Yeah, I know I was kind of dismissive about twitter earlier, but I changed my mind. I'm twittering over at http://www.twitter.com/lemay.
If you don't know what twitter is, its kind of like a short-form blog, each post less than 140 characters, answering the question "what are you doing?" It tends to skew kind of trivial.
11:20 AM ::
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Note: the following procedure refers only to the consumption of Smarties(tm) brand citric-acid based candies available in the continental United States. For information about the consumption of Smarties(tm) brand chocolate-based candies available in the UK and Canada, refer to subsection 4.3.2(a), Proper Consumption of M&Ms.
1. Shuck the Smarties.
Regardless of the total number of Smarty rolls to be consumed, all individual Smarties must be removed from their respective wrappers and piled up on a flat surface. Shucking and collecting Smarties ensures even distribution of flavors across rolls.
2. Spread out the Smarties.
After piling up the Smarties, spread them out into a single layer so that all flavors and colors are visible. A single layer enables the smarties to be properly sorted.
3. Pick out and eat the pink ones.
Ideally, each individual Smarty should be nibbled around the edges until both sides of the Smartie are flat (rather than concave). Then the Smarty itself can be squared off, octagonned, rounded again, and eventually reduced to zero. If you're pressed for time, this step can be skipped.
4. Pick out and eat the orange ones.
5. Pick out and eat the yellow ones.
6. Pick out and eat the green ones.
7. Pick out and eat the purple ones.
8. Eat the white ones.
One could make the eating process more efficient by sorting the Smarties into piles by color after shucking them from the wrapper. But that would be obsessive.
2:55 PM ::
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It is apparently root canal season. I had one a few weeks back, and two co-workers have either had one or are just about to have one. This coincidence sparked a conversation yesterday over (yes) coffee.
First Co-Worker: You'd think with medical technology the way it is that they'd be able to just grow new teeth by now. Just pull the bad tooth and put in a new one. None of this painful root canal stuff.
Second Co-Worker: Yeah but teeth have nerves and stuff. You'd have to like grow it inside your mouth and that's a lot harder. I don't think we have the technology to regenerate body parts yet.
Laura: Its the side effects that are a problem. You know, the part where the new tooth grows its own brain and tells you to kill your family with an axe.
(long silence)
Laura: what? you didn't see that movie?
8:39 AM ::
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Yeah, all my stories always involve coffee. I'm not sure what that means. (time for more coffee.)
2:36 PM ::
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Today while I was waiting in the starbucks line a very large man came in the door behind me YELLING into his cell phone.
"I know that's what he told you," he said, "but I'm sick of that shit. You tell him that he needs to get that work done. You tell him that he's had three months now and that work isn't done and he needs to get OFF HIS ASS AND GET THAT SHIT DONE. NO. NO. You're NOT LISTENING." The man was poking the air next to my head. I edged away nervously. The people in line behind him edged away nervously. "You need to get on the GODDAMN PHONE AND tell him what I'm telling you. Tell him I WANT THAT WORK DONE AND I WANT IT DONE THIS WEEK OR HE'S GOING TO GET A VISIT DIRECTLY FROM ME AND NO ONE WANTS THAT DO THEY. OK? OK? OK? GOOD."
The man slapped his phone shut and moved up to the counter. "Hi," he said to the barista, who edged away nervously. "I'd like a decaf pumpkin latte."
12:08 PM ::
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You may have heard we had some rain last week out here in California. At our house, it was ten inches of rain and 50MPH sustained winds. On hummingbird mountain nearby they had wind gusts at 127MPH before the meter apparently blew down. Big storm. Big one.
When Eric and I got up on Friday morning last week the rain wasn't so bad but our internet connection was out. So we made the incredibly stupid decision to leave the house and go to work. Because, you know, having access to your email is so much more important than knowing that your house and your pets are safe and dry or having a familiar place to sleep that night.
