twitter fail

maura @ 11:16 pm

I have given up on catching up on twitter this week. I’m not sure when it happened, but I’m anywhere from 24-48 hours behind on reading tweets right now. And I think I am just going to say no to catching up entirely.

It’s usually pretty easy to keep up with twitter — it fills in the gaps between things so nicely. I guess I haven’t had any of those gaps in the past few days. Except on the subway, but there’s no internet on the subway.

It feels even failier than usual to give up on twitter. Twitter is the easy one, the quick fix, not something to dwell on or worry about. Maybe I need to cull the # of folks I follow.

Also why is it still 85 degrees on some of the subway platforms? It’s November, for pete’s sake!

day 2…

maura @ 10:52 pm

…and already I am too spent to post. How did this happen? Probably my grand tour of NYC today: to the Upper West Side and then to Kips Bay for meetings, then back to work in Brooklyn (for a conference call and then a meeting a few blocks away in the other building), then back to Manhattan for dinner, then home. Rode 8 subways today. A good day, if tiring. Wish I could buy a few more hours, but doesn’t look like that’ll happen.

If I ever fail to be impressed by the view when the train goes over the Manhattan Bridge, that’s when I know it’ll be time to leave New York.

i traveled far and wide

maura @ 11:04 pm

I moved into my new office at the end of last week. New office! I’ve never ever had an office with a door all to myself. It’s pretty swell.

Want a tour?

This is right after I moved in. New chair, too!

Old wooden desk! It was here in the space, and lucky me, I get to keep it. It’s got loads of drawers and dividers and there was a little key in one of them. Mysterious!

One of my three (3!) bookshelves is small and blue with glass doors. Very nice, and the bottom shelf is perfect for my shoes. (I keep my work shoes at work so I can walk to + from in sneakers.)

Two (2!) more bookshelves, plus a table. Which right now is covered in bags with much of the contents of my old desk in it, because I haven’t had time to rearrange everything yet.

Whiteboard, file cabinet, and giant globe! Which also came with the office, and I couldn’t be happier. I love globes, so very cool.

Right now I’m only partially moved because I haven’t had a chance to move everything. I’m trying to bring a little bit over every day — it’s incredible how much I’ve accumulated in the past 2.5 yrs. Also there’s a small sticking point: my old file cabinet is legal-sized, and my new one is letter-sized (which I actually prefer). So I’ll need to get some new hanging folders, sort out the legal folders, etc. And all of Gus’s drawings and my other wall art need to come over, too.

All of which I love, seriously! Mmmm, organizing. But I just don’t have time for it right now. Which is tweaking me ever-so-slightly in an OCD way because I’m not sure where anything is (though I did find my post-it notes today, which have become my most critical office supply lately). The absurdity of filing something in my old cubicle today did not pass unrealized, too.

keep on calling me

maura @ 10:24 pm

Hey, look at that! November 1st, time for NaBloPoMo again. I know, I know, right now you’re thinking: “Maura! Don’t be an idiot! You barely have time for proper home + family maintenance, much less writing a blag post every dang day for the rest of the month!” And yeah, that’s all true.

But this year I’ve realized that there must be some kind of karmic scheduling at work, because while *every* November seems to be just insanely busy, it’s also true that this is the time in the semester when my butt is most likely to be bruised from having fallen off that ol’ writing wagon once too often. And this year’s no different. And I just emailed a journal editor about an article idea I had and got a positive response, so I really need to hoist myself back up into that saddle.

Tally ho!

(P.S. I promise no more horse-related metaphors for the rest of the month.)

questions & answers

maura @ 9:30 pm

Q: What’s going on around here? Why so quiet lately?

A: Oh, you know, the usual: work, research, chores, weekend bike rides + park visits, fencing (now with mask + glove!), homework, last-minute costume prep, etc.

A: Also, the unusual:

– The bathroom renovation, which has really been much less stressful than it could be (and also mad props to J for acquiring most of the needfuls, including tile, which is very heavy). I haven’t been in there in a while, but I hear things are progressing swimmingly. Right now there’s a hi-tech plastic sheet spanning the hallway in front of the bathroom door from floor to ceiling, with a long red zipper for entry and exit. So CDC!

– Gus’s prehistoric technology studies at school are in full effect. Yesterday was one of the wigwam field trips, and Jonathan helped the kids make fire. (Fire! Fire!) Also I got a slate pendant necklace that Gus had drilled a hole in with a stick, bringing this month’s homemade necklace haul up to 2 — yay!

– So I am on a team that got a very very big grant at work which is very very exciting. My responsibilities have shifted somewhat, though, and I am still getting my bearings time-wise. Which is a complicated way to say that I am very very busy.

Q: Are the cats freaked out by the bathroom renovation?

A: The big one kind of is, and spends lots of time sitting on Jonathan’s lap during the day. The little one could care less.

Q: Have you quit Twitter and/or Facebook?

A: No! See above about the busy. Mostly succeeding in keeping up w/Twitter these days, but can’t really seem to find time to look at Facebook more than a couple of times a week. But our library has a Facebook now so you should be our fan!

