140/160

I always write a lot on my various blogomachines when I have a talk to prepare for. I’m going to Michigan this week for a flyby visit to Lansing and the Michigan Library Association conference. I was writing an update to this post from last September and realized that my various archives are sort of fucked. So I had to go and move include and archive files around and now they’re mostly okay and wow there’s another hour gone. I have this real back and forth about the time here, whether it’s “need another hour” or “get rid of another hour, please!” This set of weeks is the best for it because all the clocks, in an effort to be helpful and set themselves for us, have derailed us. All the Windows machines at school say it’s an hour ago. Most of my clocks at home say it’s now. My new-to-me car doesn’t have a clock at all, and my wristwatch is … someplace. So this means I’ve been showing up at work sometime between early and on time, not knowing which until I walk in the door and I’m still a little amazed that works as well as it does. But I had other numbers to talk about.

I upgraded the RAM (2 GB) and the hard drive (160GB) in my year-old laptop (details here, nothing special) which was a process involving a few screws, a few hundred dollars, some savvy online shopping, and a half an hour. And, as always, I think about the people I work with who are still at the Mousercise stage of their computer learning. The fact that you can now do a lot of this work yourself makes computers in some ways more affordable. The fact that it’s still thought of as esoteric mojo, going under the hood so to speak, does not. We’re working on some open source chicanery in Vermont, getting serious about an open source online catalog at some of our small libraries. Part of the plan is to have geeking sessions where people actually bring their CPU and we install server software together, transfer records and data together, hammer things out together. This has always been the way geek projects have worked, to some extent, but in a profession with more of a sense of “authority” getting people to trust each other and not people higher in the food chain has been a challenge. I’m excited for it.

And, speaking of exciting challenges and what got me sitting down to type besides my current Distraction Initiative, I’m checking in on how last year’s “do exercise, eat well, be fit, look fit (and don’t look bad in photos)” plan is going. It’s not bad. Since I started this all last Fall, I’ve lost a little over twenty pounds with what I considered to be a medium amount of attention and no amount of deprivation. When I first started — after what was already a few months of exercise and attention to eating, but a serious dread of the scale — I weighed 161. Today I weigh 140.

It’s been a simple plan really, involving basically The Hacker’s Diet and a lot of time in the pool and lately, in the backyard doing garden stuff. There’s also a really short list of things that have been helpful which I’ll note for future reference.

Getting on the scale – if you want to lose weight to lose weight (not so your clothes fit better, for example) this is mission critical. I use a little widget called The Google 15 where I give it my goal weight, tell it what I weigh every morning that I remember, and it does a five day average and tells me if I’m getting closer or farther from that goal. It’s stupid easy. Everyone has their own technique for fitness and weight loss, but I really believe if you’re not getting on the scale, you may not be totally serious.
Exercise goals – while I’m probably not going to make it the length of Lake Champlain this year — thanks to shoulder injuries and a life that’s gotten busy — having something to work towards kept me going even on days I felt lazy or cranky. This was a good thing and I’m sure I exercised just a little more because I was, theoretically, going somewhere. Having an exercise buddy can help with this, but you have to make sure your goals are somewhat similar.
Cooking at home – not only is it easier to calorie check what you’re eating, you’re unlikely to make yourself too much food, as opposed to restaurants that pretty much always serve too much food for what I want to eat but it’s SO TASTY (mmm butter and salt!) that I’ll eat it anyhow. At the outset, I decided I liked food too much to really diet, so my other main option (really there are only two) was to exercise more. I developed a bunch of tasty not-super-high-calories small meals and just got used to preparing and enjoying them. I swap out a lot of stuff: tea for juice, fat free for lowfat milk, turkey for beef. If you’re really into doing all this stuff in slow motion, all you need is to eat 100 calories less a day and you lose a pound a month. One less glass of orange juice. One less cookie. Ten more minutes in the pool.
No bargaining – I think it’s an easy step to take, to make deals with yourself about eating and exercise, less now more later or vice versa. My deal with me is to do what the hell I want and let the scale (over time that is, it’s easy to see your weight shift 2-4 pounds daily, hence the Google averager) be the arbiter. So I don’t not eat food that I like. I let myself stay home from the pool if I want to. I’ll have a third delicious empty-calorie beer if I’m having a good time. I eat what my friends are serving. Once you make yourself your own opponent for health and fitness, you’re really having a different problem.

