Let Leaping Dogs Fly

Newsflash: Pregnant Lady Delivers Baby!

2008-07-28T13:28:00.005-04:00

Once upon a time, a long time ago it seems, I was pregnant. Then I was very pregnant, then I was super pregnant. Then, and this is where it gets exciting, I had a baby. Who would have imagined I could do something like that? Without drugs, even! Of course there were a lot of grunts and bodily fluids involved with that part, which I will tell you about if you really want to know, however I won't post the story just yet.

Now I have a son. We'll call him That Baby, because that tends to be how I refer to him around other people anyway. You know, "there's That Baby I delivered." or "That Baby threw up on me again." It's a whirlwind life with a 3.5 month old who spits up a lot. Feedings, diaper changes and vomit, oh my.

The great secret about all this, the thing that I want to wrap up in my pocket and keep close forever, is that I feel like I've stepped into the best poem I ever read, or into one of those fiery sunsets you see on travel billboards, and I don't want it to end. I am inside of a dream, inside of magic, inside of the world instead of being merely a bystander. I am living now in the most present way I possibly can, in the place I tried to reach for years with all the job changes and graduate school and self examination and whatever else it was I did to try and find meaning in the random passages of my life.

I like this person I've become. I'm excited to see where the story goes from here. I'll try to post a little more often so you all can ride along with me.

Newsflash: Pregnant Lady Spotted at Yellowstone National Park

2007-11-16T14:11:00.000-05:00

oh.my.gawd I am, like, totally pregnant! It's true, people, or at least the ultrasound suggests that there is a tiny human growing in my abdomen and not, say, a big spider. I am due to erupt around April 1st.

As I am a biologist and I am trained to report on these sorts of details, I must note that this new human is behaving an awful lot like a parasite. So far I have found that it controls my appetite, my hormones, and sometimes even my behavior. I am entirely helpless to stop it! This means that for several months now I have been crying over every sappy TV commercial and eating meals made up entirely of pickled foods and dairy products. Mmmmmm... pickles.

Sometime soon, I expect to have to sign over a kidney and the rights to my 401(k). Wait, maybe that's AFTER the birth. Being pregnant has so addled my brain I can't remember anything anymore, like that I have a blog and I need to update it periodically. Therefore, if you want news you may need to (gently) remind me about it.

Anyway peeps, I am also mostly-unemployed (that post is forthcoming, promise!), which means maybe I'll update more than once a quarter. Maybe. As with all things in my life these days, we'll just have to see.

You know you're a nerd when...

2007-07-12T12:53:00.000-04:00

You know how I know I'm a nerd? When I looked at the bottom of the test and saw that I scored above the 99th percentile for nerd AND geek AND dork, I though to myself "Hey, I did great on this test. Awesome!"

Your Score: Pure Nerd

91 % Nerd, 39% Geek, 34% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

Congratulations!

Thanks Again! -- THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Secretly, I am an old bearded wizard.

2007-06-10T21:42:00.001-04:00

If you had asked me, I would have said that Hermione was my alter-ego, however it appears that I have managed to grow up at least a little bit since turning 30.

You scored as Albus Dumbledore. Strong and powerful, you admirably defend your world and your charges against those who would seek to harm them. However sometimes you can fail to do what you must because you care too much to cause suffering.

Albus Dumbledore

95%

Hermione Granger

75%

Severus Snape

70%

Draco Malfoy

65%

Harry Potter

60%

Remus Lupin

60%

Sirius Black

50%

Ron Weasley

35%

Ginny Weasley

25%

Lord Voldemort

15%

Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...?
created with QuizFarm.com

I knew it!

2007-05-20T19:46:00.001-04:00

Even though this is so last year, I just had to post it. I must caution you that the lyrics are hilarious but slightly inappropriate for work--just trust me and put on your headphones. The song originally hails from the Broadway musical "Avenue Q". The geek in me insists that I close with "For the Horde!", because that's just the kind of WoW player that I am.

