Archive for the 'mundane happenings' Category

PSA: Tilapia /= Catfish

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Last month I was sitting around in the TA office and someone commented, scornfully, that “tilapia” was just a fancy name to make the stupid bourgeois eat catfish. Having been raised relatively bourgeois, I blinked and did not mention that I had never heard that tilapia was catfish. It did actually make a fair amount of sense. Who among us had heard about tilapia, say, six years ago? Not bad evidence of some kind of clever marketing ploy, I thought.

I was so convinced that I even attempted to pass it on to a carful of people on our way to the Victoria’s Secret semi-annual sale over at West Towne Mall,* although I did admit that I didn’t have independent confirmation.

Keely was a little skeptical, although she allowed that she hadn’t heard of tilapia before she moved to Madison, but argued that since she didn’t eat fish before then, why would she have noticed? Other passengers, however, confirmed that they, too, had only become aware of tilapia in the past few years.

So when I got home, I looked it up online and discovered: tilapia and catfish are about as distantly related as it is possible to be and both be FISH. Wikipedia informed me that tilapia are of the family “Cichlidae” while catfish are classified into about 50 freaking different families,** NONE of which are “Cichlidae.” According to the Wikipedia catfish entry–which, sure, take with a grain of salt–5% of vertebrate species are catfish. AND YET. Tilapia? Not catfish.

Being motivated to correct the misconception I had inadvertently been spreading, I brought it up when I called home in the evening, which set Dad off, and led to his confirmation–he, too, turned immediately to Wikipedia–that catfish and tilapia are, as noted, as totally dissimilar as two fish can be. I don’t know if “not tasting like much of anything” would be considered a phenotypical similarity or not; as my friend Crystal says, people fry catfish because they like the taste of fry and the catfish are handy.

By “set Dad off,” I mean that we are both compulsive reference checkers. I may or may not have previously related the story of an argument I got into with some of the girls in my 8th grade gym class, the subject of which I have long forgotten although some corner of my mind is convinced it had something to do with gypsies–I could totally be making that up–and so I went home and looked it up that night and came back in, the next day, vindicated, and told them loftily that I was, in fact, totally right and backed up by encyclopedic sources.

For some reason no one was at all impressed, and I was probably lucky to escape the interaction without being stuffed into a locker. It turns out that citations are not pertinent to junior high debate. So now you know why I’m in graduate school.***

Dad, anyway, had apparently known about tilapia since the early 80s, when they were the hot new thing at the University of Arizona’s School of Agriculture. They can be raised in very densely populated tanks, or, for that matter, in irrigation canals. The internet also tells me that they only require 1.2 pounds of feed to put on one pound of flesh, which compared to 6-8 pounds of feed for one pound of cattle flesh is pretty damn good. Plus, you know, they taste like whatever sauce you put on them.

And goddamn are they cheap. I picked up a bunch of frozen fish at Trader Joe’s this week as part of my effort to get back into shape, and you can get over a pound of tilapia for $4. That’s at least three meals right there. If I had a drainage ditch I could cut out the middleman… but I think I’m willing to pay for Trader Joe’s to handle it. Now the real question: what do I put on it when I bake it for dinner tonight?

*The sale started three days ago so it’s probably hopelessly picked over by now, plus any time you enter the VS store you’ll be surrounded by 12-year-olds, but the sale seems to bring out the especially inappropriate, e.g. the woman who was dragging her approx. 8-year-old daughter from bin to bin screaming, “Let’s look for some EXTRA SMALLS for you!” I mostly try not to judge other people’s parenting and god knows I am no arbiter of What Is Appropriate, but sweet fancy Moses, someone is going to be telling a therapist about this someday.

**To be totally accurate, 36–unless my finger slipped while I was counting down the list.

***Also, of course, a number of my family members went to graduate school. I don’t know if my father’s father was a compulsive reference checker or not, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

These are blasting caps. Don’t touch them.

