friends

There are 4 posts tagged friends.

a few people I met, remet, or just enjoyed seeing in SFO

Hey, that photo that I put up yesterday was on Serious Eats, check me out! It may also interest you to know that MetaFilter was one of Time magazine’s top blogs and that I was interviewed for an article on Ask MetaFilter that was in Slate this week. Here’s another AskMeFi story you might like.

The big difference between hanging out up in Vermont and hanging out in San Francisco is that most of the people I met or hung out with have URLs I can point people to that are live active websites. Most of my friends here have websites that are sort of functional. I am somewhere in the middle. Here are some URLs that go to people that I met.

  • Peter – his website has been the same pretty much since I’ve known him but now he’s married and has a kid.
  • George – actually a lady, she is looking for work after doing cool things at Flickr for a long time.
  • Mike – I sort of met at SXSW and now we’re twitter buddies enough so that when I had a few free hours I could tweet “you free?” and he was like “sure” and we chitchatted about drupal and web nonsense and it was totally fun.
  • Judith – my long time friend and owner of Lyle, who always shows me a good time.
  • Bryan – probably the person I’ve known online the longest without actually meeting. His indy junior map graced my travel page for a while. Now I use DOPPLR.
  • Courtney – I met her briefly at Burning Man but got to eat burritos with her She created the cloud bed, she is a genius.
  • Liz – is at the Berkeley ischool, we talked about library stuff. She knows my friend Aaron.
  • Mike – used to work at Adaptive Path with a bunch of people I know, we yammered on for a long time about… transportation systems.
  • Mike – another Mike who, towards the end of the party when I finally said who I was, said “oh, from MetaFilter?”
  • Erika – went to Dartmouth and is taller in real life than she seems in her headshots.
  • Molly – I met again at SXSW this year and we talked about academia and Princeton and pneumatic tubes.
  • Jennifer – gave us a sober ride home from the party for which I am eternally grateful.
  • Yorvit and Roswell – part of the household that took me home when I was trapped at the airport and fed me snacks and watched the Oscars with me. Wonderful folks, maybe without websites?

That’s who I know off the top of my head. I figured I’d drop this all here in case people were curious.

how to make an introvert

40-something women

This is a picture of me and my good friend Sharyn at my Mom’s house over holidaytimes. I just got back from a week away which is pretty much the longest I’ve been anywhere in the past few years except Australia. I’m not really an introvert as people who know me pretty much know. I get energized by hanging out with people, I like to talk, I have a lot of friends and acquaintances. That said, I also live alone and have a lot of routines and subroutines that involve long periods of silence, stillness or solitude. Everyone’s routines get disrupted when they travel, see family and/or get outside their little home oasis and mine are not an exception.

I was happy to see my sister and her (about to be sold, omg) house. I liked getting to spend sort of lazy hang-out and walk around time with my Mom and the house I grew up in. I enjoyed spending some holidaytime with my boyfriend and his family and their full house of people who have known each other forever. I got to bring my friend Sharyn into the wilds of Boxboro and introduce her to my family and friends and spend more than a day with her for the first time in our decade+ long friendship. I had a cat or dog on hand at all times. I nearly poisoned myself with amazing food and lack of exercise. I stayed up late and slept in like I was a teenager.

Yesterday I drove home after driving in to Boston to drop Sharyn off at the train. I got lost and wound up meandering all over hellandgone to figure out how to get no 93 (yes I KNOW it’s right there, no I couldn’t find it). At some point I figured it out and started pointing the car approximately northwards, but the whole bumbadabumbada no-particular-place-to-go meandering around was something that is part of my daily life up here and was no part of my if-this-is-Sunday-this-must-be-brunch last week of time.

I haven’t spoken to another person since I said “thanks” to the lady who sold me a cookie on my way home last night. The phone hasn’t rung, as it usually doesn’t. I’ve got dinner plans but a wide open calendar today with one To Do item “get stuff out of car.” I think I’m up to it.

come ooooooon autumn!

The pool is going to be open until 10 pm. This is great news. This means there will be something to DO at 9 pm around here during the week.

I went to the movies again, this time with Rick and Sarah. We saw Ratatouille and then it started to pour rain so we skipped out on Pirates of the Carribean 3 which is okay by me. Then a bunch of social stuff fell through (mixed signals plannign a lake trip, too many clouds for flying) and I knew I was back to my old self again when I shrugged and thought “oh, well I guess I’ll have some free time to do a bunch of stuff around here” And I did.

I took all the recycling out. I cleaned up the kitchen. I took the hanging baskets with the fake plants on them off the kitchen ceiling (you’d have to see it to really get it) and put them out on the porch where they look nice and are more easily dusted. I mopped the floors. I paid the bills. I did the laundry. I unpacked some stemware that I’d brought home from my Mom’s place months ago and put the box out in the garage. I planned the Nova Scotia trip. I updated my blog software (well, I’m in the process now). I finished a blog project for a friend. I started another blog project. I downloaded some music. I changed lightbulbs. I did a little dusting. I threw out a bunch of bottlecaps with pithy sayings because I didn’t have anything to do with them. I wrote a few letters. I made plans to move my 401K from the random people who were managing it to Fidelity who has the rest of my investment-type money. I called the fuel oil people.

You get the idea. It felt GREAT. It’s been getting cold here and tonight I had tomoato basil soup and a two-cheese grilled cheese sandwich to welcome the Autumn. The Virgo Month of Leisure begins on Thursday and I think I’ve gotten a lot of picky nonsense done that I will NOT have to do while I’m trying hard (and failing, as usual) to relax.

Plus I’m training to be a lifeguard. More on that in a few days.

free day in August!

I got back from Seattle Wednesday morning the first and Wednesday was a sort of predictable sleepy haze. My sister arrived on Friday (see drive-in pic below) and there was a meetup at my house last Saturday for about 13 people. My friend Joanne stayed over so she wouldn’t have to drive down the moose and bear highway late at night. Sunday Gordon stopped by briefly with his cheese head and I had a friend from libraryland swing by on a trip through the Northeast for the evening. Monday I hung out in Randolph with my friends’ three cats. Tuesday my friend Peter stopped by on his trip around the US and I got to pick him up at the train station right in Randolph which is something I don’t do very often. It’s nice to get to walk to the train station. Gordon showed up at about 1 am on his way back from a punk show in Pennsylvania and he slept here brielfy before catching a morning flight. I drove Peter to his Dad’s house — one of my all-time favorite houses but alas I don’t want to live there — and then it was back to catland until Tom (MetaFilter user Meatbomb who sent me a lovely satchel from Afghanistan as well as this excellent hat) showed up with his fiancee on their first stop on their cross-country adventure. I made them some waffles in the morning and sent them off to Niagara Falls. Then it was back to clean-up and laundry and closing down the catsit for my friends’ return. When my friend Finn showed up last night I wanted to take a photo of him holding a sign that said LAST BAG but forgot about it entirely and we went for a walk down by the river and ate some homemade foccacia and were savaged by mosquitos.

I went to bed in an empty house and woke up with a totally open day. Well, open until I have dinner with friends this evening and I’ll probably hop into the pool before then, and I guess I have some errands to run. My plan is to spend the next few weeks doing some local visiting. I have friends renting a lakehouse up in Vermont and a few other pals with new babies a little farther out that I’d like to see sometime before things get hectic again. The hectic, of course, coincides with the Virgo Month of Leisure, as usual.