See, I wore a dress

2007-04-03T19:04:00.000-04:00

In case you were wondering

2007-04-03T18:31:00.000-04:00

Watch the kid in the red shirt in the back. That's the closest you'll ever get to understanding me at age 11, excepting of course that I was not a boy and I had a big frizzy perm because it was all the rage in the 6th grade. Otherwise, it's dead on. I am pleased to present the Crazy Frog Bros.

2006 In Review

2007-04-03T18:27:00.000-04:00

So my 2006 went something like this:

Busy busy busy busy omygod PhD school choice omygod wedding busy busy omygod crosscountry move omygod no rest busy busy busy oh sad sad sad whew snowstorm

I've been recovering from the wedding since the day after the wedding, and recovering from everything else for these first few months of 2007.

So far this year has been quieter (whew!), which means that it's time for me to throw my life into upheaval again by changing jobs. And moving across town.

Apparently, I can't make anything easy.

Updates, and of course, a mild wedding phobia

2006-04-25T11:33:00.000-04:00

So, dear readers, forgive me for opening with a cliché. Let’s see, what have I been so busy working on that I haven’t had time to tell you all about it? Many things. To whit:

1. Mike and I drove about 2,000 miles over spring break back in March, out to Kansas and then on to Wyoming. Visits were paid, people were met, many meals were purchased, yea verily did we eat too much. The muffler fell off my car as we were leaving Laramie, a sign if ever there was one. A sign of what, I’m not sure, but a sign all the same. Oh, and CompUSA. Apparently, the local CompUSA is not virile enough for Mike, so on our way home from WY we had to drive 100 miles out of our way to visit the CompUSA in Boulder, CO. Without going into too many details, I’ll say that it was the least productive shopping excursion I’ve ever had. Wyoming won the grad school lottery; Mike and I will be moving to Laramie in July.

2. Once we returned home, I began to froth at the mouth over the finer details of data extraction for my thesis. 4 weeks later, the frothing continues unabated. There may be a small chance that I can move this whole wretched mess to a completion point prior to my first graduation deadline of May 12, but it seems unlikely. My drop-dead second graduation deadline is August 1, but with all of the summer activities that need to be done (wedding? what wedding?), I imagine I’ll be motivated to hurry my happy little a** just a bit to beat that deadline.

3. Then, of course, the wedding. I got a rather sobering call from the church folks on Sunday night in which they politely inquired as to who I was and what I had called about earlier, and no, our wedding wasn’t on the calendar at all, and I guess they could hold off on renovating the church floor on Memorial day weekend because their last church secretary quit without telling them about our wedding reservation. After some silent screaming and a strong drink, I decided it was maybe time to finalize the rest of the wedding details. We now have a tent, and maybe a caterer. Invitations are in the mail (and welcome everyone who’s visiting from the wedding website). So maybe this won’t end up as slap-dash as it is threatening to be. Then again, all this wedding stuff may fall by the wayside as my thesis-writing dementia deepens. I’ll try to post about it, if my frothing doesn’t short out the keyboard.

Don't let the tree hit you on your way out the door

2006-03-14T19:02:00.000-05:00

An addendum to yesterday's glorious weather: severe thunderstorms. I love spring, I just don't love temperature inversions. One of the large trees in our side yard lost a significant portion of its upper half during a gusty period. Fortunately, the house and Mike's truck weren't damaged. Neither of us were home when it came down, but the noise must have been of the 'big-scary-bang' variety because the cat and the dog were still hiding when we got home after our classes. The cat later spent a considerable amount of time telling us that she was in no way responsible for making the tree fall. I suppose I believe her; she sounded far more sincere than that time she tried to convince us that she wasn't on the counter eating leftover Mac 'N Cheese (though we had caught her in the act).

