you make your little way

maura @ 9:50 pm

So I read a book on my phone this week.

Just typing it makes it seem like the future, doesn’t it? I mean, seriously, I read a BOOK on my PHONE. The flying cars must be next!

The book was Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow of bing bong fame. It’s a YA terrorismtechnotyranny kind of thing, an enjoyable and compelling read. Because he’s all open source in the hizzouse, you can download it and read it for free. Also because he’s a widely published writer who already has a roomful of money. JOKING! Sort of.

But see, here’s the thing. There’s a lot from the internets that I could be downloading and reading. I mean, practically every journal article I read these days is a PDF. And there’s tons of fiction that’s out of copyright out there, too.

But I don’t. Why? Well, for work/research stuff, it’s because I need to be able to jot down marginal notes (though, to be honest, they are often along the lines of “right on!” or “that’s stupid!”). But the real reason is that it’s just not that fun to read big fat chunks of text on a computer. Esp. when you sit in front of a computer for much of the day.

Enter the phone! I can take it anywhere, and that’s what I did. It’s much more fun to read a novel while propped up by 3 pillows in bed than while sitting in my hard desk chair. My only complaint is that Stanza, this cool iphone ebook reader, is a huge battery suck, so it’s not like you can read for 12 hrs straight or anything. (Not that I have time to do that these days, anyway.)

blug, blig, blag

maura @ 9:29 pm

So I was going to post tonight about how I’ve had some hardcore bloggers block lately. And I was going to title it: “bleck, blick, block.” But then I sucked one of Gus’s soccer socks into the vacuum cleaner as I was vacuuming it, and suddenly I had something to write about!

I know you’re wondering why I was vacuuming Gus’s soccer socks. See, this season Gus’s team is playing on astroturf. Last spring they played on real grass, and got muddy or dusty or whatever during each game. And I often thought, “man, what a pain, he’d be much less dirty* if they played on one of the astroturf fields.”

* And can someone please explain to me why the 100% planet-killing polyester jerseys don’t ever seem to come clean? He had a white shirt last time and it’s pale yellow this time and it is just ridiculous how easily those things stain.

But now I rue my hasty thoughts, because astroturf was clearly invented by Satan. Last weekend it rained, and green, straw-like bits of astrograss and black specs of astrodirt stuck to everything: cleats, the ball, his water bottle, everything. Today it was dry as a bone, and the static electricity also** made the aforementioned astroturf byproducts stick to everything! Evil, evil, evil.

** Can I mention, in a total tangent, that Gus has lately started to actually emphasize italicized words when he reads to us? So cool!

Those 10 ft long soccer socks are like velcro with the astrograss, and since Gus wasn’t in during the first quarter today he instead spent it rolling around on the ground. Those socks looked like a shag carpet. Of course he has a game tomorrow, but I didn’t want to contaminate the laundry with all of that gross plastic. Hence the vacuuming.

Our vacuum has a mighty suck! But luckily it’s bagless, so the sock just went through and into the canister, where I plucked it, dusty but unharmed. And finished vacuuming it, of course.

and now i don’t hear anything else

maura @ 9:54 pm

Why does it seem lately like the less I blag the more Mimi Smartypants does? Which is good in a way, because then when I finally have time to read her blag I have a nice backlog to catch up on. That sounds so negative…really, it’s a good backlog! I think the word “backlog” is onomatopoeiadically* bad-sounding, there’s no way around it.

* which is the second word I’ve made up today! The first was “useways,” which is like foodways except about users + using. In a non-junkie sense, of course. Coffee + research days = wheeee!

But what I really want to talk about is that I realized recently that scooting to work is kind of like a video game. I mean, of course it’s fun and all, but it also engages video gamey parts of my brain. All of that scanning for pedestrians (who are moving erratically while talking/texting), watching for sidewalk irregularities, aiming for curb cuts and keeping an eye out for cars driven by people who don’t remember that pedestrians AND scooteurs have the right of way…all of that reminds me of a good video game, esp. one of the racing (maximum power!) or snowboarding (stiffy!) variety.

I haven’t had much time for video games lately, which makes me a little bit sad because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about them. I might even be germinating a research project, but there’re 2 others ahead of it so I’m trying not to let myself get carried away. At least not til that time extender’s invented.

The small bits of gaming I have been doing have all been on the iphone. I’m still incredibly stingy about it so I’ve only bought one game: Subway Shuffle (I think it cost $2.99). It’s a puzzle game designed by some math whizzes and pushes all of my puzzley and trainy buttons. Plus you can pick it up and put it down anytime without suffering for it (I just can’t make time for games that require lots of level memorization right now).

The other games I have are all free, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that the one I’m gravitating towards now is RemovEm, another puzzley game. The UI is clean + pretty, but the gameplay is along the repetitive, pattern recognition lines of Tetris. Which I don’t consider to really be a game as much as a way to pass the time (oooh, burn!). I’m disappointed in myself, but I keep being lured back in by the way that RemovEm sort of looks like my ur-puzzle game, Tesserae. Oh Tesserae, how I miss you!

