LSA News

No. 47, June/July 2003

It is summer time. In this issue we have The View from Hidden Spring, a message from Lara Nesselroad, a column from the Diversity Committee reviewing our visiting librarian, Mihyang Kim's presentation, the Fact File with answers from the last newsletter.

In the next issue we will have a review of the year in LSA events with pictures from the Tree Walk, the Spring Tea and Gonzo. Enjoy! If you have anything you want in the next newsletter, send it to lsaweb@lists.uoregon.edu by Friday, July 18, 2003.

The view from Hidden Spring

By Pam DeLaittre

On Super Bowl Sunday, a year ago, we lost our old, beautiful, 24 year old gelding 'Sherman' [aka Valiant Windfire]. He'd been with us almost 5 years, and I knew when I bought him that we would be his owners.

This gallant old fashioned Morgan had been shown for years and knew all the ropes. He was my daughter Margot's first horse and she loved him dearly. We walked him and kept him up until the vet could come. We kept him on painkillers for the whole day, hoping the blockage in his intestines would clear, aided by the oil the vet had tube fed him. Hours went by, nothing changed, he was in more pain as the gasses in his bowels had no where to go. It was a very difficult decision for my daughter, but having worked for a large animal vet for many years, I knew this was a fatal colic. So we let him go, euthanizing him with a massive overdose of barbiturates the vet pumped into his jugular vein.

We mourned for months, then finally as spring came, we decided to find another trail horse for my daughter to ride. We looked at all kinds of Quarter horses, Morgans and Paints. Nothing would suit. In May, we decided to go to a sale in Eastern Oregon, in the small town of Kimberly, outside of Spray. This is where the ranches are counted in thousands of acres, the dry part of Oregon.

We arrived the evening before the auction of the Rudio Ranch Horses. They were selling their broke-to-ride horses. We watched some of the animals work and were pleased at the way they handled the animals. These were horses that had actually done some work in their lives, and that had been raised on the range, learning to watch where they stepped and to look before they leaped.

The next morning we were there early with our catalog in hand having marked certain ones that we anticipated would be good choices. We were looking for a gelding most likely, they tend to be more even tempered [though I've had mares since 1965].

We looked at horses until we were blurring them all together. My daughter had brought an apple to eat and asked one of the hands whether it would be all right if she fed it to one of the horses. When they said it was fine, she set off to feed it to one of the ones she liked. The sale was starting so Kirk and I started into the sale arena when Margot came running up to me "Mom, you've got to come look at this horse." I told Kirk we'd catch up with him and turned back to the horses waiting for the sale.

Margot had offered the apple core to horse after horse, they didn't know what to make of it until she came upon a mare who gobbled it greedily. This was the horse that I had to see. I looked her up in the catalog. She was a 9 year old registered Overo Paint mare, broke to ride and had been used as one of the horses people were taken out on rides on the ranch. Her conformation was fine, her beautiful blue eyes were clear and her color was very loud. The drawback was she had been bred to their Quarter horse stallion less than a month before and might be pregnant.

I found the hand that was tending the string that this mare was in and inquired about why she was being sold, rather than retaining her as a broodmare. He said they had 250 horses and half of the number had to go, this mare they thought would sell easily so in the sale she went. He said she had no bad habits, was a good trail mare but that she was a pushy 'alpha' type mare who always got her choice of the hay piles.

Margot and I caught up with Kirk, and told him about the mare they called 'Lacy' [aka Gemstones N Lace]. He was still more interested in the geldings. The sale started and it became evident that the cowboys there shared Kirk's interest in geldings, they were selling for twice what the mares were bringing. Few of the horses were selling for 'big' bucks, but we knew our limit and these boys were selling for more than we wanted to pay. Some of the foals were really cheap, going for a few hundred dollars. The broodmares in the sale weren't selling well at all. I convinced Kirk to reconsider the mare, maybe she wouldn't turn out to be pregnant after all. When they rode Lacy into the arena with all the people and noise and confusion, she just looked around with interest. The bidding started, there weren't many bidders. Kirk said go ahead and bid but you know our limit. I bid, someone else bid, I bid, someone else bid, I bid my final amount before I'd be over our limit. The auctioneer called for more bids, Margot held her breath. SOLD to the lady in the third row. So Lacy came home to us, to pastures with more grass than she'd ever seen, and more mud in the winter.

