The Talens' Tales

When I am in the kitchen (which is a good chunk of my day) I really enjoy listening to different podcasts on the computer. I like that they keep me thinking and learning and, since Wilbert listens to several of the same ones as I do, it give us something to talk about.  Here are some of my favourites as of late. The Allusionist : This one appeals to the word geek in me. It looks at the history of words and the stories behind words and why we say the things we do in the crazy English language. Bonus: host is British and has a fantastic dry sense of humor. Lots of fun, though some episodes are a little less family friendly than others. Radiolab : This is one of Wilbert and my favorites. The loose description is it stories from science and technology, but you almost always learn something new. Like "blow-your-mind, I-never-knew-that, God-is-amazing-something" new. The Memory Palace : A short podcast. Each episode is a little story that the writer tells in a masterfu...

Last week, I hosted a fun and unique event one evening. I had a Shoe Cutting Party for Sole Hope . The basic idea is simple. Invite your friends over. Have everyone bring a pair of jeans they no longer need or want and a pair of scissors. Then spend the evening tracing and cutting out pieces of the jeans you brought for the top half of shoes for kids in Africa. I had fully intended to take cute and fun pictures of my friends cutting out shoes during the party. Then, when I realized I had forgotten to do that, I made a mental note to take a picture of the piles of shoes we had cut out. Unfortunately, I remembered that after I had packaged the shoes in a box and taped it all up really well. So, the above pictures is what you get. A box with 25 pairs of shoes to be sent to Sole Hope's office in the States before being shipped to Uganda where the Ugandan shoemakers employed by Sole Hope will put these shoes together.  But, the party was great. I kept all of my materials beca...