And SimCity, too. That would be kickass on an iphone.

toes are sticking out of socks

maura @ 10:23 pm

Did I fall into a black hole? (perhaps created by the Large Hadron Collider?) No! Just busy here, is all. Work has been a whirlwind since the start of the semester. In a good way, definitely, but mental space has been limited. Downside: have not been keeping up with the (online) paper + library news + blags. Upside: am not as stressed out as I could be about the upcoming elections or financial services crisis. So everyone wins!

Should have blagged last weekend, but it ended up being full of soccer + sausage and beans for lunch + the freemarket (where I scored an excellent pea soup-colored skirt that fits perfectly, go me!) + visiting friends (complete with super mario galaxy, painting the outside of the house, and a trombone!) + more soccer + the apple festival at the historic house in the park (mmmm, fresh cider + fritters) + courtyard neighbor dinner.

I did break my election media fast to watch Tina Fey on SNL, and have spent the past few days occasionally saying to myself, “I can see Russia from my house!” and giggling.

Hermph, this post is going nowhere. Jonathan said I had to post something tonight because my last post has so many comments. But I’ve been all tapped out of blaggable topics recently. OH! Except that I could mention that Gus’s soccer team is called the Lightning, because they have pale yellow shirts. But for a few moments it looked like they were going to name themselves the Yellow Flamers (not a typo!), which was very funny.

apropos of nothing

maura @ 10:14 pm

This week was busy. Gus started school, so I spent a couple of hours there on the first day and meeting his teacher later in the week. Also the holiday! I kept thinking I wasn’t getting enough done, but there was less time than usual, duh me.

Today we had dumplings + shave ice for lunch, yum. For shave ice flavors I had plain coconut (because I’m boring like that), Gus had lemon + lime w/condensed milk, and Jonathan had passion fruit + green tea w/vanilla ice cream.

Last night we (=parents) watched “Everything is Illuminated,” which was really good. Tonight we (=family) watched “Pokemon: The First Movie.” It was not really good, and I hope it is Pokemon: my last movie. But I’d been crabby about the netflix subscription for a while because it seemed like we were letting movies hang out forever, so watching is good.

Why do we have so much stuff? Certainly we could have far less. Today was deal-with-Gus’s-room day, and a whole pile of little kid stuff, outgrown stuff, cheapo plastic birthday party favor stuff and random broken stuff was gotten rid of. Plus I finally went through the big pile o’ 1st grade stuff (that I’d been avoiding all summer) AND the big pile o’ kindergarten stuff (that I’d been avoiding for over a year!). It’s incredible how much paper these kids come home with, it’s like 1 linear foot per grade. No one has enough room in their home archives for that!

when was the last time you made a record book

maura @ 10:04 pm

Yesterday I cleaned the whole house and this morning I mopped all the floors, because it really, really needed it. But now the holiday weekend is 2/3 gone and I still haven’t made myself a new iphone cozy! Tomorrow we’re picnicking w/friends from Gus’s school so it probably won’t happen then, either.

Before we went on vacation I went on a sewing jag, and among other things (of a mostly utilitarian nature, like taking in some pants and a shirt and making a few new vegetable bags for grocery shopping), I made myself an iphone cozy prototype. Like much of my sewing, I didn’t plan it out as well as I could, so while I didn’t mean to make a prototype, that’s what it (somewhat frustratingly) became.

This anti-prototype thing must be genetic, because at one point recently Gus was making something and it wasn’t working out, so Jonathan cheerfully explained the concept of a prototype, to which Gus replied (rather forcefully): “I DON’T MAKE PROTOTYPES!!!”

Anyway, so I had pictured a form-fitting cozy (the old red felt one I made was getting sort of loose, and I don’t want the iphone to slip out) in a jaunty fabric, lined with a different jaunty fabric, with a thicker piece of fabric in the middle to provide some cushioning.

Everything went well enough initially. Jaunty fabric x 2, check. (And if you knew me in college you might recognize the outer fabric.) Form-fitting, check. Then it was just time to finish the edges.

And there’s where it all broke down. I like to finish edges with folded over ribbon, but actually I’ve only ever done that on the insides of bags that I’ve made. I started working on the folded over ribbon thing on the cozy, but the ribbon was too slippery and the corners were too difficult and suddenly it was 11pm on the night before the night before we left for vacation, ack!

So I cursed a lot, then decided that this is a prototype. I grabbed some (jauntily) contrasting thread and stitched up the raggedy edges on the sides, and dubbed it frankencozy. And I have spent a lot of time since then thinking about where I went wrong and how to avoid it the next time. Because there will be a next time, oh yes, there will. You won’t get the best of me, cozy!

i still can’t believe we nearly rolled down the steps

maura @ 9:18 pm

Yesterday I saw a manhole cover with the word TELEPORT on it. And I thought, “really?”

