owl barf

You might enjoy this story, explained by my friend Anil, about how a silly online contest and a casual comment about pubic hair turned into a Vermont school project owl pellet wish list fulfillment. And yes, I had something to do with it. I’d write more but I’ve got to go out and rake now that the iceberg is gone before the leaves start to fall. The window is so tiny.

Follow-up: everyone gets thanked on Donors Choose. Here was my thank you.

Dear Jessamyn,

I cannot even begin to express the thanks that I have, as well as my students, in hearing that our project was funded. Although we are surrounded by some of the most beautiful woodlands, it is not so easy to find food chains and food webs in action at this time of the year. Your funding will keep the love of science alive in both the girls and the boys and hopefully will continue to grow the awareness that is needed to keep our Green Mountains healthy, as well as our many other biomes on this Earth. Thank you for your donations!

the iceberg in my yard and the onset of spring

that fucking iceberg I always say there is a day when the day gets warm in that way where you know (or you think) it’s not going to get cold again and people get outside and start attacking their yards because they’re so darned sick of being outside and the air is full of dust from people getting the road salt out of their flowerbeds. I remember this from Seattle, a similar sort of day, when the rains finally stopped and it was sunny long enough for things to dry out and people came out from their apartments covered in lichen and moss and coffee stains and ennui to greet the returning sun.

So, that day was Friday here, I think, and then it continued all weekend. I did the raking of the grasses and the pruning of the lilacs and the filling of all the bird feeders and the picking up of all the junk that had accumulated in the yard. My last order of business, when I was so full of ENERGY that I just had to do something else, was to go after the iceberg that was melting too slowly in my backyard. Since there’s a plow that comes to do the driveway in the winter, there is also a pile of plowed snow. I’ve got a pile, my neighbor has a pile. Mine is, mercifully, in the sun. Hers is not. So as the sun was setting I was outside in shorts and a t-shirt hacking away at the little mound of snow with a rake for hours, hoping to get it flat enough that it would be melted, mostly, by today or tomorrow sometime and then I could actually see and get to my yard.

It’s school vacation week this week, which means no drop-in time and no classes just a vast expanse of sunny days. I’ll be scooting down to Boston to catch Matt Haughey at ROFLcon and see some folks and teach a library/tech class on Monday next. Say howdy if you see me.

not melted yet

I got back from the super-techie (as opposed to super-tetchy which can sometimes describe library conferences) SXSWi conference in Austin Texas, drove home through the snow, went almost immediately to sleep and woke up today to a few things.

The realization that the porch had not actually collapsed in my absence. Yay team!
A toothache that I need to deal with soonish, one that I had successfully ignored with a steady application of Shiner Bock and distraction.
The espresso machine that I had left on for six days which still made decent espresso.
Three hours of work in rural Vermont teaching, among other things, the moderator of my town meeting how to open attachments and how to back up his memoirs to a USB drive, presuming he buys a USB drive that is.
My Getting Started with Excel class complete with “oooh” noises when I showed people how to format a date and right-click to change tab colors.
The fourth, I believe, request for the article about me to be deleted from Wikipedia.
More snow.

I have been putting off writing this in the hopes that the whole Wikipedia debate would be closed and I could link to it without appearing to be shilling for people to vote against the article’s deletion. Believe it or not, I sort of trust in the Wikipedia process and figure it will be deleted if it’s supposed to be deleted.

I expect you’re all sick of my re-entry stories anyhow. They’re mostly the same. “Oh hey, I was someplace populated and then I came home and it was unpopulated and the night was dark and starry and I slept….”

My trip to Texas was a joy from start to finish. Flew out of Boston, so I got to have dinner with my sister on the way out. Arrived in Austin and was picked up by my puzzle hunt buddy who put me up (and put up with me?) for nearly a week. He then went to Houston for the weekend and left me to my own devices in his house with his girlfriend who I had not yet met, and an assortment of charming pets with amusing names. SXSW was a blur of friendly faces from the recent and distant past. The panel I was on went really well; my co-panelists — Gina, Annalee, Jeska — are amazing, hilarious women. I spent a day not in conferenceland visting libraries and got to see another Gutenberg Bible (my third!). I played kickball for the first time in I have no idea how long. I lost my camera. It was recovered. I went to a MetaFilter meetup. I went to a few parties. I attended several dinners involving more than fifty people and a few that were five or less. I ate lots of delicious foods including Mexican, TexMex, BBQ, and combinations of those. I went out for croissants at 2 am. I played with OLPCs. I took taxis. I listened to interesting speakers and met interesting people. I sat around with my laptop and people came and talked to me, or I walked around and talked to people sitting around with their laptops.