So yeah it’s been a slow process and one that I’m sure is ongoing. I felt like I’d mention it again. Maybe I’ll mention it once a year, since it’s good to remember just how much in our lives is actually under our control. As for me, I sort of like my jawline and I’m happy to have it back. I like the pool and I’m happy to be there a lot. I like it when people say “Wow you’re looking great.” The one downside, if there is one, is that those extra twenty pounds kept me warmer at low temperatures. I may have to invest in long underwear.

I would have written, but

Tom Robbins once dedicated one of his books — Still Life With Woodpecker, says Google Books — “to everybody whose letters I haven’t answered” which I always thought was an oddly hopeful phrase. This was back when I thought Tom Robbins was the original redheaded truth-teller and well before I saw him speak at Bumbershoot with a “Heaven Doesn’t Want Me and Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over” t-shirt and became uninterested in him, boom just like that. But I liked the way I read that and thought he might write to me. I’ve been on the receiving end of more than I’ve been giving lately, and there’s a reason or two for that.

I was in recuperation mode after a week on the road. The whole trip went great and I was happy to have gone and happy to be back and those two things aren’t always true. I got back in the pool and back to work and to make a long dull car story very short: the steering rack in my Honda basically disintegrated all at once. My excellent mechanic kindly informed me that while he’d love to take my money, this wasn’t really a repair that was worthwhile since I’d soon need a new oil pan and new snow tires and at the end of it I still had a 12 year old car with 160K miles on it. So, I have to go get the car and drive it home without any power steering and see if I can interest the kid next door in it, otherwise it will go up on Craigslist (unless anyone here wants it. It’s much more cheaply fixable if you can do the work yourself). For now I’m driving the green AskMeMobile and feeling pretty happy that I decided that having two cars was a decent investment a few months back. Now I have basically one. So, I spent some time online thinking about buying a new (to me) car, but I didn’t see what I was looking for. I dislike shopping, and car shopping more than most shopping.

Monday I decided to take some of this energy and hit the front yard to get things ready for Winter and with the help of my pal Rick, got a lot accomplished (photos here). Then I went out and kicked a soccer ball around with Kelly and Forrest and by the time I got home, after some beef tacos, I had forgotten that I was in a quandary. Similar thing today. Swam, went to the library, went to Adam and Meredith’s and ate ice cream and pizza and even though I opened my laptop once to see the 31 emails waiting for me, I closed it back up again and waited until I got home to deal with it.

So, I’ve been in intake mode more than output mode lately and as long as I’m getting out of bed and dressed sometime before noon, I’m still considering things successful. I’ll get to those letters I’ve been meaning to write. Soon.

hemming, also hawing

I’ve been in need of some new clothes lately, so I’ve been getting on that. I found a perfect pair of pants except they’re made for someone taller than me. Story of my life. However, I’m getting to the point where cuffing just isn’t going to work if I’m trying to look halfway professional. So I got out the sewing kit and started hemming. As I did that — just sat in one place and measured twice and pinned and cut thread and threaded needles and sewed — I realized that it’s been a while since I’ve done one thing at a time.