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

The post title is really only funny if you have seen my father perform a public service announcement from his childhood concerning the inadvisability of touching blasting caps on construction sites, imitating Willie Mays, with metacommentary by his schoolmates (”You could lose an arm or a leg… which you may need in later life. If you see them, call the police, or a fireman. Let HIM lose an arm or a leg… he doesn’t have as much later life coming to him as you do.”) Maybe someday we can put it on YouTube, along with my Scottish great-great(?)-grandfather’s admonishment that son, you’re going to college, and if you’re gonna drink, JOHNNY DEWAR.

However, the general thrust of the title does work with today’s topic, which is: Your Health & Safety.

1) Carry condoms. If there is any chance that you think you might be going to have sex with someone with whom you do not have a long-standing association, an explicit contraceptive arrangement, AND credible assurances of a clean bill of health, you should have condoms with you. Sometimes people do not want to admit they are planning to do something like this, because they think it is immoral, and people prefer not to plan behavior they think is bad even if they are likely to do it anyway, because they’d rather pretend they’re not. The morality of casual sex is basically your own concern,* but try to think about your past behavior (which is a way better predictor of future behavior than attitudes are) and just, you know, be prepared. Just because you have them doesn’t mean you have to use them. And you know, maybe someone ELSE will need one, and then they’ll owe you. Think of the backlog of favors you could accumulate. To this end, you might also want to carry around tampons, pain killers, and a hip flask.**

2) Wear a bicycle helmet, for the love of god. The other night I stopped at Trader Joe’s for a few odds and ends and the cashier, who I think was trying to be ingratiating, commented that, gee whiz, you don’t think about helmets and lights and stuff until you have a bike accident and then you sure realize that they’re a good thing to have! Actually, I have never been in a real bike wreck, various near-misses with idiotic motorists and that time I flipped over when I was 10 and still learning to use hand brakes notwithstanding. However, I do FEAR DEATH, and so I wear a bicycle helmet.*** Just recently frippy was in a bike wreck that cracked her helmet; as she remarked, she didn’t realize how bad it really was until she realized what it did to her helmet. She got off with a deep contusion in one leg, instead of a concussion or worse, because she was wearing a helmet. And of course there was that UW-Madison grad student who got hit by the UPS truck. As frippy points out, there are people who would never drive without a seat belt or stick their hands out of fast-moving passenger trains who blithely pedal around town with no helmet. BAD IDEA.

2b) If you are on a bike, do not ride the wrong damn direction in a bike lane. If there is any justice in the world, you will be hit by lightning, and also I will scream at you if you do it near me.

2c) If you are driving a car, follow the damn law and don’t try to turn left over bicyclists who have the fucking right of way because they are going straight through the intersection. I am talking to you, stupid woman at the intersection of Regent and Monroe with whom I had the misfortune to meet some time between 8:15 and 8:30 am on Friday, October 5th.

2d) But also, don’t try to politely yield the right of way to bicyclists when you have it. It makes me nervous, because you know, it’s never entirely clear if that’s what you’re doing or if you’re just momentarily distracted and about to hit the accelerator again and also, you do not control everyone else on the road! Just follow the law! We all (theoretically) know what it is, which cuts down on the potentially fatal misunderstandings, okay?

3) If you need help, do not be embarrassed to ask a stranger. Pretty much everyone would rather call 911 for you when you can still provide some relevant information than have to report finding your non-responsive or lifeless body. And in many situations, they may not realize you need help (and are not just, say, having an emotional meltdown in the ladies’ room) unless you tell them, so SAY SOMETHING. Embarrassment is generally not fatal.

4) Do not use Mr. Clean Magic Erasers on exposed skin, even if you are covered in pink stains. You will get a rash, which is arguably more unsightly than the pink stains and definitely more painful.

*Readers, long-term and walk-through, may draw their own conclusions about my opinion on the subject.

**Remember when my flask saved the day at San Francisco Pride? Lousy over-priced under-boozed PrideFest “margaritas.” Jose Cuervo lemonade, more like it.+

***Okay, early indoctrination and my father’s clever technique of equating helmet use with intelligence, a quality highly salient to my sense of self–”People who don’t wear helmets have nothing to protect”–probably helped, too.

+Some local legal restrictions may apply.

Pretty much anything that makes my back make a godawful noise is a good thing.

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Today I went to the chiropractor. Now that I have access to my Wisconsin HMO again, I am trying to take full advantage.

