We got some very good news this month about Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound — the book is a finalist for another award! If you read my posts about winning a 2008 ASPCA/Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award, you know how much I love feeling those shiny embossed seals on copies of our book. So it’s a thrill to be a finalist for another award, this one from the Dog Writers Association of America. Hanni and I will be crossing our fingers –and pads – until February, when the winners are announced.
But wait. What? You’ve never heard of the Dog Writers Association of America?! DWAA started way back in 1935, and I’m a card-carrying member. Honest. I really do have a card and everything. DWAA holds an annual meeting in New York City just before the Westminster Kennel Club show — that’s when they announce the award winners.
The best known aspect of the DWAA is its annual writing competition, which is meant to encourage quality writing about dogs in all aspects of companionship plus the dog sport. The competition is open to all writers, photographers, editors and publishers…
Hanni and I won’t be able to attend the banquet – we’ll be in Indianapolis that weekend, giving presentations for the blind children’s foundation and the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually impaired. Not to worry – my publisher will be at the Dog Writers Association of America banquet to accept the award if we win! Jude and Francine Rich from Blue Marlin Publications live very conveniently on Long Island – they can make a NYC night out of the event.
There I was, happily baking bread on Christmas Eve morning, listening to Chicago Public radio, when a “public service announcement” came on plugging this week’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Sweater Drive & Storytelling Festival! Hanni and I will be giving a presentation at that fest at 1 pm on Wednesday, December 31 — it was a kick to hear about it on air.
I smiled and listened, kneading and turning the loaf, folding in the bits of rosemary and sundried tomatoes that kept slipping away from the dough. It was a happy Christmas Eve scene. But then came the end of the public service announcement, the part where the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago’s Hyde Park was touted as the host.
Dude! That’s the wrong hood! The Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Sweater Drive & Storytelling Festival is actually taking place all this week at The Field Museum in Chicago. To be exact, it will be at the Field Museum’s Crown Family PlayLab.
The PlayLab is a special part of the Field Museum created especially for little kids. I had no idea the Field Museum had a special area for little ones – well, I mean not until Danny LaBrecque, the Coordinator of PlayLab Programs, contacted me last summer. He wanted to know if Hanni and I would be interested in participating in this year’s Sweater Drive. When he told me Mr. McFeely would be one of the other participating authors, I just had to say yes!
Every day on Mister Rogers’ neighborhood, Mister Rogers zips up his comfortable sweater, but not everyone has a sweater this winter. If you have an extra sweater, would you consider donating it to someone who might need it? This December 26th through the 31st The Field Museum’s Crown Family PlayLab will host the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Sweater Drive & Storytelling Festival. During this week families are encouraged to donate new to slightly used sweaters which will be delivered to a variety of Chicago area charities. After dropping off sweaters families are invited to celebrate the spirit of neighborhood care with a variety of storytellers, authors, artists, dancers and musicians featuring a visit with Mr. McFeely on the 30th. This event is free with basic admission into The Field Museum
Danny gave Hanni and me a private tour of the PlayLab at the field Museum earlier this month — what a cool place! Real artifacts and specimens the kids can touch and play with; kids can dig up dinosaur bones, grind corn in a pueblo, make music, play scientist, stomp on dinosaur footprints. In one area, kids are encouraged to put on an animal costume and crawl, growl, hop around. Exhibitions in PlayLab often coordinate with those in the more “adult” part of the Field Museum. If kids come to PlayLab first, they might better appreciate the more sophisticated displays in other areas of the museum.
PlayLab makes for a great rest area for families with little ones, too – family bathrooms, stroller parking, infant zones, and a staffed reception desk make it a comfortable place for little kids who need a break. While Hanni and I were there on our tour, a little boy who was lost was brought to the receptionist so his family could find him. He seemed scared, and the staff was so nice they calmed him down.
If you’re in the Chicago area and looking for something to do with your kids during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I highly recommend the Field Museum’s Crown Family PlayLab. Especially this Wednesday, December 31 at 1 pm!
Wednesday, December 31
Beth Finke Children’s Author
NPR commentator Beth Finke is an award-winning author, teacher and journalist. She also happens to be blind. “Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound,” is Beth’s award-winning book about the love and trust between guide dogs and people who are blind. Come meet Beth Finke and Hanni, her guide dog for a reading of “Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound.”
The public service announcement ran more than once on Wednesday, and Danny and I made many frustrating calls to Chicago Public Radio that day to encourage them to make a speedy correction about the location of the sweater drive. But alas, it was Christmas Eve, and Chicago Public Radio is no Scrooge! They’d done the right thing, airing pre-programmed shows all day to allow local staff to spend time at home with their loved ones. No one answered the phones.
So if you want to come see Hanni and me at the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Sweater Drive & Storytelling Festival this year, make sure you go to the Field Museum. The Museum of Science and Industry is swell, but Hanni and I won’t be there!