Hyacinth

2006-03-13T10:41:00.000-05:00

We traveled this weekend up to the arctic hinterlands of the Northwest Chicago Suburbs for my dad's 60th birthday party. Happy Birthday Pops! After two 9-hour driving days back to back(which should have been 7 hour drives, without the heavy rain and sloooooow roads), it was good to get home last night. I walked the dog and collapsed in bed to watch a few minutes of 'Sense and Sensibility' on DVD so I didn't have to DREAM about driving after having driven so much. Woke this morning to 70 degrees and an overnight transformation of the trees and lawn and every flowering plant into wild growth. The cardinals are up in the trees and on the rooftops, flirting madly with each other. Every early bulb is up and blooming. The air has that ineffable perfume, the one you remember from being a kid when you first found a flower in the garden after a rainshower, rich and heavy and promising. It smells like spring.

Point of View

2006-02-05T17:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we made our biannual excursion to Opry Mills, where I was overstimulated and stressed to the point that it took me 3 hours to get to sleep after I went to bed last night. The sights! The sounds! The people who walk slower than legless tortoises! The endless maze of stuff-I-don't-need- yet-feel-strangely-compelled-to-buy! Have I mentioned how impatient I get behind those slow-movers? Have I also mentioned that I don't "shop" like a normal person (whatever that is...)? If I have need of a particular thing, obviously the first thing I do is try to find something like it that I already own. If I don't have anything that fits the bill, I'll try the local thrift shops, or Freecycle, or Craigslist. If I still can't find it, I might consider buying a new one, but not at full price, and not from a brick-and-mortar store if I can help it. There are people in those stores, and heaven forbid I have to deal with one of those. They want me to buy stuff, and hard as I try I can't remain immune to the "buying fever" pheromone that all those other shoppers release as they ring up their purchases. My fingers get itchy and I start playing out justification scenarios in my head, and before you know it I'm considering that $100 pair of shoes and some new pants, because the 12 pairs of pants I already own just aren't good enough anymore dammit. At least I'm to the point that I know that I'm vulnerable, and I can stop myself before I make any purchases. It took me a few years to move from wanton spender to thoughful saver and I had lots of help along the way, but these trips to the mall make me want to take a big clue-stick and hit people to open their eyes about their spending habits.

Mike's a little more consumerist, although I have slowly, slowly begun to convince him that having a budget and saving money don't automatically qualify him for membership in the 'no-fun stick in the mud' club.

A perfect example of the difference in Mike's and my viewpoints came as we walked through our 3rd sporting goods store of the day and came to the Kayak display.

Mike: Ooh, someday I'd like to have one of those! (referring to a $2000 fiberglass kayak)
Me: (Referring to the recorded birdsong on the store audio) Someday I'd like to live where I can hear this all the time, then we wouldn't have to come to the store...

The mall reminds me, first and foremost, of why I hate shopping. Too many people, too much noise. The energy is so discordant. It also makes me ineffably sad to see so many people buying so much junk they don't need with money they don't have. Who are we as a culture that this activity "shopping" has become a pastime? I have trouble imagining historians lauding this as the greatest economic innovation of our post-industrial civilization, but we certainly aren't doing much else to keep money moving through the economy. It doesn't bode well for my generation's wealth-building and future economic security.

Officially not eloping!

2006-02-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

Well folks, it's official: Mike and I will not be eloping. Despite our best efforts at avoiding the whole "wedding planning" hoo-ha, we've made an actual reservation with an actual place to have an actual ceremony. Actual save-the-date cards will be in the mail soon to let you know the actual date (Saturday, May 27, around 3pm). It's a great victory in the battle against entropy, though I worry we might swing the universe out of balance if we do any more planning.

In other news, I've added the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS to the list of schools I'm considering for my doctoral work. According to Mike, K-State is officially the worst possible place I could ever force him to live, so I'm secretly rooting for an acceptance letter from them, just to be difficult. Seriously, though, dear readers, can you please talk to Mike and convince him that his life won't be coming to an end if we move to Kansas? I haven't had any luck with this and it's making me want to kick him in the shins.

