Year-end post

And so the Year of the Something has drawn to a close. Well, here on the Left Coast it's got a few hours of partying left in it, but I'm scared of New Year's Eve drivers (having lost a friend to one in high school) so we're hiding at home and listening to interesting music, making a yummy dinner, and relaxing. I have a glass of White Truck (Red Truck is better but this is quite tasty) and the hubby is on zucchini duty, so all is well. My carpool home took me past Colorado Blvd (Rose Parade route) which is in full Running Amok mode already, including caravans of VW microbusses and idiots blocking the intersection and getting out of their cars to make angry noises at each other. I think when we finally own a house one thing that would be fun to do would be to have a New Year's Eve slumber party. I like New Year's parties but I don't want my friends driving around with lunatics on the streets. Well, okay, drunk lunatics. I realize the lunatics are there every day of the year, but they are particularly bad this night. So a New Year's Slumber Party seems like the right answer, but most of us have outgrown sleeping bags on the living room, so I'm going to need some more bedrooms.

But my point was going to be to reflect on 2007. It has been a good year, I think. We attended three weddings. Friends had babies (on purpose). I didn't have to take any big exams. I didn't clonk any heads together. Vocational things progressed for both me and my hubby. We got to do a lot of travel and fun things like that. We have a lot to be grateful for - a warm home, plenty of food, clean water and medical care at our beck and call, and most of all, one another. Yes, I would say it was a good year. I even exercised some - and kept a log of it all year, which I'm a little afraid to look at, although the last quarter of the year was pretty strong on that front.

We joined a newly-started book club and made new friends. I got a new car (because I totaled the old one with a baby in the back seat but let's stay positive here - the baby is fine and her parents are still my friends - yet more for which I can be grateful!) I read a lot of books, and enjoyed most of them. I started a blog, which I even write in sometimes. I baked a lot of bread. I rode my bicycle twice (an opportunity for more progress in 2008). I outlined a book I want to write. I sang in front of my whole company (upon request- long story) and they appear to have liked it. I got to know my sister-in-law and her honey better (and like them even more!) I can think of more things, too.

Thank you all for your contributions to my well-being in 2007. I lift my glass to you and look forward to a lovely 2008!

Spendy Jeans

There are a bunch of new boutiques in Claremont, so that now I have at least three options for stores that would love to charge me over $100 for a pair of blue jeans. I don't get this. I know I'm not a fashionista, but seriously, $178 for a pair of jeans? I have trouble bringing myself to spend $100 for dress slacks, where it's arguably worth while. Jeans I put on to be comfortable, not scared of puddles. One of the newer shops is also offering a pair of very comfortable-looking pajama pants type things for $84. This is the sort of garment that I would spend half the weekend in and get covered in cat hair and possibly various food products. Eighty-four dollars. Did togas get really high-end and expensive before Rome fell?

Dorking Around on Facebook

So, I have been kindly invited by a few friends to join Facebook. This has been interesting. Most of my work on the Facebook page I have created has been accomplished while nursing an upset stomach. I wonder if I'll go back and look at it later and be horrified at what I posted when I was too ill to know better? I also wonder if there is a selection bias towards geekiness (geek is sexy!) in the sub-group of friends who are using Facebook? Coming from me, this is a compliment, so please remember that before bristling, o dear ones. For example, one friend of mine appears (judging by his friends list, which is one female) to have joined just to be friends with one chyck. Probably a strategically wise move. And then there is one guy, whom we shall call KON, for King of Networking. He has a ridiculous number of friends. Next we see GooberJock, who is one of my favorite people ever. He immediately sent me six widget requests of some sort or another, involving alcohol, hotness, and werewolves. I called him and asked why he had so much time to be dorking around on Facebook.