The day turned out to be full of incredibly stupid decisions. My second stupidest decision was choosing to wear a long wool coat to work, rather than a nylon waterproof rain jacket. My logic at the time went thusly: the wool coat is just so much more attractive than the nylon rain jacket; I only have to go from my car to get coffee and back, and then from my car into my building at work; and I have an umbrella. How wet could I possibly get?
I contemplated that question for a good long while as I sat in my car in the parking lot outside the coffee shop near work, as my car rocked back and forth on its suspension while the wind tried to blow it right over. I was parked four cars away from the door but the rain was coming down so hard I couldn't actually tell if the coffeeshop was still there. I bravely picked up my umbrella, pushed the car door open and the wind forced it closed again, nearly taking off my fingers. I put down my umbrella, which was now quailing in fear, and had another long contemplative moment. While I contemplated the wind pushed my car another parking space away from the coffeeshop, leaving grooves in the pavement like the rocks in Death Valley. Did I really need coffee that bad? I took a deep breath and kicked my way out into the storm.
So the answer to how wet can one possibly get in a wool coat in a rainstorm is quite wet indeed, and the third stupidest thing I did on friday was wear tennis shoes. When you are dashing across the parking lot in a storm with your wool coat up over your head it is hard to tell that the wide puddle you are about to splash across is actually eight inches deep. And cold. Very cold. Did I mention the cold?
No, actually, I did not need coffee that bad. That was definitely the line right there.
But I got my coffee. And I got to work. Later on, my group went out to lunch. The wool coat was well and thoroughly soaked through after still more trips running to and from the car, and here's something I never realized: a soaking wet wool coat smells kind of like a big wet dog.
It was such a peachy day.
8:40 PM ::
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I have a clean office, a new computer, and a big pot of coffee. It's the new year, a bright new day and it's time to get back to work.
First of all, thanks to everyone who sent me mail (and mail to my sister!) wondering where I was and if everything was OK. All this time I was thinking my readers (both of you) might be disappointed that I had stopped writing but that there were five trillion other blogs that could take my place. Little did I know that I had FOUR readers and that they did indeed miss me. Wow! :)
I am fine. My health is fine. My head is fine. It's all good.
I have been running, and swimming. If I start bicycling again I will end up accidentally training for a triathalon. I have acquired a small flock of chickens, and a piano. I cleaned my office (this is is a big deal). I lost eight pounds (this is not a big deal; I have lost them before but they keep coming back). I have read something like three dozen books in the last six months. I got my hair cut short. I gave up caffeine again, three times. I sleep ten hours or more a night, but I have strange dreams where tiny espresso shots cruelly laugh at me.
Most importantly, I successfully survived turning 40.
I did get a big ugly case of Deep Thoughts at 40, and a whole series of those Deep Thoughts concerned the amount of time I spend on the internet every day. I really did not want to have "successfully maintained her social network" carved on my gravestone. I still don't.
In August I was reading hundreds of blogs a day, keeping up on dozens of mailing lists, web forums and old-style BBSes, reading and (um, sometimes) replying to personal email, and regularly posting to this blog as well. All of this in my spare time, on top of my normal daily workload. I didn't have to get this involved in the internet, but I had built it up over time, slowly abandoning my own writing and my other interests and feeling like I was behind if I didn't keep up on my email and my feeds. Even when I did sit down and write or draw or play music on my own I felt lost and blocked, as if there was nothing there in my head to draw on.
This was also a time when twitter and facebook were very popular amongst many of my friends. I was having a hard time imagining signing up for more internet time-sucks when I already felt so stretched for time and attention, and so creatively empty.
I'd like to say I unplugged from the net in August and that I feel much better, but I'm not that virtuous. I have cut tremendously back on the amount of net reading I do, I turn off my IM most of the time, and I am not on either twitter nor facebook if you've been looking for me there. I feel like I'm wasting less of my life on the net, but I still don't feel good. I still feel like I have a lot of work to do to pull away.