2,834

2006-01-24T16:08:00.000-05:00

Things that are making me anxious right about now:

I have 208 films to analyze.
I have to digitize 13 different measurements for each of those 208 films.
13x208 is just shy of 3,000.
Even if I digitize 10 films per day, it will take me 22 days to finish digitizing.
By the end of that time, it will be March, people, March.
That leaves me 4 weeks to do the statistical analysis and write about 30 pages of discussion.
Have I mentioned that I don't know how to do a statistical analysis?
Did I also mention there's this wedding that we're supposed to plan before May?
Then there's also that move that we might do about 3 days after the wedding.
But we don't know where we're moving.
Or even if we're moving. Wrap your brain around that one.

On a lighter note, I recently learned that the labs I'm teaching this semester have a 60% FAILURE rate, regardless of instructor. I suppose I can relax a little in the face of news like that.

David Hasselhoff: not just 'Knight Rider'

2006-01-17T12:04:00.000-05:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled absence to provide you, our devoted readers, with some funny things. Sorry to have left you with that ranty message for such a long time, it was Christmas and I was vomiting and there was little time for such niceties as posting. Oh, and Jeff, sorry to have passed the vomiting on to you, you're busy enough anyway with l'enfant. Welcome to the big world, Cole Jeffery! [Yes, I know he was born several weeks ago; when have I ever been known for my punctuality? Also, if I've messed up the spelling, let me know and I'll fix it.]

So, go click on that link in the title (via the Republic of T). That's some funny stuff. You may not be aware of this, but our man Hasselhoff is a big-time recording star in Germany, which explains some, but not all, of the video's silliness. The rest, who knows?

Finally, a fresh gem of truth about the dog, from Mike, last week:

Mike is trying to convince Ripley to sit still while in the presence of a delicious doggie treat, an action that violates at least 2 of Newton's laws of motion. If he ever succeeds, the world may spontaneously implode.

Ripley: spazzing
Mike (with infinite patience): Dog, you must have been designed by a committee of fifth graders.

Go laughing into the new year, peeps.

Like a big red velvet slap in the face

2005-12-12T11:48:00.000-05:00

Woe, the holidays are upon us, and verily, Wal*Mart is crowded with cheap crap that people buy "because it's so crissmassssssyyyyy". It's not even safe to shop in the middle of the night, since they pipe in the music 24/7. I am not capable of being relentlessly cheerful when I visit Wal*Mart, I need to be grumpy and cross in order to survive its onslaughts. Please, make it stop.

Yesterday, I was watching something on cable TV. What it was, I cannot say, because I couldn't sleep well the night before so all day yesterday was spent dozing off on the couch. It was probably a Poirot mystery on A&E because if I turn on the TV to watch something it usually ends up being about Hercule Poirot or the wonders of engineered megastructures around the world. My life is just like that. The point, which I am slowly getting to, is that the nice folks who work for our cable provider put together some sort of 'holiday greeting advertisement' to foist upon unsuspecting customers, and I was lucky enough to be awake to see it. The ad included the ususal blather about holiday cheer, from our family to yours, blah blah, AND an employee piping up with "remember, Jesus is the reason for the season". That raised some flags. Is my cable provider, by choosing to include that employee's statement, endorsing the christian faith? Could the cable provider have told the employee to NOT say that on TV or could they have decided to edit that out? Did they even think about it? How do the cable provider's employees of other faiths feel about not having their viewpoint included in the advertisement? Does that employee make himself a terrible hypocrite by buying (literally) into the rampant consumerism of "Christmas!!!!!" for his family even as he gives lipservice to that 'religious' view of the holiday?

It makes me sad, sometimes, to see how little thought people put into the things they do, the rituals they observe in their daily life, at any time of year but particularly now. It makes me worried, too, to see how easily people's opinions can be manipulated when they don't take the time to understand what their opinion is and why they believe what they believe. Organizations purporting to 'do good' are just as guilty of manipulating people's beliefs as the basest advertiser selling p*rno; it is a wonder to me that we as a species are so willing to take advantage of our own weaknesses for profit (really, no it isn't. Maximizing available resources is one of the strongest behavioral impulses in ANY organism. Competition is survival).

