Happy New Year!

And, w/ a new year comes a new site. My blog has now moved! See me on my new self-hosted blog on our family domain - www.taneya-kalonji.com. For any subscribers, please update your feed readers.

For the holidays we went to NC to visit my family. Had a great time, and the kids enjoyed their extended holiday. Click on the pic below to see the album of pics

From Dec 2008

Photos from a holiday party this week at the home of our day care provider. It was fun and all the kids were so cute opening their presents and running around. http://picasaweb.google.com/taneya/HolidayParty2008#slideshow

Yesterda at the daycare provider's house, Kaleya and friends had fun making snowmen. Apparently, the red icing was a bad call. :-)

Awesome video from UNC where I went to library school!

my poor little blog :-) Facebook is all the rage for me now - it's easier to connect w/ my friends and family that way.

The advantage of having this blog though is that it is a wonderful archive of what has gone on in our family, so I come back here to help me remember things. Like, the time Kalonji and I disagreed on whether or not he had been with me to Rainforest Cafe and so I proved it by coming back to a blog post I did four years ago. It's great :-)

But, for now, blogging on here will be sporadic. Until next time, enjoy this digital scrapbook page I did of Kaleya and her friend with pictures from a recent trip to the zoo.

Have been way to busy to post lately, but life is good. School is good, work is good, family life is good. Kaleya's birthday is Thursday; I can hardly believe she will be 4!

Librarian + Rap Music Aficianado

And what do you get? Me, loving the Search Engine Battle Raps! Three rounds:

Google vs. Yahoo Google vs. MSN MSN vs. Yahoo

Note: you may or may not agree with all the lyrics, I myself do not; but I love the concept!

The Color Purple was on tv tonight and Kalonji called me down for my absolute favorite part of the movie. I LOVE this scene. Makes me cry each time. :-)

While catching up on some blog reading tonight, I saw that Picasa has a new "faces" tagging feature for their web albums.  I decided to give it a try and how cool!  

After scanning all the pictures I have in my Picasa Web Albums, it brings up collections of faces for me to tag.  I present to you, the Many Faces of Kaleya.  I am ver

y impressed that it recognized her :-)

It even has clustered her with family members, including one picture of Kalonji's mom as a little girl 

Check out DH's post on Obama's speech last night. :-)

This is a snapshot of one of the bookshelves we have at home. Today, while Jihad was standing near it, I said to him, "Jihad, find the book that has your name as part of the title." Kaleya was standing right next to him and please tell me how she was able to point to the RIGHT book within 20 seconds?

It blew me and Kalonji away! We know she has some pattern recognition going on, but this was just wild! That book has been on the shelf for a year now unmoved. Kaleya has been learning tons from her care provider and these type of things reinforce how wonderful we know her sitter is!

Have you found it yet? 1st column, 6th book from the bottom. :-)

It's been awhile again since my last post, but a lot has been going on!

First of all, we have been getting ready for school. Jihad, my stepson, is now living with us, and he starts 4th grade on Monday. We are all excited at the start of the new year and hope to get a lot from it.

On August 1st, I officially became a student again! I am now a National Library of Medicine-funded Informatics Training Fellow within the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. My supervisor was kind & thoughtful enough to guide me through the application process so that I could do this. Ultimately, it will work out for the best for both the library and myself and while it will be a challenge, I am definitely looking forward to it. In my fellowship, I will be getting a Masters of Public Health degree with a focus in informatics. I have been an NLM fellow before, that is what brought me to Vanderbilt in the first place, so I am VERY grateful to have another opportunity for training at this point in my career.

Then, yesterday, I had the joy of experiencing my first ever tooth extraction. Turns out I had a partially erupted wisdom tooth that was causing me toothaches this week, so it had to come out. My extraction was yesterday afternoon, but the pain was so bad Wed night that I spent from 2am-6am in the Vanderbilt ER where they gave me some Loretab, and then some bupivacaine to alleviate the pain. It was great! And, the tooth extraction itself was hardly a problem at all. The dentist was very funny - he kept me laughing the whole time and I didn't even realize when he took the tooth out. Pain last night was kind of bad and even though he prescribed more Loretab, it didn't work very well. But, this morning I started taking ibuprofen and it has been perfectly fine all day. I even ate a real meal at lunch today.

So, I am now getting back into some normal routine. I'm parked in front of the television right now watchign the opening ceremonies of the Olympics - I'm so excited!

Signing says "To Kaleya - You Rock! Taylor Parks"

This is what we received in the mail today for Kaleya! Kaleya has been all over Hairspray the past month and she loves Little Inez's part. So, Kalonji found her on MySpace and I requested an autographed picture for Kaleya and she sent it. How cool!

We gon' party like it's my birthday!!!!!! :-)

Yep - It's my birthday. July is full of birthdays for us - among both family and friends.

• Jihad turned 10 on the 8th
• I have several co-workers whose birthdays fall within the first two weeks of July
• My step-father and I share our birthday today
• My mommy's is later this month

Family Fest - Day 3

Today we went to Fisk and had an incredible day. I have a new appreciation for the history of the institution and all that it symbolizes. We took the kids there so they start to understand the importance and significance of having an education.

