Thomas Edison's daughter

Last night I had this dream, which was undoubtedly influenced to some degree by Fringe. Don't let that discourage you, though, because it was quite different. It was based around the idea of an alternate universe, which Fringe did not invent (FYI).

It started out when this girl named Thomasina or something like that invented a device that allowed her to pass between alternate universes (okay, so that part's a little Fringe-y). When she got to that other universe, she found the version of herself that lived there, whose name was Anna. They were physically identical, but vastly different. Anna was at a liberal arts college where she was studying literature. Thomasina was at a MIT-like school where she took only science classes and was studying to be an inventor, which was the most prestigious occupation possible in her universe. She had already invented a flying skateboard, doors that can recognize and remember different people, and of course, the inter-universal device. For the latter, she had won the grand prize at the inventing competition at her school.

Anna was shocked to meet Thomasina, but not so much the other way around. Thomasina was more interested in finding out exactly what had broken the two universes off from each other. You see, all alternate universes were originally one universe that split into two, or three, or a zillion, when something happened differently in one universe than another. Denethor explains it better than I can.

So, Anna and Thomasina decided to compare history books. Everything going back until the early twentieth century was different between their universes. They found that things began to look more similar starting in the late nineteenth century. At that point Anna had the thought to ask Thomasina why their names were different, despite the fact that they had the same parents. Anna knew that she had been named for someone in their family, who also existed in Thomasina's alternate family. Thomasina said that she had been named for "Thomas Edison, of course." Anna realized that Thomas Edison was exalted in Thomasina's universe in an almost god-like way.

When the two consulted Thomasina's history books, Anna learned about Thomas Edison and how he had trained his daughter to be his successor from the time she was young. Ultimately, the daughter invented a device that slowed down time by increasing the speed of the Earth's rotation by like a zillion times. In the Superman universe, of course, this makes time go backwards, and in Planet of the Apes, you need to be on a space ship to slow time down, but this was my dream, so bear with me.

Apparently, speeding up the Earth had the effect of making every second exactly 2x longer. That meant that every hour in Thomasina's universe was expanded to two hours; days were 48 hours instead of 24 hours long, etc. However, humans (and everything else) aged at the same rate. This meant that a person would experience two years of life, but only age one - effectively doubling the life expectancy of humans. It also meant that in the time since 1900, 109 years had passed in Anna's universe and 218 had passed in Thomasina's. In that regard, Thomasina could be considered to be from the future.

The effect that Thomas Edison's daughter's invention on the world had been tremendous. In Thomasina's world, everyone aspired to be an inventor. Inventing in Thomasina's universe was rather analogous to writing in ours. Everyone learned it in school, everyone did it at least once in a while, and a large number of people learned to do it proficiently and even excellently. The universe was filled with wonderful inventions that had prolonged human life even longer and vastly improved life quality for everyone. There were still problems in Thomasina's world, but little to no hunger, poverty, war, etc.

My whole dream was mostly about Thomasina and Anna's relationship. At first, they were fascinated by each other, but soon both became irritated by the differences between them. Thomasina regarded herself as superior to Anna due to her knowledge of science and the fact that she was, in one sense, twice her age. She looked down upon Anna's passion for liberal arts. Both Thomasina and Anna found their identities being challenged by the notion that their alternate self had turned out completely different. They both considered their talents and interests to be intrinsic. Each thought that her passion - in science or literature - to define who she was. But how could that be, when the "other" her was defined by an opposite set of talents and interests?

When Thomasina and Anna got along, it was when they regarded themselves as long-lost twins. It was when they started to consider that they were NOT twins but the same person that they both experienced an identity crisis. They began to realize that their differences extended beyond their main goals in life and into their personalities. Anna regarded Thomasina as rough, short-tempered, cold, arrogant, and overly rational. Thomasina regarded Anna as soft, weak-willed, dim, cowardly, and emotional.

Over the course of the dream, of course, they discovered that they were wrong, they were not so different after all, yada yada yada. You can imagine how that would play out if this were a film. They would ultimately realize that it was the fact that they had such passion and not the object of the passion itself that defined them as people, etc.

And of course there was a twist in the story: just as Thomasina and Anna were starting to see eye to eye, Anna learned that Thomasina's mother was dying of a brain cancer that only existed in Thomasina's universe, as a side effect of some invention that had gone wrong, or something, and was incurable. The main reason that Thomasina had come to Anna's world was to get close to Anna's mother (who was really the same person as Thomasina's mother) and adopt her as a replacement when Thomasina's mother died. And yeah, this part is pretty Fringe-y, even though Thomasina wasn't planning on kidnapping Anna's mother to her universe, just spending time with her - since it was easy enough for Thomasina to cross back and forth between worlds as she wanted.

