Sunday, September 28, 2008
For someone who travels as much as I do, you’d think I’d be a better sleeper. I’m one of those people who checks into a hotel room and more often than not is back at the desk within 30 minutes asking if maybe there is another room. I try to be polite, I know it’s a little annoying. Sometimes the room smells funny and makes my throat itch, sometimes it’s right near the ice machine or the elevator, sometimes the wifi is broken, sometimes there’s a noisy party next door. Because I tend to arrive late, I usually get the worst room. Because I travel often, my trips overlap with other big events, often.
This time, for example, a hockey tournament in Marquette Michigan had taken up nearly every hotel room in the Marquette area, or so they told me when I asked for another room. I had hit the sweet-spot trifecta of ice machine noise, machine room noise [room next to pool pumps] and irregular rattley HVAC racket. Not only did this hotel not have another room ["I'll even take one with a broken TV" I said, I hear this helps sometimes] there wasn’t even another room in the area. I called a few places just to make sure and they all told me the same thing. I took a few benadryls and made a little nest in the actually-quite-quiet bathroom. I’m not proud. I had to work the next day, and if sleeping someplace ridiculous was going to allow me to sleep, then so be it. I care about it being dark, quiet, and warm enough, I don’t care if I have to sleep on the floor.
After the next day of library talks I still had a few more days in the UP so I did a bit more calling. Turns out the Imperial Motel, a funky old-looking place across the street had plenty of rooms. Sure they didn’t have wifi, or a working sauna, or cookies at the check-in desk, or free breakfast, but the room was quiet and dark and warm enough and the nice lady at the front desk, who also lived there, said “Nah we don’t take hockey teams…” I cut a dashing figure running back and forth across the divided highway with my luggage after checking out of the noisy chain hotel but I happily spent my next few days there. I wrote them a nice review on TripAdvisor.
More on the Michigan trip once I’ve gotten some sleep [in the NEW SILVER BED] and settled in some here.
Monday, September 22, 2008
So yeah I got a bicycle which has been mostly fun except like everything else with a computer machine inside it, it’s a little buggy and didn’t take photos of the most beautiful part of my nineteen mile bike ride on Thursday. Yes I said nineteen. No, this is not something you didn’t know about me, this is just a crazy anomaly where I went on what was supposed to be an eight mile ride and didn’t figure out until mile nine that I was still nine miles from home. What do you do?
I just got back from Sacramento and a flyby through San Franciso, talking to librarians about computers. I came home and waited in line behind a woman at the post office who sent something registered mail and was asking how she could tell if it had been delivered. The lady at the post office started out by saying “well you can type this number into the box at usps.com…” and wound up telling the lady “oh just call me and I’ll tell you” when it was clear that blahblahblahdotcom was not really a sensemaking phrase to this woman.
The airlines tried to send me to San Francisco, claiming it was the closest they could get me to Sacramento and gee they were sorry but it wasn’t their fault so no they wouldn’t pay to get me to Sacramento and yeah things are tough all over aren’t they? I sympathized because airline ticketing software makes library catalog software look sleek and modern. I got on the chatmachine and sent out a few plaintive wails to the friendosphere “um hey, how can I get from San Francisco to Sacramento at around midnight…?” and I had a ride before the lady came back with my boarding passes for my new suckier flight. Once I got to Chicago, I smiled and said “I’m a very nice person” to the gate agent of the (supposedly full) Sacramento flight and managed to get the last seat. I’ve been harboring a headcold for the past week or so, so despite feeling like my eyeballs were going to pop out of my head while we were landing it all worked out pretty well.
Now that I’m home I can even breathe out my nose. My friend gets to be a superhero without even having to drive me anyplace [actually he was already my designated driver from Sacto to Frisco (hee) the next day; I met him when he came to pick me up at the hotel - Ashton you are a wonderful man] and I find sometimes my magical thinking can play itself out in the real world with decent results. I’m heading to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on Wednesday. The UP is where I have gotten my second highest bowling score of all time. I am anticipating great things.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
So I had plans to do a big birthday wrap-up thing here sort of like what I did when I turned 30 but time sort of got away from me. I guess this is not surprising. Here are some birthday highlights
- I woke up to an online birthday card “signed” by hundreds of people. Whole thing schemed by my terrific boyfriend. Yay.
- Pancakes for breakfast with my friend N@.
- Drinks on the porch at Forrest and Kelly’s with my new bike and a lot of neighbors and friends.
- Housewarming/birthday party of sorts at my house with a bunch of other people (mad props to Stan who managed to hit both parties). Super thanks to Andrea and Corey who helped a lot with set-up and cake.
Some photos are here, there aren’t many. Since then I’ve gotten started with travel/speaking with a trip to Potsdam New York Thursday for an all-day training type of thing (notes here) which was fun but exhausting. I hit the travel just right so I was driving home through Grande Isle County at around sunset and had some lovely peaceful views of Lake Champlain and remote Vermont.