Somewhere in our deep past, it came to be that if we weren't socially bound to and accepted by our 'tribe' we didn't survive. Advertising is a very effective play on those behavioral instincts. The suggestion, delivered over and over in every possible medium (and in every season of the year), is that if you're not spending (lots of) money you don't belong. You're not one of us. If you believe the advertisers, Christmas is a time when everyone can belong, because everyone has a reason to go and spend (lots of) money. Poor? Not a spender? No matter! You can achieve redemption, my friend, at Christmas. My response, of course? Bah humbug.

We avoided spontaneous cranial decompression

2005-11-30T00:39:00.000-05:00

But only by the narrowest of margins.

Exam, blah blah, passed, blah blah, head hurts, blah blah. I have no language left that does not encompass some biological concept. I just said "compass" there instead of concept, but fortunately for you guys I have a snazzy in-line-editor feature as part of my non-decompressed brain that allows me to remove all my typing gaffes before you see them. It likes to roll out the big words at times when it's late and I'm tired, like right now, just so you're warned about that.

I'm happy to report that the exam did not take place in french as I had feared it might. When I arrived there were several non-committee-member professors milling about in the hallway with notepads in hand and I thought they might be there to enact some other version of the pre-exam nightmare. You know, the one where the department eccentric grills you on his favorite subject, about which you know nothing, and upon whose response to your answers your whole grade depends? It's like when you dream that you're a kid again and you show up at your old elementary school and realize halfway through the dream that you're not wearing pants, only worse.

My sentence structure is clearly getting the best of me here, I'm starting to write like an overdramatized Victorian novelist. Onward!

Now that I've cleared this hurdle, I'm back to the lab to film, film, film. You see, I've poked holes in the crania of my study fish, and I capture data by threading a pressure transducer through the hole into their oral cavity to capture pressure information while they eat. I simultaneously and synchronously "videotape" them eating, using a high speed digital camera recording 500 frames/second. There's a lot of information in 500 frames of data filmed over 2 or 3 seconds (saved data usually works out to about 1GB per feeding event), and I need to record about... 200 more feedings. That and maybe possibly apply for some PhD positions (quick, make sure nobody heard me say that). Oh, yeah, and that whole elopeme... er, wedding that we're having. I think the theme may be "come celebrate our elopement! (shh, it's really a wedding)", and everyone will receive party hats and noise makers at the door. If we pretend it's not really a wedding, it should be less wedding-like, right? Easy peasy. Right now all that activity sounds significantly easier than going to sleep, which is what I'm not doing as I sit here typing at midnight...

True happiness this way lies

2005-11-24T12:36:00.000-05:00

There was a stretch of years in my twenties when things did not go well for me, and a longer stretch afterward that was heavily shadowed by what had happened when things were very bad. Most of you are well-versed in my ups and downs; those of you who didn't experience it first hand, celebrate that you weren't there to see me stumble. What was painful for me was also terribly painful for the people who loved me, yet they listened time after time as I worked my way through each new setback. Why any of you didn't just shake my shoulders and tell me to get over it, I don't know; given my stubbornness I'm not sure that even that would have been sufficient but it would have made you feel better (Tracy!). There are some things that this grasshopper learns slowly.

After a while I forgot what it was like to be happy with my life. I knew that I was unhappy, but I could never put my finger on the "magic button" that would make things better. I think for a long time I knew what I needed to do, but fear kept me glued to the same miserable path . The ruts were deep. This analogy is getting old. It is challenging to put some of this in writing where everyone can see it, so I make jokes, ha ha ha, but it's true. I was stuck and I couldn't change myself in the way that I needed to change. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I grabbed hold of something that would force me out of my familiar patterns. Lucky for me I was clever enough to choose the right thing (graduate school) and the right place (a small town).