It was really the just-right conference for this time of year and my frame of mind. I’m really glad I went. You can see a few photos here.

emergencies, averted?

The pool has still not fixed the broken phone and I’m not sure what to do about it except continue to ask “Have you fixed the phone yet?”

I’m pretty sure I got enough snow off the roof. When I went to swim at the pool I realized that I am all bruises up the arms and legs and I was a little sheepish in the shower about it. “It’s okay, I did this to myself!” Clearing off the roof without further ladder climbing — because I decided that was crazy — involved borrowing my friend’s half-broken roof rake (thank you Forrest!) and manipulating it through the two upstairs windows that I could open and open the storm windows for. So, the whole process was a bit like laproscopic surgery where the roof is large and the window is teeny and the rake is long and I am upstairs inside the house, standing five feet away from the open window trying to get a good angle so that I can push the last pile of snow off the far end. Also, did I mention all the electricity and telephone juice comes in the house through the same window, the one that opens? True. Did you know that if you hit that insulator with a rake at a certain angle that sparks fly off of it? It’s true.

So we’re supposed to get snow or rain this week. The pile of snow in the yard — created by the backhoe that my neighbor brought in to put the snow someplace besides the driveway — is now approaching ten feet tall and the neighbor kids are sledding down it. I am not joking. I have to say that the combination of my nifty AWD car and the new socks I got at the Cabot Hoisery have really minimized my annoyances with Wintertime this time around. I’ll have to take some photos before it all goes away, it’s really something.

alert: february not always a pit of snowy despair

It’s been a while since I’ve been too busy to write here. I mean there are a few sorts of busy. For me they break down into busy online — where my online world/job/friends have all gone crazy and my typing is all devoted to that — or busy offline where either I’m away, socializing, ill, working, or some combination thereof. This was a nice offline time because I was all of the above, except ill. Before I mention anything else, let me say that it is pancake week in Vermont at the King Arthur Flour store, starting tomorrow. Free pancakes and real syrup. There was an IHOP Pancake day on Super Tuesday, but there is no IHOP in Vermont and their syrup is crap anyhow.

So… I went to Canada which is my favorite out-of-country destination. This time was particularly good because I could just drive up there to get to McGill. I managed to grab my mail before I left town and opened a priority mail envelope only to find that an associate of mine had sent me a book aboyt the madness that is the USA PATRIOT Act. I made a mental note to read it and tried to hide it beneath my seat. As I crossed the border I somehow managed to get into the truck lane. As I craned out the window wondering why the customs guy’s window was so high up I noticed he was laughing at me. “Are you a truck?” he said. “I’m in the wrong lane, aren’t I?” I said. Except for a little back and forth about whether I needed to declare the 50 lbs of birdseed in my trunk as “food” my border crossing was otherwise uneventful.

I gave two talks — or rather the same talk twice to two very different groups — and had a lot of delicious food at various restaurants representing totally unavailable food in Vermont. I drove home and my friends Andrea and Corey were just getting out of their car in my driveway for a weekend in the country and we did a bunch of country things including snowshoeing, geocaching, sitting around the fire, making soup, making hats, making pizzas with Wayne and Jill and Casey, eating birthday cake (Corey’s) and eating waffles. Andrea and Corey know they have shot right up to Favored Guest status in my mind because when I drag my sleepy ass into the freezing kitchen in the morning when they are staying with me, there is a hot waffle waiting for me. Also, Andrea crocheted me a hat. Everyone went home yesterday and I was happily exhausted enoguh so I went to bed less than twelve hours after I woke up.

