wallet reunion!

penny farthing
So I got my wallet back yesterday and on the way to getting it back, I had a party. Let me explain.

I left my wallet at the mall somehow on Friday, I have no idea how. Casey and Sandee — who live in New Hampshire nearish to the mall — offered to go to the mall to pick it up. I asked them what would be a good way to meet up to exchange it and they said “Why don’t we come to your place to grill stuff on the 4th?” Sounded good to me. I invited some other people.

They went to the mall where my wallet was locked in a safe that very few people knew how to open, but they persevered. I got a lot of definite maybes from people who already had some stuff to do on the 4th. After the parade (photos of all of this here) I came back to do some prep work. I made turkey/pork burgers, two salads, some angel food cake and cut up some peppers (for the grill) and strawberries (for the cake). I also had some Spirit of America Little Debbie cakes because I thought they were hilarious and they were on sale at the dented can store.

My wallet was returned to me. People came to eat food. We had a good time. It rained like the bejesus. I was a little pleasantly surprised that except for cash money (which I had to borrow from a friend for things like eating) I could safely do without everything in my wallet for almost a week. I don’t really need my library cards to check out books. I didn’t need to buy anything on credit. I wasn’t flying and didn’t get pulled over while driving. The supermarket let me use their discount card. I didn’t need emergency road service or health care.

Today one of my projects is to take all my stuff in my wallet and photocopy it so that if I ever lost my wallet for real, I can more easily straighten this all out. I’m also going to take a dremel tool to my health care card which has my social security number on the front of it. I had previously crossed it out with permanent marker, but I think it’s time to make a stronger statement.

odd little iphone day

I did not get an iPhone. I’ve been a cell phone user for about two months now, I don’t need a cell phone that costs more than I make in a month at one of my jobs. Oh, and they don’t have service in Vermont. I’m sure you can use them here, but I wouldn’t be able to get an 802 number. However, I was definitely iPhone curious so when my friend Casey said he was going down to the Rockingham Mall to wait in line, I said I’d swing by and say hello and see what was happening. It was a good time. I took a few pictures. I made a little video. I watched my Flickr photostream fill up with pictures of people with their new phones.

Once Casey got his phone registered we messed around with it a bunch. The interface is impressive. It’s not Mac-like at all, and to me it felt sort of intuitive, but I’ve been around computers a lot. It does some pretty basic things fairly well: phone calls, photos, video-watching, music playing (great speakers actually) and has some really killer mapping tools. The on-screen keyboard is a little tough for people with big hands and as near as I can tell there’s no other way to interact with it. It took forever to sync up the first time. And, of course, it’s $600 or so. The line-waiting experience was so weird, so staged, so hypey but the people were really nice and chummy. I like geeks. I even met a guy who had been linked on MetaFilter which was a fun story.

The last time I can remember waiting in a really long line for anything that wasn’t food in Eastern Europe, a roller coaster ride, or airport security, I think I was buying Violent Femmes concert tickets in high school. We camped out overnight in Boston and got fourth row seats. This was before Ticketmaster was a huge Internet business so if you waited in the big line at the box office you’d wind up with something good. There were maybe 100 people in line at the Apple Store when I stopped counting and I think the bulk of them wound up with phones. While Casey was making his purchase I noticed that the store model phones were active so I stood around making iPhone calls while he finalized his purchase.

At some point in the whole crazy mall experience — when do I ever go to malls anymore? never — I misplaced my wallet which I realized the next day right before I headed home. After a few phone calls it turns out that the mall security people had it and all my crap was still in it. I had spent a lot of the drive back making a mental list of what was in my wallet [credit cards and library cards mostly] and getting to not spend the rest of my saturday reporting all my stuff missing or stolen turned out to be the high point of what was still otherwise a very entertaining start to my weekend.

note: for those of you who were wonderng why you couldn’t comment all of the sudden (this past month) without being part of my “team” it was just a momentary blip. I suddenly got a ton of comment spam while I was on the road, turned comments off until I could deal with it and then… forgot. Feel free to comment away. Thanks to Kate for pointing this out.

city/country

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Got back last night. The wedding was great. The train ride back from New York City was relaxing and lovely, watching the sun set over the Hudson River Valley. My train car was full of (I think) teenaged musicians going to some sort of summer music thing at Killington so all the luggage space was full of cellos and guitars and other large instruments. I got to spend the time captioning my photos from the trip and staring out the window, letting my voice recover. I managed to lose my voice sometime on Friday before all the festivities thanks to some sort of a summer cold, so while I had a great time hanging out with some of my favorite people — both at the wedding and also in Park Slope at my friends’ place — I did a lot of croaking and heard a lot of “you sound like Kathleen Turner” and “that must hurt.” Actually, my throat felt fine, it just functioned poorly, so having some time to rest it was great.

My photos of the weekend are here. The one above was the last one I took before I got home.