I'm starting to feel a bit like the cyberworld of Ender's Game is upon us. Not the war part, but the part where his siblings are writing stuff on the net, or whatever they call it. Hey, maybe that would be a good book for bookclub. Nothing to get political about in there, right? ha ha. Anyway, it feels like there is a whole universe in there, which of course only exists in a couple of really huge servers in Virginia? No, that can't be right. I have a lot of resistance towards learning how the internet actually works - because it sounds terrifically boring to me - but it seems important, like knowing how to change a tire. Maybe a responsible adult should know the rudimentary workings of the internet. Although unlike the tire, I am not going to be called upon to fix it ever. But it seems like I ought to know how it works, like I know how the electoral college works, or where the food I eat comes from - you know, Jeffersonian Citizen sort of thing. Come to think of it maybe I should look that up... But I'm a little afraid, like if I learn too much I'll get sucked into it a la Tron, and be forced to wear glowing spandex and throw frisbees to save my life, neither of which I would want to be called upon to do under even less dire circumstances.

Interestingly, I used to have a similar level of resistance towards learning how the stock market works... Hopefully this doesn't mean we'll find me making my living at something to do with the Internet in ten years.

So, I better go find something to eat that won't worsen my tummy.

Apostrophe Catastrophe

Okay, I don't know what hit the fan recently, but it seems we have had a sudden epidemic of people thinking one uses an apostrophe to pluralize something. For example: "Shopper's serve as the eyes and ears for those clients as part of their efforts to enhance the quality of the customer's experience." Ack. This bugs the foo out of me. It's bad enough with its and it's. Or maybe I'm confused - maybe the country has just been feeling really possessive recently. And Lord help us if we need a plural possessive - what then, quote marks? 'Worker's"~_* Compensation'?

Feeling grammatically isolated today.

Partial Victory

So, Courtney and Ben did not win the Starbucks Music Makers competition... but they DID win the online vote! So thanks everyone for your help! As I pointed out to Courtney, while a free trip to Hawai'i would have been awesome, the popularity they can demonstrate with this accomplishment should be very appealing to record labels and other biz folks. Congrats to KaiserCartel!

Vote for Courtney!!!

Notice the cool "widget" I added to this page - with this, you can vote for Kaiser Cartel in the Starbucks Music Makers Competition and help my sister-in-law win!!! You have to enable pop-ups to get the verification screen. We only have until 10/11/07 so please vote now!

Yay!

Braindead.

So. Completely. Comatose. Seriously people, if ever my nose was in danger it would be now, from the imminent threat of hitting my keyboard. My intestines seem to have decided that not only will I be utterly unable to consume coffee, now tea is getting a little too strong for me. Tea. This is the drink that genteel English ladies whose ribs were being crushed by corsets and thus were prone to fainting would drink. Not whiskey. Tea. I am old before my time. I've been greying since I was 15, and apparently my intestines are joining in the line of stuff to go early. Next will be something equally weird no doubt, like my toenails. Ooo, actually, my knuckles have been getting stiff and achy... but that's probably from my secret double life as a vinyl-catsuit-clad Woman of Mystery. Too much punching bad guys.

So that's enough random stream of consciousness for one afternoon when I'm supposed to be working, I suppose.

Post HP7 Let Down - very mild spoilers

I wrote this the Monday after Harry Potter 7 came out but I didn't have this blog yet to post it on, so here it is, a bit after the fact:

I can't concentrate. I o.d.'d on Harry Potter this weekend (I really wanted to avoid spoilers...) and now I'm totally distracted. First I'm bummed that I'm not a witch. Yes, thank you peanut gallery, I realize I can be witchy. You know what I mean. Then if I can't be magical, maybe I could be Harry's cool American cousin, whom he comes to visit to recoup after his big battle. Except he's fictional. Okay, then how about I be J.K. Rowling. Um, sure, go right ahead, Kaiser. You do that then. Okay, fine, I'll just go look at pictures of Daniel Radcliff. Um, I could be his MOTHER. Sure, I would have been 15, but more scandalous things have happened. So that doesn't work.

So here I am, stuck in my utterly muggly, unglamorous office, trying to force a spreadsheet out of my brain and into my computer. And it ain't working. Obviously it's time for that fabulous career as an International Woman of Mystery. But it's a little hot out for vinyl catsuits...