I complained at the library conference last week that the free wifi was worse than no wifi at all because it was oversubscribed, so you could really only do one Internet-thing at a time. I no longer knew how to do that. As soon as I’d open a tab or try to IM someone or even click a link to open in another window, I’d get booted by the network and remember “oh yeah one thing at a time…” It’s worth remembering. While I truly believe that the cell-phone-while-driving contingent isn’t paying enough attention to the road, I do drive and listen to the radio, or read and eat, or fly and watch a movie. There’s a media aspect to all of this that isn’t really present if you’re, say, walking and singing. Or swimming and thinking. Or eating and laughing, mouth open and all.

I know the difference. I’m not trying to draw weird fake-o conclusions about “OMG technlogy convergence made me impolite!” but I notice how getting things done [not Getting Things Done, lord help me] often involves this sort of media-lumping to get more done faster. Which is great if what you’re saving time for is pie, or time with friends, or a good book before bed, or the river. I just spent a lot of time with this artificial throttle when I was already in hyper-productivity away-from-home mode and resent that my lack of multitaskability made me come home with a few things left undone in the internetto-blogoland. On the other hand, last night I listened to the radio and hemmed my pants, and looked out the window, and listened to the rain, and heard my nemesis the mouse invade the downstairs and it didn’t really seem like multitasking at all.

went to topsham, brought some back

So. One of the questions I get asked a lot is “When was the last time you went up to your place?” I say “Oh it’s been a while…” but the truth is it had been almost a year and I had been putting it off and doing other things and generally enjoying myself while also secretly dreading what I might find there. My house in Topsham is a great little place that was never really set up to be a year-round house. Michael, who I bought it from, made a go of it and did okay but I always found someplace else to ramble to when I was there alone for too long. A series of caretakers, some good, some not so good, left the place a little worse for wear and the final straw came almost three years ago when a renter left early, left the propane on empty, and the place froze solid and really broke.

This all happened when I was in Australia and Greg was taking finals and things were never the same between me and the house, or me and Greg and the house again. I had to get a lot of expensive plumbing work done by a not-great plumber [okay work, lousy attitude, slow. I don’t expect more but I do appreciate it] and his last project was to put a drain on the house so I could leave it over the Winter which I had never been able to do before. So, I left it.

I went up once with my sister last year to pick up some things and was relieved to find the place standing. I have some sort of quirky dread that I’ll round a corner and see the barn as a pile of sticks. You can keep your “those are the joys of home ownership!” remarks to yourself. So, I went up again yesterday after getting an email from Ola saying she might be coming back stateside to take care of her sister in TN. I don’t know if or how much she might be up here but I figured I might want to have a Plan B in case my little honeymoon here was wrapping up. So I got in the car and went up there before I could talk myself out of it. There was no pile of sticks. The place was still standing. It looked sort of like I thought it would — distressed but not destroyed — but there was a lot I had forgotten.

As I mentioned in the caption to this photo, I basically stopped the bi-coastal thing in 2003 and started a library job in Vermont. Greg started law school and we moved from Topsham to Bethel. At first we were coming up on weekends and we slowly did less and less of that. Bethel is a nice little town, Topsham is more of a remote outpost and you really need to like that “I’m at the edge of civilization” feeling to want to spend a lot of time there. I had forgotten how much I liked that feeling. I grew up in a fixer of a house that my parents worked on, seemingly non-stop when I was a kid. I felt at one time that maybe I wanted a house to work on non-stop. But my life is different from my parents’ lives; I may have felt like I lived on an outpost back then, but I didn’t really.

When I packed up my house in Seattle, I left some things behind and mailed some things out to myself in Vermont. The bedroom in Topsham had a few of these only-partly-unpacked boxes in it from 2003. I had taken some books and some papers and my favorite mugs to Bethel and left behind a lot of storage and knick-knacks and furniture and stuff I’d gotten in garage sales. I had left bahind all my photographs, my printed photographs. I had left behind my Burning Man gear. Did I really wear a black bra that said “I love you” on the cups out in semi-public? I guess I did.