Today will be my first day just hanging around the house since last Wednesday and I have a to do list with such exciting activities as “laundry” and “transfer station.” It’s vacation week here in Vermont which means no drop-in time and a few lifeguarding stints towards the end of the week and then more friends coming up from Western MA which is my impetus for making short work of the to do list early in the week.

writing, freezing, watching

I got a whole new outlook on garbage, mine in particular, when I had to carry it to the dump myself. In my own car, with my own hands, etc. I feel the same about the leaf explosion that is so popular around here. I love it, same as everyone, but the leaves in my own yard, the ones that come from these big beautiful trees, require moving. Last year Ola hadn’t quite left yet and so did most of the trim and mulch work herself. This year it falls to me. The good news is, I’m really enjoying it, a lot. The bad news is, it’s a LOT OF WORK to move each leaf just across the street. Also it’s starting to get really cold. Today I bought gloves and mulch, the slice across my middle finger reminding me that grass is sharp. Mulch is on sale, it’s that cold out.

And back on the topic of mail and writing. I got a lot ready to go this weekend. I packed and prepared four of my books — $84 straight to the EFF, yay for tiny fundraisers — and mailed a friend a box of lawn clippings that I suspect he’ll like. I wrote a letter to my Topsham Postmistress saying that I guess it was time I closed out my PO box there and stopped paying for it, and then I filled out a change of address form and checked the “permanent” instead of the “temporary” box on it. I mailed a copy of The Thin Man to a stranger on PaperBackSwap and I got my inbox down to normal levels by sending a few thoughful and overdue replies.

So today, oh my! I know that karma is mostly in my mind and that nothing I actually did this weekend was what caused my mailbox to be full of wonderfulness. Logically, I know this to be true. The mail I got today was sent before I even started my weekend reply-to project. And yet, there was something about feeling that not only did I get awesome mail, I halfway deserved it, that made the rest of my day shiny. What follows is a vaguely dull-to-others list of what I got.

A letter from my friend who I sent the weeds to, full of news and XO signoffs
An AskMe t-shirt from a relative stranger in just about my size and bright green
A thank you note from the librarian who invited me to speak at NELA
A check from my Mom whose domain I renewed over the weekend when we couldn’t figure out her password at Gandi (always make your kids your technical contact!)
The phone bill, I love $19 DSL
A silly reminder from my bank that they cashed yet another Canadian check for me
A random birthday type present from an old friend including a top-notch Belgian chocolate bar, a tiny box of shells from Capetown, a card and my 128MB USB drive that I had lost at her house last December. Also a stick of RAM, for no reason I could fathom. I wish I could say that the drive contained something fun, but it was just class notes from last year.

I woke up today and it was freezing, frosty, frozen outside so I’ve switched the house into Winter mode which means closing all the inside doors, putting the weird little area rugs back around, locking all the doors but the side door, preparing to stop using 75% of the house, and buying plastic for windows. There should be one or two warm days left when I can put it all up. Today I just noticed the sun and the shade as I drove around. Sunny places were warm, shady places were still a little icy, or maybe they just felt that way to me.

music and soup

One of the things I schlepped down from Topsham was my old iMac. I got it in exchange for one of my first webbish jobs, a job that I was forced to learn CSS for. I turned it on and learned that it hadn’t had a software upgrade since 2003. Not surprising since I never had more than dial-up in Topsham and you can’t do 100MB downloads realistically over a 42K connection. Two more things about it. 1) it has all the music on it, or most of it that I lost in the “oh shit” music massacre of a few years ago, that’s neat 2) it has kickass speakers. I’ve been on laptops since that machine and they all have pretty lousy speakers. I have the iMac set up on the kitchen counter belting Goodness which is great for reasons 1 and 2.

The last few days have been a blur, enough so that when I looked at the online Scrabble games I had been playing, it was my turn in all (9) of them. Whoops! I had a soup party thing at my house to welcome Chris Mear to town. He’s a guy I’ve known from MetaFilter and he’s on a VT – MA – NY trip for a few weeks. He stayed with Rick and Sarah for a few days and then me for a few days. There’s something about having a guest in town, particularly during an amazing week in October, that kicked my ass into gear getting things done. I got my oil changed, took out the recycling, cooked two pots of soup and some tasty foccacia, went to Montpelier for barbecue, hosted seven people for dinner, upgraded my WordPress install, cut a bunch of flowers and put them all over the house in jars of water and even cleaned up afterwards. Not necessarily in that order. Now I’ve got a day of downtime — actually getting four talks ready for next week — before my friends from Brooklyn show up and we try to find the tastiest chicken pie supper in Orange County.

abada abada

twenty-five years of jessamyn

vermont