A few technical details

So, I figured out how the comments thing works. Sorry about that. All should be able to post comments now, and they are "moderated," so you will presumably not see them until I check my email and approve it as containing no profanity or other wackiness which I'm sure would be the result of anonymous flamers (meaning e-Flame, not a reference to any sexuality choices) and not any of the wonderful humans to whom I sent my inaugural blog email. Speaking of whom, I did so from webmail while in Portland, and brilliantly did not save the list I created, and of course being the sensitive little creature that I am I put you all in the bcc to protect you from harm, SO... I can't really email exactly the same list to tell you that I've fixed stuff. So I'll email the ones who actually noted that and the rest of you I will hope are still reading.

Last and perhaps mostly, a few have complained that I seem to think this blog will get me out of the responsibility to actually write to each of you. Heavens, no! This is intended as a place for me to wax babblotic (hopefully not idiotic) at any random point of day and not clog people's in-boxes with the results. I think this will actually free me up to send real, personal emails to people and not feel guilty having not sent something to "the carlie list" in a long time. Further, I will probably not be using this blog for "what's going on in our lives" stuff unless it seems interesting and germane. There's just too much potential for me to embarrass myself (further).

Thank you for reading and (trying) commenting!

Babble enabler

Having just finished my first Portland post, I realize that blogging is the perfect venue for people like me who like to talk way more than anyone really wants to listen. This could be dangerous.

Portland

Portland, Oregon (OR-regn, not o-re-GONE, thank you. It's still here, it's not gone.)

We are in Portland for the weekend! Our friends Rob and Mel are getting married (yay!) and were so considerate as to chose a location 1.3 miles (as the MapQuest flies) from the fancy, penthouse apartment of my totally awesome sister and brother-in-law.

Portland is a great town. It calls itself "the city that works," which indeed it does. What's not entirely clear to me is why. So far as I can tell, they have an economy which is entirely based on drinking coffee and walking one's dog. One's own dog, so no paying work created there. The coffee purchasing does involve some commerce, but the coffee shop per capita ratio appears untenably high. But maintain it they do. There are, of course, office buildings and a port (it would be a bit silly not to have a port in PORTland, but my sister tells me it is named Portland because the guy from Portland, ME won the coin toss against the man from Boston [thank goodness, I say] so maybe it wasn't really about ports at the time). But there are SO many coffee shops, and people hanging out in them at all hours, and people walking their dogs in the middle of the day, that I find it difficult to believe that there is a high enough fraction of the population creating saleable goods and services to maintain this lovely town by themselves. So I suspect either a lot of inherited wealth or some sort of shenanigans. (side thought - shenanigans sounds Irish - am I dissing my Celtic brethren without realizing it?)

Not that it doesn't make sense to want to drink coffee in Portland. Today is July 28, and it's cool and foggy, like San Francisco without the attitude problem. I can see why a bit of caffeine to get one through to the next sunny day makes perfect sense. It's just the sheer quantity of shops and hours devoted to the beverage which I find remarkable. The dogs, too, seem like a good idea to cheer one up. But which came first, the cheerfulness or the dogs? Porties (I imagine one is supposed to call them Portlanders but they are too cute) seem very cheerful and mellow. So, not cheerful like me, the sort of brownian particle of activity. Cheerful like a tree sloth appears to be very happy hanging from the tree with moss growing on his tummy. In fact, the weather here appears perfectly suited to those creatures who wish to grow moss on their tummies. But anyway, that was not my point. Cheerful people like dogs, to make a broad generalization. Dogs cheer people up, to make another. So what happened first? Do the Porties get bummed out that they haven't seen the sun since August, and go get a dog? Or do the cheerful Porties get dogs, which then help to keep the cheerful in the rainy, foggy weather? Clearly once the Portie adopts the dog, a virtuous circle of cheer is created.

Back to Cathy and Erick's apartment for the moment. It's not technically a penthouse, because it's not the entire top floor. It is in the Northeast corner of the 24th floor of a 24 story building. The North and East walls of the living room slash kitchen slash office slash dining room are windows. On a clear day (so, like, monthly) you can see Mounts Hood and St. Helens from various different windows. The town is mountainous and pretty and interesting and there's good food. I'm all about the food, not surprisingly. Not an unreasonable distance from here are some fancy shmancy chocolate shops, a good pizza joint, and, oh, yeah, some coffee shops. There's an amazing Japanese garden just up the "hill" (that is a mountain, thank you, but these Porties don't know that) and this is our second visit in six months and we haven't made it to the garden yet, even though I LOOOOVE Japanese gardens. We're too well entertained by sitting in this apartment, flopping about, cooking and eating things, and staring out the window. Ooooh, hey, we could bake bread! That sounds cozy. See? That sort of thing happens, and we use up all our get-up-and-go on things like buying yeast and molasses.

