I was waiting for the fire truck

I was waiting, today, for the fire truck picture, the photo of me in the fire truck, before I started typing here in the box. There’s always a reason I haven’t updated, but rarely a good one. Randolph Vermont is still in the lake. I have written a song about it. I need to get the neighbors together to record it. I have been struck down with a terrible head cold for the past week (week!) and I have been marshalling my energy to keep to my word count (successfully). At some point I just decide that a life with a headfull of terrible snot may be all that lays ahead of me for the rest of my life and I get off my ass and clean the house and do what I call “powering through it”

Other people call this “getting better” but I’ll believe it when I see it. I got a neti pot. It’s okay and fits my personal ethos of ridiculousness.

There was some drama last week in the MetaFilter world which I don’t have much to say about except that it raised a very interesting point about my job there. You can read more about it from the sources linked on this page. Thanks to the 24 hour news cycle there’s not much more to it. The women involved are safe and staying with some MetaFilter people in New York. Nothing bad happened to them. It’s tough if not impossible to prove that anything bad ever was going to happen to them, and a dramatic story becomes a non-story. I talked to a guy from Slate yesterday about who I could put him in touch with, to verify the chain of events, the actual threat, the urgency of the matter, etc. All of the people involved in big ways [lawyers, cops, government workers, aid agencies] can’t really say anything. And all the people from MetaFilter are people I know “from the internet” and it all goes from being a very interesting and dramatic and gripping story to being like telling someone about a comic book you read. “And then the really big monster, he has like these metal claws, and he goes up to the big fuzzy snakelike thing, which has these articulating teeth and goes GRARARARAR and sort of waves his tail around, and then….”

I’m okay being under the radar. And okay being under the lake.

underwater and full of dust

mt saint helens ash

My grandmother sent me a little packet of ash that had fallen on Mount Saint Helens back in 1980 when she was visiting Washington state, well before I’d ever considered living there. It stayed in my pink jewelry box [shut up] and somehow managed to come along with me this whole time until now it’s on the little shelf on my dresser along with a wire sculpture a friend made, a portion of a Buddha from Afghanistan and an orange fuzzy thing with googly eyes, all things that survived the many deaccessioning stages that I’ve gone through.

And today is the 30th anniversary of the main eruption (though the ash is from a few weeks later) and the internet can bring all those photos back, pictures that I only remember seeing in the Boston Globe, in print, back when I was eleven.

I am still writing. I’m in the word count range where the numbers of words I’ve typed can be represented as zip codes, moving roughly westwards, usually. I typed from South Bend Indiana to Flint Michigan today. Sometimes I wind up in Spain.

My town is, as always, underwater and I am out of ideas to get Google to repair it. I am working on a catchy jingle. I hope they like it.

the most boring people in the world are writing books

I swore I was only going to write here again when I explained how the town finally got out of the lake, but it’s there still and I had a few things to say.

First, yeah wow, I’m a little surprised that it takes this long to correct an obvious map error, but that’s sort of the good news/bad news about doing your business in the cloud yes? Google Maps is great because it’s got a ton of data and delivers it to people with very little human interaction needed. Downside being when you need a human it’s pretty much impossible to get one.

I took a day off from writing yesterday (I’m ahead with my word count) and drove to Underhill after having lunch with my friend Stephanie in Montpelier. No idea how I missed Underhill before. In fact I’m pretty sure I must have been there before but the maps show no highlighter pen and I can find no record of it. Underhill is sort of a co-town with Jericho. They even have a shared website: Two Towns Online. The back road I wanted to take was under construction, a casualty of the weird snow we got this week, so I got to take fairly normal roads to get up there. And there was snow! I stopped at the local library [not the one in the photo] and did a little email checking. Once I got home I was curious about the funky looking building that also said library on it. Of course, there’s a web page explaining it.

I’ve installed keylogging software on my machine because I’m convinced that whatever amount of words I’m typing for the book, I’m doubling it with email, blog posts, chatting and whatnot. I wanted to check if that was actually true. I realize this makes me a crazy person. I will report back with my findings.

The bigger deal is just that as much as I’m enjoying writing this book, watching the word count increase, getting my thoughts on paper, I’m also somehat blasÃ© about it, sometimes to the point of being downright yawningly bored. I can’t explain to people what it’s about without apologizing and even though it’s all I think about lately, I feel like I have nothing to talk about when I chat with friends. “Still writing the book.” I say. “Great.” they say. And then we talk about the weather or something interesting. I realize that this is normal. I felt this way about my thesis. I’m sure I will miss these days, when the book wasn’t a set of words on a page but a set of ideas in my head. Fixing things to paper gives them a terrible finality that makes me somewhat nervous.

