Want to buy a trashcan?

Yesterday afternoon, I needed to review some documents. So I printed them out, stacked up the 5 trashcans currently occupying all the foot-space under the side area of my desk, and got to work.

This morning, I needed to review some reports. So I printed them out, stacked up the 7 trashcans currently occupying all the footspace under the side area of my desk and spilling out into the floorspace in the middle of my cubicle, and got to work.

Just for reference, I currently occupy a three person cube. That's right, three. And today we've got 7 trashcans, even though yesterday we had 5. My cubemates and I on average throw out .25 trashcans' worth of stuff every day (today we might be up to .32, if you include the bonanza of destroyed doggy chew-toy recently contributed by my boss's black Lab).

Corporate life is sometimes very, very weird.

Frost

Last night I officially went from two homes to one - finally! After 3 car trips with final batches of stuff from Cupertino to Palo Alto, hours of vacuuming by yours truly, and more hours of shower-scrubbing by my guy, we finally closed the two garage doors of our original townhouse and drove away.

This morning when we woke up, my guy went outside and found our cars and the front yard covered by fallen red leaves, their edges covered in webs of frost. He brought in a leaf to show me, but of course the ice melted as he walked past the heater. So we both headed outside, heavy coats on - our feet crunched through the frozen grass. Yes, there is such a thing as winter in California!

Ahhhh. . . .

Downtown

"Ooooh, what an attractive man!" says the woman behind the counter at Caffe del Doge. She has a heavy Italian accent and fluffy blond hair. I turn to look for the attractive man (who wouldn't?) Behind me in line: one middle aged, average-looking guy in a yellow windbreaker and those silly stretchy biking shorts. The man grins hugely.

"Most attractive man all day so far!" agrees the other woman behind the counter. And to me: "Latte macchiato, piccolo, right?"

"Right," I say, and turn again to see what I'm missing in shiny-blue-bike-shorts guy.

The two women behind the counter laugh, not the basic flirty giggle you usually get around here, but a real laugh. Both women both seem incredibly awake for 8:30 am. I mean, they can flirt. "He's my husband," the first woman says to me, pointing at bike-short guy with her chin. "We don't really rate all the men."

I lean forward, keeping my voice low as if this were some kind of conspiracy. The oh-so-Italian guy with the neatly-folded newspaper standing next to me, elbows on the counter, doesn't move. "Would it be so bad if you did?" I ask.

She grins. "Well, we do, but we don't tell everyone."

Bike-short guy steps forward. "Cappuccino," he says, and I can see that both he and the woman behind the register think this is incredibly funny.

"Cappuccino again," says the woman, shaking her head: she doesn't believe it. I bet this happens every morning.

Latte macchiato, piccolo, in hand, I head back onto the street and start walking home.

What I'm really doing

Earlier this fall I signed up for a class: "Introduction to Interior Design" through Berkeley's extension program. Since then I've been driving madly up to San Franscisco one day a week, turning in homework assignments late, and reading the book well behind schedule. I am far from a model student.

And yet I now know:

• You need about 3' for a walkway between furniture & the wall.
  
• If the room looks "off," make everything symmetrical. That'll let you see what's not working.
  
• There is no standard solution to a room with a TV at one end and a fireplace at the other.
  
• It really is different when you draw it. It's different again when you draw it to scale.
  
• Balance matters. Once you draw the room, divide it into squares - and then into triangles. Sketch in the furniture on tracing paper. See?! See how it's not symmetrical and how two thirds of your belongings are crammed into a tenth of your floorspace?!
  
• This is kinda fun.
  
• I do not want to be an interior designer.
  

I'm not sure I ever thought I did want to be an interior designer, but it's an inevitable question when you take the giant step of signing up for night classes. Somewhere in the second (third?) hour of the first class, though, I realized that this is fun, but as careers go It's Just Not Me. Imagine: largely solo work, no one to delegate to, having to do your own marketing - blech. Not to mention drafting. I love scale sketches, but drafting is what happens after you're already done with the idea and just need to make it pretty. I feel about drafting much the way I feel about PowerPoint: you want me to do what?! That'll take hours. Here's a nice flowchart instead, now please just go get to work on it.

