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Sunday, August 12, 2018

My Favorite (type of) Places

When asked what is my favorite place, my mind goes to the sunroom of my grandmother's house that I grew up in; it had 4 giant windows, two on the back wall and one on each side with one being a sliding glass door that lead to the backyard. My grandma, Sharon, lived on a 5 acer plot of land surrounded by trees - so hidden that you had to be careful when leaving because a car on the main road might not see you coming. While this is my mental go-to spot now, as a child at night it terrified me because if the curtains weren't drawn then all you saw was dark forrest (this is where my love of horror movies comes back to bite me). I loved that room more so because of the surrounding greenery and sunshine that filtered in and I hope my future house has one (but if it doesn't you can bet I'll be budgeting to build one). My grandma passed away February 29th, 2016. While the house itself is still standing it definitely isn't the same without her.

Below is the only photo I could find of the room; in it you can see my mid-yawning cat Jazmin. The sunroom was also a guest-room (reason for the bed in-between the two back windows).

This was taken with a kodak camera, early 2000's.

I don't really have favorite places so much as favorite situations. I love all of the quiet study areas around campus that have Friends-styled mismatched furniture, or just being surrounded by books in general. I love the energy in the room when a live band is playing (The Deli is a wonderful place in Norman to go for local music [if you're over 21]). I really love kayaking - the combination of being in the water, sun, and surrounded by trees is amazing. And of outdoor situations, I love sitting around with friends and just looking at a campfire (provided I have plenty of mosquito repellant). My favorite holiday is the 4th of July simply because I enjoy fireworks and barbecues so much.

The best example of what I mean, and one of my favorite situations: when the house is empty or everyone else is asleep, and you're up early on a cloudy morning drinking coffee watching the rain fall. That calm feeling of content, nothing-on-my-mind is one of my favorite places to be in. I guess what I am getting at is that my favorite places are less locations and more states of mind.

Below is a photo of my favorite coffee cup - it happened to be raining today so I figured why not take an attempted artistic photograph of it outside.

I bought this cup and coffee from a local vendor that was selling their product on campus one day - while not my favorite coffee, I love the cup.


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4 comments:

  1. Laura GibbsAugust 14, 2018 at 10:32 AM

    Oh, Selena, how sweet that you found a picture of the place itself there... with a yawning cat even! (You will see that there are a lot of LOLCats who make an appearance in these classes, ha ha.) That combination of rain, books, and coffee is one of my favorites too. And you can treasure those memories of your grandmother and remember her when you manage to recreate those moments in your future. My grandmother introduced me to books-on-tape when I was little (she was blind), so I remember her often when I am reading an audiobook now, almost 50 years later!

    And I hope you will enjoy getting to learn about the TREASURE-TROVE of books that are available in online libraries now. It's not the same as holding the book in your hand, but being able to "page" through a 16th-century book, reading, zooming in on the illustrations, as if you were there in the Harvard University Library or the University of Munich, wow, for me that still seems like magic! :-)

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    1. UnknownAugust 14, 2018 at 6:21 PM

      My grandma is also the reason behind my book love; she had a custom-built bookshelf that was 8 ft. high and 16 ft. long and it was completely filled with books. I haven’t tried books on tape before, but I bet they would be great for long drives (I sometimes listen to Pandora Comedy or podcasts on my 40 minute drive to work). My myth teacher in Gods and Heroes in Art also utilized online books/art to save us money (thankfully) and I’m excited to see other resources are out there. I just invested in blue-light filtering glasses since I work as IT and on screens all day, but they’ll be great for this too!

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  2. Laura GibbsAugust 15, 2018 at 11:33 AM

    I am such a fan of audiobooks. A great resource for this class is LibriVox, which has free audio recordings of public domain books, many of them the same books I used to make our class UnTextbook. It's amazing; here's their site: LibriVox | free public domain audiobooks
    :-)

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  3. ErinSeptember 2, 2018 at 4:49 PM

    Hey Selena! Haha, I love the yawning cat! I have a similar picture of my own cat, and it’s one of my favorites. I also love your coffee mug! I collect coffee mugs (I really wish I had chosen a more easily transported collectible, but here we are) even though I don’t drink much coffee. Fourth of July isn’t my favorite holiday, but I love it, too. It’s just fun to be outside with a bunch of people, eating cheeseburgers, playing tailgating games, and setting things on fire.

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