Now I can’t remember where it was, so maybe it was for real after all.

three-quarters of george washington’s head

maura @ 10:19 pm

Hi there, intertubes! How’re you? We’re fine here, just back from our nearly-end-of-summer beach week. Yes, things are fairly chaotic in a house containing 3 six yr olds, 1 two yr old and 1 six mo old, thanks for asking! Despite the noise level, good times were had by all. While there were some disappointments (crab cakes that were more cake than crab, no clothesline at the rental house), they were more than offset by the good stuff (amazing weather, steamed clams, toasted waffles w/vanilla ice cream). And I managed to read 2 books. And I won at Carcassonne: fear my massive misshapen city, w00t!

Thankfully we have tomorrow to recover + to do all the laundry. Monday morning it’s off to camp for Gus again, poor kid. Though he did make a new friend this year who will also be doomed to camp for the last week of the summer. Plus they are swimming every day next week, so I don’t feel that bad for him.

And it’s back to work for me, where summer is over: the fall semester starts this week, eek!

we found the house that the animals had built

maura @ 10:21 pm

You may be wondering how the kittens (now 5 mos old!) are doing. And I’m happy to report that they’re swell! They’ve quite settled in, and so have we. Jonathan said that he’d always thought that cats came in 2 varieties: normal and psycho. But it turns out that within the “normal” category cats actually have their own distinct personalities.

Gummy is still the little one — we are thinking that he was the runt. He’s got really big paws for how skinny he is and cuts a tiger-like figure when he strolls into the room. He’s definitely the smart one and the more accomplished hunter: he will sit still and watch while Caramel is freaking out over a toy, then bust out a crazy ninja move to steal the toy away. He also is always the dominant one when they wrestle. Gummy likes the loving but isn’t a pest about it — he’s happy to solicit cuddles and purrs mightily, but when you need to stop petting him and go do something else, he’s cool with it, catch you later, no big deal. He likes to sleep on the floor by the foot of our bed, which seems to me like something a dog would do.

Caramel is bigger, softer + prettier in a traditional cat way. His belly is super soft and he likes to be held like a baby for belly rubs. He’s kind of a dumbass, but it’s always good for a laugh when he loses it for a toy while Gummy watches + waits. Caramel is a super cuddle monster — he is all over you when he wants snuggles and meows insistently about it. He also does that thing with his paws where he kneads your leg or arm or whatever, which means we really need to keep his nails trimmed. It’s kind of annoying at times: he’s fond of walking all over our heads at 5am looking for love. But he’s a good lap-warmer, as I’ve found out these past two chilly evenings. And he’ll grow out of the early morning wakeups, right?

It’s hilarious how much cats are like kids. They are always following me around the house, wanting to be involved in whatever I’m doing. We got a fantastic new laundry rack at Ikea and I can’t really hang anything on the bottom rungs because it’s like a kitty jungle gym to them. They are even losing their baby teeth! I have found 6 so far, 4 canines + 2 molars, mostly in a spot where they like to wrestle. And of course you have to clean up their poop (though thankfully they are pooping less often than when we first brought them home).

I will admit that it’s a little hairy in our house right now. Gus is growing his hair long, “until I can put it in my mouth.” I’m not sure why that’s a compelling reason, but he does look very cute w/his skater boy hair. Which is good, because the maintenance is kind of a drag. Washing + conditioning w/every bath! Of course my hair is still long too, and the cats shed a bit… Thankfully Jonathan’s hair is pretty short right now or we’d be overrun! Or we could collect it to fill a mattress or something. (Yes, we are reading Little House on the Prairie at bedtime, can you tell?)

to the center of the city where all roads meet

maura @ 10:29 pm

When do you write? Yes, I’m asking you.

(And if you = Anne then you have three where I only have one so surely if you can find time to write then I should be able to, too!)

No, really, when do you write? I would like to write more. Not even necessarily blag or scholarship or journal but anything, just anything. That new Lynda Barry book has plenty of prompts, just in case I get stuck.

Right now my weekdays are like this: get up, get ready for work, eat breakfast (and make sure Gus does, too), leave for work around the same time that Jonathan takes Gus to camp, work, come home, eat dinner, hang out with Gus a bit, either do the dishes or get Gus ready for bed (we switch off), make my lunch, download my email…and then it’s 9pm, if not later.

I’m pretty tired by then, and it’s hard to write. If I have a deadline I can do it (tea at dinner helps). But even my journal lately, when I write in the evenings, has been all “blah blah blah, I’m so tired, there’s never any time, blah blah blah.”

People say to get up early and write. It sounds torturous to get up any earlier than 6:45, but maybe I will give it a try. Of course I’d have to go to bed earlier too. Maybe I should be writing at lunchtime. Seems like it could be kind of pleasant to go sit on the plaza and write for a bit.