End result, though, is that I am getting out of the class exactly what I wanted: the ability to lay out a room so that it actually works, plus a few designs for custom furniture I plan to get built one of these days.

And I'm convinced that my solution for what to do with those pesky laptops + iPods + wallets + purses + cellphones + random batch of papers when you walk through the door at night and really just want to drop everything on the floor is . . . nearly perfect. Is a $995 price point too high?

Done!

It's all ours! Isn't it cute?!

Well, actually it's all ours as of December 1st. Meanwhile we get to run around our current home, madly sorting and packing (at least I do - I think the guy is more Zen about the whole moving thing). We signed the lease this morning. And while we were driving away from the leasing office, we realized that not only is it walking distance to downtown Palo Alto Ave, it's also walking distance to downtown Menlo Park! Two for the price of one.

Isn't this a great photo? This is one of my favorite kinds of weather: perfect California winter. Wet streets, not too cold, soft colors, just a little mist in the air.

You can't see it here, but the house is actually across from a creek, rather than another row of houses. And we'll be able to just barely hear the train (I like trains, so this is a good thing, and for those of you who knew me when I lived in Louisville, no, it's not near enough to rattle the windows!).

After feeling so uncertain yesterday, today I can't wait to move in. If you're someone I called while I was stressed out about deciding, thank you for holding my hand! And come for a visit real soon. . . .

Girly

I am posting this photo purely for my own amusement. This is my Halloween costume - the first time in years I dressed up, thanks to the Los Altos Costume Bank & the Junior League (I previously had no idea what the Junior League do. Apparently they rent costumes. Go Junior League go! I swear, if I'd known it was this easy I'd have been dressing up for years.)

My new Halloween strategy: wear the things you couldn't possibly get away with any other time. At work I wear faded jeans & t-shirts; on the weekends, I wear more t-shirts, fuzzy sweaters, & occasionally a leather coat. But come on, when do I get to wear bright orange tulle?! Not to mention sparkly purple wings.

Added benefit: if you have a shiny gold wand, you can tease a cat and mesmerize a baby. Or, in the words of the baby's father, "those things are like baby crack!" :)

Ambivalence

We scheduled an appointment to look at the house at 9am - the latest we could make it and still both get to work for our respective 10am meetings. It wasn't a big house: from the street we could see how far back it reached, and it wasn't far. But it had a one-car garage, and a yard with a tree (and way too much ivy, but that's another story).

An absent-minded man named Fred showed up at 9:20, miniature very excited Doberman in tow, to show it to us. It had hardwood floors and a working fireplace. At 3 bedrooms (small) and 1200+ square feet, it was just barely big enough. It wasn't recently redone - the kitchen cabinets couldn't possibly be more 1960s - but that makes it a blank slate, ready for us to put our mark on.

We sent in our application forms & our credit reports. We explained that we want to move because of our current commutes, and to be near a downtown. We crossed our fingers.

And tomorrow morning, we have an appointment to go sign the lease papers. This is good news - it's just what we wanted! But the place we live now is the first place we lived together. It's spacious and has a two-car garage and an amazing landlord and besides, I'm sentimental about it.

And yes, that's balanced out by the traffic on highway 85, and the complete lack of anywhere to go for a walk, and the rock trucks that roll past our bedroom at 6:30 am going bang-bang-bang, and the living room being way too dark. I have no doubt that moving is the right idea.

I'm just sorry I can't shove our current living room over next to the kitchen, get rid of the rock trucks, re-route all the other commuters off 85, and carry the house magically through the air to a place with a real downtown.

I am not making this up

My favorite quote overheard at the company Halloween party this afternoon:

"Hey Sam! That dog is wearing the same dress as you!"

Yup, pretty much sums it up.