For some reason that wasn't really clear in the dream, Anna felt angry and betrayed by the fact that Thomasina was "stealing" her mother and furthermore hadn't made her motives in coming to Anna's universe clear. She was angry that Thomasina regarded her own mother as easily replaceable and their two mothers as interchangeable.

Of course, later on Anna learned that Thomasina was not a cold-hearted sociopath who believed replacing her mother with an alternate universe one was an easy solution to her mother's cancer. She realized that Thomasina had been terribly hurt by the fact that science - something in which she invested all of her trust and her energy - was unable to save her mother's life. She was desperate to find any way to deal with her problems using science - thus the alternate universe device was born. Thomasina was actually very close to her mother and couldn't bear the thought of parting with her, to the point where she had to either find a replacement or lose her own life.

In an incredibly schmaltzy turn of events, Anna ended up curing Thomasina's mother's cancer when she realized that a treatment for the type of cancer was available in her world and not Thomasina's. You see, the people in Thomasina's world had invented a cure for cancer long before. I assume it was some sort of cancer vaccine that kept anyone from ever developing cancer - thus there was no need to ever develop a treatment for it. However, in Anna's world, where there was no cancer vaccine, plenty of people had cancer and thus there were treatments available. Something like that. Yeah. Irony. Yup.

So, they both were happy and ended up living happily ever after, with Anna and Thomasina collaborating to make each universe better by augmenting it with stuff from the other universe. The End.

And yes, every detail of that - and a ton more - was in my dream last night. I could describe Thomasina's universe to you in excruciating detail but I'm tired.

The above picture is of Madeleine Edison, one of Thomas Edison's daughters.

Profile of a family.

Inspired by Nie Nie's beautiful annual silhouette portraits of her family, I decided to make my own. The pleasure I got from making them and looking at them is bittersweet knowing that Nie herself is unable to make new ones this year due to injuries sustained in an airplane crash. Hopefully, if she ever reads this, she'll find some comfort in knowing that her blog has brought happiness to yet another person.

So, without further adieu, this is what I did today:


This is my mom:


My dad:


And me:


You can click each one to see it bigger and in greater detail and such.

I'm hoping to find a few frames to put them in and hang them up somewhere, maybe in my new room. Speaking of which, we tried out some colors on the walls today, in shades of white. More on that to come.

Antiquity.

I'm extremely fortunate to possess approximately 2409823 photos of my relatives going all the way back to the 1850s. And I love them. In high school, I scanned a fraction of these photos onto our computer, and put them on a CD that I've recently found (and by that I mean my dad had it). I thought I'd share a fraction of that fraction with you. All of the pictures I have here are super high quality so please click on them to see them in all their glory.

For instance, you see Frances Collier whose image is at the top of this blog and whom this blog is named after? Here's a picture of her with her bebeh, circa 1869.


It's a tintype, which has been lightly hand-colored. In case you're wondering, the bebeh is a boy. He's my great-great-grandfather, Myron George Hamblin (1868-1959). Look at his fat widdle legs! They're positively bulging out of his bootsies.

This is my great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Jane Moore Card (1832-1895) circa 1855. I want her dress so bad.


Below are pictures of Myron Hamblin and his wife, Aletta Card (Mary Jane's daughter), on their wedding day in 1892.



This is Myron and Aletta's daughter, Ruth Hamblin (my great-grandmother) at the age of 11. She lived from 1896 to 1987; I just missed meeting her by two years.



Ruth was an only child, who grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. It was very isolated; she had to rent a room in town in order to go to high school. She went to school at what is now SUNY New Paltz and moved to my hometown in 1918, where she became an elementary school teacher.

I have a million pictures of Ruth. These are just some of my favorites from the late 1910s.











This picture is my favorite picture ever. I mean, EVER. You MUST click on it and see it full size. I believe my great-grandmother is the third from the left in it.


Below is a picture of a bunch of my relatives and their friends with naturalist John Burroughs (the bearded guy in the center).


From the 1920s: here are my great-grandparents (in the center) on their honeymoon in Canada, with my great-grandfather's sister and brother-in-law, 1923.


This is the house that they lived in. In 1960, my grandparents built a house on the land next to their house, and that's where I live today.


This is my great-grandmother with my grandmother, Janet, in 1930 ...


... and lastly, this is Janet. Awww.

Movin' on up.

Let me tell you a story.

When I was born, way back in 1989, my parents lived in a one bedroom apartment in a town I'll call Taulkinham for the sake of this post. I lived with my parents in the one bedroom where they hung a big blanket with geese on it on the wall behind their bed, which was so postmodern. We also had a cat named Kitty, and my mother put tin foil around the edge of my crib so that Kitty wouldn't come into my crib at night and kill me. It also kept Vulcans from reading my thoughts, or something.

