lists

pack and panic

2007-10-14T13:28:57+00:00

We are going to New York.

Jeff and I don't 'vacation' together often. He has the same love for quiet days at home that I do of plopping myself in a new city and learning it by wearing out the soles of my feet. The typical end result (which you will see in December) is of me packing a small bag and Jeff dropping me off to catch a plane heading off to parts unknown.

(...and I don't even like to fly!)

While planning has progressed, slowly but steadily, I realized last night I have been making those plans with the dazed unreality of someone who hasn't quite comprehended that she's really going. It's Sunday morning as I sit here typing, and part of my brain thinks I'm going to work all week, when in fact my itinerary insists otherwise:

Tuesday: fly Nashville -> Newark; check into hotel; pick up PATH train passes and 7-day Metrocards; take Jeff by Times Square; snag some food and then see Phantom of the Opera (Jeff's birthday present)
Wednesday: potential lunch with one of Jeff's contra dance contacts; shabu-shabu dinner with John and Fahmi, friends of Stephen and Misty's
Thursday: tickets to see Avenue Q (my birthday present)
Friday: late dinner reservations at Veritas
Saturday: Jeff goes contra dancing, while I have a bit of a dilemma (see the poll)
Sunday: fly home.

Many of our Fuzzy Itinerary items require the cooperation of the weather, and NYC is scheduled to get sporadic thunderstorms for most of our visit, so we'll choose our activities based on the weather:

The Brooklyn Trip - go for pizza, take the subway back to the base of the Brooklyn side of the bridge, get ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, and eat it as we walk back across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan
American Museum of Natural History - one of Jeff's contra dance contacts, who volunteers at the AMNH, very kindly offered us two vouchers to get into the museum for free. They have a T-Rex skeleton on display. Yes, please.
Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art - if we only have time for one, however do I choose? Rembrandt or Van Gogh? Given that a major gallery in the Met is closed for renovation, if we only have time for one museum, I'm betting we pick MoMA.
Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
St. John's Cathedral - why yes, I do want to bring my camera to the world's largest Gothic cathedral and take pictures.
Jazz clubs!

I, uh, need to go pack and panic now.

Take a look at the poll and let me know what you'd do in my place, given the choice.

106 Books: the Amy edition

2007-10-10T18:08:57+00:00

Stolen from Stephen and Misty.

Misty: "These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. I’ve bolded what I’ve read and italicized what I started but couldn’t finish..."

49 read, 2 in progress, 2 instances of sheer loathing:

1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
~~Catch-22~~
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces (started it when doing hospice care for my father; just can't bring myself to finish it)
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
~~Gravity’s Rainbow~~
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : A Novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera (currently reading)
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present (currently reading)
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values

(P.S. We're going somewhere Really Cool next week. Expect a metric ton of photos.)

The librarian, her tea, and her quirks

2006-12-20T04:38:33+00:00

In life, there is a continuum between money and time. Most people, in order to make the amount of money they want to have in their lives, must sacrifice time. Those who want lots of time must give up money.

Money's good.
No time for writing.

It doesn't help that the dreaded moment has come—my work life and personal life have blended together, and I've started making friends that cross that boundary. This is new and interesting. I'm not used to socializing, nor having co-workers that I might actually want to spend time with. I've even invited a couple to PHE. It makes me wonder what I can say here, though.

Speaking of PHE, the party that ate the northern hemisphere…I think we're set. Two bartenders, one culinary student, and Little OCD Me twitching over it all. I fully expect to be fired from my own party.

On Thursday.

Right now, I've got nothing. Work is eating my brain at a prodigious rate. I haven't had a lot left at the end of the day since—well, October. I've missed out on a lot of locals gatherings, and I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that the only people who have talked to me much lately are the ones who have managed to memorize my somewhat-unwieldy work address.

But Jeff gave me this gift, this funny silly little gift, that just makes me laugh and sums up how much has changed in the past few months. It's a mug that celebrates what I've become. It's a white mug with the Dewey Decimal number for tea on it. What's even better? I work in a building full of people who get the joke.

So, since I've abandoned you, and had no energy for writing, I'll give you something silly.

Courtesy of Joyce, ten strange things about me that you might or might not know. Too obvious to make the list: I am a compulsive list-maker, my left foot has toes that are crossed, my fingernails bend backwards and I like to use the ace and the queen of hearts as a signature because I'm the only person I know who can accurately use two playing cards as her initials.

I am terrified of fire. I was in a house fire. Once was enough.
The sound of crunching ice makes me violently twitchy. I can't stand to be in the same room as someone who does this.
I cough or make a small noise before entering a room that I know is occupied, in the hopes of not startling the occupant.
My eyes each see color slightly differently. I can't always see it, and I have to be in an area with lots of white space, but one eye perceives things with the slightest of bluish tinges and one sees things slightly warmer and redder.
I have a bumper sticker from a convicted felon on my filing cabinet. (Jim Guy Tucker.)
Some words are inherently funny to me for reasons that I can't explain. 'Susurrant' is a good example. 'Penguin' made me laugh before the little waddlers became my unofficial emblem.
I react to the smell of cucumbers and pickles the same way that I react to crunching ice.
I have a mild allergy to an unknown component in yellow gold, which I discovered when I had my ears pierced as a child. As a result, what little valuable jewelry I own contains white, not yellow, gold
I learned a few months ago that 'domesticat' is the only name I've got that's really mine. My first name was my great-grandmother's. My middle name was my mother's. The first half of my surname, my maiden name, turned out to be an unrelated name my grandfather picked up after his mother's remarriage. The second half of my surname I picked up by marriage.
For years, the same what-if dream woke me from a sound sleep many times: I dreamed I had a chance to go back and re-decide whether to stay an English literature major or switch to information systems. (For those of you who didn't know me then, I switched.) I knew I was never sure about my decision, because my unconscious kept re-examining it. Since I became the webmaster for a library, the dream hasn't recurred once. It's as if the decision, and the process that caused it to come to pass, finally rests easy in my mind now.