Q: What is Gus planning to be for Halloween?

A: Well originally he wanted to be a bat. And we looked all over the internets for a costume only to find that it’s apparently pretty easy to make one with an old black umbrella. So I brought my spare umbrella home from work to sacrifice it, but then in true Gus fashion he changed his mind, and now he’s going as the grim reaper. Which I think is kind of spooky for him these days, but what do I know? Maybe he just wants the scythe. He’s going to a Halloween party before the trick or treating on Sunday afternoon, so maybe we’ll go have a grownup halloweenniversary lunch or somesuch.

Q: Is minute 2:13 in “Leaders of Men” still your favorite part of any Joy Division song ever?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you sad now that Mad Men is over?

A: Sort of. I do miss it, but it’s nice to be caught up on the other TV. House has been decent this season, though Fringe is disappointing. It’s just so *flimsy* with the dual universe storylines. Jonathan keeps saying that they are spreading their story butter too thin across the toast of the show. Also we got a new toaster oven, which performs well enough but has an annoying digital readout (power vampire!) and makes a beeping noise when it’s finished toasting that is much too close to the standard smoke detector noise around these parts. Which is sort of funny given that excessive toasting could in theory set off the smoke detector.

Q: Are you tired? Right now? Because you’re getting a little loopy with that progression from TV to toast, is all I’m saying.

A: Right again! Gold star for you! But you’ll have to wait for it, I’ve got some work to do right now.

saturday morning writing

maura @ 8:46 pm

When Gus was doing karate last spring I was really good about writing during his class. But then he decided to stop and I fell off the wagon. Now he’s doing fencing on Saturday mornings and I am having a hard time getting back into the swing of it.

There’s a lot going on these days.

Last week there was weird sideways hail which, only 2 weeks after the tornado, seems a bit apocalyptic, even for the most agnostic of agnostics (= me).

Work is fun but busier than ever — my course has tripled+ in size (which is good!) and I’m at the beginning or in the midst of a couple of big projects. Next week is Open Access Week so we are prepping a bunch of events (with stickers!). My research project is back in full effect and it’s absolutely fascinating but also exhausting. (I wrote about it at one of my other blags.)

Our bathroom renovation starts on Monday. We decided to go ahead with it after all — the floor tiles are thrashed and coming up all over the place and the faucets are all leaky and the whole shebang is 24 years old and wasn’t ever the best work, anyway. So there are huge boxes all over the apartment with toilet parts, sink parts, etc. It’s a little chaotic. Of course the cats love it — the fat lazy one has decided that the boxed bathtub is his own personal fainting couch and he spends all day lazing on it. Hopefully the cardboard kitty playland will make up for the temporary displacement of their litterbox.

I’ve also been kind of obsessed with this crazy little silo house upstate recently (it started with that house + land in Vermont). Maybe it’s the fall, the real fall, finally here after so much summer, and with good smells of woodsmoke and crunchy apples and pumpkin spice donuts at Tim Horton’s.

And we finally finished catching up with Mad Men! Just in time for the season finale.

daydreamers please wake up

maura @ 9:10 pm

This year Gus’s school camping trip was moved up to the fall, so we are in the midst of both the read-a-thon (to raise money for the trip) and the no-screens time (this year it’s 12 looooong days!). It’s kind of bummer timing because Gus + Jonathan were really getting into playing Minecraft and Gus + I have been playing Professor Layton & the Curious Village, but it’s not the end of the world, I guess.

Mostly things have been fine in no-videogame land, though I can’t say that I’m any more fond of it now than I was last year. We’ve had plenty to do this weekend: fencing, Apple Fest at his school, brunch w/a pal, seeing the stick houses at the gardens, going for a bike ride, and (of course) reading. It was perfect weather this weekend, too — all breezy and sunny and fresh. So nice to be wearing sweaters again!

Yesterday Gus spent a long time working with sculpey. And here’s what he made:

My kid is awesome.

you make your little ways

maura @ 9:36 pm

All week I felt like there were lots of things to blag about, but then this weekend Gus has been sick and the resulting time slowdown has meant that all will to write has evaporated. And now I’m annoyed at myself for not having taken better advantage of the lying-around-on-the-sofa time (or maybe that’s just a case of Sunday Nightis).

I was going to do a cathartic post to try and get my frustration with this year’s schoolbus situation out of my system. Short version: because they’ve added another school to the route, the morning ride is 1 hr 15 min to get to his school that’s 2 miles from our house. Which doesn’t seem to bug Gus much, thankfully, but I still find it maddening (while acknowledging how lucky we are to have a schoolbus at all).

Then I thought maybe I should blag about how we spent last night thinking about whether to buy a small house + land in Vermont (not that we were looking — the link swam through my twitterstream). But that’s really not all that interesting, either. In the end it was about a 4 hour “hmm, maybe…” run of thinking about the house. It’s just too far and I can’t see how we would go there very often. Though it is, funnily enough, only about 40 miles from my dad’s house.