Then in 1990 or somewhat my parents moved in with my grandmother in the house my mom grew up in, in a town let's call Milledgeville, which was only a few miles away from Taulkinham anyway. For the next 12 years my parents and I lived in the first story of the house and my grandma lived on the second story, and when I was six I told my first grade teacher that there was an old lady living in our attic, and she was alarmed and called my parents.

Then when I was 13 or something my grandmother moved into a nursing home, and for a while everything in the upstairs rooms was the way she left it because we didn't know what else to do with it. Then slowly we began to ship our stuff up into the upstairs rooms and the computer and one of the rooms became an office and the other is a guest room.

My mother has been trying to get me to move up into one of the upstairs rooms, which are each at least twice as big as my room downstairs that I have had for eighteen or nineteen years, and until now I was like "Eh" but now I am like "Yes." Ever since I started living at school it's become obvious that my style has changed a lot since my home-bedroom was last decorated, and I really would like a chance to start anew.

Of course, there are some issues surrounding my moving into the big room. The biggest issue is my Teto. My dad is all like, "How is Miss Teto going to react to your living up there?" Miss Teto basically lives in my bedroom downstairs. When she's not eating in the kitchen or in her nest in the basement, she's on my bed. When the door is closed and I'm in my room, she'll come up to the door and stand up and put her paws against it and mew until I let her in. She likes my room very much.

Today I lured Miss Teto into the upstairs room using a can of her favorite snackies. She seemed very fascinated. Now it's like a half hour later and I'm on the bed typing this and she's still with me. She seems to like; she did a stretch and rolled around on her back. Now she is taking a bathy. It is quite cute.

If Miss Teto can adjust to me living in another part of the house, it will give me hope that she can adjust to living in a different place altogether once I graduate from college and get myself a real living place that allows pets. I really want her to live with me, but I wouldn't make her if I thought she would be miserable. I'm hoping that she will prefer living with me somewhere new to living without me in her old familiar home.

And now Schwat has come to join us. He is demanding (quite loudly) to know what the hell is going on here.





One other problem with the room: I don't like the color. I don't know if you can really see it in the pictures but it's kind of a pinkish-bleh. It hasn't been painted in twenty years so my parents have approved my re-painting of it, and it's going to be white. I keep telling my mom to call the painter guy and she's like, "But we have to figure out what color it's going to be," and I'm like, "I want it to be white," and she's like, "Yes, but which white?" There should not be more than one white. That is heretical.

In any case it doesn't matter which white it is as long as it's not pink anymore. It clashes horribly with my hair.


I'd also prefer if the floor was made of something normal, like, say, wood or wood-like laminate or whatever, but since my grandfather ran out of money while building the house and we haven't managed to scrape together enough since, it seems like I'm stuck with black tiles. Maybe I can manage to get a rug that isn't a fragment to cover them.

Maine.

We went to Maine for the shortest time ever. But it was good. We went to Peak's Island, which is small and founded by Quakers. Now my parents want to live there.





We stayed in a nice hotel and the weather was great for walking around and such, but not so much for pictures. I didn't get many good ones. Plus my camera crapped out halfway through the trip.


But I did manage to grab a couple more potential entries for the "Most Similar-Looking Mother-Daughter Contest."

Fin.

This is my last outfit post in my room! Today I'm packing up my shit and trundling on home. In honor of whatever, I'm wearing my cardigan that my Mermy got me for my birthday*. It's from England and it has dots.


I'm going to miss this room. It's been a good room to me.


*My birthday isn't for a month, but that's how Mermy presents work.

Cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck.

I plan to make a flock of knit chickens. Flannery is chicken #1. Chicken #2 is in the works and will be named Frida. She is for my mom. Chickens #3 and #4 will likely be for my little cousins. After that, I expect that more chickens will be arriving just in time for my friends' birthdays and such.

I really enjoyed making Flannery, and she's such a great friend. She is the cuddliest thing I have ever knit. Everyone should have a chicken like Flannery.

Nice job, Fringe!

Dear Fringe,

Jeebus-to-bits. I have never seen a show suck so much and then turn around and be so great in one season. Too often it's the other way around. But Jeebus, Fringe, you really kicked ass these last two episodes.

Granted, you're still not perfect. And it's hard to recommend you to my friends, given that they would have to suffer through the first few episodes in order to get to the good ones. I mean, I almost didn't make it. But I am SO GLAD I did. Do you want to know the #1 reason why I stuck around? Denethor. That's right, Denethor. I think that he should receive approximately 90% of the money made by this show, because he is responsible for its greatness.

Before I get on to the good stuff, here's a few bits of crap we need to talk about.