In July, we hauled her over to our vet's office to check her pregnancy status. Well, you know how it is, if you really want a mare to be pregnant they never are, and if you don't they always are. Yep, she was pregnant. Margot rode her all summer long, she was level headed and laid back. Choosing to trot, not canter unless you really got after her. In other words, she worked out great.

Over the winter, she got fatter, more pendulous and lazier. It got to the point that in March she would stop 4 or 5 times on the somewhat steep walk to the turnout area. I thought we were going to have to carry her!

Then, the first week of April, in the morning she gave birth in the no nonsense fashion that mares who have had foals before do, to her daughter 'Rainy'. The picture is of Lacy and Rainy when Rainy is about 3 hours old. She is 8 weeks old now and is a wonderful sweet foal, who like her mom is very sensible. Yep, she might just turn out to be a keeper.

Thank You!

by Lara Nesselroad

Last fall, I asked you all to sponsor me in a cyclathon for the American Cancer Society. Thanks a bunch to those who did; our total contribution was $105 for my two hours of cycling, which was pretty high within the group I rode with. I wanted to add to the story, just a little bit. I sort of felt impelled to do this event at the last minute. I didn't know why, but I just thought I should. Some of you asked me if I had lost anyone close to me to cancer, and at the time, not only had I not lost anyone close to me, but I had even forgotten (again) that a long-time friend, someone I had known for nearly 15 years, who was my friend since we lived in the same first-year dorm in 1988, was also a long-time cancer survivor-he was such an alive, active, broad-shoulders kind of guy that I kept forgetting, because nothing about him seemed ill a whole lot of the time, and because the odds of him letting his cancer slow him down an iota more than medically necessary were zero.

Anyway, the impulse to participate was sudden, powerful, and unusual for me. It's not that I object to doing stuff for a good cause; it's that any participation that will involve garnering sponsorships pulls up fairly unappealing memories of being the absolute worst salesman of candy bars, magnets, stationery, and whatever all else the school orchestra/drill team/honor society was selling door to door, that has ever (un)graced Ellensburg, so I avoid such opportunities. I do try to listen to strong impulses, though, because I find usually there turns out to be a reason, so I gave it a shot this time.

As you may have gathered by now, my friend has died since the cyclathon. He died October 20. Technically, he didn't die of cancer, but ultimately cancer was what killed him, when long-term side effects and a compromised immune system caught up with him after some ten years. I don't want this to be a sad story for our newsletter, but I do want to again (and belatedly) thank everyone who contributed-I was already glad I did it, and I am now a lot more glad. Maybe I didn't forget with my unconscious mind that there was someone I cared about that I was riding for, after all.

Early plug: I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be an annual event, in which case I will be riding (and calling for sponsors) again this fall.

End sales pitch.

--Lara N.

Student Pizza Party

On Tuesday, June 3, we all thanked some of the most important people that work in our libraries: our student workers!

"From Seoul to Eugene"

The World Around Us

by Shirien Chappell

Did you know that the literacy rate in Korea is over 99%? Or that the Seoul National University Library has 61 soldiers working in it? (They're not in any security guard roles, either...) How about that back in 1446 King Sejong figured that the Chinese characters would not do for capturing Korean meanings in writing, so he invented a whole new alphabet with the intent to improve the quality of life for all people so they can express their thoughts and feelings....... and that this cool alphabet, with only 24 characters, worked its way right into the computer when it was finally invented? Korean folks love technology, and their written language lends
itself to computer use, so that might be part of why the literacy rate is so amazingly high. Did you know that the Library where our visiting librarian Mi-Yhang Kim works (the Seoul National University Library) is comparable to our Harvard, and that while users may browse the collections (they don't have closed stacks), they may take only a notepad and pen with them into their general stacks?

I learned about these things from Mi-Yhang's most interesting presentation to the UO Library staff on June 11, or I got them from the web sites that she used.

