Yesterday was deemed "one of the country's worst days this year for air travel." And hey check me out, I made it home! Well, I made it home this morning actually at a time which is late in my world but not obscene. I had a good time in Ann Arbor and even a decent time in the Detroit airport where I was waiting, loaded on to the plane, loaded off the plane, delayed and finally transported home where we had to stay in a holding pattern over Burlington waiting for the wind to die down. By the time I got back, the Thrifty lot place where my car was had closed. Thanks to my cellular telemophone I had arranged with the guys to leave my car in their parking lot, key under the floormat. I got a ride to it from a guy on my flight. I drove home on an empty foggy highway which was lit mostly by the moon. I pulled into my driveway as the church bell struck three, noticed that someone had mowed my lawn while I was away, and went immediately to bed.
I talk a lot about places I travel as not really being my idea of a fantasy. I got home and got out of the car and heard the river rushing behind the house and the peepers making all of their noises and saw the freaky looking moon hanging over the neighbors' yard and figured maybe it's just tough to top this.
I made another little video, this one is actually decent and may transcend boring though I do use the adjective "little" far too often. It's just me walking around my town but I managed to put a vocal track (all in one take!), and and audio track and keep some of the original sounds and I think the mix works pretty well. Every time I go to the VT International Film Festival, I leave thinking "I'd like to make a little movie." This year I finally got off my ass and learned to do it. Like many technological things, it's not hard to do at all, but I'm finding it a real challenge to learn to do well.
wonky bad week turns into good week - recap
Mar 31, 2007
It's tough when it's school vacation. This is not because there are more teenagers on the street or because the library isn't open as much. It's tough when it's school vacation because the pool schedule gets erratic becaue most lifeguards are on vacation. When I'm having an otherwise good day that goes south, I can't work it off in the pool. Or, I may show up all ful of piss and vinegar expecting to swim and then can't. In this case only vegetable soup will save me, apparently. I'm up to 35 miles for the year.
In any case, these are the milestones from this week, both up and down.
Ola is getting relocated to Botswana. I got a series of confusing emails from her where it looked like she was leaving Kiribati because of safety/transportation issues (not hers personally as I understand it, but the country's generally) and might be back soon. I went through about 24 hours of "Oh my god, I just got this place working like a finely oiled machine" Then she emailed and said she'd be going to Botswana instead. She's getting back to California on Monday and heading out to Africa in mid-April. I will likely not see her, but I'll probably talk to her on the phone. She seems okay with the change, but she'll have done more plane travel than me without all the fun vacation part of the trip. I'll keep you posted on her whereabouts.
I had a Kafkaesque run-in with the health insurance company. They bill on the 15th of the month. If you haven't paid by the first day of the next month they cancel your health insurance, effective immediately. Now, I'll jump through a lot of hoops for low cost health care, but I sent a check and... something happened to it. I was jetlagged, who knows where I sent it, or maybe it arrived and slipped through a crack. By the time I figured it all out, it was Tuesday and I spoke to many nice people who claimed that the ONLY way, the only way to pay my health insurance bill was via check, via the mail. No person could take my money, no phone representative would take my credit card, no state worker would confirm my check had been delivered, no one would take my eleven dollars. Their back up plan was to give me an address to Fedex a check to when I asked where I could drop one off. I was very nice and, in my most pleasant phone manner asked if they were really going to cancel my health insurance because their system was so antiquated they did not have a post-1950's system for taking my money. Eventually I got through to someone whose job title included the word "grievance" and was given an address, in Waterbury, where just this once, I could drop a check off. It felt like a somewhat hollow victory but at least I don't have to worry about getting his by a bus.
I went to see a fancy ear doctor about the ringing in my ears that's been going on for the past few months. She says my hearing is fine, but the ringing may not go away. It was nicer the way she said it than the "suck it up" way my doctor said it. I'm not being driven crazy by it, but that's partly because I've been doing my best to ignore it -- been working okay so far. Don't expect to hear anything else from me on the subject, it's one of those weird topics where endless talking about it actually makes it seem worse than it is.
I got an article published in Library Media Connection magazine (yay!) and they screwed it up (boo!). One of the hardest things for me about writing is that I dislike being edited, a lot. I've found a few editors I work really well with, but maybe it's the profession or maybe me being a perfectionist but I swear I've had more errors injected into my articles via editing than taken out of them. In this case a perfectly good screenshot that I'd supplied was replaced with a different screenshot, of a completely different part of the website, that didn't illustrate what the caption said it did. My first inkling that this had happened was seeing it in print. I got a very nice apology from the editor but also a "gee I don't do layout" admission so it's still a mystery what exactly happened.
Good things that happened included my Excel class that has been going gangbusters and my hilarious (to me) sample spreadsheet that I whipped up for Seven Dwarves LLC for everyone to work on. I also got a copy of my friend Meredith's book Social Software in Libraries in which I am one of the two back-cover blurbers. I went to Maine last weekend for a MetaFilter meetup and to see some friends and it was a great excuse for a day away. You can see some dorky pictures here. I also went to Small Dog and finally bought a dongle for my newish laptop so that I can use it with a video projector. I then came home and showed it off to Forrest and Kelly who already had one that they never used. It never occurred to me to ask "hey before I drive off the Burlington, do you guys have a spare dongle?" I made another little semi-boring movie. The house next door is for sale again if anyone would like to be my neighbor. The property value has been decreased by one birdhouse which I stole because squirrel piss destroyed one of mine. Won't you be my neighbor?
If last year was any indication, it will take another week until I feel that my entire brain is back from Australia but I've done better at waking up before noon lately, though the obscene phone call (I think it was obscene, I couldn't really make out what the kid was saying) at 1 am didn't help. I've decided to learn a new skill: making little movies. I spent part of our road trip hanging out the window taking little videos of the Great Ocean Road and side of the road sights. When I got back I tried to put them together into something that wasn't just clip-clip-clip-end. Then I tried it again with some different scenery yesterday. Neither of them are high art filmmaking but they have some neat things to look at and some okay music. Every year when I go to the VT Film Festival I say "I should make a little movie" and now I think I may know how to go do that. Also, thanks to YouTube, you can see them.
6/09/2007