all that's past is prologue...

So I give myself a "B" for last year's resolution: Anyway, my one resolution for 2009 is to enjoy living in our house a lot more (I suppose in preparation for the eventual move). That encompasses a lot of things, from enjoying the time spent playing in the living room with Beatrix, to getting small things fixed and big rooms finished, to keeping the house neater, to entertaining more at home. We definitely made some progress on this front. We finished the den, and a beautiful patio outside, and planted lots of new things. We fixed some major appliances. We put in all new windows (a project that started in late 2008, but whatever). We spent a lot of time hanging out at home, and expanded our household — Miles moved back in, and we took in a stray cat. We did not finish the front room, or fix a lot of small things that bug me, or paint the house, or entertain as much as I think we would have liked to, or been as neat as we could have. Life (and lots of work) just got...

From her speech Monday at Georgetown University regarding human rights in the 21st century — "I remember some years ago seeing a play about women in Bosnia during the conflict there. It was so gripping. I still see the faces of those women who were pulled from their homes, separated from their husbands, often raped and left just as garbage on the side of the road. So I think that artists both individually and through their works can illustrate better than any speech I can give or any government policy we can promulgate that the spirit that lives within each of us, the right to think and dream and expand our boundaries, is not confined, no matter how hard they try, by any regime anywhere in the world. There is no way that you can deprive people from feeling those stirrings inside their soul. And artists can give voice to that. They can give shape and movement to it. And it is so important in places where people feel forgotten and marginalized and depressed and hopeless to ha...