The chiropractor is about half a mile from my house, and she did awesome things to my back. She confirmed that my neck and shoulders are fucked up, but she assured me that they are fucked up in a way that is common to people who spend a lot of time at computers and that she can fix me. Then she made my back make loud noises but rubbed my neck more sedately, because she was afraid of causing me to have a stroke.* Then she hooked me up to a MACHINE with ELECTRODES that rub your muscles. It was very Return to Oz or something.

I didn’t have to pay anything, and I get to go back next week. My insurance is pretty awesome. Although it probably doesn’t pay for therapeutic massage, but I might get some anyway. We’ll see.

Afterwards, I stopped off at the drugstore by my house, which is also a costume shop and sells wine. It’s pretty much my ideal retail establishment. They also have limited postal service, but they don’t send international packages over a pound, so I couldn’t ship my eBay shoes to Canada. They did, however, have a wide selection of brightly colored wigs, and the greatest selection of crazy sunglasses that I have ever seen. I put together quite the birthday present for my pseudo-goddaughter. Even my own heart-shaped sunglasses didn’t have GLITTER on them.

While I was there, two elderly women approached me and raved about my hair. One of them squeezed my hand, which I actually didn’t mind. Often when people are exclaiming about my hair, they try to touch it–since it’s so short, this means that they are basically lunging at my face, which is not awesome. Hand-squeezing is different, especially if you are a matronly older woman. The woman behind the counter looked like an older Ellen Kushner, right down to her taste in clothes. I think I really like this neighborhood.

*This is a concern when you have a clotting disorder, although I doubt I have any clots hanging around in my neck waiting to kill me at the moment.

bike path vampires, or, what to worry about when the Roaming Larcenous Telepath threat level is low

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Southwest bike path, riders in the distance

Southwest bike path across Glenway

One of the awesomer things about my new apartment is its proximity to the bike path. When I tell other grad students where I live, they often exclaim, aghast, that it’s “so far!” It’s really not. It’s less than three miles from where I work and I can bike it in about 15 minutes. I am told that the city of Madison has special snowplows specifically for the bike paths, so I should be able to commute without too much difficulty throughout the winter.

Also, I’ve discovered that in my new location, I am much closer to places that were always a pain to reach before, like, say, real grocery stores (Capitol City Foods so, SO does not count, no matter what they told the new post-doc about living downtown). There’s even a Sally Beauty within about two miles, so I can keep stocked up on my many grooming supplies.* And finally, the bike path is in WAY better shape than most of the roads around here, so it’s a nice smooth ride when I can keep to it.

At night, however, when it is cold and there are still puddles everywhere although at least it’s finally stopped raining, and the bike path is really, REALLY dark, it is kind of scary (although there are reflectors along the edge whenever it curves at all). Naturally, all I could think about the whole way home was vampires, and how even a very small and weak vampire could definitely overtake a bicycle, and how crashing into a vampire on your bicycle is probably not covered by renter’s insurance** (although actually, it seems pretty obvious that the curséd undead should not count as “Act of God”).

What I really should have been worried about was rabbits, which were a) everywhere and b) apparently very depressed. One of them ran back and forth across the path in front of me like three times–I want to die! Wait, no! Yes! No!–and another one paced me alongside the path for a nerve-wracking minute during which I was sure he was going to leap under my front wheel at any moment. Carly recently mentioned the current plague of insane Madison chipmunks, but I’ve mostly just seen the rabbits, and a few squirrels–although I did see a squashed chipmunk on Tokay this weekend. I assume it was hit by a car rather than a bike.

Perhaps these particular suicide rabbits thought I was some kind of strange cycling rabbit robot, based on the placement of my back light. It is red and sort of triangular with clipped off corners, and I used to clip it to my backpack when I biked in the dark but now that I have panniers, I don’t ride with a backpack anymore.*** Anyway, the light could be mounted on my rear rack, if I had the mount for it, but I have no idea where it went and I haven’t gotten to the bike shop to ask them to rig something up yet. Consequently, when I ride after dark I have to clip the light to the back of my pants, where it blinks merrily in case anyone was in danger of missing my butt. Fortunately, I never looked that dignified to begin with.

