asakiyume | small bouquet of things

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.