Oooooh . . . nifty

I love maps. The idea that one person can represent space on paper and as a result, share info about that space with someone who's never been there is, I think, one of the neatest of all time. During my crazy roadtrip days, I read maps the way I read novels: to see what else was out there, to get ideas for what might be next, and to pass the time (if you don't think you can read a map to pass the time, either you don't have a good enough map or you're not reading carefully enough! A good map should point out random things like fake Dutch windmills build purely to attract tourists driving through Minnesota. Really.).

So I think Mapbuilder is one of the neatest websites out there. Not only do you get to look at maps, you get to write on them!!! Wow. Cool. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't report on ease of use and so on, but soon I will. Soon!

Road trips kick *!&@!!!

My guy has just left his Horrible Lawfirm Job and taken an in-house position at yet another of the Valley's Big Tech Companies. To celebrate, we went back to our roots & took a roadtrip - which I happily announced to co-workers as "I'm driving to Canada!"

Isn't the Oregon high desert just the coolest thing you've ever seen?

From Pacific North...

Check out how you can see our car's shadow in the photo - yes, this was shot out the window on highway 97, a few miles off I-5 heading north to Klamath Falls.

Road trip poetry means 297 miles to the border, a semi dipping its headlights at you at 2 am as you pass at 90 miles an hour, the sudden shock of dark volcanic rocks through the headlining clouds. The telephone poles blur and the lanes narrow from eight to two at the turnoff in the aptly named town of Weed. I remember driving I-5 with chains last New Year's, and I'm grateful for the October heat and fall leaves this time instead.

Huh.

The thing about the internet is that really does let anyone publish anything. No, this isn't a new or particularly timely insight - but it struck me anew (I love the word 'anew'!) this morning. I have my homepage set to display links from wikiHow. Here's today's collection:

How to Overcome the Fear of Marriage

How to Make SIM Card Earrings

How to Know if Your Cat Is Sick

I love this! I mean, is there anything else in life you need to know?

I wonder how they pick the links.

Sweet techno-victory

This weekend, I didn't buy a TiVo. Ha!

My guy and I recently had a DVD-player breakdown. This led us to the idea that we should start recording TV on our current hard drive. We don't have TiVo or rent a DVR from Comcast, because we feel about subscription fees the way most people feel about visits to the dentist (besides, back when I taped things onto videotapes, I owned the darn thing I was recording onto. I controlled it. It was mine. Why should I settle for less now that we've gone all digital?).

The obvious solution seemed to be to hack our desktop computer - after all, it's got the storage space, right? The cool part is that I just finished getting it working, it adds to my geek cred, and it was easy. It was also cheap, at least when you compare it to other electronic gadgetry out there. So here's my setup:

• Existing desktop computer: 200Gb hard drive, some kind of Pentium chip, etc.
  
• New Hauppauge 350 TV tuner + PVR card - $133
  
• Splitter to send our incoming cable +internet signal into two separate jacks (the TV tuner + cable internet modem) - $15
  
• GBPVR software - free (tho I'll send the guy a donation once I've run it a little longer)
• Monthly subscription fees - none! Works just beautifully without 'em.
  

The only things I can't do with this setup:

• Watch my recordings on the TV in the living room. If/when I care, I can hook things up using Hauppauge's MediaMVP.
  
• Watch one show while recording another. If/when I care, I can install a second tuner card.
  

Sticky points:

• Rearranging the wild jungle of cables under the desk. It's still wild, but no longer actually prevents me from reaching the printer.
  
• Figuring out which tuner card to buy. Hauppauge seems to be industry standard, but they've got a 150, a 250, a 350, and a 500. I opted for the 350 because it had a bunch of enthusiastic user quotes re: picture quality, and because it has TV-out jacks. If we ever put the real TV in the same room as the computer, I can use those TV-out jacks to hook my computer directly up to the TV.
  
• Figuring out which software to use. Hauppauge's own software is a pain. My options were SageTV (costs $100), BeyondTV (costs something, and the UI got poorer reviews than SageTV's), MythTV (works on Linux, not Windows), and GBPVR. I was sceptical of GBPVR at first since it's free & has no manual, but it got so many user raves that I decided to try it. It turns out to be some of the easiest-to-install-&-use software I've ever run across, and the support Wiki & the user forums had all the info I needed.
  