*Developer, activating powder, lightener–you need all three of the preceding to make bleach–color-protective shampoo, color-sealing treatment, color-protective conditioner, super moisturizing hair masque conditioner, special protein serum to mend breakage… I don’t just wake up with beautiful, effortless pink hair, dear reader.

**I have friends who do not have renter’s insurance. They will be sorry when vampires burn down their apartments and/or bite passersby on the front steps.+

***Although my back still hurts. Tomorrow I am going to the chiropractor, hooray!

+Renter’s insurance includes liability.

As we sociologists know, it’s all about your reference group.

Monday, June 18th, 2007

When I first moved in, I bought a frame for nine 5″x7″ photos–I’m a big fan of montage frames. I figured I’d pick out some photos from the prints I’d ordered from Flickr around then, but I didn’t have enough with the same orientation, portrait or landscape, which the frame requires. I finally decided to order some prints for it today, and as a not-very-patient person, I went for the “pick up at Target” option (even though you can only get glossy prints from them, which I don’t really prefer). It turns out, however, that you can’t pick up your photos at just ANY Target. Only certain Targets may be specified.

Unfortunately, the Mountain View Target, which is pretty convenient to my house, is not on the list. The closest was the Sunnyvale Target; I mapped it out with Gmaps Pedometer and it was only an extra eight miles or so, with bike lanes all the way, so I went ahead and ordered them for pick-up. I mentioned this to another intern who had stopped by my office to say hello at the end of the day; he was appalled.

“Are you sure you don’t want a ride?” he asked me.
“I’ll be fine; it’s not that far.”
“To SUNNYVALE? That’s hardcore.”
“I dunno,” I said. I was flashing back to the conversation I’d had with my father yesterday, when he informed me that he’d ridden 78 miles that afternoon:

“I–what?”
“I rode 78 miles.”
“…Did you just say you rode ’seven to eight miles’?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”

As Dad pointed out, he is training for his trip to New Orleans, but I only did 21.7 today and I think my legs may be a little sore tomorrow. Of course, that is on a mountain bike that was never meant for road commuting; I like to think of it as my little exercise weight.

If only I’d yet made time to attach my bike lights and didn’t have to worry about sundown, I would have stayed at the Sunnyvale Target longer to marvel–it was two stories high. I have never seen such a Target. I guess I’ll have to ride back there some time.

Eldest children: we follow the rules because we never ever get away with breaking them. NOT LIKE SOME.

Monday, June 11th, 2007

My friend Crystal is fond of citing birth order research. Most of it has been discredited, as I always point out, particularly that bit about the authoritarian mindset of the firstborn,* but it’s hard to deny that children tend to get treated differently within the family depending on it. When my sister Sophie came to visit Hannah and me in Boston, she and Hannah both came over to my apartment one night for macaroni & blue cheese** and drinks. As I was grating cheese, the two of them freely admitted that as the eldest child, I was required to do absolutely EVERYTHING, and they never had to do anything, especially Hannah, who was barely even ever HOME for the last two years of high school.

Apparently this bias is not just limited to the home environment, but universal, because for some reason Hannah is able to get contacts from 1800contacts.com on an expired prescription that, in fact, she has UPGRADED ON HER OWN AUTHORITY in some kind of attempt to become the Bionic Woman, and every damn time I try to order contacts from them, my order gets flagged and I get a bitchy phone call*** about me needing an eye exam–which, of course, I have to pay for myself since I’m in California and my Wisconsin HMO won’t cover it. And naturally there is no cheap-ass department store Vision Center (WalMart, Target, Sears–anything!) within 10 miles of my place, so I’m stuck with the place with which 1-800-Contacts has an agreement.**** If $69 is not a good deal on an eye exam, I do not want to know.

*For some reason, people always remark that I myself provide strong anecdotal evidence in support of this theory.

**Thanks to Aaron for the recipe. It is DELICIOUS.

***Actually, she was very pleasant, and should probably not be held responsible for whatever red flags my name raises with their computer system, but I am a cranky person.

****”Site for Sore Eyes.” There’s a confidence booster.

Are you guys from Missouri or what?