Another Deep Thought I had this fall I did was wondering why I blog at all. I suspect this is a phase that every blogger goes through, a nobody-cares-why-bother-its-all-pointless phase. It just took me a while to get here and probably lasted for far longer than it should have, given that I've been a writer my entire life and writing a blog should come easily to me.
I think I have been unconsciously influenced by the so-called A-list bloggers, who are blogging as a business and who have a single-minded focus on attracting readers so that they can pull in advertising dollars and thus get rich and famous and quit their jobs. I've never really viewed this blog as anything more than a hobby and a place to write once in a while, but I still find myself feeling guilty that I violate every major business blogging rule. Thou Shalt Not Write a Journal Blog. Thou Shalt Write About What Everyone Else is Writing About and Cultivate Pagerank. Thou Shalt Not Post Cat Pictures. I've been guilty that I can't seem to follow the rules and thus I'm not rich and famous like the business bloggers. Never mind that not even the business bloggers seem to be doing all that well at the rich-and-famous-quitting-the-job strategy. I can find a whole lot to be guilty about if I try.
But looking over my archives it does seem like I've been trying to do too many things and imitate too many other sites. I have a focus problem. I'm not kottke or boingboing or engadget but it is like I'm trying to be all these sites and a half dozen others, in addition to posting my own stuff. What I do notice from my stats is that the most popular posts on this blog, the ones that are linked the most and commented on the most, are consistently the longer posts, the more personal posts, the opinions or essays or reviews or stories about cooking or gardening or tech. The funny posts are usually a big hit.
What a surprise: my best posts are the ones where I actually write like me.
It's time for a blog reboot. (for the content, at least. I want to do a new design and move the blog to wordpress, too, but that will have to wait for when I have more time.)
In 2008 I want to stop trying to be other people's blogs, and be more creative on this one. What this means, I hope, is longer posts and more personal stuff. Fewer link-log posts and more funny essays (or at least attempts at being funny). I'm probably going to talk more about gardening and cooking. I'm going to post about work (not so much "my co-worker is an asshole and the coffee here sucks" type of things but more about technology and teaching and writing and publishing, which is what I do). I would really like to post more fiction. There will be cat pictures.
What I'm aiming for is an unpopular blog that is nonetheless richer for me to write. And, I hope, if all four of you stick around, richer for you too.
2:47 PM ::
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I will be back and posting again soon. Thanks to everyone who has sent me email wondering where the hell I am.
1:00 PM ::
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Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. - Dante, Inferno (Ciardi, trans.)
Ten years ago I wrote an essay called Thoughts on Turning 30. It was a very personal essay, for me. One of the big reasons I wrote it was because I don't keep a journal (kind of unusual, for a writer). I had talked in that essay about how I had spent time at every significant birthday up to that point moping about my life and about what I had learned. But I had never written any of it down. Part of my intent in that essay was to capture a moment in time, to explain how I was feeling at that moment so that Future Me would know.
I am Future Me now. Today is my 40th birthday. I joked in that essay that Future Me would look back on 30 me and laugh about how naive I was. I read that essay now and I don't think that I was all that naive. I'm not laughing. I am, however, struck at how self-confident 30 me was. Self-confident, and optimistic. I was a bright young woman with a big attitude, at the top of my game, with big ideas and a whole lot of years to accomplish them stretching ahead of me. 30 me had so much to look forward to. 30 me was, frankly, really cool.
30 me, unfortunately, didn't know how quickly things could unravel, didn't know how dark the next ten years would actually be. How easily things could change with a few health problems and a lot of worry. Life sometimes jumps up and stands in the way of one's big fabulous plans.