Korea's over 5,000 years old. It was a Japanese colony for only 35 years, and the Korean war was only 3 years long. (You might recall that the TV Show "MASH", which was set in Korea during that war, was on for 11 seasons and had 251 episodes!)

There are about 48 million folks in South Korea, which is about the same size as Britain. (The Britannica Online says Great Britain has 47 million.)

The first-rate information/communication infrastructure in Korea provides free internet broadband service to all K-12 schools. Also, Korea has the world's highest rate of broadband internet usage.

You can imagine the demand for electronic resources placed on Seoul's National University Library! You can look at some of their most impressive projects from the PowerPoint presentation she gave to the library staff by going to My-Hyang's web site and clicking on "presentation" on the left bottom of the page: http://plaza.snu.ac.kr/~hyanggi/ENG/

Check out her resume to see what part she's playing in the digital world.

To find out a bit more about this fascinating woman, her sense of humor, her interests, her experiences, visit her home page again and check out the beautiful wedding dress she wore, and the map of her 4,177 mile cross-country trip with her husband in only about 15 days. She made an ebook while she's been here at the UO, and got Korean libraries to donate about 280 Korean books
to the UO because she was disappointed in the UO's collection. She does pottery at the EMU and she's a golfer. Have you ever wondered whether and how chopsticks fall in love? Check out her site.

I very much appreciated the time Mi-Hyang spent preparing for this presentation. She's been a great addition to the UO Libraries, and we'll miss her when she leaves.

FROM THE FACT FILE

The JULY Fact File Index

• Number of Oregon school districts whose school year was to be shortened this past year due to budget shortfalls: 90

• Rank of the U. S. among world countries in percentage of its citizens behind bars: 1

• Number of members of the United Nations who have failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child: 2

• Number of those countries failing to ratify that are either the United States or Somalia: 2

• Percentage of The Netherlands's ruling monarchs since 1890 who have been female: 100 (see Fact File answers, below)

• Number of candidates for graduation at the University of Oregon this June: 4,028

• Number of checkouts by Oregon Card Program borrowers during the first six months of 2003: 12,436

• Revenues generated by the UO Libraries book sale last month: $11,900.00

• Number of people using Knight Library between 2-3 am on June 9, during Knight Library's 24-hour experiment: 157

• Number of faculty members at Seoul National University: 3,099
  (See related facts in "The World Around Us," above)

• Ratio of American League victories to National League victories in baseball's All-Star Games since 1933: 4:5

Sources: (1) Oregon School Boards Association, (2) Human Rights Watch, (3, 4) The Stanley Foundation, (5)Wikipedia, (6) Eugene Register-Guard, (7, 8, 9) University of Oregon Libraries, (10) Seoul National University, (11) Baseball Almanac

Family Ties

Our previous "Fact File" asked you to identify multi-generational pairs of famous performers, actors and history-makers. Five staff members correctly identified the eighteen famous persons (including the "extra credit" name) described in our eight clues. Chosen by lot among those five was Stacy DeHart, to whom we've sent a gift certificate worth $5.00 toward purchases at the University of Oregon Bookstore. Also scoring perfectly on the contest were Jen Lindsey, Colleen Bell, Susan Stumpf, and Carol Lenocker.

You may revisit the clues in the last issue of LSA News.

The answers:

1. Kirk Douglas (father) Michael Douglas (son)
2. Naomi Judd (mother) and Wynonna Judd (daughter)
3. Nat King Cole (father) and Natalie Cole (daughter)
4. Maureen O'Sullivan (mother) and Mia Farrow (daughter)
5. Leopold Mozart (father) and Wolgang Amadeus Mozart (son)
6. Indira Gandhi (mother), Rajiv Gandhi (son), and [extra credit] Jawaharlal Nehru (mother's father)
7. Felipe Alou (father) and Moises Alou (son)
8. Queen Wilhelmina (first female monarch of the Netherlands), Queen Juliana (daughter), and Queen Beatrix (daughter of Juliana)

Been to an interesting conference?

Send us a brief report for publication in the next newsletter. Thanks!

Last updated: 030708
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