[Spoilers after this point]

The DEAD PETER!!! thing was totally predictable. I know you were trying to drop hints about it and such, but you dropped about 100 too many. We all saw DEAD PETER!!! coming a thousand miles away. HOWEVER. You pretty much made up for it, again - with Denethor. Denethor's acting is always perfect. Even though I knew exactly what the grave was going to say, I saw Denethor's face and he sold it to me. I was touched.

Also, I am so tired of all this "I can't telllll youuuuuu" bullshit that goes on in so many shows. Shame on you, Fringe. I know you have to keep up the suspense, but really. It grates on the nerves. You shouldn't have to rely on so much WE DON'T KNOOOWWW! to tell a good story. If you want to keep secrets, make them unexpected secrets - secrets we didn't even know we didn't know. Okay?

I don't like when the characters of this show, many of whom are supposed geniuses, are dumber than me. Re: DEAD PETER!!!. For a genius-person, Peter is awfully thick. I love when Walter's all like, "I lost something PRECIOUS TO ME" while he stares at Peter from one inch away from his face. Also, "Hey, remember that childhood you don't remember for some reason?" - yeah. I'm getting really tired of the "Remember what you don't remember?" hints. And Peter doesn't even ask what the "PRECIOUS!" thing is? Does he think it's the One Ring? I don't buy it.

Also, Olivia being all, "Do you THINK this MIGHT be related SOMEHOW to the Cortexifan drug trials?" Really, Olivia? It doesn't occur to you that absolutely everyone that has weird shit happening to them on this show was born in 1979? That took you way too long to figure out. And now that you have figured it out, why haven't you gotten your hands on the complete list of kids who were drug-tested in the '80s? Did that ever occur to you? Are you just going to wait around to see what other people born in 1979 show up? And then are you going to be all, "Do you THINK this MIGHT be related ... ?" again?

Okay, now the good stuff.

The Observer: I love. So much. Especially when he's like, "I'm a conflicted otherworldly being with no eyebrows!" I want to bring him to my house and serve him jalapenos or whatever he eats. I like Little Observer too. WTF happened to him? And I'm so glad they don't seem to be evil so far. I do want to know why the FBI hasn't been able to get their hands on Big Observer yet. He's there EVERY TIME something weird happens? And they notice him, but no one's like, tried to catch him while he's there?

Oh, but also, I loved the part when Denethor and Big Observer were on the beach. I was like, "So that's where Big Observer wanted to take him? Beach trip!"

And I like how Denethor calls Big Observer "my friend," because that's what I call him too. Every time there's a scene where some shit is going down, I'm like, "Where is my friend? You know, my bald friend? Where is he? THERE HE IS!" It's great. Big Observer is great for my morale.

Olivia is good too. She's improved a lot over the season. I like the amount of ass she kicks, even if it's not so much ass as Nina Sharp kicks, with her Kevlar-coated ribcage - she is awesome. I want a robot arm and a Kevlar-coated rib cage. She's the only one who doesn't annoy me when she gets all, "I am going to drop hints at you but not tell you what I'm really talking about," because it seems to fit her character.

Lastly, I must talk about the last, like, 2.5 seconds of the finale. Amazing. I felt more emotional in those 2.5 seconds than I ever have watching any show. The win was so great, it nearly exploded my computer. And that makes NO sense, but I wrote it anyway. It was amazing even though the "I'm Spock in the dark!!" thing was stupid and "White walls are scary!!" thing is tired.

I can't wait for next season to see where they go with this. Bring it the hell on.

Flannery.

It's Flannery the chicken! Did you know that Flannery O'Connor always had chickens? Well, she did. It seemed appropriate. More appropriate? A knit peacock. But that's a bit too ambitious for me.





Flannery took only about two and a half days to complete and was super super easy. The pattern is Knit Chickens by Susan B. Anderson. I made the large size.

Adjustments: I used natural chicken colors instead of the ones used in the original chickens. I didn't stuff the comb with Polyfil; I thought it looked more chicken-like that way. I used bunched up tissues to stuff the beak so that it would be firm and keep a pointy shape. And I sewed in the tailfeathers so that they would all fan backward, like a chicken's do.

Doris.

Socks for my grandma:


From the pattern Spring Forward Socks by Linda Welch.

Ode to Wheat Germ.

Oh Wheat Germ
I love you
I love you on yogurt
That I eat with my biodegradable spoon.

What the hell is in a biodegradable spoon, you ask?
Maybe
Corn products.
But I really don't know.

Because all I care about is my Wheat Germ
That came in its vacuum-sealed container
That went "SCHOOOMP" when I opened it.

Oh Wheat Germ
I love you so much
That I will keep
Your dark and terrible secret.


[Contains wheat products]