• Installing Microsoft's dotNet 2.0 framework. Windows told me I already had it, so I didn't realize at first I needed to install it. Grrr. Evil Windows!
  
• Configuring the Mpeg decoder settings on the GBPVR software. This actually wasn't hard, I just forgot I needed to do it.

And there you have it. It's up, it's running, and I'm recording Grey's Anatomy on Thursday.

9/11

I wasn't there. I was in LA. I didn't lose a family member or close friend. I can't write anything intelligent about this. But still. . . .

On the west coast we should be woken early by shrill phone calls. We should wander out into the street, aimlessly, and talk to people we don't know and would normally never speak to. We should remember. We should tie up the phone lines with east coast calls and spend hours watching the news. We should laugh nervously when a little crop-duster plane flies low over a field, doing what it always does, and turn to the person next to us to see if, just for a second, they too imagined it much larger, flaming down from the sky.

Why isn't this a national day of mourning?

The Ironic Doppelganger

A couple of weeks back, my guy & I drove out to Half Moon Bay to go to the beach. On our way through town, we spotted a new bookstore, so we wandered in. While browsing for anything new by Michael Faber (I can't decide if The Crimson Petal & the White is a great book, a decadent guilty pleasure, or just a fun ride), I ran across this book.

Note the author's name.

Note that the author lives in the Bay Area, has hair about the color mine gets when I spend a lot of time in the sun, seems to be about my height, and appears to weigh about what I do.

Note that I didn't write this book.

What the . . . ??!!?

When I first picked it up, my stomach turned over. I think my fingers shook a little bit. I looked over my shoulder to see who - or what - was watching me. All those sci-fi & fantasy books I read as a kid, not to mention the time one of my friends asked why I'd been in San Francisco one weekend and not waved back at her but I hadn't actually been there, came bubbling up from the unused, not-looked-at-too-often recesses of my mind.

I have to admit this feels damn weird.

I'm also pondering a new question: when I send my current story out to magazines in October, what name do I send it under?

It's going to be pretty funny if I wind up taking my guy's last name after all - and do it to maintain my own separate identity, rather than to establish new credentials as part of a couple. Just when I was getting comfy with the dictates of feminism. . . .

One small step . . .

I've always been irritated that birth control pills are prescription-only. I don't need a prescription for the over-the-counter cold medicine that makes my heart race double-time & causes mood swings; why the heck do I need a prescription for an optional drug whose main possible side effects are pimples and reduced monthly cramps?

I'm hardly a conspiracy-theory junkie, but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to start picketing street corners, ranting about the evils of a paternalistic, pseudo-Victorian society trying to control women's sexuality.

So I am naturally overjoyed that Plan B has just been approved to be sold over the counter. My only question: how long is it going to take for the rest of us? Come on, we don't want to incentivize people to plan poorly . . . do we?

Adventures in networking

Last week our DVD player started making sad little staticky noises instead of actually playing any sound. Hmph. So much for watching News Radio while lazily eating pizza.

Possible solutions: we could clean our DVD player . . . buy a new DVD player . . . or we could network the whole house! Use our 200 GB hard drive to record TV! Download movies! Set up our internet connection to run thru the walls on our electrical wiring! Copy our old VHS tapes to a portable hard drive!

Naturally we chose option three.

We haven't set it up yet, but here's what I've learned so far about doing it (as well as prices, for my own amusement in case they come down before I get around to doing this):

• Total cost to get the TV network set up should be $300-$400. Wow, less than I thought!
• No need for Windows Media Center edition - in spite of Microsoft's nasty website that tells me I need to buy a whole new computer!
• We'll need a TV tuner & recorder to install into the computer - $134
• We'll also need a Media extender to get the signal from the computer into the TV - $90
• Two powerline ethernet adapters to get the network signal from the room with the computer into the room with the TV. Sounds like the older ones are too slower, but the latest from NetGear might work: see Powerline Networking that Doesn't Suck, and Mossberg's column
  
• Possibly Sagetv, which supposedly has a better UI to navigate recorded stuff & find new things to record - $100 (including the site license re: the TV networked in the other room)
• This page has great details on how to set up recording from various sources. Another good reference guide is here.
  