On Saturday, I filled my Subaru with stuff I thought I might want: my old iMac, my banjo-mandolin (no, I don’t really play), my engineer boots, my photos, my raincoat, my wooden boxes, my knickknack shelf made from an old printer’s tray. Being there was just really strange. I bought the place shortly after Jack and I had split up and I was thinking a change of scenery might do me good back in 1997. I was reading a lot of Mother Earth News and making plans to make braided rugs all Winter long. I never did settle in for good though, and moved back and forth between there and Seattle until I met Greg who moved out there and then decided to go to law school which turned out to also wind up being in Vermont but not close enough to drive to. We moved south to Bethel and when we split, I was set up here with a town I liked living in and a job I loved, so I never thought much about going back to Topsham for good. I still don’t have a good answer to what I want to do with the place.

Going back to it now, I can still remember all of my ideas I had for the place and they washed over me in an oddly poignant rush of “what might have been”s. Some of that was tied up with Greg, who left a lot of stuff there, but a lot of it was just being almost-40 remembering being almost-30 and looking at the world a little differently. In fact the queerest thing about being in Topsham is how quickly it took me back to a place before I’d known Greg, or Bethel, or a lot of my current local friends. It took me back to when I had a cat, to when I was sort of pseudo-married, to before my Dad was remarried (happy ninth anniversary guys!), to before my sister could drive. Back to when I had Fourth of July parties every year and a big sleepover on 12/31/99. It also took me back to before I travelled for work, before all this public speaking stuff, before I’d been to Australia, before I had what I now amusedly but happily call a career. Before I was published. Before I cut my hair. Before I started swimming. Before I drove a Honda. Before I worked at MetaFilter. All this stuff.

I’ve been in a good mood lately and so all this thinking and reflecting wasn’t at all bad but it was engrossing. I came home and got in the pool, then I went to hang out with Kelly and Forrest and some of their visting friends and had a great time meeting new people and experiencing Autumn in Vermont. Then I came home and slowly unpacked and took a look at the time capsule of stuff I brought with me. I never did turn the water on up in Topsham but, unlike the last few times I’ve been up there, this time I am looking forward to going back.

lifehacks! jessahacks!

I haven’t had much to say in a bit for a number of reasons. I pulled something in my back swimming on my birthday and now thoroughly hate getting older — I was okay with it before — and have been out of the pool for a while. I do my best thinking in the pool, so my mind feels sludgey. I’ve also been nose-deep in books, working on maybe one too many WordPress projects, and let a friend talk me into a drinking-and-working evening which left me in possession of a bad hangover (a merciful rarity) and this photo.

It looks like the site works well. If you hit something that doesn’t work, please tell me.

Mostly I came over here because I just read this post on Lifehack. Lifehacking is really popular among people I know, online nerd types who are looking to eke a little more happiness or productivity out of an already pretty happy and/or productive day or life. I don’t read it much because I already hacked my life the way I like it. The photo with the article is one of a man wearing a suit. My jessahack number one is don’t wear suits, unless you like them in which case you should wear them all the time.

Here’s the rest of their list and my commentary on it. I’m not trying to be a sanctimonious pain in the ass about this, I just think that lots of these sorts of essays have so many cultural assumptions built into them that we forget that there are so many more changes we can make if we are willing to look outside the normal “coke or pepsi?” set of choices. Actually, I just wanted to try out bulleted lists in this new template.