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

So today is my third day biking into work, and my second making it here in approximately 40 minutes due to not going seven miles out of my way. So far, the wind has been against me every morning, which also happens to be the direction in which there is more uphill going; this is fine with me, since it means that on my way home in the evening I am going mostly downhill with the wind at my back, and I shower after I get to work in the morning anyway.

On Tuesday, on the way home, I actually stopped in at Trader Joe’s near my house for a few additional grocery items I’d forgotten when Stevie drove me around on Saturday to run errands. This involved going a few blocks down El Camino because I hadn’t yet discovered how to get there on California;* although I am normally a strong opponent of sidewalk-biking, El Camino is insanely busy and has no bike lane, and I do not have a rearview mirror.**

Not that a rearview mirror would do you much good against a guy leaning out the passenger-side window of a pick-up truck and SCREAMING IN YOUR EAR.

This is exactly what happened to me, within my first block of El Camino. I narrowly avoided running into the bus stop that was coming up ahead of me. The subsequent yelling, which continued for the next three blocks every time they passed me (there were unfortunately a bunch of red lights), was at least not as startling, although it did become even more abusive in tone after I gave them the finger.***

Everyone to whom I’ve mentioned the incident is just floored that such a thing could happen in freaking Mountain View, California. The only thing that would have made sense would be if they’d been giving me shit for being on the sidewalk, but the content of the yelling was actually mainly centered around my hair, which is somewhat visible even when I am wearing a helmet.**** One would of course imagine that most people in Mountain View have seen freaky hair as well as cyclists, but perhaps the combination was just too much. I haven’t been subjected to ANY other negative behavior on my bike, though; people actually let me make LEFT TURNS, for godsakes. Sometimes they even yield to me when they have the right-of-way.***** El Camino aside, most of the major roads I want to ride on have bike lanes. I am totally ruined for trying to bike in most of Missouri, from whence I can only imagine the assholes in that pick-up hailed. Or maybe they have family there.

Or you know, maybe it’s me and my attitude problem. I think I might have what they call a “haughty bearing,” although I didn’t think it would be so obvious while hunched over my handlebars, and much like my tendency to attempt to lead while dancing, I’m not sure I can turn it off. The bird-flipping, though, I should probably try to work on.

I really like riding my bike, though. I definitely plan to keep it up when I get back to Madison, which is fairly decent for bicycling, especially by general Midwestern standards. My friend Keely recently suggested we should take one of the little bike maintenance classes that one of the shops offers; I think I’ll take her up on it. Whee.******

*It often takes me a very long time to learn new routes places, because my sense of direction is so bad that I am loathe to experiment. California runs parallel to El Camino, however, and has a nice bike lane, and I’ve pretty much got the six or seven block stretch of it that I need down, I think.

**Matt made fun of my desire to get a clip-on one for my helmet, but I’m going to assume that’s just because he wants me dead.

***I know, I know. I have to learn to control my temper, especially when it is Bicycle Vs. Car, even if I AM on the sidewalk. Evidently I have not actually learned much since I was 11 and did the exact same thing to a big scary 9th grader who was threatening to beat me up over the pro-choice pin on my backpack–no one was more amazed than I that I was then able to outrun her, believe me.

****I am thinking about getting a pink helmet, as it would probably be cheaper than getting my bike painted pink.+

*****I don’t actually like this very much. I believe I have posted in the past about why I think motorists should not muddy the waters by being nice–if everyone follows the LAW, then we should (theoretically) know what the hell everyone else is going to DO and be able to act accordingly, instead of it being a big courteous free-for-all.

******Or “duh-doo-dee-doo-dee-DOO-doo,” which is the Wicked Witch of the West’s motif, and which I like to hum to myself, when I am riding my bicycle.

+Although I have considered nail polish lightning bolts.

Navigation mishaps, gaudy linens, and karaoke: my life in a nutshell.

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

So it took me 90 minutes to bike into work today, but I think I can shave off some time tomorrow by not going 6.2 miles out of my way.*

First I forgot my cell phone. That cost me about a mile, but the real problem was when I forgot that Arastradero doesn’t start until after you cross El Camino, and failed to turn left on Charleston. Because I had written down directions for myself off the Gmaps Pedometer route I plotted over a map of bike lanes in the area, I was TOTALLY SURE that I was not supposed to turn left on Charleston, despite the niggling doubt in my mind as I sped through intersection after intersection with no sign of Arastradero. This is the peril of documents,** even ones that we ought to know are not exactly 100% reliable given that we created them yesterday and are notoriously bad at navigation in general. They just seem so authoritative. Oops.