I also have a bunch of questions:

• Can we watch DivX movies and/or streaming movies with this setup (eg CinemaNow - and is there a better site than this one)?
  
• The TV tuner supports 125 channels. BBC America is on channel 162. Will this work?

And of course, the final question: if we clean the DVD player, will that solve the initial problem?

You've been where?

Peru smells of dust and diesel and the leftovers of crops burning in the fields and incense and cedar and good things cooking. I gorge myself on fresh squeezed pineapple juice and say "no" and "no" and "no" to all of the dozens of small children trying to sell me postcards and shine my hiking boots. On the train out of Cusco I marvel at the fact that I can now afford a seat with a view (so unlike that previous anguished trip six years ago, but still containing brief flashes of vivid memory: last time I sat on this side of the train, last time I ate breakfast at this bakery).

I chat with cabdrivers and the women who keep the hotel desks running. I say, "so much new construction!" and they tell me yes, the Lima airport has been privatized and is now run by a German, see the new hotel? Be careful after dark, don't call attention to yourself or buy from street vendors. Enjoy the torn-up, graceful beauty of the slivered, shadowy, squatter-filled mansions in the center of the city and be sure to visit the mall on the edge of the sea - it's amazing. If you like you can take a bus up to the peak and see the city - 10 million and growing - spread out below you.

They ask: Have you been to Cusco? Did you like it? Will you come back? Have you seen the fortress at Ollantaytambo?

I take a photo of three doorways: one Inca, one Spanish, one modern. The doorways are lined up on a street that was first laid out over six hundred years ago by people I can barely imagine, but whose profiles I encounter daily behind a shop counter, above a business suit, mortaring a wall with modern mud. Behind the Inca doorway a dog barks, and I hear the smack of a soccer ball against the wall.

I walk for hours every day.

I am here for a week but it feels longer, and when I return to work I can no longer remember the combination for the cable that secures my laptop computer to my desk.

Boxes of . . .

Sitting peacefully in my garage are no less than four boxes of books I don't intend to keep. I've got books that looked good but weren't, books by famous authors that bored me, and books that just weren't, well, me. I won't read any of them again, so the question is "what now?" My available shelf space is in high demand, thanks to a guy who loves books and reading as much as I do, and collecting a little more. For the past couple of months I've been thinking about selling these books on Amazon, but I haven't actually gotten around to it - and it seems like a lot of work. Maybe this is a better option? Seems less painful, and I know just enough about online shopping fraud to be leery of getting into the money-related actual merchant game. Now . . . will I get around to it?

Thursday night

Exhaustion and heat osmose in, lazily, through the floor-height glass-paned windows.
Today the air conditioner is off, and I am stuck at 7 pm
to the fabric of my black desk chair
by an upcoming conference call with India - twelve and one half
hours ahead of me around the world.

The air conditioner is off. We turn the thermostat down
and email Facilities (who we suspect go home at 5 pm, day in and out,
their lives untroubled by product launches - but perhaps
there are other consolations, new cafes and traffic flow to solve).
There is no answer.

We eat take-out Thai food from recyclable corn-based cardboard boxes
in the coolest conference room we can find.
(It's on Facilities' side of the building. Go figure.)
The room smells of hot grease and dry-erase marker; the early evening sun
glares on the projector screen but we, rebellious, refuse to close the blinds.

The phone rings: India, and a dual-continented policy discussion
taking place simultaneously at night and morning.
Can we ever really agree? We all knew each other in the same context
before the India office opened. "It's hot here," we in California say,
but we know, this time of year, it's really hotter in Hyderabad.

Responsibility

This morning my guy and I had a conversation that went roughly like this:

Me: We need to get plane tickets for our friends' wedding in Hawaii. It's really soon.
Him: Yep, but I'm super busy right now - can't do it. If you can, great - otherwise it'll have to wait.
Me: But I'm busy too! I can't do it either.
Him: Well. . . .