The longer I stay in Vermont, the more I’m a gawking slack-jawed tourist when I’m in the city. Look at these PEOPLE. Look how TALL that BUILDING is. I got to do a lot of late night subway riding. Look how LATE these people are AWAKE. I had tacos out in Redhook while watching a soccer game. OMG how TASTY is this food?! I paid equal amounts for a taxi ride and a fancy cocktail. Twelve DOLLARS. I got to hang out with ten friends at once and it wasn’t even a holiday. It sure was fun.

Then I got in my (unlocked all weekend – you know how this part goes) car to drive home from the train station. When I was just a few miles from home, driving along a road (yes it’s called notown, I know I know) that is bordered on one side by a river and one side by a pretty steep hill. I saw what I thougth was a horse in the road and slammed on the brakes, skidded a little and came to a stop next to a moose. We regarded each other for a while in the light of my headlights on the totally-abandoned-at-10-pm route 107 and then he trundled off. I’ve never been that close to a moose in my life.

I got home and my house smelled funny. After ruling out the usual suspects (trash, compost, dead animal in wall, mold, tray under fridge, leaving cereal bowl wiht milk out) I went down to the basement where I found out one of the windows was out of its frame. The basement was damper than usual, so damp that the dead spiders in their webs in the ceiling were growing a thin coating of moldy fuzz. Gross! I turned on the dehumidifier and headed off to bed only to be awakened by a different smell a few hours later that could only be the result of a skunk fight. I talked to my neighbor this morning and we discussed whether or not to call the trapper. I finally put the screens in the last windows that didn’t have them and I am airing the hell out of this place. I hope it helps.

I haven’t done the city/country back and forth thing in about four years now. Seattle is really seeming far to me (though I’ll be there next month for, you guessed it, a wedding!) but I could really deal with some regular city time like this. I’ll have to see what I can scheme up.

my driveway, june 20th

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taken by jessamyn.

I wasn’t having the best day, then I walked outside. I thought you might like this picture.

about me, sort of

I know the whole jessamyn.com universe sometimes seems like it’s just this blog now, but there’s a lot here. I did update the “about me” page today, for the first time in a few years. I didn’t write anything new, just copied the Valley News article that was published about me and now no longer online, in flagrant violation of applicable copyright. I guess if there’s one thing that blogs and continuous partial broadcasting have taught us, it’s that there’s never a whole story. So this is another freeze frame from back when that article was written. Close readers will notice a few teeny inaccuracies, but it’s really mostly right. I added a few hyperlinks but otherwise it’s just how it was in the newspaper.

update: in the “weird timing” category, I ran into Valley News writer Alex Hanson, who wrote this article, at Onion Flats this evening where I went for dinner. I don’t think I’ve seen him since the interview.

the story thus far

I wrenched my shoulder overswimming and now have to take it easy and do exercises according to my physical therapist (a nice Libertarian sort who uses words like “wimpy” and “freaky” to describe my physiology but I have to believe he means it in the nicest way) so I’ve been annoyed and a bit under the weather lately. Add to this that two of my other female colleagues seem to have fluish symptoms of eerily similar description and I’ve shifted from my normal low-grade hypochondria to full-on chemical warfare conspiracy theories. My guess is that I am only right if they’ve been able to somehow lace the toxic agent into the local pollen because there’s certainly a lot of that around and I haven’t had any of my normal Spring sniffles….

In any case, I’ve been tired and achey and taking it easy. I got back from NH only to head back out to go to my Dad’s for Father’s Day and a MetaFilter meetup in Marlboro MA on my way back home. This weekend I’m going to a wedding in Brooklyn and then I swear I’m staying home.

I had some good successes at work today, more Ubuntu happiness as well as more old people with new computers who seem to think I am some sort of super wizard lady when I explain how to open a program, follow a hyperlink or send an email. It’s sort of low-hanging fruit I guess, but it’s fun for me to do I also got to talk to one library about a long range plan that might include an open source library catalog and a media creation center for people to learn how to interact with their web environments. I’d be happy if that happened, but I was happy just to get to say it out loud and have someone seriously listen to me.

When I got home from my friends’ house this evening, there was a phone message from JetBlue — the airline that lost/stole my stuff in Puerto Rico — saying they had forwarded the letter I had sent to their CEO to some central baggage specialist who would be calling me back in a few days. Apparently JetBlue may not want to go to small claims court over $70 worth of cables. I, on the other hand, would love to go to small claims court over $70 worth of cables. I have nothing but time and a burning distaste for getting jerked around over technicalities on stuff like this. I like JetBlue an awful lot most days, but I think they could have handled this with more class.

My only other recent event of note is that I bought a car, on Facebook, from a friend of mine. I need to go to Ithaca to get it, or get someone from Ithaca to drive it here. If you are Ithaca-linked in some way, please feel free to drop me an email.