PS: The “Savory Bread with Onion, Pancetta and Sundried Tomatoes” I brought to Flo’s yesterday was a hit. All that dough-slamming I did when the phone calls didn’t go through must have brought out the best of the yeast and gluten.
The great comments you left after reading my Christmas from Scratch post got me thinking. Maybe Chicago Public radio would be interested in airing a piece about our Grandma Moos and how she was a recycler wayyyy ahead of her time.
And so, I rejiggered that post a bit (translation: made it shorter) and submitted it. After a few back and forths with the editor, I cabbed over to the WBEZ studios at Navy Pier to record it.
Most commentators read their public radio essays. But that doesn’t work for me. I can read Braille, but I’m very slow. So Joe DeCeault, one of my favorite producers, put me in front of a microphone after Hanni and I arrived at WBEZ last week. He asked what my essay was about, and once I got started I just went on and on and on about Grandma Moos and her recycling ways. I told him how Grandma’s good sense evolved into our tradition of making things for each other at Christmas – you know, rather than buying gifts.
Joe had a printed copy of my essay in front of him, but he didn’t want me to repeat it verbatim. He looked it over as I talked, but only interrupted if he found something I’d forgotten to mention. “Tell me about the wrapping paper your grandma used,” he’d say. Or, “What did Grandma Moos do for a living?”
When all was said and done, I said just about everything that had been in the written essay. I had sent a link to the song my brother Doug wrote for me as a gift last year, and Joe had already listened to it before I arrived. “It’s perfect!” he said.
Joe has good taste –it is a pretty darned good song. The way Joe takes Doug’s tune and weaves it in-between my words, however, brings it to absolute perfection. The piece aired yesterday on Chicago Public Radio’s 848 show. If you missed it, you can take a listen online to see (okay, hear) if you agree: it’s perfect!
That's my handsome nephew Robbie with his handsome father Rick.
I came home, checked our answering machine. There it was. A message from my nephew. The message was alarming. Not because of what Robbie said. Just that he called me!
My extended family lives all over the country. We consider ourselves “close.” But we rarely, if ever, phone each other. We email. We send cards. Some of us are even starting to use facebook. But we don’t chat on the phone.
Robbie’s message said he had a question. I should call him back that night. All I could figure was that he needed information about:
1) A homemade gift he was making for Mike, or
2) some woman he was interested in who lives here in Chicago.
Turns out #2 was right. But the woman he was interested in was. me! “I was just wondering,” he said when I phoned him back. “How do you text if you’re blind?”
The answer was easy. I don’t. And from what I’ve been able to find out, few blind people do. I mean, there are phones that let us send text messages. The research I’ve done since Robbie’s momentous phone call, however, has not turned up a single phone allowing blind people to read a text message after it appears on our cell phones.
• Creating text messages is accessible, and you just follow the voice prompts. You use the multi-tap method for composing the message, pressing the 2 key once for the letter A, twice for B and 3 times for C, etc.
• There are some inaccessible aspects, e.g., the pound sign (#) is the space bar and the OK key sends the message, which you wouldn’t know without a good manual or learning with a friend. Punctuation is accessible. You press the 1 key once for a period, twice for a comma and it reads it out to you.
• Important Note, the LG VX8350’s voice cannot read text messages you receive.
So this LG might be the most accessible, but it still can’t read text messages aloud to us.
A2006 article in gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine gushes over a Samsung “Touch Messenger” cell phone for the blind That won an Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) that year. Only problem? The “Touch Messenger” is not in production yet.
The innovative Touch Messenger enables the visually impaired users to send and receive Braille text messages. The 3-4 button on the cell phone is used as two Braille keypads and text messages can be checked through the Braille display screen in the lower part. Once this product is commercialized, it is expected to dramatically boost the quality of life for visually impaired people, numbering as many as 180 million worldwide.
I have no idea what it was that made Robbie wonder how I’d be able to text. He is 25, though, so I know he spends a lot of his day with his thumbs on his phone. That, plus his genetic aversion to chatting on the phone would make him curious about how I manage without being able to text. I promised him I’d look into it, and told him if I figured out a way, he’d be the first person I’d text. “My first message will be ‘Hi’” I laughed. “That will probably be about as much as I can handle .”
Most of mobile carriers offer free Email to SMS gateways which can be used to forward simple text emails to a mobile phone. And the good news, majority of those gateways are free and available to the general public. You just need to know the number and the carrier of the recipient to start emailing them to mobile phone
I had no idea which carrier Robbie used, so I just typed his phone number in and tried it with three popular ones (the site provides a list of email addresses to use with a bunch of different carriers). Since I could use my computer keyboard, my message was a bit more complicated than a simple “hi.” I wrote, “omg, aunt betha cn txt now.”
