Granfalloon

If you count college, I've now lived in Pennsylvania for roughly half of my life. My God, I almost forgot about how I put the electricity for my fresh Philadelphia studio in the wrong apartment because I didn't know that I was 2R (rear) and not 2F (front). I assumed 2F just meant second floor, which is where I was. I sat in sadness in a dark apartment as the sun went down before deciding to call PECO and get it sorted out. How embarrassing. I said several times that I'd leave Wissahickon and move to a more Center-City area apartment. Instead I just moved to different parts of Wissahickon. I love it here. I am jealous of people who live in Center City during large snowstorms because the city must look amazing, quiet, and peaceful throughout. But I have the woods here. I said I'd never ride a bike in a city. I ride my bike to work frequently now, sometimes even in the streets, sometimes even going with car traffic.  I've weaved in and out of some friend groups, eventu...

But I KNOW I bought coconut flakes. I vividly remember looking at the various brands of coconut flakes in the store and not being able to choose, and ultimately going with the cheapest brand because they're coconut flakes and probably all taste the same, especially when sprinkled atop a baked bar. I remember the bag: baby blue plastic with the tear-off-supposedly-resealable top, and a little window displaying the flakes themselves. I REMEMBER IT. I remember purchasing the coconut flakes at the self checkout and going on my normal route home. BUT here is where it gets interesting: I DON'T REMEMBER PUTTING THE COCONUT FLAKES AWAY UPON RETURNING HOME. I remember putting the other things away, and I surely remember intentionally leaving the puff pastry on the counter so it could thaw. And then I did my normal evening activities and went to bed. Here's where things really take a turn: The next day, ready to bake, I begin assembling my ingredients: Flour, butter, brown sugar, con...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon     Comments: Suspenseful! Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut     Comments: Not my favorite of Vonnegut's but it was fun. Selected Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka, Willa Muir (Translator), Edwin Muir (Translator), Philip Rahv (Introduction)     Comments: Damn!  The Metamorphosis  is way scarier and sadder and way less funny than I had remembered (first reading was in high school), and Kafka's other stories are also mostly scary and sad. A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer     Comments: Relentless. The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories by Robert W. Chambers, E.F. Bleiler (Selected by)     Comments: Some really great stories, some boring ones. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury     Comments: Breathtaking! The Road by Cormac McCarthy     Comments: I never wanted to put this down which is rare for me. Happy Birthday, Wanda June b...

I got this idea from: Reflections From The Bell Curve In 2023, I will stop over-thinking about my future and enjoy what I'm doing now. I'm slowly getting better at this. And future can mean any future, including like this coming Friday. I'll let myself look forward to the weekend, but that shouldn't stop me from enjoying my morning walks to the bus stop and other mundane weekday activities. In 2023, I will start being more open to new projects at work, even if they are in areas that don't really interest me. I realized toward the end of 2022 how rewarding this can be when I helped out at a work event. I'm not super experienced when it comes to library programming and events, and up until last month I thought I wanted nothing to do with it, but I ended up having a good time and feeling very accomplished afterward, even though the work itself was a little stressful. In 2023, I will continue  cooking and trying out new recipes, then writing and drawing about the ex...

Using the internet to find recipes is wonderful, yes? Well for some reason I recently decided that reading recipes on the internet, while great and convenient, was not enough for me. I wanted a more personalized experience for my recipe-reading. And I was hit with inspiration on how I wanted to do it in a very (for me) unexpected place: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania , a.k.a HSP, a.k.a. my own darn workplace. I recently had the delight of looking through Martha Washington's cookbook while helping out at HSP’s Young Friends open house in December. I was blown away by the intricacy of this little book, and fascinated at the simple beauty in writing down recipes that are important to you. So, I tried it out myself. Behold: The first page of Briana Giasullo’s Cookbook. Pictured recipe:  Date Night Rigatoni with Sausage and Kale  from Pinch of Yum Don’t mind the writos and messy design, please. This was all done rather quickly and on a whim, remember. But it was fun! And wh...

I had the most riveting concert experience that I’ve had in probably a decade when I saw Rammstein at the Lincoln Financial Field on August 31, 2022 (immediately after attending a comparatively tame but pleasant retirement party, complete with dessert potluck and work-themed quizzo, for a beloved colleague). I thoroughly enjoyed the concert and honestly want to devour as much Rammstein-related content as I possibly can within the next few weeks… but I couldn’t help but get annoyed by a particular behavior I observed in a good number of concertgoers throughout the night. That behavior is the dreaded filming-of-the-ENTIRE-show-on-a-cell-phone. ( WHYYYY????!!! ) I absolutely hate being a 33-year-old curmudgeon, but I just could not let this one go–even upon waking up the morning after the concert with my ears still ringing and my palms bruised from clapping too hard (I wish I were kidding). Over and over I repeated in my head: Did they even enjoy the show?? I can understand taking a few p...

