fair location, far in the east of London in an area called Docklands (because that's what it was), is a disappointment. Poor directions, few people on site to direct people arriving, and appalling food. I'm disappointed; we were promised better facilities to make up for the extra travel and for giving up the lovely historic venue the Fair was in until this year. 
But this event is still a favorite of mine because I see old friends from my U.K. publishing days. I have more recent memories, too, like my first LIBF two years ago. Here's a photo of the booth at MQ Publications. I was gobsmacked when I saw this: I had signed the contract for The Armchair Environmentalist, the book that was the whole outside of the stand, only a week earlier! The publisher had contacted me and persuaded me to write this for them, but somehow the promotional effort was miles ahead of editorial. A bizarre situation that only got more complicated, but I did finish the book. It's available in several countries now (though I'm still waiting to see copies of the French and Thai editions--hardly a surprise, given how things started). I also ran into an old friend within minutes of arriving at that first Fair, so it was a memorable morning. Nothing this year quite so exciting.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 3:30 AM | Comments (0)
March 4, 2006
A perfect day in London
I spend yesterday either talking about networks and connections or experiencing them in rather amazing ways. Because I lived in London in my twenties, the connections I find here are a wonderful mix of old and new.
After lunch with a friend, and former employer, who has become a wonderful source of counsel on how to build a global business (and he's graciously never said how surprised he must be to find me doing this), I had tea with Tim Coates. Tim was managing director at Waterstone's, the British bookstore chain, and has become a advocate of reforms to U.K. libraries. I brought him one of our new buttons, designed for the Libraries We Love book project, that say, "Libraries make the world a better place."
Then off to the launch party for a publishing center at University College. My friend Richard Charkin was speaking as I finally found the room (after wading through a lot of students with wine bottles, empty and full, in their hands--this seemed a little strange at 6pm). A wonderfully mixed conversation (that interdisciplinary "two cultures" I'm always confusing people with), because along with Richard I got to talk to Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search Europe (like Macmillan, I think, a sponsor of the Centre) and a English professor from UCL's School of Advanced Study. I had a chance to indulge in some technology debate and to talk about literature. Heaven.
Bringing the day to a perfect close, supper with Lucy Hooberman, the inspired instigator of a global mentoring project. She is working out how to use the Internet as a means of linking mentors in developed countries with, well, 'mentees' in developing regions. Besides that, there's the challenge of finding the right technologies--and financial support--to manage the network and relationships. It was a thought-provoking conversation, and I also got some new ideas about wikis (a good thing, as I'm giving a talk about them in New York in three weeks).
Posted by Karen Christensen at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
March 3, 2006
Slightly Foxed
Every once in a while something comes along that reminds me how much I love books. My last copy of the Literary Review came with a flyer about a new and apparently beautifully produced journal about books that are available but not well-known. It's called Slightly Foxed, which I understand to be a collector's term for books that are a bit worn. I haven't seen the sample yet, but I had such a lovely personal note when I ordered it (the woman who wrote had noticed that I lived in the U.S. but was having it sent to a London address, so advised me to pack warm clothes) that I feel sure it is going to be wonderful. I have electronic publishing so much on my mind these days that I need these reminders that books themselves are also an important medium, and one to be cherished and promoted.
In fact, our popular culture databases are a good way to collect and share lists of favorite books related to certain subjects, and it's good to realize that as we develop them online we'll be encouraging offline reading for pleasure.
And London is cold--but nothing compared to Massachusetts.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 9:32 AM | Comments (0)
March 1, 2006
Rituals of the road, squash at Grand Central Station
En route to London for three days business (and fun) before the business of the London Book Fair. It's a long trip to JFK but I prefer it to Boston because I can take a train--much more relaxing than driving. Rachel, my daughter, is traveling with me, and that's a help because I'm carrying encyclopedias for display at one of our representative's stand (Cranbury International, F760, in case you're around!).
In a refreshing change from curling, there was a crowd at Grand Central Station watching a squash match. I don't know if it's squash season or what, but I'll ask Liz, who has herself qualified for a big competition in New Haven later this month. We have quite a women's sports crew at the office these days: Jenn plays Ultimate (frisbee), indoors in the winter and on the field in summer, Liz plays squash and is now promoting curling, and Carrie surprised me by her enthusiasm about boxing.
Here at JFK I was reminded of our faith projects when the jolly woman at the baggage area explained to someone that it is Ash Wednesday and that's why she had a gray smear on her forehead. I'd never seen that before. But we had our own Berkshire Publishing religious ritual: pancakes with lemon and sugar last night, for Shrove or Pancake Tuesday.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 8:35 PM | Comments (0)