These are English-to-Latin song translations. I wrote most of them when I was in high school in the late '70's and in college in the early '80's. Many were written to reinforce grammar points I was learning or reviewing at the time. Some of them are faithful translations; a few are effectively new songs set to the same tune; the majority convey the spirit but not always the words.
In 2010, I self-published a multi-volume history of student life at my undergraduate college, Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Back when I was a student, I read the official college history with high hopes, only to discover that it was mostly about the doings of Trustees, with occasional mentions of faculty and staff, and, I thought, the students might as well not have existed. I decided right then that someday I would write a student-oriented history of my school, and I have. I think perhaps even someone who didn't attend my school might enjoy it.
I divided the college's history into five-year periods, and tried to describe the daily life of a typical student at that time, and then I mentioned all the non-academic things that happened then: plays, pranks, faculty-student baseball games, and so on. I used the student newspaper as my primary source, and for eras with living alumnae, I wrote to them all and asked for their recollections.
(One exception: the last book, *And When I Go*, is not funny at all. It's about the time when my school's Trustees decided to make the school co-ed, and the resulting student and alumnae protests. I don't think it would interest anyone who didn't have a connection with the school.)
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New Zealand from Bench to Bench
In 2010-11, I travelled solo to New Zealand and spent three months hostelling around the country. I blogged my trip and attracted several readers who had never heard of me before the trip started, which encouraged me to self-publish the story of the trip in book form. I was often unhappy while travelling, and perhaps that comes through a bit too much in the book, but I have derived a great deal of enjoyment ever since from remembering my travels, so it was quite worthwhile in the end.
Someone once told me a relevant anecdote about a friend of his who had traveled solo on the Trans-Siberian Railway. It seems that his friend spent quite a bit of time talking wistfully to his co-workers about lovely scenery he had seen and interesting places he had visited. "It sounds great," one co-worker finally said. "Maybe when I've saved up a little money we could ride the railway together."
"Do it *again*?" his friend replied, in undisguised horror. "Good heavens, no!"
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For thirteen years, from 1999 to 2012, I maintained an anti-bullying website, updating it daily or nearly so until 2005, and as often as I could thereafter. It was chiefly a manually curated news-aggregation site, with links to news stories about bullying, and there's no point in keeping most of those links; they've long since been taken down. But I also asked my readers to send in accounts of the bullying they had experienced, and those stories are worth preserving, as, I think, is my own story, Stalag HS
Raven Days