Cathy and Erick moved here after three years in Boston. Erick is a cognitive psychologist specializing in hearing, and there are about eight labs in the whole country with an anechoic chamber (where sound really only happens once - it's pretty weird). That is what took them to Boston, where they were both so busy being good sports about being on the East coast that when this opportunity presented itself they each surprised themselves with a huge sigh of relief. They are West coast people. They went to Reed, here in Portland, and in fact that is where they met. Reed is funny - lots of really smart, really out-there students. Cathy liked it because it was the first time in her life she felt mainstream. This is the union-side labor lawyer, you may recall. So, anyway, they sold their car in Boston and don't need one here. Erick takes public transit to work, Cathy can walk, and they have "flexcar" for things like big trips to the store or picking up their siblings at the airport. See? The City That Works. Except that it's really expensive to fly here. Not exactly a hub. Which is probably part of why it's nice here. One can find flights to and from wherever one would want, but it costs an extra hundred bucks, compared to, say, Seattle. This time we flew Alaska, which has cute bunnies and moose (mooses? meese? Caribou?) in their ads. The plane was cute too - littler than most jets, and not exactly cushie of seat. But the ride was smooth enough that I slept most of the way.

When we came in February for Justin and Kelly's wedding, we still didn't know what was wrong with Matt's ear, so we took the train. It was fun to do once. I was pretty done with it by the time we got home. It took about 30 hours to get here that way, as compared to 2 1/4 on a plane. You see a lot of retired people on a train. On the way up I also ran into a lot of racists. I'm not sure what the selection mechanism is there that attracts racists (or perhaps just more outspoken racists) to trains. But that was a downside. We booked a cute little sleeper and it cost about the same as flying. This gets you a "room" with the footprint of a longish bathtub, which has two fairly comfortable seats facing each other and its own window. These seats fold into one bed, and another folds down from the wall at about chin height (for me). The top bunk is WAY less comfortable than the lower bunk. Also, the top bunk has a harness net thingee you can put up to catch you when the train lurches and throws you out of bed in your sleep. I recommend using it - the train is pretty lurchy. So anyway, you get on the train in LA at 10:00 a.m. From about Santa Barbara to San Jose, you are so close to the coast that you feel like one good lurch and the train might just roll into the ocean. Totally amazing view. I'm not clear on why the train tracks are on this beach front property - presumably an accident of history, from back when California was the frontier and LA was a small town. So I spent the first six hours of the ride pretty much just staring out the window, listening to my iPod, happy as tree sloth. Then you go to bed, and you wake up in Klamath Falls. Mountains, trees, and snow (in February). Fairy land. Wonderful. The towns you see don't come off well, as the train tracks tend to be in the less glamorous parts of town.

This is like their first class, this roomette, so they're pretty fancy towards you. You also get all your meals paid for in the dining car, which is about cafeteria food level with the occasional surprise to the upside. Alcohol is extra, but there is a free wine tasting for these fancy folks each afternoon.

I think this post is getting a little long. I'll think of more to say about Portland later. It might be time for a food topic now.

Thus my blog is born

And I can already feel the format changing my prose. Somehow to blog I must be cool, I must be in some sense tragic and edgy. Never mind that the word "blog" sounds like the sort of mishmash sound that one makes when suffering from a nasty headcold. Well, I shall defy the pressure to be cutting edge, or any more tragic than necessary. I shall be the dork amongst the cool, forging ahead into the chilly waters, leading my nerdy pack in safety, like good King Wenceslaus (good gravy, I spelled that right on the first try!) in the snow. Join me, o dorky ones, o lovers of peeps and non-fiction "fun reading!" Ye who look things up for fun, they that prepare for book club meetings via wikipedia, welcome!