It is deeply frustrating to know what you want for your life and to believe that you will never achieve it. The biggest surprise I've had, then, and the saddest regret, was how easily I swept away all the barriers I had set up for myself, once I gave myself permission to do it. I could have done this sooner, I could have done this years ago, but I didn't. I couldn't. So today I am thankful that I finally did. I am healthy and happy. I have everything I need. I am living instead of just existing. It's all good.

Now, please, go look at this link and laugh, before you get all morose and weepy. Nobody should cry on Thanksgiving.

The brain that ate New York

2005-11-23T14:44:00.000-05:00

My comprehensive oral exams are coming up this Tuesday, so instead of doing fun things like celebrating Thanksgiving or sleeping restfully, I have been studying. I'm not sure I've ever studied as much and as thoroughly as I have for this process, which is really saying a lot, since I am normally a brilliantly lazy academic. Those of you who have lived with me before are probably familiar with the other side of this preparatory coin: perfection anxiety. Am I worried about failing the exam? Do I lie awake wringing my hands for fear of not knowing an answer? Certainly not. I worry that I won't remember every single thing I've ever learned about my-favorite-obtuse-topic-in-biology well enough to reference it in the 2 hours allotted to me for learned discourse. Come on, think about it: when will I ever again have a captive audience willing to listen to me talk about everything from the social biology of naked mole rats to the feeding mechanics of the jaws of Largemouth Bass? These poor souls don't know what they're in for. It is absolutely necessary that I use this time to discuss all those bits of trivia I've been saving up for just such an occasion as this; therefore I am experiencing stress. Poor Mike has been bearing the brunt of this; for the last two nights I've woken up in some sort of fury and shoved him as he's come to bed (several hours after I've gone to sleep, as is our habit). Why? Because he's been unlucky enough to interrupt me while I've been dreaming about my perfect oral exam performance, which is somehow taking place in Hawaii and being conducted in French. That and the fact that he crawled into bed last night and put his arcticly cold hand on me for longer than 0.005 nanoseconds, to which I reacted as I would normally react because dammit man, your hand was really cold!

You may all commence with the teasing now. On today's agenda, I will paint one wall in the kitchen, bake a pie, and generally work hard to not think about my exam. I will probably also study a quantity of material equivalent to a one-semester college course, digest it, relate it to the constellation of information already crammed into my head, and bleed profusely from my eyeballs.

A side note to all you lurking Tanners: don't be shy, come on out and comment if you want. You know who you are, Jeff.

Love in the modern era

2005-11-15T12:54:00.000-05:00

The scene: Mike and I have just returned from our morning classes. We are exchanging affectionate pleasantries when this gem passes between us.

Mike: You know, I really love you.
Me: Baby, I know it in my heart. I know it in my bones.
Mike: But does your butt know it?
Me: As much as my butt knows anything, it is confident of your love for me.

We don't settle for platitudes in our relationship, nosiree. Only the finest romantic prose will do.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria lavi

2005-11-10T10:37:00.000-05:00

With all apologies to Wilfred Owen, I must herein celebrate the newest addition to our household: a dishwasher. It is sweet and right to wash for one's country, with a portable Whirlpool dishwasher that's nearly 2/3 the size of your refrigerator. I tried to say "It is sweet and right to wash dishes with a machine" but I couldn't find the appropriate vocabulary. No wonder latin is a dead language, you can't use it to describe anything cool. That's almost as bad as not being able to create acronyms in ideogrammatic languages (which is apparently a big hurdle on the road to brevity for communications within the Chinese space agency).

In other news, I' m heading off to an academic conference for the next couple of days, where I'll be presenting a short 15 minute talk on my research and hobnobbing with other scientists from around the state. I plan to use lots of feeding films and expansive hand gestures to distract the audience from the fact that I don't have any quantified data to talk about. Wish me luck.

