small bouquet of things

[asakiyume]

Thing One: Marathon
Over this past weekend, Wakanomori ran a marathon in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom (I love that name--what a name!), way up by the Canadian border. Even though the mountains there are not 14,000-foot crags like in the Rockies, there's a high, lonely, mountainous air to it--you feel Up There.

It was a very tiny, intimate marathon. Here is the group taking off--not just marathoners, but people running a 17-miler and a half-marathon as well. There were also bicyclists, but they took off from a different spot.



The starting point was a small airport. Further up the road was a signboard advertising plane rides:



That road is paved, but most of them were just gravel. I walked up the road from the finish line a bit.

An old barn


The landscape


feral apples--russets (tasty)


The finish line was near this country store:



There was all-you-can-eat pizza out back for the racers, hula hoops to play with, and Beg, Steal or Borrow (a bluegrass band), playing.



One couple got up and danced:



And Wakanomori came in second! He won some Vermont beef jerky--other winners one Vermont maple syrup.

Thing Two: Jury Right/Duty

In the class I help out in, the students were reading about qualifications for serving on a jury. Someone asked when women started being allowed to serve. No one knew for sure. I thought it would be around the time women got the right to vote. WRONG.

As late as 1942 only twenty-eight state laws allowed women to serve as jurors, but these also gave them the right to claim exemption based on their sex. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 gave women the right to serve on federal juries, but not until 1973 could women serve on juries in all fifty states.
(Source)

These little reminders of the lack of recognition of women's full rights and responsibilities as fellow humans freak me out.

Thing Three: Catalogue

Sometimes the best guesses of algorithms are wrong. I have some ideas of how my name might have come up as a good candidate for a catalogue of Catholic church accoutrements; nevertheless, it's a faulty assumption. I will not be ordering any vestments, devotional statues, candle stands, or intinction sets.** I like that I *could*, though.

**I've learned from the catalogue that that's what you call the equipment that holds the stuff for the sacrament of the Eucharist. ETA: Or rather, that was my guess, but I found out from amaebi that actually it's the set-up for when you're going to dip the host in the wine.

Comments

[queenoftheskies]

Congratulations to your husband!!!

From your pictures, it looks like it was an amazing trip.

[asakiyume]

It was a lot of fun, a very beautiful place (and thank you!)

[wayfaringwordhack]

Wow, thanks for taking us on that journey with you. Congrats to Wakanomori! I love beef jerky.

And wow, super scary about women's civic rights. We take so much for granted about our current (still sucky and under-represented and -appreciated) status in just about every walk of life.

[asakiyume]

I have **memories** from 1973. I grew up in New York State, and I assume it had women serving on juries already by then--it's a fairly progressive state--but somewhere in the United States, women weren't. I was reading the Prydain chronicles and was excited and nervous about a class camping trip... and meanwhile, somewhere in the United States, women weren't considered fit to adjudicate people's innocence or guilt. It's like finding out that women only got the right to vote in Switzerland in 1971--and in one canton not until 1990 (source). Holy crap.

[amaebi]

When Sheeyun and I lived in the Monterey, California area we used to go to a trivia night at a local bar. How I remember one of the quizmasters, a misogynistic wag, frothing on about that canton completing the destruction of society hurrah hurrah.

[asakiyume]

I suppose the quizmaster could have consoled himself with Saudi Arabia, where women didn't get the right to vote until 2015? But I guess that didn't match is profile of an ideal state in other ways.

[wayfaringwordhack]

Holy crap indeed! O.O

[sovay]

And Wakanomori came in second! He won some Vermont beef jerky--other winners one Vermont maple syrup.

I love that: a barter marathon. The quality of light in that first photograph is high and cold and autumnal.

[asakiyume]

The medals were made of wood--someone was calling them "woodals," since they weren't metal (a joke that only works with American pronunciation, but still).

It really was another world. On our way there, we stopped at a store that had been identified as a supermarket on Google maps. It was very tiny, and not a regional chain, just its own, unique thing.

[amaebi]

I hope the feral apples are plotting a takeover movement. More orchard, less cement!

Intinction is the mode of communion in which the host is dipped in the cup and then consumed.

Back when I periodically visited a religious supply store, I was tempted (every time) by the crusty Greek Orthodox copes. Luckily they weren't just gorgeous and costumes but expensive.

I had never thought about the jury issue. Would you consider putting that on fb so I can share it?

[asakiyume]

Sure! I'll do that next.

Okay, it's up. And I'll edit this entry to correct the thing about intinction--thank you!

[amaebi]

Oh, I didn't mean to correct you! Just to add a detail.

And thank you so much!

[asakiyume]

No worries! I didn't take it as a put-down but as an expansion or clarification of my guesswork.

[kore]

I hope the feral apples are plotting a takeover movement. More orchard, less cement!

I'm now thinking about a feral apple colony....

[cmcmck]

And that lack of recognition is still there all over the world.

There are place on this sorry globe of ours who still believe we don't possess souls.

[asakiyume]

People can be so stingy with recognition of other people's humanity--I wish we were all extravagant and generous instead.

[osprey_archer]

Wonderful hills - and the feral apple tree! And the leaves just beginning to turn in the photograph of the road leading to the airport... it's like the perfect little snapshot of those first moments of fall.

[asakiyume]

It really was; everything about it seemed very iconic--and yet natural at the same time.

[cmcmck]

I've often wondered how you'd go about proving you were a cardinal, bishop or whatever.

I suppose being male would be a good start with the RC's! :o)

[asakiyume]

I guess **not** being male would be a good way to **dis** prove a claim. Unless, of course, you had some really elegant vestments ;-)

[pameladean]

Congratulations to Wakanomori! I'd have had to try and trade my beef jerky for somebody's maple syrup.

I was TWENTY YEARS OLD in 1973 and my view of juries was formed almost entirely from reading Dorothy Sayers, who was showing women on juries in the 1920's. WTF, USA?

I really like those mountains. Very swoopy.

P.

[asakiyume]

WTF USA is really just such an appropriate thing to say at pretty much any moment, about anything, these days (... and apparently in the past too)

[kore]

Those are GORGEOUS photos. I feel like I was there! So iconic!

As late as 1942 only twenty-eight state laws allowed women to serve as jurors, but these also gave them the right to claim exemption based on their sex. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 gave women the right to serve on federal juries, but not until 1973 could women serve on juries in all fifty states.

DDDDDD: BURN IT ALL DOWN

[asakiyume]

I'm glad I was able to take you there!

What's ironic is the text that told me all this is accompanying a Gibson (of the Gibson girls) illustration of an all-female jury--an all-female jury that THEY WOULD NEVER HAVE HAD at the time he drew the illustration, so it was presumably ha-ha cute.