I'm not here to write thoughts on turning 40 and moan about how terrible things have turned out for me. They're not terrible. I'm healthier than I've ever been, I have a good career, a terrific marriage, and a very comfortable life. But things are much different now than they were for 30 me -- quieter, more settled, more introspective, more routine, more boring. Which would be fine, if I was happy. But there's a lingering, nagging doubt in the back of my mind, and sometimes the front, that I could be, should be, more than I am. There's a doubt that is only underlined when I read 30 me excitedly talking about what she has learned and how much more she's looking forward to. I find myself at 40 envying the overwhelming energy of 30 me, and wondering when it was I lost the drive to change the world. Is this just what happens when you get older, or did I make a wrong turn somewhere? Am I, like Dante, lost in the dark wood? And if I am, what I do I need to do to get out again?
8:32 PM ::
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More updates. I had planned to post this immediately after a panoply of updates (part 1) but I got distracted by the arrival of really large book. Perhaps you heard of it? Harry Potter and the Weekend of Accomplishing Absolutely Nothing?
My iPhone post was exceptionally popular the week I posted it, what with frenzy being at its peak just before the phone was released. But then as I watched my stats I noticed something funny: there was another post that was consistently getting better hits. A post I wrote almost exactly two years ago about cold-brewed coffee was by far the most popular post on this blog, even more popular than the iPhone post.
What the hell? I thought. It didn't take long to figure out what was going on: the New York Times had done an article about cold-brewed coffee, and it had sparked a fad. Suddenly my review was in great demand from the curious. (the same thing happened when I wrote about no-knead bread; perhaps if I want to be a more popular blogger I should just always write about what the New York Times writes about.)
I panned cold-brew coffee in that original post. I had nothing good to say about it. "Tastes like ass" was the term I used, and I stand by that assertion. ("assertion," ha ha ha. I'm sorry. I am 12.) I have a bunch of friends who have glommed onto the fad recently and they insist that my method was flawed, that you need to make smaller amounts than the full pound at a time I was making, and you don't need to dilute it.
I am still dubious. But perhaps I will try it just to update that post and keep my stats up.
An update for the happy camper (1 and 2)
A couple weekends back we drove out to the Sierras for the Death Ride, one of Eric's two big bicycle events of the year. I've written about the Death Ride before, here and here. Eric wrote up his Death Ride story on his blog.
Normally for the death ride we get a motel room some distance from the ride, wake up at 3AM, and drive in a panic for an hour to the start of the ride in hopes of finding a good parking spot. At 5:30AM when Eric leaves I go back to sleep in the back of the car and wait for him to get back.
This year we have the VW camper van. This year we could camp along with a zillion other bicyclists in the park next to the start line. This year there would be no parking spot worry. And best of all, we could sleep in. All the way through to 4AM, when the Death Ride organizers turned the loudspeakers on, put the volume up to 11 and woke us all up with rousing music. The Mission Impossible theme. Appropriate.
This was our first big camping experience with the Eurovan and I am happy to proclaim it a success, mostly. On the one hand, sleeping in the poptop is comfortable and spacious. The windows in the side of the poptop are right at eye-height, which means as you're dozing off in the wilderness you can look out at the stars (and the night sky in the sierras without any urban light pollution: tremendous). On the other hand given that the poptop is canvas it is very noisy up there. If you're not used to a lot of noise -- and we're not, we live in the country -- normal outdoorsy noise from other people can keep you up at night. We didn't get a lot of sleep. I'm thinking earplugs.
Hanging out in the Eurovan is awesome. All the windows have curtains and there are accessory curtains for the windshield so you can make it entirely private if you, um, want to do private things. With all the doors and windows open it's airy and comfortable, and sitting on the rear bench seat with a lemon soda out of the fridge and a bowl of blueberries on the table, reading a book, is almost decadent.
On the other hand if you really want to have the genuine sweaty and uncomfortable camping experience you can shut all the windows and does get really hot and stuffy inside fairly quickly. If you're really lucky you can trap a couple really angry yellowjackets inside. Your choice.
7:03 AM ::
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