We got to campus at 10am and were treated to a tour by a student with an intriguing background - W.J. (we'll call him), is a double major in history and religion and a minor in secondary education. He was an awesome tour guide - extremely knowledgeable and exactly the kind of tour guide we hoped we'd have. If I were to post about everything we learned today, I'd have a post five pages long! Fisk was established in 1866 and was the first post-civil war education institution for blacks. We started in Cravath Hall, which used to be the original library. Built by masons, the building looks the same from all directions and has masonic images over the doorway.

W.J. then took us over to the Fisk Chapel where performances by the who's who of black history have performed and lectured. The Chapel is a beautiful structure and we learned that when a royal patriarch in Ghana learned that Fisk did not have the money to finish construction, he literally took the roof off of his residence and sent it over to Fisk with his architects. Also, the Chapel is made from stone and mahogany wood which do not burn, so whenever there was a threat to the students on campus, they would go into the Chapel into rooms hidden among the roof of the chapel.

W.J. informed us that Miles Davis had once performed there, so of course I had to take a picture of Miles standing in front.

We then walked over to Jubilee Hall, the original building on campus and the one built with the funds raised by the Jubilee Singers. Along the way we passed by this painting on the ground done by Nikki Giovanni when she was a senior at Fisk, and now the tradition is that each year, the senior class repaints it.

Jubilee Hall is a great structure, built on what was the highest hill in Nashville and the original location where slaves were sold. Jubilee Hall was the first permanent structure in the country built exclusively for the purpose of educating blacks.

The first floor of Jubilee Hall is maintained in original condition for the most part b/c it is a National Historic Landmark. Inside, the original painting of the Jubilee Singers is housed in a meeting room. That meeting room also has beams in the room that were taken from an Austrian castle built in the 1300s. Amazing.

At this point, W.J. departed from us and we went off to lunch. We came back to the campus after lunch to visit a colleague of mine at the Fisk Library and we viewed the art in the Aaron Douglass gallery on the 3rd floor of the library. Also on the 3rd floor was a collection of sketches by Cyrus Baldridge, who walked across Africa with his wife in the 1930s and made sketches of those he interacted with. There was so much more to our visit but these were some of the highlights. Pictures from yesterday's visit to the TN State Museum are here, and pictures from Fisk are here.

Tonight, we got the boys watching the first half of Roots. Further education for them. Tomorrow we'll finish. No other major plans than that and running some errands.

Family Fest - Day 1 & 2

This week we have all the kids! (I have four stepsons in case you didn't know) for a week of family fun.

Yesterday we had a very leisurely morning - not really stirring until around 9 or so (well, them -- i myself did not get up until about 11!). We headed out to run a couple of errands (including vehicle registration, which if I had only known about the new online option last week I could have avoided).

[Kaleya & Miles at the county clerk office.]

Then, we decided to go to the TN State Museum, however, I failed to realize that the museum is not open on Mondays. Instead, we went to the public library for some time, then hit a local used bookstore to pick up some of our own books, went grocery shopping and came home.

[Walking downtown.]

Last night, the boys are watched the movie Pride about a black swim team that came out last year. It chronicles the story of Jim Ellis, a swim coach who started the first black swim team. The team was based out of a recreation center in Philadelphia. I watched this with Kalonji a couple of weeks ago and it is definitely worth watching.

This morning, we went to our local Regal Cinemas and were able to see Bee Movie for free due to a program they run in the summer for showing free movies. We had all seen it before, but it was fun to see it on the big screen again. The movie theater was packed to!

After having lunch at home, we then took the kids to the Tennessee State Museum. This was my first time going, despite all the years I've lived here and I was pleasantly surprised. There were a good number of exhibits -- all of them well done. We asked the kids to take turns reading from the exhibits and discussing what was presented. I actually learned quite a bit about some of the history of early Tennessee and the cities here. Also, learned more about some of the lifestyle conditions of the people in Tennessee from the early frontier days to early 1900s.

[Kaleya next to a bench carved by Davy Crockett. ] [everyone watches a short educational film]

Tomorrow we go to take them on a tour of Fisk. We got them started early as they had to read the plates that went along with each item in the collection.

[Miles reads about the Fisk Jubilee singers.]

Not sure what tomorrow necessarily brings after the tour - possibly visit BiCentennial Mall for a minute or Fort Negley, then I'd love to get some swimming in for them; we'll see.

The Davidson County Clerk has re-done their website! Why does this make me so happy??? I don'tknow, I just love the new look and I just learned that vehicle registrations can be done online - whippee!!!!

In my last post I put up a video that demonstrates an application that goes with Microsoft Outlook and helps manage the email -- it is called Xobni. I've been using it for about three days now and I love it.

Unfortunately, I'm not at work and I forgot to grab some screenshots, but I am finding it very helpful in keeping track of who has sent me what files and email. I highly recommend it.

In other news - we are going into our busy time of the year. We will have my stepsons for this coming week and then next week, Kalonji has a course to attend for a week. Then, after that, we are planning to go to Alabama. In addition to this, my sister is moving to Nashville and will be working at my library while she takes this year off to apply to grad school.

We will definitely be busy!

Will this application be my saving grace for using MS Outlook at work? I just downloaded it and will be giving it a trial over the next few days. I'll report my opinion this weekend.