And now I’ve just spent 15 minutes looking at the Catskills version of Craigslist, looking for land that we could build a tiny house on (not that we have the time or $ for this anyway). I’m not looking to leave the BK, but we do have such a nice time whenever we get to travel to green foresty mountainy lakey places, and I miss the occasional nature, esp. in the fall, which is such a lovely time for nature.

But now it is time for Mad Men — we’re almost done w/season 3. And we are *not* moving to Ossining.

a very blustery day

maura @ 9:32 pm

So, there was a tornado in Brooklyn yesterday! Yeah, I know the weather service is saying they’re not sure what to call it yet, but it sure seemed like a tornado to me. It’s funny: I lived in Missouri for 2 yrs as a kid and have spent lots of time visiting my in-laws in the great Midwest, but it’s here in the big city that I first encounter a tornado.

The whole thing was really weird — as Jonathan said at dinner, the weather forecast for the day didn’t seem that awful, just a 20% or so chance of rain in the evening. I was chatting with a coworker and ended up leaving work later than I planned, and as I walked from the library to the subway it was just starting to drizzle. But the air was really unsettled and the clouds were speeding by and the lightning was just weird, so you could tell it wasn’t a typical storm.

The train was really slow so I was probably down in the subway for 20 minutes or so. When I got to my stop and walked up to the first level above the platform, there was a huge tree branch near the turnstiles. Which was unexpected! Then I got upstairs to the sidewalk and saw the first of the big downed trees on my walk home (that’s the photo on the left above). There were three big trees down on the three-block walk to our street, though strangely none of the small trees on our block were damaged at all. The buildings around us are all fine but there’s been lots of roof + window damage elsewhere in Brooklyn and Queens.

(The Times has a cool map today of the downed trees that traces the storm’s path. Go GIS!)

We’re fine, as is everyone we know. Our car is fine, too, which makes me a little sad. You see that last photo up there, on the right? See the little bit of red car across the street from the car that has a tree on it? The red one is ours, and I wish it was the other one. I’ve been trying to make us get rid of the car for about 3 yrs now. But my enthusiasm is not shared, and it’s a lot of work to get it together and actually sell it. So we are still car owners.

But we have friends whose car got totalled a bunch of years ago, I forget how, I think they were in an accident but thankfully no one was hurt. And afterward they decided not to get a new car. Which got me thinking what a great thing it would be if something like that happened to our car. Accident, disaster, whatever — as long as no one gets hurt and nothing else gets broken. It just seems so much easier than having to make the effort to sell the damn thing.

So hello tornado in Brooklyn. If you were going to take down all of our beautiful trees, the least you could have done is dropped one of them on our car. The owner of that car across the street is so lucky, sheesh.

new year

maura @ 12:06 pm

Tomorrow Gus starts 4th (!) grade. Really school started last week, but since they only had one day (Wednesday), tomorrow feels more like the real start. He’s pretty happy to be back in school: one of his best friends is in his class this year, and he loves riding the schoolbus with his pals from our neighborhood. The 4th graders get to do lots of awesome stuff like go to camp for 2 nights (again) and build a Lenape wigwam in Prospect Park with a Native American Technology Specialist. He’s going to have a ball.

Fourth grade was my favorite year of school, hands down. For that year (and for half of 3rd grade) I went to a smallish Montessori school — I think there were maybe 10 or 15 of us in the 4-6 grade unit. We had a huge open classroom and lots of interesting stuff to work on. We got the blue sheet with our work for the week on Monday, and once we finished the work we could essentially choose what we wanted to do. I was kind of obsessed with geography in 4th grade so I spent lots of my free time with atlases and globes learning countries and capitals, drawing flags, and labeling photocopied maps. Or I would park myself in our small library and read.

Fourth grade was also when we lived in my favorite of all of my childhood houses. It was a twin but pretty big even so, with 3 floors and a basement and a wrap-around porch (which I used to drive my remote-controlled car off of) and a pretty little Japanese maple tree in the front yard. My sibs + I slept on the 3rd floor, and my bedroom was really long and narrow. The closet was all the way at the dark end of the room (near the wall that was shared w/the house next door) and I remember being absolutely certain that that side of the room was somewhat evil, what with the darkness and the closet. Maybe I just read too many Narnia stories.

One of the coolest things about that house was that it had front stairs–which went up from the entrance hall next to the living room–as well as back stairs–which were sort of tucked into the back corner of the kitchen. Both stairs met at about the same place on the second floor, and if you were chasing someone (or being chased) you could run up the front stairs down the back stairs and (slam!) out the back door into the yard. Or the reverse, onto the front porch.

The neighborhood we lived in (in suburban Philadelphia) was great too. We could walk or ride bikes to parks, playgrounds and the little commercial district in the town. My mom sent me out to the little grocery store to pick up milk, and I walked to piano lessons, friends’ houses, and girl scout meetings. I guess we do the same with Gus here, in many ways, though he’s still less independent than I was at his age. We do send him to the corner store to pick up milk, but we don’t let him cross streets by himself yet — he’s not very tall, and the cars drive really fast in our neighborhood because our streets are so wide. I can’t quite decide when he’ll be old enough to go to the park with friends + no adults. Maybe next year.