Nostalgia, circa twenty-aught-five

2005-11-09T14:43:00.000-05:00

Recently, Mike and I were watching a fun little show on the Travel Channel called Amazing Vacation Homes (some of which are amazing, and I can't understand why their owners don't live there full time. A few can be seen here). Cue commercial, cue theme music, and before I can figure out why, cue a thousand memories of my years on the debate team in high school. Somehow, the amazing They Might Be Giants have branched out to television tunes, and their theme sent me down memory lane. It seems only fitting, that one of the quirkiest musical groups I've ever known should be asked to do a song for a show about quirky houses. What is truly unfortunate, however, is that because of the way my brain works I am stuck with Birdhouse in your Soul playing endless loops in my head, which in turn has led me to dream about debate tournaments. I even found myself grouping topics as "Ads" and "DAs" as I took notes in my genetics class yesterday. Believe me, if I could suppress this reaction I would; by the time I graduated, debate was one of my least favorite activities at school and I would rather not remember it (fabulous partner aside). Why didn't I quit, you ask? I was, and still am, unable to stop doing something when other people are counting on me to do it.

Speaking of fabulous debate partners, I believe I will forward a copy of this post to my former partner, Plucky Duck, because she was the person who introduced me to TMBG back in the day. Of course that's her real name! This all might seem fairly ordinary to you, but in fact it isn't. You see, I haven't actually communicated with Ms. Duck in several years, yet I can quickly reach her by email. How, you ask? I, dear readers, am an internet spy. It gives me a great deal of secret pleasure to find out the current life status of people who may or may not remember who I am and who are almost certainly not sitting around wondering what I'm doing with my life. It's another side effect of sitting in front of a computer all day with nothing to occupy my time. I'm forced to invent little games for myself, like "I wonder what my lab partner from AP Biology class is up to?". As it happens, she's got a Medical Degree from Harvard. How about my best friend from the 5th grade? She just finished her PhD. Does this make me a stalker, I wonder? I don't DO anything with this information, it just scratches the itch of curiosity. The information is public, and I'm certainly not paying for anyone to "check up on them". My big brain demands answers, and like I said, I can't say no when something is expected of me.

{Before you think I really am a stalker, I should say in my defense I've looked up a total of about 5 people. Most of them are lawyers, and lawyers are registered in a big public database because they're certified professionals with unique areas of expertise. They're very easy to locate, if you know that they're lawyers to begin with. The others have a googleable public web presence. No prying was actually involved in finding this stuff.}

So anyway, Plucky, I hope you stop by here sometime and say Hi. It would be good to hear from you. We can talk about our salad days and wax nostalgic for when CDs were a novelty and you had the first Macintosh computer on the block.

I'm waiting....

2005-11-07T22:28:00.000-05:00

Dear Internet,

where is the instant fame and glory I was promised for starting this blog? I've been up and running for at least 5 days now, and what do I get? Nada. I saw what you did for Pets.com stock values back in 1999, and I have to say that I'm at least as novel as they were. I am even skilled enough to create a cheesy sock-puppet mascot and offer free shipping on 50lb. bags of dog food, should you demand it of me. I daresay all these other upstarts can't say the same. Do I have to prove myself to you, internet, by casually mentioning that my Yahoo! mail account dates back to 1997? That I used to play text-only MUDs on my 2800-baud modem? It's true I haven't kept up with your latest gewgaws but I was there for you, Internet! I stuck around in 1993 after I tried to send that photo by email even though it couldn't be done yet! I found a job online before they even invented Monster.com! Do I have to mention how much love I have for Craigslist? I didn't think so. So c'mon, internet, cough up what you owe me before I start with the real threats. You know how much you hate it when I stay out all night watching PBS...

Muchas smuchas, internet,

S

How could I not marry him?

2005-11-07T14:19:00.000-05:00

The scene: we are on the couch, watching Episode III.

Mike: Yoda's really a badass.
Me: Yeah, he's the ultimate Jedi.
Mike: He's so badass, he's probably got his own underwear line.

And so you see why I am compelled to spend the rest of my life with this man.

