.

what I did instead of swimming today

I like machines
Originally uploaded by jessamyn.

I swam on Wednesday.
I was away Thursday and Friday.
I got home on Saturday.
The pool was too hot to be open to the public on Sunday.
It was still too hot by Monday.
Today it was open, but closed by the time I was done with a meeting. Tomorrow it is open and I will swim.
Today I took this picture where they are building a new addition to the gym and some sort of student center.
Mmmmm earth moving.
I love the smell of dug up earth more than almost any other smell.
Just testing the Flickr to Vox posting. Seems to work.

QotD: Holiday Shopping

When do you start your holiday shopping?
Submitted by Murphy.

what to do with the old books?

Never. Or always.

I make postcards, write letters to friends and sometimes do some baking and special meal-making during the holidays. I have a collection of kids' books that I've picked up here and there that go to my younger friends. My biggest expense is stamps. I'm not a churchgoer, but Bill McKibben's Hundred Dollar Holiday idea always resonated with me.

If I'm spending the holidays with family Kate and I will often make something out of stuff we have around the house, hers or mine. It's a little hand-made-ashtray-ish but we're pretty talented and everyone knows we're like this. Otherwise I'm an impulse "Hey this thing just screamed your name at me" shopper, and that can happen at any time, but most frequently at the library booksale and not today, because today is a holiday.

Sorry friends and family, it's books again this year. When you're done with them, would you please pass them along to someone else who might like them? Thanks.

So Long Ola

Ola & a bottle of Jim Beam

If my landlady were on MySpace, this would be her photo there. However, she is not. She does have a new gmail account and satellite radio in her car. I helped set her up with both of those. She left today on a big driving adventure, down to Tennessee to see family over Thanksgiving and then off to California with her dog to visit four of her five kids on the west coast. If all things go well, she'll be entering the Peace Corps in March 2007 and heading off to the South Pacific. If that happens, I'lll be minding the place here. If it doesn't, she'll come back sometime in the winter and we'll move on to Plan B.

There was a big going-away party at the neighbor's place down the street and this picture is from that. It was mostly the local area Democrats (Ola's license plate reads DMOCRAT) who were happy for a change, and very happy to have a party to see Ola off. There was a lot of great food that people made, and our two local elected officials -- the local rep and the local senator -- were there. I bent the ear of one of them talking about my blah blah digital divide stuff and offered to come by her place any time and fix her computer. Free tech support is the coke vial on a chain equivalent here in rural noplace; I'm sure I'll be able to make inroads with her.

Overheard from the local senator "It's too bad that we overused and wore out the word 'facist' in the sixties when it just meant anything we didn't like, because it's really apropos now"

Then Ola and I hopped into her car with part of a bottle of Jim Beam and were happy to find that the satellite radio had finally populated itself with all the stations. We got home and I programmed in the 40s channel, CNN, CSPAN, the old time radio channel and whatever passes for NPR on XM radio. She went to bed early, like she always does, and we said goodbye since I knew she'd be leaving in the morning well before I got up, before the sun got up. We had been getting to the point where she was getting up almost when I was going to bed, each of us having a different manifestation of our restless minds.

I woke up this morning to a quiet and empty house, a clean kitchen and a to do list forming in my mind (get rid of extraneous hutches in kitchen, install programmeable thermostat, feed birds, INSULATE) and I've been picking away at it for a while now. I'll probably still be picking away at it when she comes back.

who lives here?

my house

I got home yesterday to a leaves-off-trees Vermont that was an unseasonable 60+ degrees. I opened the door to my room and it was like cracking the seal on a time capsule, though I'd only travelled a few months into the past. I haven't been here for more than four days in a row since August. As I fluffed up my pillows preparing to get into bed (bed! my bed! the best bed!) I noticed five little seeds underneath one of the pillows. I am not a nocturnal seed eater, but clearly someone or something had been. The mystery was further revealed when I moved the other pillow and found a small assortment of sunflower seed husks, pillow feathers and the wings and legs of tiny insects. My friend the mouse must have had a field day with the big empty room and the soft and quiet place to sleep. Sadly, now that it's my turn to have a field day with the room, he or she will have to go elsewhere. It's a big house, we may be able to go some time without running in to each other again.

a Brautigan poem, and a pool in Lansing Michigan

whirlpool

KARMA REPAIR KIT: ITEMS 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
And eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.