For most of my life I’ve considered myself a little obsessive, in the sense that I have a tendency to get really deep into things that interest me. The first example that comes to mind is my favorite band, Modest Mouse. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve loved them since I was fourteen when I first heard the songs “Float On” and “The Ocean Breathes Salty” on the radio. After years of listening to my favorite songs repeatedly and seeing the band live about seven times (I’ve almost lost count), I still listen to their music regularly and keep up with their new album releases which, happily for me, still occur every five years or so. Oh, and I totally lost my cool and embarrassed myself when I met the lead singer, but that’s a different story. While Modest Mouse is definitely the longest-lasting obsession of mine, a number of other seemingly random interests have had strong impacts on my life, even if the obsession period itself was rather short. I probably wouldn’t be writing this right now ...

Are you an all-or-nothing type of person? Or are you more like me: a something-is-better-than-nothing type of person? I think I first embraced the SIBTN idea a few years ago, when I forewent the idea that every time I went for a run, I had to run at least three miles otherwise the run was useless. I traded the three-miles-or-nothing mentality for a more laid-back approach, in which I accepted that as long as I got outside and ran some distance–even if it was just around the block–this was still better than staying inside on my tokus. The bonus part of this is that probably 99% of the time, I’d go out with the intention of only running for ten minutes but end up feeling so good that I’d continue for at least another thirty. I also feel less anxious about getting out the door in the first place, because I don’t have to worry about feeling like a failure if I don’t hit my specific goal. It’s about time I take my own advice into the world of writing. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I d...

As mentioned in the last post, genealogical research often requires asking living relatives to provide historical narratives and fill gaps in ancestral data. However, doing so can be harder than it sounds. Some people don’t have any living relatives, and sometimes living relatives are not easy to contact. Even if the relatives are both living and easy to contact, they are not always easy to communicate with. I’m going to take a brief pause in my genealogical research so I can tell you about my mom. While this is a vehicle of sorts for the “real” genealogical story I’ve been constructing, I think more importantly my mom deserves her own post separate from everything else I’ve been doing here. This will serve as a way to prove my above-mentioned point, as well as a much-needed written account of some of the more personal aspects of my mom’s life that have, up until now, lived only inside her own head. The details below have all been told to me over the years by my mom. So here goes: My ...

Over the last month of working on my genealogical research, I’ve learned that names and spelling in various records are often inconsistent. This can make determining the “correct” way to spell someone’s name a bit tricky. Spelling was not taken as seriously 100 years ago as it is now, and literacy rates were lower than they are today. I remember reading somewhere that spelling a name phonetically was often more important than spelling it “correctly,” because for people with differing reading abilities, being able to pronounce the name was more important than being able to write it.  To make a genealogist’s work even harder, sometimes handwriting on old documents is hard to read, and scanned images might be blurry. These challenges can cause transcription errors when a document is digitized, as seen in this example from Ancestry.com: Source: AncestryInstitution.com, accessed from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Of course I know that my paternal grandmother went by the name Sa...

Picking up where I left off in part one , I’ll begin this post with two more pieces of advice that I’ve found in genealogical literature: Start with yourself and work backward Research one ancestor at a time I wanted to start working on my mom’s side of the family because I don’t feel as connected to her side as I do to my dad’s. Among myriad other reasons (including family dramas that I won’t go into), I think this is in part because I was very young when both my grandparents on my mom’s side passed away, and once that occurred we just didn’t spend much time with other relatives from that side. I’d like to learn more about my mom’s parents and hopefully build a stronger connection to them. I decided to start with my mom’s father, Francis T. Martin. One of the few things I remember about him, besides that his friends and family called him “Sparky,” is that he was a veteran of World War II. I thought it would be interesting to dig into some military records, but these can be tricky to f...

Recently I was asked what part of Italy my ancestors (on my dad’s side) were from, and I was incredibly embarrassed to say that I didn't know. After asking my dad, I learned that my ancestors hail from Naples and Sicily. However, I still wasn’t particularly interested in knowing more; I guess I just wasn’t fully convinced that knowing about the origins of my family would have any impact on my life today. Honestly, it’s difficult to explain what I thought about my family history because for so long I hadn't thought much about it at all. Now that I work in an environment that is heavily involved in genealogical research, I find myself fascinated by people who spend hours collecting not just general knowledge about their ancestors, but actual first-hand accounts and details from primary sources. My interest has been piqued, and I've decided to take my own genealogical journey. When I got started I realized that I really knew nothing about genealogical research and wasn’t sure ...

  Mothers Who Can't Love  by Susan Forward Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books  by Philip Nel Into the Wild  by Jon Krakauer Flowers for Algernon  by Daniel Keyes Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse  by Nina Schick Dune  by Frank Herbert The Man Who Couldn't Stop  by David Adam Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone  by Bo Burnham, illustrated by Chance Bone Dandelion Wine  by Ray Bradbury I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream  by Harlan Ellison Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  by Robert Louis Stevenson   Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic  by Eric Eyre  In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper  edited by Lawrence Block 2021 Favorite:  Dandelion Wine  by Ray Bradbury I was blown away by Bradbury's writing, especially since my only...