Wondering what Robbie’s response was? Me, too. He can’t text back to my email address, and if he texts to my cell phone, I won’t be able to read his message. My God. Robbie and I may have to break a family tradition. Pick up the phone. Actually talk to each other again!
My brother-in-law Lon is just itching to use the homemade gift he got last Christmas--a pine cone backscratcher.
My Grandma was “green” long before Kermit was a tadpole. She cleaned houses for a living and walked to all her jobs. She never owned a car; never even got a driver’s license. Her carbon footprint was far smaller then her real one, the one she left all over Elmhurst, Illinois with those practical, black, leather shoes of hers.
Her name even had a green, “friend of wildlife” ring to it: Grandma Moos was 33 years old when the stock market crashed – the great depression taught her to recycle wayyy before the word “green” came to mean “environmentally friendly.”
She cut frayed worn-out wool coats into long ribbons, sewed the strips into tubes and wove them into throw rugs. Burnt-out light bulbs were never thrown away – Grandma Moos shoved them into socks to make the fabric stiffer. You know, so she could darn holes. Because, of course, she neverthrew out a pair of socks! She saved old nylons and hose, too, using these throwaways as stuffing for her hand-sewn pillows.
The list goes on and on. Empty wooden spools of thread were strung on old shoelaces for babies in the family to play with. Used wrapping paper was pressed with a cool iron, then reused. And reused. And reused. Vegetable and fruit crates? They were covered with padding (made from those worn-out nylons I told you about) and cloth, transformed into baskets for our dolls.
Grandma Moos died in 1990, but her green spirit lives on. Especially at Christmas. She left 11 grandchildren, and now many of my siblings and cousins are grandparents, too. – buying Christmas presents for everyone is pretty much out of the question. So we pick names instead. But here’s the rub: you have to make a gift for the person you choose.
New babies press handprints into clay wall hangings, cousins stuff homemade pillows for gifts, pinecones collected in backyards are magically transformed into Christmas ornaments –and back-scratchers!
I get compliments on the earrings my niece Jennifer made me every time I wear them. Every night I cuddle on the couch under an afghan my sister Cheryl crocheted. Not every gift is so treasured, though. Example: Last Christmas Mike chose our nephew Ben, A Cub fan. Mike covered an old pin with white paper, wrote the letters “sh” onto it with a magic marker, and presented it to Ben with a Cub shirt, the one that boldly announces IT’S GONNA HAPPEN. “Wear the shirt as is during the season, “mike wrote in the instruction form he put together for Ben. “And then attach the “sh” pin in front of the first word during the playoffs.” Still scratching your head trying to figure out what cursed the Cubs this year? Now you know. It was Mike Knezovich.
Usually gifts are G-rated, but we're talking Cubs-White Sox here.
Some family members get into a groove – one brother-in law is a hunter, so every year he has his catch made into a deerhide wallet, or a deerhide make-up bag, or deerhide gloves. My brother Doug, a jazz trombonist, always writes a song for the person he chooses. Last year I was the lucky one – you can hear Doug performing “Beth, Betha, Best” with his band by clicking the “play” arrow/button below. You’ll hear a little musician talk before the song begins, so be patient.
Doug’s daughter (my niece) Marsha Boyer wrote an article about our Christmas tradition — “Cousin Pen Pal Kit” appears in this month’s issue of Family fun Magazine.
Grant picked his 11-year-old cousin, Anita, who lives three hours away, and whom he had seen only a few times. At the time, Grant wasn’t particularly interested in practicing his writing in school, so we came up with the idea to make a pen pal kit for his cousin.
Marsha’s article describes her 7-year-old son Grant making personalized stationery, including that in a package with a pen, pre-addressed envelopes, postage stamps, a picture of Grant with his bio, his age, grade, and his favorite things to do.
We figured the kit would make writing fun and be a great way for him to get to know Anita….the cousins wrote letters back and forth regularly (well, regularly for two youngsters). Grant liked to send drawings, Anita decorated her letters with stickers. Anita’s mom, my cousin, was happy to see her daughter writing more. Most of all, Grant and Anita loved getting their own mail.
We’re all delighted to add Marsha to the growing list of published writers in the family, and of course we’re tickled to have our homemade Christmas ritual touted in a national magazine. I’d gush more about all this, but I’ve gotta get away from this computer keyboard – I haven’t finished making this year’s gift yet!
A homemade pen pal kit made a writer out of my nephew, Grant.
We got some very good news this month about Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound — the book is a finalist for another award! If you read my posts about winning a 2008 ASPCA/Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award, you know how much I love feeling those shiny embossed seals on copies of our book. So it’s a thrill to be a finalist for another award, this one from the Dog Writers Association of America. Hanni and I will be crossing our fingers –and pads – until February, when the winners are announced.
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