A Resurrection !!

After nearly two years of non-blogging, here I am, back again, celebrating  the (near-) completion of 39 years of delightful service to UNCG ! And, as importantly, 17 WONDERFUL YEARS with my beloved wife, Pam!!

Our latest "gift" has been a 6-year-old CHIHUAHUA, named Mason., that we "rescued" from the Greensboro SPCA. (They had actually done the rescuing; we just gave him a new home

More news, on several fronts

[This post was written 18 months ago, then forgotten !!  My brother Kirk married Diane just over a year ago !!!]

I have (I believe) survived my 73rd semester here at UNC Greensboro.  Several more to go, although I am not sure how many !!  Still loving the work, so I should be here to meet my fifth chancellor. Our current one has announced her retirement next summer, after some kerfluffle that got out of hand !!

The other HUGE news is that my "kid brother" is marrying his high school sweetheart, thirty five years after they broke up !!

Finally, an update !!

July 11, 2014

The day after my grandson Atticus's 5th birthday and my 66th!    Thing's are going well for both of us.

he has his pug, and I have my wonderful wife

And now, rather amazingly, and thanks to the incredible generosity of Linda Belfield of Princeton, NJ, I also have this

A watercolor/ pencil (?) portrait done by Amy Sacker, the Boston artist, book designer, bookplate designer, and illustrator I have been studying for a while now. Probably done in the 1940's, it is an incredible findfor a "sacker scholar" !

My 70th semester !!

So, here I am in my 70th semester helping students, faculty and staff use library resources at UNCG! And I still love it, so that must be a good sign !!  Here I am with one of our great student-athletes, Kenyan runner Paul Katam, (pretending to explain library resources. It was a "photo shoot" for something else, but it was another  "15 minutes of fame" !)

UNCG remains a great place for me, hanging out with lots of the students, past and present. Here I am with a (rather large) former student: Eric Cuthrell was being inducted into the UNCG Athletics Hall of Fame this past weekend, along with other members of the 1995-96 basketball team that went to the NCAA tournament.

I still play some frisbee, enough to occasionally impress the young, though perhaps not as often as before.

I can still do some of these things, I guess!

Big summer travel news !!

This past August, Pam and I went to Boston, to meet her "new" 44-year-old son.

That may sound strange, or even impossible; it is in fact quite true. An infant she gave up for adoption in 1968 has now come back into her life, and into mine. Pam found him in January, the the day after his 44th birthday. And on August 11, we attended his wedding in Lexington, MA.  It was a joyous occasion, as you can imagine. Pam had gone up a few weeks earlier to meet David and his fiancee, since "meeting Mom" and "marrying the love of his life" seemed to be a bit much for a single weekend !!

We were very lucky, too, because Pam's daughter Saskia and son Tanner were able to come to the wedding, too. They stayed at the same hotel as we did, so we got to spend a lot of "quality time" together.

While David was finishing up plans for the wedding, Pam,Saskia, Tanner and I did some historical sightseeing. Here they are at the Old North Bridge, in Concord, MA. [I was working the camera, apparently.]

These few days were a part of a two-week (or so) swing up north, during which we visited Pam's brother Jim, in Hamilton, NY, saw some pretty books in libraries in western Massachusetts, and stayed in some nice B & B's along the way. Our friend Kim Greer even drove up from RI to spend a couple hours talking with Pam.

Good fun all around !!

Summer Travel News -- Episode II

New England, while not cold, was much pleasanter than the weather in NC during our absence. In Rhode Island, upstate New York and Connecticut, we had agreeable evenings and quite bearable days.  Here we are outside in various relaxing venues:

Pam at brother Jim's

 Pam and Kim at The Elms, Newport, RI

 And on the "patio" of The Breakers

 Incredible begonias at White Flower Farm (Litchfield, CT)

Our visit with Pam's brother Jim in Hamilton, NY, included great food and a wonderful "cruise" on the lake he lives on, as well as the purchase of two of his paintings. Our visit to our friend and Pam's former colleague Kim in RI was both restful and exciting, as we saw two incredible homes in Newport [see above photos].

Summer Travel News -- Episode I

One of the major "goals" of this summer's 11- or 12-day vacation (and I realize that vacations should not have goals) was to meet my fellow Amy Sacker fan and scholar, Stuart Walker, who works at the Boston Public Library in their Rare Book division.  Pam and I did get a chance to spend an afternoon with him, over lunch at a Cambridge Indian restaurant, then at the Schlesinger Library (Radcliffe) enjoying the generous hospitality of Marylene Altieri, Curator of Books there.  What treasures they have! Although I realize that Stuart and I swim in a tiny pond of binding enthusiasts focusing on a few designers, it was great fin to meet him in person rather than cybernetically as I have for the last several years.


Amusingly, a half hour or so before before meeting Stuart as he emerged from the subway, my wife and I were sitting in Harvard Square, passing the time by people- and sparrow-watching. A fellow glanced at us as he walked by, proceeded another 20 feet or so, turned, and said "Your name is Schumacher, isn't it?  You work in the library at UNCG."  As it turned out, he works here at UNCG in Student Affairs and was in Cambridge for a one-day conference. Small, as they say, world !

That was only one afternoon of our trip.  The other highlights of our three nights in Boston (Natick, actually, but so much cheaper!!) were our visits to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts [enormous, global in scope, with a wonderful exhibit of Dale Chihuly's magnificent art glass] and the Gardner Museum [intimate, idiosyncratic, and delightful] just a couple of hundred yards away. Between the Rembrandts, the Stellas and everything in between,  we were quite "arted out" by the end of the day !!

 [This is outside the BMFA, but a bit too much chiaroscuro !]

More news soon . . .