Blurbs From Eunee's Mind (and Life)

Hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving! I did. I cooked my first turkey and then a few days later watched a video of how you're actually supposed to carve a turkey (none of us had a clue!). We all took turns in cutting the turkey into tiny broken off pieces, and even had a vegetarian have a go at it! Crazy! She asked me not to post the photo on Facebook as her friends would kill her. *laugh* I'm keeping the photo for black-mail. ;) Just kidding! The turkey, thankfully, turned out to be pretty good. But man, I didn't realize how heavy an 18.5 turkey could be! Nor did I realize how many HOURS it took to cook the sucker! So, we all had a true Thanksgiving dinner - late really, as we began eating around 9 p.m. Lol! I'm not sure I'll ever do a whole Thanksgiving dinner again. But the fact that I DID do it was satisfaction enough for me. :) And as proof, here's the turkey photo. Heh heh.

On my other website where I blog about human rights issues and children rights' issues, I added an entry today after attending a vigil for a slain Ecuadorean man at a train station near my university. While it wasn't the train station that is on the border of our campus, it occurred in a town nearby. See my entry here . I'm glad I attended the vigil today because it reminded me that while I'm griping and trudging reluctantly through my classes, there is a bigger vision for why I am here: social injustice, social change, and social action. And I believe that these all lend themselves to a framework of human rights that should be very evident in the field of social welfare. I guess I'm just not done blogging about my reflection of this incident and some of the remarks made at the vigil this evening. It makes me wonder that if people aren't really concerned about injustice and senseless acts like this happening in their backyard they sure aren't going to be co...

It's amazing how despite all the griping I've come this far in the semester. I know it's not of my own doing. I have not been a good student this semester and have griped about all the philosophical round-and-round arguments/discussions we seem to have week after week. I can't believe I don't even turn off my phone anymore during class. I really have to have an attitude adjustment. But I just can't seem to get over the fact that even if our "foundation" of sorts is necessary in some way we are not knee-deep in the issues that face our field as well as our society from a social welfare perspective. Social justice, social change, and social action are largely absent from our discussions and our classes. Research experience is at the periphery and yet we're expected to become good researchers at the end of our program, probably as a result of the struggle we go through when we conduct our dissertation. I think this semester for me has been a challenge...

I do some crocheting now and then - although the only projects I've ever finished are my scarves. I still have a shawl I need to complete and I just started a hat for the upcoming winter.... If I'm lucky, I'll get to wear both before the winter months are over next March. One day I decided to experiment with knitting needles (the 2-needle thing), and I was having so much fun I decided to intertwine 3 different colors of yarn because the yarn was the thin kind. And of course it was pretty cool. But take note: this was an "experiment", which means I never had any intention of completing it into an actual item. So after my summer hiatus and fall adjustment from that hiatus, I recently took out all my knitting and decided to undo this multi-colored experiment because you can do that with knitting and crochet, provided the yarn isn't too fuzzy with extras so that it tangles real well. Well, these thin strands of yarn that looked pretty easy to unravel created such ...

I have to post something on the upcoming U.S. Presidential Elections as it has been most interesting, and perhaps one of the most urgently important elections that I have faced as a voter in my voting lifetime (which hasn't been too long). I've watched the debates and the last one I listened to was the VP debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin. But let me just venture to encourage you to think about some issues. I've outlined some of them here, and obviously they are not exhaustive, but they are what particularly come to my mind at this time: What are the candidates' stand on Darfur? What are their records for human rights related activities? Do their VP picks have the same stand on Darfur and human-rights issues? What do they consider the "middle class"? Are they really looking out for the interests of a majority of the American people or just the wealthy few? What about their stand on the Iraq war which is affecting too many people at this...

21 years, yes 21 years, after leaving Malawi, I returned. I returned to a land that was so familiar, and yet so foreign. As we drove through the city of Lilongwe, I tried to sift through my memories and dust off the cobwebs to help my eyes drink in the familiar; but a lot was also registering as something completely strange. Despite having spent one-third of my life (the beginning one-third) of my life in Malawi, the first few days did not feel like home to me. And I was distressed. But still I looked, staring at the sights that greeted me, looking for the signs of the familiar. And when I did, I felt like I had met an old and dear friend. But among those familiar - the banana trees....those sweet, yummy bananas: nothing like Dole or Chiquita bananas you get in the States.... the papaya trees....and boy did those papayas taste soooooooooo absolutely goooooooood!!! And of course, one of my most beloved sights: Lake Malawi - oh so beautiful. Here are those familiar rocks at Salima.... I ...

Before I go on to blog about my other adventures, I wanted to blog a bit about my conference experience in Durban. I know I already have an entry, saying a little bit about it, but there's so much more that I learned from that conference. Some of it is expressed in one of my blog entries on my "Be A Voice" blog which you can access here . While sometimes I dislike conferences because it's usually daunting to go by myself (and I'm often attending conferences by myself), I am always glad I went to most of them. Well, I couldn't have been more glad to have gone to this one. Life is always interesting in that the path of least resistance isn't always the most rewarding or the most inspiring or the most educational. The conference itself was just inspiring. I was moved to remember that there was a reason I quit my job as a school psychologist to move on to Social Welfare - something I wouldn't have discovered if it weren't for my friend Cha who listened...