Month: January 2004

Went to the blogger homepage to edit my blog, found this listed as the second item in the list of recent blogs–was the first listing in English! Quite liked it–sent a comment to the author. Continue to wonder if I’m too old for this?
“He/she” talked about Lost in Translation, which is on my movie to-see shortlist, and “he/she” used the term “mise-en-scene,” which stumped me.
I Google-dictionaried “mise-en-scene” with no success. A straight search brought up mise-en-scene but not sure how much help that is.
(I use the quotes because the cues say “female.” But–Who knows? Or cares?)

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I finally sit down to write, martini near at hand, and I remembered Roger Angell’s New Yorker article.
Googling “Angell martini” brought up most notably this post–Mark Bernstein: Nov0301 which starts out: keepreal.html: “Keeping It Real: Roger Angell and the Centenary of a Martini Genre Roger Angell’s article on the Martini in this summer’s New Yorker belongs to a minor genre that can be called ‘the demise of the Martini.’ ”
And I remember the state college professor, a Sinclair Lewis scholar, and his famous line that Lewis was a writer who drank, not a drinker who wrote. And I?

I finally sit down to write, martini near at hand, and I remembered Roger Angell’s New Yorker article. Googling “Angell martini” brought up most notably this article–
keepreal.html: “Keeping It Real: Roger Angell and the Centenary of a Martini Genre
Roger Angell’s article on the Martini in this summer’s New Yorker belongs to a minor genre that can be called ‘the demise of the Martini.’ ”

Home. In bed more specifically. Just got back from L.’s basketball; seven and eight year-olds, not too tightly refereed, starts to look like hockey. Speaking of hockey, don’t know if I mentioned that we all went to a Wild game of Friday. “Hit ’em.” Hockey. An odd thing to do. Dorothea was very diplomatic in that she said it was fine, but once was enough. Of hockey Liam got his fix and fill, and actually made it through the entire game, a first for basketball, football, or baseball. I have put out emails for the blog and gotten some responses, most thoroughly from Maggie. I should post the responses to her questions. The point that came back to me was is it worth the time? I think so, either on the journaling level or the connection to people level.

Home. A nice long Sunday for me. I finished scanning my baby pictures from the old family slides. So expect those to start showing up as thumbnails soon.
We went to the Quakers, and that was alright too. Potluck, third Sunday, but we didn’t stay. A neat thing was that some folks were doing Shape Note singing in the meeting room after meeting. Also jiffy was that Liam’s first day school teacher was reading a book about MLK to the kids when I went into the room to pick him up. Even though the end time for the class was past, there was still quite a good audience in there. I called it a “drive way moment” a la NPR where you stay in the car to hear the end of a news bit. Odd considering I don’t have a drive way. And I don’t think the teacher got it.
Then tonight Liam brought in the book Henry Climbs a Mountain by D.B.Johnson, which I had bought him for Christmas after hearing a review and reading of it on NPR by Daniel Pinkwater. It was this book that I had thought of while Phil was reading the MLK book. I am going to try sending it along with L. for the next time that we go to Quakers.
Also I created a mailing list and sent out emails to notify the list of the blog. The only feedback that I have gotten to far has been from D. and Aurelia.

Kess just called and we talked for awhile. I told her about the blog. She asked if I edited, if it was ?politically correct,? sanitized, inoffensive. I said that yeah, I was doing that approach. I am not going for controversy. ?So it could be like a long bad Christmas letter?? she asked. Yes! Exactly I responded, and I need someone to tell me if is like a long boring Christmas letter so I put this bullshit to rest and put myself out of my misery. It is a lot of extra work and time to get this on the web.
Still haven?t heard back from Kess.
Finally–caught up.

There is an article about blogging in the New York Times Magazine. It focuses on adolescents. I wonder how appropriate, that. I am sure I’ll have more about that later. My So-Called Blog is the article. Another New York Times article is from December 18, 2003 ?Basics:Setting out the welcome mat at your home on the web.? This article is archived now; google? Yes, took a bit, and you?ll probably need to sign up for the free NY Times subscription?but here goes–Basics: Setting Out the Welcome Mat at Your Home on the Web. And ran across the author?s website; looks like, time permiting, there might be some good basic computer stuff at PCAnswer.com. I am especially interested in the SafeTeens.Com Home Page.
This may be a bunch of hyperlink diarrhea. But I was just reading in Essential Blogging that lots of links are what make blogs interesting. Let?s look into this a bit. Mind you, as I write this comment, I am in Word, don?t have an idea of what this text will look like with all these links. So I am going to look in the book?there it is. ?Blogging isn?t just a weblog?If you post interesting things, share links with other bloggers?? Blah and so on. –Greg Hard www.tssaddicts.com. (Not sure what the connection is.)
There was that article about the 89 year old PR guy and his “snappy” copy. Okay, here is where I should put a link to the article. Already getting too lazy, and would skip it, except that the kone so to speak I can?t remember, so I will look it up and I will post the link. Here goes the search?Well, not. I get to the NYT webpage and draw a blank. So off to the newspapers in the recycling?Doh, recycling gone. (Not because I remembered to put it out.) One more try; limited search to one week, than to New York region. Oh well.