_____

I was going to remove the STFU picture of me so that I could demo Vox as
part of a talk I was giving to librarians about blogs, but instead I
just told them there was a picture of me standing by a sign with a
dirty word and figured they'd mostly go look at it anyhow.

I'm wrapping up the two week trip tonight and tomorrow and
getting hom on Friday to a car with snow tires and new plugs
and wires and an almost-empty house. I came back from my
last-of-five talks and listened to poetry in my room before
dinner. I might have gone to the pool but it didn't look too inviting.

[note: damnit, copying and pasting from a page with in courier font makes it
impossible to have word-wrap or a non Courier font in the rest of your post.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to fix this with all the cartoony
buttons at my disposal?]

I'm sorry, but I really sort of like this picture...

STFU

I went to Bar 107 while I was in LA. They have this outdoor smoking porch that is bordered on four sides by tall buildings and has sort of a cage-match wire mesh over the top of it, I guess to keep falling debris (and rats?) out. I took a picture of Bryan standing in front of the full wall sign, including the part that says "please" and he sent me this picture that he took of me. I'm sure I'll find a use for it someplace online; I'm just stashing it here for now.

A tale of three ipods

Ipod

This is sort of a MetaFilter story.

MetaFilter has a jobs section. I had a job I needed doing -- some code repair on a site that Greg had built and wasn't interested in maintaining. Dano made this post and I followed up. He wrote some code that added categories to my booklist, and I prepared to send off my old 2g 20GB ipod to him. I never used it anyhow, and it seemed like it might be good to send it someplace where someone would enjoy it. In the course of swapping "what's your mailing address?" emails with Dan, it became clear that my firewire-only ipod wouldn't work with any system he currently had. No problem I said, I have this old Vaio in a drawer that isn't doing anything, I'll send it along. Of course this is easier said than done; finding a box for a heavy heavy laptop and wrangling up the cords and accessories were delaying me. Plus, I had a two week trip to go on Real Soon Now. (on which I am, currently)

I was IMing about this to my friend Stan who had been using Ask MetaFilter to figure out what sort of MP3 player to buy. He had decided to get rid of his old ipod and was looking for something new. He made me a sweet deal on his 4g 20GB ipod (USB 2 compatible) that included shipping. I said great and we arranged to have him pick up a check at my place while I was out swimming and leave the ipod on the table in that grand country arrangement way "come on in, the door's open."

Meanwhile Matt had been asking me what my home address and phone number were, saying he was going to send me something from Amazon. Having recently endured a lot of bad Amazon interactions -- no I never did get that cell phone, I just cancelled the whole deal -- I set my expectations low.

I went to the pool and left a check on the table. I came home to a box on the table and a box on the porch. The table box had Stan's old ipod and a pre-printed Fedex shipping label -- only 12 miles to drive to get to a Fedex box, I guess that isn't too bad. The other box had a new nano, one of those little green jobbers, and a "thanks for the work you do on Ask MetaFilter" note from Matt. Total suprise. So I mailed off the 4g ipod from the quickie mart in Sharon -- all the tyvek envelopes in the Fedex kiosk were we from the recent rainstorms, I sure hope this isn't a problem. Then I came home to try to make friends with my new ipod and see if I can't learn to become a joyous, if somewhat reluctant, convert to the Ipod Nation.

I still have this old 2g 20GB ipod in a drawer and the brickish but functional Vaio, if anyone wants to make a trade....