Now my guy basically meant what he said: he's busy, he can't think about plane tickets right now. But my internal, gut-level response goes something like this:

Me: Oh no, he's expecting me to do it! How can he do this to me - he knows how busy and stressed-out I am right now! I can't do it! Gaaaaah!

Why is this? My guy didn't actually say he was expecting me to do anything at all - and based on past history, I know he wasn't thinking it either. I just assumed it.

The other interesting thing is that my guy doesn't think this way. If I say, "I can't do such-and-such," he takes that info at face value, without assuming any responsibility to deal with such-and-such himself.

So what causes the difference? Is it how we were raised? A gender thing? Based on how much sleep we've each gotten lately? And is there some way I can learn, or at least temporarily borrow, the way he thinks?

From listening to female friends talk about this kind of thing, I know I'm not the only woman stuck in this hamster-wheel cycle of taking on more responsibility, more ownership for the mechanics of daily life, than I need to (or than my significant other even asks me to).

My highly scientific conclusion: this is not good! I don't know what's causing it, but I don't like it at all. I don't have a fix, either, but I'm crossing my fingers that putting this idea out there makes me more aware that yes, there is another way to think. And over the next couple of weeks while my work schedule goes crazy, I'll be trying to remind myself that just because my guy can't deal with something, doesn't mean that I have to. There are very few things that really have to get done, after all.

Now . . . how often will I remember to tell myself this? And is it fair to ask my guy to remind me?

Morning

It is 8:20 am. I have a melon smoothie and a dried cherry scone. I'm sitting outside at a picnic table.

The only downside is that I'm at work. Over the past week I've reached that lovely point in exhaustion when you work not because you have a deadline or have a great idea on a project, but because it's become the default activity - it's what you do because you're awake. I recognize that this is not ideal, but this week I'm doing it anyway. Right now I'm clocking 11-13 hours at work every single day - and I'm not expecting today to be different, even if it is Friday.

On the upside, I'm stubbornly holding out on work-free weekends.

So what's next? When does this change? When does work become routine, rather than an ongoing challenge?

Admittedly, I'm not very enthusiastic about most things that are routine (brushing my teeth comes to mind), so perhaps I should be careful what I ask for.

What I ask for at the moment is sleep - and to wake up without thinking, "oh yeah, what I should do about that policy is. . . ."

Microbrews!

The purpose of this post is entirely self-indulgent. A new hire at work sent out a desperate plea to old-timers, asking where he might acquire some local microbrews. I'm saving their replies here for my own self-indulgent delectation. Haven't tried any of 'em yet, but soon, soon. . . .

The best result: somebody's done a cool integration of Google Maps with Pacific coast breweries.

And now, the rest of the list, in no order whatsoever:

Magnolia, a brewpub at the corner of Haight and Masonic in San Francisco: http://www.magnoliapub.com/

21st Amendment, in San Francisco: http://www.21st-amendment.com/

Beach Chalet, in San Francisco: http://www.beachchalet.com/

Pyramid, in Berkeley: http://www.pyramidbrew.com/alehouses/berkeley.php

Jupiter, in Berkeley: http://www.jupiterbeer.com/

Triple Rock in Berkeley: http://www.triplerock.com/

San Francisco Brewing: http://www.sfbrewing.com/

Rogue Brewery (from Oregon, but have a pub in SF)

Thirsty Bear: http://www.thirstybear.com/

Mountain View's Tied House: http://www.tiedhouse.com/

Faultline (mediocre reviews): http://www.faultlinebrewing.com/

Devil's Canyon: http://www.devilscanyonbrewery.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=15

Half Moon Bay brewery: http://www.hmbbrewingco.com/

Firehouse Grill and Brewery: http://www.firehousegrill.com/

Not a brew pub, but reputedly has a large selection of good beer on tap: Toronado on Haight St (between Steiner and Fillmore): http://www.toronado.com/

Microbrewery of mead (not beer): Rabbit's Foot: http://www.rabbitsfootmeadery.com/

Mendocino County: Mendocino brewery in Hopland, Anderson Valley Brewery in Booneville, North Coast Brewery in Fort Bragg

Marriage, happiness, and justice for all

. . . or at least all who want 'em.