I look forward to having something else to talk about, just a month or two left. And in the meantime, I read quotations from the other Jessamyn West, who had been writing much longer than I have.

“Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers having had their hell on earth, will escape punishment hereafter.”

fleeing the submerged city

I’m a little surprised this is taking so long but a Google Maps search for Randolph Vermont is still showing the town in the middle of Lake Champlain. I have done what I consider to be “all I can” to try to get this rectified including

clicking the report a problem link on Google Maps
Getting all my neighbors to do the same [resulting in an error from Google saying they suspected me of sending “automated queries’ to the report a problem form]
Alerting the media
Contacting Google Maps on Twitter
Filling out an official-sort of form on the support website

We got word back that our issue has been escalated–apparently it’s happening to bigger towns than ours, all over the world–but nothing really. I tell people who are maybe coming here to make sure they type in the street address if they want to know where I actually live. And I guess I’ll wait, bemusedly, and entertain people on Twitter about it in the meantime.

And I’m skipping town. Not as a result of this obviously, but because it’s school vacation week. Jim and Milo are going to visit his folks in Arizona and I’m going to swing by for a few days. After all of the rain [and snow!] here in the last week, getting a little ninety degree desert time sounds nice, and I’ll be heading homewards before it starts to grate on me. It’s been a while since I’ve been in Arizona. I am looking forward to it.

And more on this in a while, but I reaized via some egosurfing that my book is actually available for pre-order from Amazon.com, despite the fact that it’s not even really written yet. Yes I know it’s expensive. You will not hurt my feelings if you don’t buy it.

moving

randolphnot

I am not moving. I am happy here. However, according to Google the town has moved to someplace in the north part of Lake Champlain. Yes, in the water. This is weird and sort of amusing. The only reason I happen to know this is because I was giving two different folks directions to my house and they both said “I thought you lived in the center of the state?” and I said “I do… WTF?” I have submitted a bug report. I am curious to see how long it takes to resolve this. If you can’t recreate the Fake Randolph on your own, you can click this link to see what I (sometimes) see. You can search for 05060 to see where the town really is.

no particular place to go

As is typical, I’m back from a short trip [quickie hello Boston!]. I went to the gym to get some exercise and now I have the sniffles. Sometimes I wonder if I am just allergic to my home and have only a subconscious understanding of this and that’s why I travel so much. Or I am allergic to exercise maybe?

I got a non-apology from United Airlines that came with a $250 certificate for future travel which is pretty okay when I just asked them to refund the $8 I spent on parking for my dopey abortive trip to Portland. Along with all the meals with friends that I am not having in Oregon, I also missed a chance to talk to my book editor about my impending book. I got an extention on the thing til June and I’m sort of in the hustle phase of writing about the digital divide and technology instruction at public libraries.

The good news is that this is not difficult. The bad news is that I am a terrible procrastinator. Or rather, I am a good procrastinator. I am pretty alright at putting other “to do” things in the path of my non-writing so that, for example, I finished up my taxes yesterday. I rarely just click idly around the internet, though I am slightly captivated by the OwlCam. The trick at this juncture is not worrying about writing enough, but making sure I don’t leave anything out. I have checklists. I finally paid for Scrivener. I made a backup. Now I just need to … keep beginning.

turn off the bubble machine

Having slightly more free time [a whole week sort of off!] has meant more screwing around online. I enjoyed my BoingBoing time — their upcoming guest blogger is John Cusack! — because I put a lot of “hey this is neat” stuff up online and people looked at it. So, my apologies dear readers, but I’m going to try to do that a little more with this space.

So I was playing a word game which, trust me on this, required me to find an old Stan Freberg track. When I was a kid this was on an album my folks had that I listened to a lot. The album was called Fly Buttons and the particular track was called Wun’erful! Wun’erful! but the part that I could remember was “Turn off the bubble machine” You can hear the whole bit here.

So I Googled “turn off the bubble machine” and found not just the video, but the Wikipedia page on Freberg, who is still alive, but also people riffing off the phrase in magazines [does it come from anywhere else?], the grave of Lawrence Welk’s “Champagne Lady,” and a ton of fun to pore over patent applications including the one pictured above.

And now, people will find this.