Nina?s. Looks like I may have lost some posts when the battery in my palm died. I saw it coming, but didn’t deal with it, and now the battery died before I was able to do a backup.
The palm pilot must have a capacitor in it to retain the memory when you change the battery, but I think that my capacitor is dead. So every time I change the battery, I have to make sure that my stuff is backed up or I will lose it.
This morning Liam said he was sick, that Dorothea said he didn?t have to go to school. Then Dorothea came down, said there were ?technical difficulties.? Liam might have strep. And she had a medical appointment, followed by a couple hours subbing at her old work, and then a meeting with a state representative. (That schedule makes me feel like a slob, an introvert, and a recluse.)
That was all distressing, distressing to me. I told Liam that if he was going to stay home from school on my day off, he had better be truly sick, that he?d spend the day in bed. Vacation days are sacred to me, that sometimes vacations are from family as well as work. I offered to not go to my appointment and stay home with Liam, but I was given permission to go. Liam was slated to accompany Dorothea to her medical appointment.
When I got done with my appointment with Dennis the trainer I thought, “Oh, if I hurry up and call Dorothea, catch her before she leaves, she could bring Liam to the Y? and I could take him. But, the public phone didn’t work. I went downstairs to the front desk. None of the phones worked. So I headed out to my car in a bustle. Got the cellphone. Called D., but she was just on her way out the door with L. to take him to school. He had had some “constipation” problems that got resolved. I hope that I redeemed myself with the call and offer to accommodate.
That I told Liam vacation days are sacred to me and are vacations from my family as well as from work makes me think of the line in the NPR bit on Mormon movies where how some guy is asking: “Let me get this straight, if I join your church and I go to heaven, I will be there with my family? Eternity with my family?” He decides to not become a Mormon. Probably an old joke.
Speaking of old jokes. Letterman is doing this thing, jokes in foreign languages, where he has people come out and tell jokes in well, other languages. Funny. This woman comes out and tells a joke in Estonian. Funny enough. Then he ?translates? the joke as something about Adam, Eve, and a punch line ?that?s a hard one.? Lukewarm joke, but the woman?s expression and response ?I did not say that? was hilarious.
Finally, at Nina?s. There was one person sitting at a table next to me. Now that is a table of four people. He has an accent. “Letter of intent” popped up. Software and VNC where mentioned, and I am thinking of programmers in India. And a young man and a young woman are at another table. Looks like a job interview. He looks Eurasian (he’s the interviewer; they both look so young–hard to tell them apart–the inexperienced from the experienced. To my left, a guy with graph paper, graphing calculator, and a ruler and protractor. Remedial? Retro? Just screwed up?
Called the numbers that I thought that I got from Ray; land line was a wrong number, and the cellphone had no voicemail. Sent the letter to the other Dave Schons back to Margaret. Ray is someone I knew in high school and college, haven?t seen or talked to or even heard anything about for almost twenty years, and anticipated as being very unfun to talk to. So I pursued it no more. The Margaret letter?pretty brief reply, but at least I did it.
Watched Madeline play two games of basketball on Sunday. That was fun fun.
Talked to Kerri about Liam starting to play piano a bit with her and start violin at school. Dororthea hoped that we would cut the Kerri violin lessons totally. I am more into weaning him off private violin lessons and on to piano lessons.
I feel as though I have quite low blood sugar?so off to home.
At home.
This is getting really complicated and twisted. I am getting mixed up between revising and adding to something that I wrote several days ago, something that I wrote this morning, and what is happening in real time. Slapped myself a couple of times when it dawned on me, when I realized that, it occurred to me that I was entering real-time stuff in the couple-day old log I was editing, stuff that chronologically belonged with this post. Or so I think. (Thought.)
“Oh,” I thought, the community radio station is playing okay music. But then it turns more to reggae/rap. Okay so far. But then I start hear sounds that are are in the kin of the off the hook phone sound. Just annoying and distracting. Then the bass is way too low. What is “music” may not be music for me for sonic reasons. So I put on the CD I was going to play in the first place. Just got the low battery message. I have been waiting for that. Expecting it. So I have to shutdown now and head into work to get the power cord that I left there by mistake Thursday when I left.
At home, again.
Got back to a message on the answering machine from Dorothea about paging and Liam being sick at school. I erroneously interpreted the message as he was sick and the school had paged her. I went into action and called the school. After some miscommunication, found out he was fine and then it occurred to me that she said page her if they did call. Oh well.