A few minutes ago I wrote a really brilliant pro-gay-marriage letter to our CA senators via this link, which my friend L very kindly sent me. Doubtless she knew that I was busy/lazy enough to have trouble finding time to do this on my own!

I was hoping the website would CC me on what I wrote, because trust me, it really was great. But they didn't. So I'm recapping here, in hopes it makes L happy :)

As a straight married woman I very, very strongly support gay marriage. It's hard enough to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with, without having half the population artificially but legally cut out of the running. And I'm appalled & insulted that the "straight marriage only" folks would imagine that gay marriage could threaten my own relationship (or anybody else's, either).

I support love & happiness & if somebody thinks they've found the person they should marry, then more power to them. We should be cheering their faith and optimism, not trying to make life harder for them.

I also support gay marriage because stable two-parent families are best for children. Happy children with solid families are good for the other children they go to school with, and on average grow up into happy, stable adults who do good things for society. And if gay married couples choose to adopt, there are fewer kids in foster care - again, better for everybody.

Not only that, but a ton of studies show that married folks spend less time in hospitals, have longer lifespans, are on average happier, and a bunch of other good stuff. Again, all this benefits society as a whole (and reduces government spending on things like ER visits).

Not only do I support gay marriage, it seems like such an obviously good idea that I can't imagine any reason not to support it. I'm only surprised that support is necessary - shouldn't we have said, "yup, that's a no-brainer," and moved on by now?

House of straw: way cool construction

A long time back, I got interested in straw bale construction: great insulation, low cost, zero termite attraction . . . the advantages just go on and on and on (though really, I just like the idea of heaving straw bales around. Go sweat equity!).

More recently, my friend J revealed that she, too, thinks this idea is cool (nice, since I often suspect that people I rant to about this are really just humoring me) - and sent me a link to David Ward's Straw Jet Machine. Inspiring quote:

"Imagine . . . a new insulation . . . made from natural materials, and had no toxic emissions. Now imagine that this new insulation was also strong enough to replace the studs in the walls, the rafters in the roof, and the joists in the floor. Now imagine that this insulation was made from a material that is available in virtually limitless supply, environmentally friendly, and simple enough to manufacture in the most underdeveloped countries."

How can you not love this?!?

And so I wonder. If my guy and I really ever do buy that Victorian flat in the city, could we renovate using this stuff? If or when we get to that point, I fully intend to find out.

This year

After years and years of saying, "I want to be a writer!" in a stubborn, hopeful voice, I've decided (or maybe just noticed) that this is the year I sit down and do it.

I am two scenes down on a story called "Missing 9xxxx." I plan to be four scenes down by the weekend.

Ha!

After years of telling myself I just didn't have the right tools (laptop, perfect fountain pen, perfect ballpoint, perfect notebook, no, the other perfect notebook), I have settled down with a fully manual 1930s portable typewriter that is pleasingly noisy when I bang on the keys and pleasingly silent when I don't. More importantly, it bears no relationship to the computer I bang on for hours each day at work. It has no glimmering screen, and no mouse. And as such, it doesn't aggravate my tech-unhappy wrists. There's this to be said for doing it the hard way: muscles are designed to take abuse; tendons aren't.

Of course, there's the interesting fact that there's no way to back up, erase, or otherwise edit. Which is why I dumped four pages of manuscript into the recycling bin last night: each one of them bore a single sentence that just didn't work.

How pretentious is that? A single sentence.

But still . . . I'm finally doing it.

Again: ha!

English & immigration

This is a rant. I've been hearing a lot about immigration lately, and I just can't restrain myself. I can't believe that we're actually considering making illegal immigrants promise to learn English as a condition of becoming legal residents.

"It's necessary!" I hear on the radio. "People living here should value this country. Immigrants must become useful, producing members of society. And to fully participate in the American dream, immigrants have to know English!"