Life's okay. Life's hectic. The best way to reach me these days is to call me. I'd like to write a Christmas entry, but I think it needs to be private; I suspect many of my words will be saved for PHE.

May the holidays find you safe, well, and surrounded by those you love. Wherever they may be.

Queen of the Armchairs

2006-11-28T23:43:46+00:00

Things like this are what happens when I'm off from work on a sick day, sitting on the couch with the following things:

laptop
cat(s)
tea
blanket
chocolate

I generally don't do memes, because most of them, frankly, stink—they're clearly the twenty-minute creations of some teenage kid who drew up the 'What Is Yuor Luv Style LOL LOL' quiz during study hall. This, however, has funnier questions than most, and the results just cracked me up.

However, this may have more to do with the fact that I am bored, restless, and feverish than with any inherent quality in the quiz.

So you think you know more than everyone else, and maybe you do. But, then again, maybe you don't. We're scared that you're just sitting back and judging, without throwing your hat in the ring. (Because love is like boxing? Just go with us here…) All we're saying is that you need to let a few people into your life, just to round things out.

You also might want to stop being so evil. Your seduction style is a little too dark for us to feel good about. One might say that you're a black hole of scary disillusion and Satanism. One might also suggest getting a puppy.

Or, the photo version:

Edmund might have something to say about that puppy, though.

minutiae : logistics

2006-08-04T18:59:18+00:00

Someone asked me recently to define what I do for dragon*con tech staff. I thought about a lot of answers, all of which encompassed part of the job, but eventually I hit on a word that I think nails the entire thing in one: "logistics."

My job is to know tech staff, inside and out, from the moment they sign up. Their biographical and geographical info goes in the database, but the rest goes inside my head. What are they like? Who do they work well with? Who brought them on staff? What skills do they have? What other departments do they like to work with? What hours of the day do they prefer to work? What did they work last year? Where are they interested in working next year? What do they want to learn?

Once obtained, I use that knowledge along with any of the following:

trading of favors
bartering of alcohol
insouciant flipping of skirts
occasional eyelash-batting
whining
outright begging*

to slot all of these individual people into a cohesive whole that spans 4 ballrooms (7 when subdivided), one equipment room, one operations room, and two other rooms of nefarious and private use. Most of these rooms run at least 16 hours per day; several run nearly 24-7.

(You'd be amazed at what I can accomplish via email.)

The end result is deceptively simple. If there's a problem, or a hole on staff to fill, no matter how strange or bizarre or abstruse, my job is to have an answer.

That's what I'm doing right now. Tracking down photos for badges. Emailing staffers to nudge them regarding shifts. Tipping them off about events in ballrooms that they should likely work. Arranging for flight pickup, cleaning up the check-in system, and plotting other things too small or mundane to shift here.

But really, I do need to call Rob Constantine about that event in that ballroom …

See?

Anyway. The minutiae have me, and will until early September. Not sure what my posting frequency will be, but rest assured, I'm at the computer a lot these days.

* In 2005, I even discovered that for a couple of people, all I had to do was demonstrate that the D cups really did bounce when I jumped up and down. By doing that, I got energy drinks for my fellow Ops workers and a half-gallon of pie for myself. I considered it a jump well spent.

class 4 slope

2006-05-30T04:01:44+00:00

[me resting at the top of Licklog Mountain (peak #2 of the day)]

From wikipedia:

Class 1: Hiking.
Class 2: Simple scrambling, with possible occasional use of the hands.
Class 3: Scrambling, a rope can be carried but is usually not required.
Class 4: Simple climbing, with exposure. A rope is often used. Natural protection can be easily found. Falls may well be fatal.
Class 5: Technical free climbing. Climbing involves rope, belaying, and other protection hardware for safety.

I asked myself on the way home: would I have done this if I had known what I know now?

Yes, yes, absolutely yes.

Life is rarely simple. Life becomes extraordinarily simple when the only decision you have to make involves the next placement of foot or of hiking pole; when you have room for minor mis-steps but major ones will send you tumbling down the side of the mountain. Life then becomes a matter of relaying information to the person behind you. "Squishy here." "Rock's loose." "Slippery."

Everything else—even snapping photographs—had to wait.

[the view of nearby mountains]

My introduction to hiking was a class 4 slope. No rope, though there was a spot on Wallalah Mountain that I might not have minded the extra bit of security inherent in having one.

I entered the trailhead not sure if I got it, if I understood why I was doing this; two hours later in the middle of climbing up the side of a perfectly good rock outcrop while trying to puzzle out where the trail went, I figured it out. Years ago, when I started workouts, I did it because I envisioned a life in which my body was not my limiting factor. I got on the machines and I ran not because I had a goal, but because I'd lived so long without them that I was willing to do whatever it took to get myself to a place where I could make choices.

[the only safe place to shoot on this slope]

I climbed those little mountains because they were there, and I wanted to prove to myself that all this work I've put in over these past two years hasn't been just an exercise in mental toughness.

It wasn't.

Realistically, I shouldn't have started here, on this trail, on this section; it was too much too soon and I wouldn't have had it any other way, because I don't have to wait and wonder if I can handle "the tough stuff."

As several of my friends will undoubtedly tell me, I've always been able to handle it. I just had to see it for myself.

Looks like I'll be wanting to price some equipment. I think I'm going to need it.

["I have to go where?]

[Full photoset is available on flickr.]