 At some point I found a Reddit AMA with Bo Burnham in which someone asked something along the lines of, “What advice do you have for an aspiring poet?” Burnham’s response was something along the lines of, “No need to aspire; if you’re writing poetry, you’re a poet!” Burnham then went on to address the thought that most of us probably have when we see such a response, which is something along the lines of, “Yes, sure, but how do I measure and prove to people that I am, indeed, a poet?” Applying this question to myself, I sometimes wonder: Can I call myself an artist when I draw one doodle on my notepad because I promised myself that I’d draw something every day, but then I don’t draw anything for the next eight days? There’s gotta be a threshold somewhere, right? I think this topic branches off into a lot of different things. There is a reality in Burnham’s half-serious sentiment that if you are actively doing something, then you are technically a doer of that thing. We can all agr...

"Hell-ooooo?" "Heellll-ooohhh?" "... Yes?" "You almost home?" "Uh, yeah. Uh, sort of. Not really." "'S'about to start pourin'." "Is it?" "It looks like it. It's all cloudy and ominous-looking. You want me to come get you?" "No I think it's fine. It's kind of windy but not raining yet." "You sure?" "Yeah. I'll uh, I'll be fine. I'll call you if you should come get me or something." "OK." "Alllrriiiiight?" "ALRRIIIGGHT?" "OK, bye." Cut to two or three minutes later as I'm checking out my item at a darling little record/CD store in Manayunk, and the cashier all but begs me to put my shabby record in a plastic bag because he can see out the window behind me and he's noticed that it has just started pouring. In that case… Cut to like ten minutes prior when I arrive inside the record/CD store, after d...

Do you ever get partway through a book and realize that you seem to have missed a crucial detail or set of details from the beginning of the story? If yes, do you:     A. continue reading anyway and assume that you will catch on to what you’ve missed?     B. skim through the earlier pages of the book and hope to find whatever detail(s) you had missed?     C. completely start the book over again from the beginning? I’ve found that I most frequently go with option A, because I figure that if the book is good I will end up enjoying it even if I’ve missed some details about the plot. Spoiler alert: I read  Infinite Jest,  completely misunderstood a good portion of the plot, and actually thought that a character had died when he really didn’t. I still loved the book, and I give myself a pass for that one considering what  Infinite Jest  is. Any time that I have tried option B I’m pretty sure I have failed to find the exact deta...

When I learned that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) houses over 21 million unique materials I really didn’t believe it--I thought maybe their website had been mistaken. The number loses its meaning to me when I try to imagine a building that can hold that many things. But taking a walk through the building’s numerous vaults containing shelf after shelf of boxes upon boxes of manuscripts, books, paintings, photographs, maps, etc. etc. helps one to grasp the reality behind that number. And then you may ask yourself: what do you do with all that stuff? The first thing to do is, well, keep it there. And keep the room cool and dark and somewhat dry and for the most part, all the stuff should stay pretty much intact. But then what? I think most would agree that keeping all that stuff intact is pretty pointless if all it does is sit there in obscurity. And here we arrive at one of the many challenges of being an archivist: the balance between wanting to share archival materials ...

This might sound dorky or cheesy, but a small portion of why I love The Preston and Steve Show is because the hosts and guests often make me feel good about getting older. All of the show’s members are at least a little older than I am, but they wake up before dawn and get on that show every morning and sound like they are just having the best time, and they talk about all their different hobbies and adventures, and perhaps most importantly they continue to learn new things every day even though they frequently revisit the same topics and use pretty much the same formula for every show. Listening to them feels familiar and casual but there is usually at least one moment per show when I hear something I had never before considered, or when one of the show members relates a story about something simple but new that they tried and then I want to try it (like making an edible charcuterie board), and then the cast continues making fart jokes and laughing about goofy nonsense and I remind m...

Video games, and more specifically PC games, hold a special place in my childhood memories. I don’t play games nearly as much now as I did when I was a kid, but I still enjoy learning about and maybe trying out some newer games--usually through my boyfriend who is much more adventurous in his gaming habits than I ever was. When I do attempt to play a game on my own I’ve found that I’m most interested in revisiting the oldies that I played as a kid, if only for the nostalgia.  My PC-gaming habit probably reached its peak around 1998, when my dad plopped a big, loud Dell in his home office and started bringing me along on his trips to CompUSA. Around the same time, I was really into horses and so I developed a strong interest in any game that involved horseback riding. As it turns out, though, most horseback riding PC games of that time were not great, and a blog post I read from The Mane Quest  provides some reasons why. The reason that most deeply resonated with me is the fac...

Here's something I learned yesterday: If your cat captures a bird you should never release it back into the wild, even if it appears completely fine, because the bird will most likely have been infected by bacteria in your cat's saliva and will end up dying from infection within a day or so anyway. My cat captured a bird in the yard yesterday. As far as I know this is only the third thing he’s ever captured in his life. When he was probably only about six months old I saw him in my West Chester front yard with something gray and fuzzy in his mouth, but he ran off into the bushes so I never found out what it was or what became of it. At my old Wissahickon studio he caught a cicada and brought it inside. And now, we’ve reached bird status. My cat immediately ran into the house with the bird as I chased after him, probably shouting like a crazy person. I then grabbed his neck and tried to pry the poor thing, which I thought was surely either dead or horrifically injured, out of th...