And okay, I totally agree with all that. The US is a great and valuable place, with a lot of good things about it (gotta say it, in spite of my left-wing nature & the complete screw-ups that are Iraq, Afghanistan, and our entire current relationship with Europe). And sure, people who live here should contribute to society (and by "contribute to society," I basically mean look after themselves and not just mooch off other people's taxes for years and years). And finally, it seems pretty obvious to me that living in the US is way, way easier if you speak English.

But. But, but, but. What does any of that actually have to do with illegal immigration? There are lots of US-born US citizens who don't value the country, who mooch off of various social programs for no good reason, and who don't speak English. We don't even have English (or any other language) fluency as a high-school graduation requirement. Arguably we should - but that's a separate debate.

We also don't apply these standards to legal immigrants. We only apply them, irrelevantly, to one small group. And arguably, it's the group who's worked hardest to be here. Illegal immigration isn't easy, after all.

Of course, that ignores the issue of whether we really regard illegal immigration as a crime. I mean, it's illegal, so yeah, I guess we do, sort of, kind of, in a wishy-washy uncertain way. But there are still benefits to getting here illegally - and as long as benefits outweight downsides, people who do the math and come up with "cross the border" are going to keep on crossing. We don't even seem to know whether we want them to or not - and as long as that's the case, we're going to keep creating inconsistent, illogical policies that half-serve both goals, and pull everyone involved in both directions.

And pretending otherwise is just dumb.

Silly kids - windmills are for grownups

One evening last week I found myself standing in the middle of the living room, arms extended, torso rotating, waist bending. "One!" I counted. "Two! Three! Four!" Bend, twist, stand back up.

"Why did I hate this so much back in middle school P.E. class?" I thought. When I got home that night, the very first thing I'd wanted to do was stretch and twist and generally work the kinks out of my back and shoulders and hips. And yet years ago, I loathed this. I loathed all of P.E. I dreaded Mrs. L, a perfectly nice brown-haired woman who nonetheless made me run laps around the gravel track next to the cow field that was my middle school playground.

I spent the hours before P.E. class trying to figure out how to get out of it - and now, years later, I can't wait for the chance to do the exact same activities. Sometime around 5 pm I start thinking about how soon I can get up out of my desk chair and away from my computer and start swinging my arms around. My guy is trying to teach me to throw a baseball properly, and I love every minute.

"What the hell?" I think. This person who's positively panting to go to the gym just isn't me.

And then it hits me: P.E. isn't for kids. Given the chance, kids will happily run up and down the outside stairs at their grandparents' house for hours just because their own house doesn't have outside stairs. No, P.E. is for the adult who's just spent five hours at a desk grading science exams. P.E. is for the parents in office buildings who just wish they were outside getting bonked on the head with a basketball.

Huh. It's a new and startling thought. All those years I never realized what was really going on.

What else am I missing?

Privacy & Me

I suspect everybody who ventures online wonders the same thing: just how connected do I want to be, anyway?

There are news stories about colleges using Facebook to investigate parties with underage drinking (oh, the horror!). There are news stories about employees getting fired when they blog inappropriately (try to get six people to agree on a definition of "inappropriate." Just try.). And I work for a search engine, so I'm fundamentally aware that if it's out there & it's a public page, it might get, well, found. That's what search engines do.

So what does that mean for my little collection of blogs, for linking to my friends' blogs, for creating a profile for myself? I'm not exactly paranoid, and no, I don't expect "the Government" to show up at my house because I'm interested in cooking and tech and travel. I don't expect any concrete negative consequences at all, in fact. But some vague & nameless concern nags at me anyway. Once the info's out there, I don't control where it goes or how it's interpreted, even though I created it. If you find my friends & my interests, you find me. . . .

Then again, I'm writing a cooking blog - and there's really not much point if no one finds it, or if I anonymize it so far that it puts everyone to sleep.

Oh well. In the short term, I'm just grateful that there's some grad student in Arizona who's got the same name I do. She's a geologist, and she's published so many articles that if you search for me, you find nothing but pages & pages of her. Clearly, rocks rock. (Yes, Mom, the pun is for you).