Today I’m heading down to Boston to see Jim’s band play, maybe see some friends and my sister and stay someplace a little wrmer. My new apartment has heat included but that heat doesn’t come on until October 1 and it’s been dipping into the low fifties here. Hello electric sheets! Thanks to everyone who helped make my birthday special and wonderful. I feel truly blessed.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
So the internet got me a bicycle. It’s both a long and a short story. Here is the bicycle.
It’s basically a purple bicycle with a cell phone and a solar powered battery charger. The cell phone has a camera and a GPS unit and is mounted behind the handlebars. The bike takes a photo a minute when it’s moving. It arrived today. You can see some videos of the people building them. There are 20 or 30 of them getting sent out to various people. You can follow the ybike tag on Flickr to see some photos, there’s not that much there yet.
The bike says Yahoo! on the side of it and at some level it’s a Yahoo! marketing project. You’ll notice that this appears to be my Sellout Week for whatever reason. Please note that while I get to keep the bike — a sort of cruiser-y type bike which is fun to ride but not very practical around here — I’m not otherwise employed by the Yahoo! machine. If I had to guess why I got this bike I’d say it’s because I know some of the Flickr folks, I take decent pictures and seem to understand the Flickr system, and I live in the most beautiful place on earth. Also it is my birthday soon. Really, I have no idea, but that’s different from it being random manna that falls from the sky. At some general level, the internet gave me this bicycle.
I had to promise to ride the bike every day. We’ll see how that goes. The last time I rode a bike more than three days in a row this decade I was at Burning Man. That said, I’m probably in the best shape I’ve been in all decade, so this will be an interesting experiment. You can go friend my bike if you want to but as you can see from some of the recent photos, the photo stream isn’t that exciting, especially at night.
I’ll save my analysis of the panopticon and the erosion of personal privacy and my place in that whole equation for another day likely in the not-too-distant future. For now I’m just like “Hey purple bike!”
I did that get home in the middle of the night thing again but this time it was because my train from New York City got in to Rutland at around midnight and then I had to drive an hour home. This time I did not nearly hit a moose. I also had a new EVDO card for my laptop which meant that I was online for a lot of the train trip which made it go a lot faster. Sneaky bossman, giving me new ways to work.
The trip to New York was a flyby, in on Wednesday, out on Friday. I was talking to some people about “digital nomadism” and I’d like to say that it was for some sociology white paper, but it was really for a Dell ad. I’ll let you know if my yammering face is going to be on the web somewhere. You know how I like to talk.
The photos from my NY trip are online here. I managed to see a lot of friends and go a lot of places in such a short time. The weather was great and I was feeling pretty good. I even charted my walking routes using mapmyhike.com which told me that I’d walked about seven miles in two days which told me that it was okay to eat rice krispie treats on the train on the way home.
Once I got home I had my obligatory all-online day. I used it this time to upgrade my main blogs to the latest WordPress and put my photos from DNC 2004 online. I had them up before in a sort of php-run photo essay, but now they’re on Flickr, tagged and everything. Today was Art Day over at Kelly and Forrest and we all went over there to do projects. I’ve been sending out change of address postcards so I made a bunch more today. My apologies to those of you who get a few of them because I’ve forgotten I already sent you one. I sure do have a ton of stamps.
I have no real plans for Labor Day — or as I call it Fake American Labor Day — except to shake my fist at all the places that are closed. I’ve got to get the house in decent shape for the weekend since I’m having people over to give me a birthday high five on Saturday [my real birthday is Friday]. If you’re in the area, consider a trip over.
I pretty much skipped the Virgo Month of Leisure last year and decided to get my lifeguard certificate instead. Two years ago Ola hadn’t yet left for the Peace Corps and I was preparing to caretake her house and greet my new roommate. I also made a list of what I’ve been doing about this time every year since 1998.
In 1998 I celebrated my 30th birthday in Guatemala and was pretty pleased with how it all went down. This year I’ll be celebrating my 40th, from my new apartment here in Vermont, and I’m also feeling pretty pleased. I’ll save the list-making for a few weeks from now, but this is just a peek at whether I’ll pull off any leisure time in the next thirty days.
As I’ve mentioned, I haven’t been working at the tech center this Summer which has been pretty good. It’s enabled me to unpack slowly and get settled here. I don’t start any real travelling-for-work for a few weeks, though I was in Maine last weekend and I’m doing a flyby to New York City at the end of next week. September will see me in Potsdam New York, Sacramento California and Marquette Michigan but then I’m not going anyplace far until I go to Kansas in October. I’m a little better equipped for travelling now also. I have a lightweight laptop and I just got an EVDO card from “work” [MetaFilter: the job that doesn't seem like a job] so I can connect from pretty much anyplace, even the dead zones in my apartment where my cell phone doesn’t work.
So, I suspect the next week or so may actually be leisurely, after that it’s anyone’s guess. Here are a few links to other things you might like to look at.
I came home from the transfer station today [i.e. the dump] and there was a little paper bag of cucumbers on my steps. They were delicious.
I didn’t realize until I actually went to get my mail that Box 345 may have been empty for a reason…. Not totally sure what is going on here, but they said they’d fix it.