Lifehack: Get up early.
Jessahack: Sleep until you wake up, you’ll feel better. If you have to stay up late working on something or playing with something, don’t arbitrarily get up early because your Calvinist forebearers think there is some sort of honor in what time you get up.
LH: Establish a morning ritual to help you do what you need to do easily and avoid forgetting things.
Jessahack: make your lists whenever your brain works best. Don’t walk through any part of your life like a robot, even the groggy morning part.
LH: Always eat some breakfast.
Jessahack: Always eat some breakfast, preferably something good for you.
LH: Give yourself plenty of time for your morning commute.
Jessahack: Screw commuting. Live near your job. Work in your community
LH: Vary your route to work as much as you can.
Jessahack: See above. Walk or bike to work. Work from home. Carpool. Take the bus. Join a local rideshare group.
LH: When you arrive, have a simple ritual to ease you gently into the work environment.
Jessahack: Be mindful of what you need to do at work and go do it. Don’t screw around at the coffee machine if someone is waiting for a phone call from you.
LH: Take 10 minutes to set the dayâ€™s priorities.
Jessahack: Reprioritize whenever you get something done, check your long-term list. Stare out the window or go for a walk if you can’t get anything done. When in doubt, go to the post office and if there’s no mail for you, send some.
LH: Never, never start your day with distractions, like checking e-mail.
Jessahack: Read email while drinking coffee, wrap up email (first pass) when you’re done with your coffee.
LH: If you arenâ€™t sure what needs to be done first, follow this simple rule of thumb: look to see whatever needs to be done next and do it. Repeat until the end of the day. the result will be faster, more secure progress than you ever believed possible.
Jessahack: This is flat out mysterious to me. I have no response
LH: Above all, make a gentle start on the day allows you to preserve your energy for whateverâ€™s still to come.
Jessahack: If what you want is a fantastic day, don’t pussyfoot into it.

happy birthday me, new blog

My birthday was yesterday. Today I had some free time. I decided to toss Blogger out the window and move this blog to WordPress. I’ll be tweaking with the design and functionality for a few days (oh let’s be honest, weeks) but I want to bang on it while it’s actually working. So, bear with me and report anything that’s weird. Thanks!

Vermont’s oldest lifeguard

I’m now officially certified as a lifeguard by the Red Cross. apparently this sort of thing runs in my family. My Dad was a lifeguard and so was my grandfather (on my Mom’s side). I explain more about the story with the accompanying Flickr photo but here’s how my week went.

I had class from 4-9 pm each night Monday through Friday. Most nights we were done by 8 but some nights we weren’t. The other students in my class were three VTC students, one high school kid, one other guy from the community about my age and two lifeguards who were training to be lifeguard instructors. The instructors were two no-nonsense women sent by the Red Cross. We split the classes up between watching Red Cross videos, going over and practicing first aid, and going over and practicing drowning and rescuing. Then we’d have tests on these things culminating in an all-day testing situation on Saturday from about 9 til 1.

I do good on tests. I have an okay head for numbers and first aid mnemonics. I am a strong swimmer. What I am NOT any good at… is drowning. Part of the class involves pairing up with other students (the female instructors make sure the women in the class are teamed up with the guys because they want to make sure the guys get used to grabbing women in rescue situations where usually they’d be more like “um, excuse me”) and practicing rescuing each other. In most ways in the class I felt like I was holding my own as a (relative to the rest of the class) old lady, but I was the worst drowner of them all.

I could tell myself it’s because I have asthma and I’m not good at holding my breath or whatever but the truth is that waiting under six feet of water for some high school student to drag me to the surface when I KNOW there are better options is just not something I’m good at. I was sort of happy with myself for being able to just suck it up and do it. As I get older, there are fewer and fewer situations where I need to suck it up to do anything or accomplish anything. I’ve sort of created my life this way and overall I’m pleased with that. However it was nice to know that for a good reason, I could suck it up and just take orders in order to learn things.

Every night after Monday I came home sore and every day I’d take ibuprofen and drag my ass back to the pool and do more practice rescues and swimming and tests. It’s not like 30+ hours of class is all that grueling, but I think they normally break it up over a few weeks. By Saturday morning I was feeling feverish and just out of it, but I made it through the tests okay — as did everyone, I think the goal is for everyone to finish up cerified (certifiable?) — and I came home afterwards, popped in to a friend’s house to say hello and then went home and slept for almost twelve hours. I woke up today feeling much better — even went for a little hike — and didn’t even think about going to the pool. Normal swimming will resume on Tuesday.