Nina’s. Left work early because I came in at six to back up John on a beta distribution. Didn’t mean much but if things go wrong… Coworkers in meetings with Microsoft about replacing our software with SMS which is the Microsoft version. And the boys are back in the lab this afternoon. I have mixed feelings about not being involved. I have continued to work on programming. When I left today, I had from starting this morning at six found John’s state text lists and put a couple of them into a table of a database that I created on the MS SQL server. I created the beginnings of a web interface for choosing what state or states you want and got that tied into Pete’s index.php.
As I was saying, when I left I was trying to print to the web page the contents of the file that I had made. Not successful. Though it just dawned on me that I was treating the file as a remote file, but really it is local. Could have a bat file that types out the contents? Possibly that would work as well.
Need to call my sister Joanne about Seattle. Yesterday I took the kids to violin lessons and Madeline to basketball and Dorothea picked her up. I put Liam to bed. We stopped at Subway and I still have to clean out the van from that. I am now hungry and tired, wasted tired. Just noted that the Palm screen makes a nice little database at a glance of weight, etc. In fact I now know that the sister’s ski weekend is coming up and I will be losing Mary’s scanner. So I should scan away while I have the time. But the basement, where I set up my scanning work area is cold.
Liam is excited about the train trip to Seattle. He is very concerned about what hotel we are going to stay at. Maybe it?s about the process of picking the hotel? Just wants to be involved? Exercise would be good. Maybe yoga? Uck. The Tai Chi people are going to the Shanghai for the Chinese New Year Monday. Babysitter? Oh, I am tired. Onward.

Nina’s, much later than usual. I am using my laptop. Hmm. There are wireless networks available here, two of them. But they both require an access code which I don’t know.
Called Dorothea and checked that I don’t have to be home directly.
Printed off a cheat sheet for the Rubik’s cube, a how-to. As Kevin Bowe says in one of his songs ?I?m wasting my own sweet time.? Feel I am as far as I?m going to get with the Rubik’s cube on my brain. (One side, matching edges.) The directions are quite challenging, They are bringing back memories of the cube and the late seventies.
Met with Carrie the counselor this morning. Left a bit late–8:08, instead 8:00 am as I had planned. Went home earlier because I forgot my wallet.
I parked in the back of the building where I work when I came back from my appointment and at the time thought about the odds that I’d forget. (I usually park in the front.) I forgot. But it gave me a chance to stop at the c-store and get a coke.
Nothing that I threw at the therapist for maladaptive behaviors really seemed to pass muster. I guess they are more like personality traits.
She liked the idea of the train trip too. I was saying that I thought it was a problem that I was gloating about the trip. Perhaps that?s too strong of a word, she said. I can get my way as long as others do too. The web log didn’t seem maladaptive either. In fact, after talking about it, we seemed to agree that it sort of levels the playing field. I don’t like to chat, call, or email people. I do like to journal, though. I am in my third decade of journaling, in fact. Even emailing is a person-to-person that makes me freeze up. So when I am journaling, I am addressing no one in particular and the thoughts flow more easily.
We talked about the introvert/extrovert thing as in the book The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World. Agreed it is pop psychology that doesn’t need to be read cover-to-cover, word-for-word, but she found general things that I brought up agreeable. Even dealing with Dorothea takes energy. Extroverts and introverts use different neural pathways; introverts use a longer path, which may explain why it takes longer to come up with stuff.
Scanning the old family slides, is that excessive? Computer use? As long as I am aware of my obsessions taking away from the demands of others, I may be okay.
Wrote a response to the other Dave Schons’ Margaret, a short note. Tried to call Ray. I wasn?t looking forward to that. Land line was a wrong number and there was no voicemail for the cellphone number.
Carrie had a comparable story about the train and about an old schoolmate calling up. Whoops, just got distracted with looking at slides. Wondered about one picture of Joanne opening something. Reminded me of her owning a Corvair and the small car repair kit with the cedar box with the sticky safety pin, which was a gag gift from someone; but, well she may have had the Corvair convertible by then. Not sure. It might have been later. But I do physically remember that gift, the cedar smell, and the stickiness of the safety pin. So that picture brought back those memories anyway.