So I didn’t lift any weights when I got in as I’d originally planned; just showered and changed and came upstairs to my office. At least I know how to get from home to work now, and am in good enough shape that I can handle a 6.2 mile detour.

As you may have gathered, I am safely in California–mostly moved in, even, largely thanks to the tireless efforts of my friends Greg and Stevie, who let me ship my many, many belongings to their apartment, helped me get my luggage and packages from my motel to my summer lodgings, and even took me in to the bike shop to get my bike reassembled this weekend. The house where I’m renting a room is pretty nice, and has pretty much everything I could ask for in the kitchen; I’ve already been baking up a storm. I’m hoping to finish organizing all my crap this week, so that my room doesn’t look so much like a dozen boxes of clothing, jewelry, and office supplies exploded in there. And I’m also planning to actually update again; I know everyone will be so pleased.

AMAZING CALIFORNIA DISCOVERY: There is a box karaoke place in Cupertino*** that has Belinda Carlisle’s “Summer Rain”**** in their catalog. This is like the holy fucking grail of karaoke for me; now I just need to find “Season of the Witch” and “When U Were Mine.”

I am singing to you, baby

And Stevie even took the best karaoke photo ever, as a bonus.

BEDSPREAD UPDATE: So Stevie took me to Target to pick up all the random stuff I still needed despite having shipped a dozen boxes of my crap to California, and I got a new bedspread to replace the one that, you may recall, I jettisoned in Boston because I hated it. At first I wasn’t seeing anything that really appealed to me in Target Housewares, but then I realized it was probably because I was looking in the adult bedding section. In the children’s section I found a comforter in PINK CAMOUFLAGE. Naturally I pounced on it. Now no one can sneak up on me when I’m sleeping! It is, after all, when I am at my most vulnerable.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR COMMENTERS: If at any time you ever posted a comment here and it never showed up, it’s because it got lost in comment spam. I had like 10,000 of the freaking things and just mass deleted them all, so I’m sorry if I accidentally trashed any legitimate comments along with the rest. I’ve just enabled a special spam-busting plugin that will hopefully solve this problem, though.

*Yes, that pretty much doubled the length of the ride.

**I am reading David M. Levy’s Scrolling Forward: Making sense of documents in the digital age for work. He gets a little crazy mystical hyperbolic sometimes, but given my own feelings for the internet I can understand. It’s a little weird sometimes, though, as the book was published in 2001 and obviously the virtual world has moved on quite a bit since.

***Of COURSE I have been to karaoke. I’ve been in the state for over a week, you know.

****No one ever knows this song. Belinda Carlisle is probably best known for “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and possibly “Circle in the Sand”; at least these are the two songs you can expect to find at every karaoke joint. They NEVER have “Summer Rain,” except in Cupertino. Lyrics here.

I am but mad north-northwest, or actually any direction in which I have to make yet another damn cross-country move.

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Seriously. I counted, and I have moved five times in the last twelve months. It is FUCKING CRAZY.

Right now I am bleaching the shower. I have to do this every time I move, because I am basically a big reddish pink contaminant, and lately I keep getting these unbelievably bitchtastic landlords as if to punish me for the SAINTLY landlord I had for two years in Madison (Bruce at SRM; he is awesome).

A friend is giving me a ride to the airport tomorrow, thank god; I spent today running around doing last-minute errands–like shipping my bike, which as it turned out really shouldn’t have been a last-minute errand, but it’s done.*

So: I fly to San Francisco tomorrow. It’s a direct flight, which I guess is sort of nice, except it means I’m in the air for six hours and I don’t have an aisle seat and I have to get up every 45 minutes or so for a little turn around the cabin, lest I get a blood clot and die. The last time I tried to use this little factoid to maneuver the old guy in the aisle seat into switching with me, he just made a face at me and told me to get over myself. So at least I didn’t have to feel bad about making him get up every 45 minutes.