Canis coprophagicus

2005-11-06T17:54:00.000-05:00

I understand that when you're a dog, the poorly-digested excrement of other animals can be the tastiest, most mind-alteringly delicious snack you've ever encountered in your whole entire life. What I cannot understand, Ripley, is why you must express your post-consumptive glee by licking as much of the exposed skin on my arms and hands as you can reach. Why, dog, why?

Les Naifs de Blog

2005-11-06T13:35:00.000-05:00

It appears that I have a family full of people who are new to the world of online publishing. This has led to a series of amusing little exchanges between my mother, my sister and myself about the ins and outs of the medium, along with a whole bunch of explanations ("Who's Dave?" being principal among them). Since the whole point of blogging (or at least something of the point of this blog) is to cut down on the number of times I have to repeat myself sequentially to relatives after the "phone tree" gets activated, I do hereby solemnly swear to try to write it all down here first so you don't all have to call me and email me to get the latest dish.

Once upon a time, a long time ago in 2000, I had a job which kept me in front of a computer all day long. When you have time to kill but you can't leave your computer and you can't play solitaire, you quickly discover that there are magical websites where people talk about themselves and you can eavesdrop without getting in trouble. The "Weblog". I was a regular reader of the message boards at The Motley Fool website, and one day someone mentioned a craft blog they followed, Not Martha. From Not Martha, I found loobylu. From loobylu, I found Sewgeeky, from Sewgeeky I found Going Bridal (she was planning her wedding and going crazy) and Going Jesus (after she climbed off the crazy wedding train), French Toast Girl, Keri Smith, and Super Hero Designs, and the world was suddenly beautiful. People around the world talking about making things! Then the mothership, Dooce. Then there were the political blogs, a can of worms to be sure, which I won't list here. People speaking for themselves, outside the pressbox. Blogs have opened my eyes, my mind, and my heart. Blogs have shaped me and helped me to define myself more clearly, at a time when I feel less and less connected to "the world" as it is portrayed by mainstream media. In the blog world, your mainstream is whatever you choose it to be. This is my kind of place.

Sometime soon I'll edit my linkbar on the left and you can take a tour of the voices and ideas that I seek out every day. Many of the blogs in the previous paragraph are still at the top of my list today. I hope to introduce some of you to these same voices that we might share them together.

The reason I "blame" Dave for inspiring me to create this blog is that Dave is the first blogger I know personally. We worked together in California, and recently I tracked him down to see what he was up to. He pointed me to his blog, and suddenly my blog experience was transformed from an impersonal to a personal one. If Dave could do it, I could do it. So here I am.

The way the blog should work, if we all follow the same protocol, is that I will write about something and post it here for you to read. When you read it, you may find that you have a question or a comment about what I have written. There's a little piece of text at the bottom of each new post that says "# Comments" (where # ranges from 0 to any number). If you click on that text you can leave a comment for me right there in the blog. No more pesky emails or phone calls! Plus, the comment is permanently associated with the post, so we'll always know what we were talking about. It's pure genius, I tell you!

You heard it here, folks

2005-11-04T13:26:00.000-05:00

Ok, it seems that some explanations are in order.

1. Yes, I am engaged to be married. There's a perfectly good explanation for why we haven't sent out 'save the date' cards yet, which is that we're still debating an elopement. Eventually we'll get around to planning the event if we don't chicken out or get too frustrated with the "wedding" industry. Of course you're all invited! We're looking at memorial day weekend next spring, May whatever-that-date-is, 2006.

2. His name is Mike. He's the best thing ever. You simply must come visit and meet him! Our couch is very comfortable, we have an excellent sushi restaurant here in town, and if you visit you will have an authentic Kentucky experience. A note for the allergic relatives: the cat and dog are very nefarious... er, friendly and also very hairy.

3. A "Blog" is a venue for personal expression on the web. You can read more about it here (from Wikipedia). I'll let you figure out about Wikipedia on your own. Welcome to the future.

Gone and done it

2005-11-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

I blame Dave for inspiring me to get this started. I have no one but myself to blame for whatever I put up here. You've been warned.