Last week my partner, C.J., finally joined Facebook.  Up to now, he has had no social media presence at all. In fact, he’s not just resisted it, he’s mocked it openly for years.  But, by the end of the week, not only did he have more friends than I do, but he was talking about opening up a Twitter account.

So Tuesday morning, when I updated my status, and saw a friend request from him, I was surprised.  The thing is, for many years now my on-line life has been separate from my married life.  I’m not doing anything on-line that I should be embarrassed about, just writing book reviews, posting what I see as witty asides on Twitter and pictures of my lunch on Facebook.  But it’s always been something apart from the “real world.”

I accepted C.J.’s friend request, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder “what if he doesn’t like the on-line me?”

There was no reason to worry.  After nearly 20 years together, there’s really not much we don’t know about each other.  The only repercussion so far was that he already knew about how my students reacted to this week’s geography lesson on Lake Titicaca so I couldn’t tell him the story when I got home from work.

In other news….

As we head into the final weeks of the TBR Dare my reading has picked up a bit.  I’ve cancelled Netflix, partly as a means to economize and partly because I had the sense that I was watching too much television.  I’m keeping Hulu for now.  As a result, I am reading more, and doing a bit more around the house.

I’d like to get back into book arts, so I too a class this week on how to make what’s called a Chinese Sewing Box.  I found the class to be much more fun than any normal person would.  Ten of us sitting around a big table cutting out pieces of paper, folding them into boxes and gluing them into a book.  Just having a great time.

I managed to convince my principal that I could use the book as a final project for next year’s unit on China, so the school even paid for the class.   I might be able to simplify the structure enough to use it with 7th graders, but there was some concern over whether or not the Chinese really use them.  Two Chinese women in the class said they had never seen them before.  A third said they were so rare she hadn’t seen any antique ones listed on eBay in years.  It took a while, but I did find a source about them.

They are more properly called a Chinese Sewing Wallet used by an ethnic minority in southern China named the Dong people.

That may even be more fun than the geography of Lake Titicaca.

I’ve asked my principal if the school can pay for a class on how to make St. Cuthbert’s Gospel of John which is one of the earliest bound books in the West.  It’s a five day class that costs more than I can afford, but it would be really fun.  As of Friday, he’s still looking into various funding sources. We do cover Medieval Europe as well as the importance of book making in relation to the spread of learning, but I don’t think this workshop will fly.

It’s a very cool book though.

Having a “real” one that I made in class  might impress a few students.

But I’m sure they’re much more likely to remember Lake Titicaca.