I will be wearing my anti-clotting prescription pantyhose, and taking aspirin, and possibly drinking heavily. I picked up four trashy paperback thrillers at the library sale table today for a grand total of $1,** so at least I don’t have to pay airport bookstore prices like I did on the way back from Chicago***–$35 I paid for TWO BOOKS, although I admit one of them was a hardback. It was the only thing that looked good to me. The books from the library sale should be better than staring at the back of a fellow passenger’s head for six hours, anyway.

Then a friend is picking me up at the SF airport, and I’m hanging out with her and her fiance (with whom I went to junior high, so I actually knew him first) over the weekend, and heading down to Palo Alto on Monday, where I have a motel room for the four nights until I can move into the room I’m renting in Mountain View. I start work on Tuesday. Oh, this whirlwind life I lead.

So you can understand why I may well not post for another ten days. But eventually there will be pictures of the Bay Area to make up for it.****

*Let’s just say it’s probably a good thing I was wearing that wonder bra when I set out to talk the bike shop guy into packing my bike in an afternoon instead of, like, three days.

**I was at the library to pay my fine before leaving Boston. I know, I am such a goody two-shoes.

***More on this later. Or possibly not. I kind of come out looking mentally deficient in this story.

****And also of my empty Boston apartment, in case at any point in the future I need evidence that I did not, in fact, wreck the joint.

Have I mentioned that I love the future?

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

I am sitting in the lobby area of the Z Center athletic facility, conducting interviews about Facebook use via instant messenger before my workout. It occurred to me this morning, as I was trying to figure out the logistics of all the interviews I had scheduled and my desire to go to the gym, that I didn’t actually have to go in to the office as I’d been planning–the wireless is just as good at the Z Center and either way I’d be on my laptop.

And this way I shave off about 20 minutes of walking around campus, which is kind of important because I have like six interviews scheduled today. I’ll do two interviews here at the gym, work out, mail birthday presents at the campus post office, and bus it home so that I can be there by 3:15 for my next round of interviews (I have to be back at home for them because one of them is a phone interview that I’ll be recording with Skype, and it doesn’t run well on my laptop, plus my headset is at home, plus I realized this morning while getting dressed that I need to do some laundry because I am currently wearing my second-to-last set of gym clothes).

And THEN, I just got a message from City of Heroes that Issue 9 has gone live, which means that there is some serious new content up. I just made level 45 on Monday night, so I’m excited to try out my newly beefed up ice armor,* but I also want to see how the new invention system works. I never bothered to look at it on the test server, so it’ll all be new to me. I just hope nothing is severely broken.

Also, thanks to craigslist, it looks like I’m set up for housing in California. This is a relief, although of course I haven’t even BEGUN packing. I’m having a party next week to give away stuff that I don’t want to move, and have decided that I am getting rid of my bedspread because I hate it. This is a recurring problem for me. Some of you may recall that my current bedspread was the object of a long and arduous search for a reversible pink and green comforter. Which it is, but you know, they’re kind of UGLY pink and green. Not the shades I had envisioned, and over time, they have become more and more objectionable in my eyes, especially since my friend Matt bragged to me about the awesome zebra print bedspread he found for super cheap in Australia.** And of course moving pretty much makes ALL your possessions less attractive.

Probably I should stop buying bedspreads online. The future is great, but given that I keep hating bedspreads that looked pretty good on Amazon Marketplace, it might be best to return to my old-fashioned shopping roots for the next one.

*For the two or three readers who might possibly care: when I hit 41, I initially took Electricity Mastery as my epic power pool, since Andromeda Sparks is an electric/electric blaster. Unfortunately, it really sucked, so I respec’d to Cold Mastery instead. So far I’ve got an area of effect sleep power and this ice armor, which is pretty cool–it takes both defense AND damage resistance enhancements, and I’ve now got two of each on it, so I expect noticeably improved performance.

**Where he lives. Matt is like my best friend in the world who I have never seen.+ He figured out how to use the automatic timer on my last digital camera over IM–it was a Sony Cybershot purchased in Japan, for which it was impossible to obtain an English manual. He also wrote me into his webcomic once.

+This is not slighting Travis, because Travis has video blogged.


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