As I was saying, we just got home from a grand trip out to California to visit my sister and mother. I hope to share a bit more about the trip soon, but as Jen went and wrote some lovely things on her blog, I wanted to share a bit about our Monday-night visit, too.
Because, you see, I got to meet Jen (of one plus two), someone who I have long admired (or perhaps hero-worshipped) from afar. Since I won’t be able to go to BlogHer, where Jen and other fine bloggy folks will be gathering next month, and since Jen will be moving to Belize in a few short months, I felt compelled to make the effort to stalk Jen in person while I had the chance. Happily, she was open to being stalked, and even invited us over for dinner.
Jen is just as warm and beautiful and down-to-earth and magnificent as you might gather from reading her blog. And M and J were equally wonderful and charming. But I got to learn more than that. Jen is also a damn fine cook, and served up some tasty gnocchi with home-made pesto, some fantabulously delicious oven-roasted vegetables, and garlic bread made from bread that she baked herself. The littler diners were served a classic grilled cheese dinner (crust removed upon request) and a big bowl of strawberries. (Phoebe may have eaten more than a few strawberries.)
Phoebe and M, frightfully cute together.
Ten o’clock rolled around before we noticed, with our little ones romping and cavorting around us, up well past their bed-times. We stayed later than we’d planned, caught up in comfortable conversations, sitting on the living room floor. We talked about life and work: kids and travel and family, friends and blogging and bloggy friends, non-profits and language and disaster recovery. And a dozen other topics that I can’t even recall.
This was the first time I have met someone in person who I’d previously only known online. It wasn’t at all awkward, though. Instead, it felt like we were old friends, just picking up the conversation where we’d left off last. Even though, before this meeting, I could have passed Jen on the street without ever recognizing her.
I’ve thought quite a bit recently about the distinction people sometimes make between online friends and real-life friends. I’ve realized that the distinction is remarkably fuzzy, because the people behind the blogs I read are unquestionably real people. The joys and pains and tidbits they live and share are real, and they affect me in real ways. Through our conversations, the friendships become real.
Of course, it’s hard to beat the pleasure of getting together with friends in person. Especially when there is real food involved. (So I hope to meet more of you out there, too. I might even cook.)
Okay, okay. I’m terribly slow to get around to things. Last week I put up a post wherein I announced that I would randomly select a commenter to receive a box of Brazilian chocolate in the mail. The deadline to enter this drawing was almost a freakin’ week ago, and I still haven’t announced a winner. But here’s the problem: once I announce the winner, I’ll feel compelled to act upon that announcement, and get my lazy ass over to the post office.
Oh, no, wait. She is the winner. (Ding ding ding!)
And as soon I get her snail mail address, you can bet that I’ll be heading right over the post office. Within the fortnight. (I also have a return gift for the lovely Dragonfly, who got the chocolate ball rolling.)
As a consolation prize for those of you not soon to receive chocolate in the mail, I offer you this scene, in honor of the meow-ness of the winner’s name. Meow! (It’s from the movie Super Troopers.)
Update:
Because Flutterasked about it (”um where is the chocolate?”), I will share some more details on the chocolate in question. It is currently on my kitchen counter, all boxed up and addressed and everything. It almost made it to the post office, but I ran out of time. I managed to get a couple of photos before I closed up the boxes.
Mme. Meow gets this batch: a box of various Garoto brand filled chocolates, a couple of small candy bars, and a whopping big bar of Lacta’s Diamante Negro (”black diamond”), which is milk chocolate with some sort of crunchy cashew bits.
Dragonfly, who has expressed a desire to visit South America, gets the slightly more tropical Garoto mix, which includes some banana and coconut chocolates, as well as two candy bars and a roll of guava cookies (which are not chocolate, but looked good).
Tomorrow I will eat a chocolate bar for breakfast.
It’s the day I’m going to get to have my glucose test at the doctor’s office. This is the test to screen for gestational diabetes. Usually, one is made to drink a seriously syrupy “drink” that is reminiscent of soda syrup without the addition of carbonated water. Then an hour later, they draw some blood to check blood sugar levels.¹ I was quite pleased to learn that, at this medical group, I can opt to eat a Hershey’s bar instead of drinking the nasty syrup. So around 9:00 tomorrow morning, I’ll break my fast with chocolate. Sweet. (I must bring my own chocolate, though.)
I must confess that chocolate in the morning is not an entirely novel experience for me. You see, if there is chocolate in the house, I will be nibbling at it no matter what time of day or night. And recently there has been quite a lot of chocolate in the house.
About a month and a half ago, Dragonfly (who is living in Germany) offered to send a bundle of German chocolate to a randomly selected commenter on her 100th post. And I was that lucky commenter. Here is some of the bounty I received a couple weeks later:
This is the photo that she posted on her blog. There was actually quite a bit more, too. I meant to take a picture of it, but mysteriously most of it…um…disappeared. (Did I mention that it was weeks ago?) And it was some pretty wonderful chocolatey goodness.
I have to say, getting a package of chocolate in the mail is a real treat. And I would like to pass along the experience. I mentioned that I managed to stop by a grocery store to load up on chocolate during the last few hours of my Brazil trip. And you, yes you, could get some of this bounty. I plan on selecting a random commenter to be the recipient of a stash of assorted Brazilian chocolates. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post by midnight on Thursday, June 5th, and I will enter you in the drawing. To make things a bit more interesting, leave the name of a chocolate bar (or other chocolate treat) in your comment.
Oh, that reminds me. Speaking of chocolate and comments. My chocolate-themed list has been getting some attention from a horde of bored 12-year-olds (judging from the content of the comments). Or perhaps mostly from the same 12-year-old, judging from the IP addresses. What did I do to deserve such attentions?
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¹ I actually failed my first glucose test when I was pregnant with Phoebe. It was very annoying. I have a rant about it that I buried away when I realized that the footnote was getting as long as the rest of the post. But a quick word of advice or anyone faced with an upcoming glucose test: don’t load up on carbohydrates right before the appointment.
I’ve decided to move the old Phoebe Blog over to WordPress. The iWeb application was great to get started, and handy for publishing pages of photos, but cumbersome for blogging. (I got a bit fed up with having to change the default surfer picture for each post, for one thing. And the bit about not being able to publish a post without also publishing any exisiting drafts was also quite irksome.)
So, updates about Phoebe will now be at this (new) version of The Phoebe Blog.
I’m seriously amused. There is a quiz out there called “The Blog Cuss-O-Meter,” which I saw at casa az last night (and at raincoaster a few days ago when I was too busy to give it a spin). I thought to myself “screw it, I hardly ever swear on my blog,” but I took the quiz anyhow. Here is the result I got:
(The site further gives this bit of info: “This is 791% MORE than other websites who took this test.”)
This surprised me more than a little, especially given that others who took this were surprised at how low a score they got. In spite of having decided, and stated, that I reserve the right to swear on my blog, I tend to shy away from using certain words in my writing that more easily leave my lips when I am, for example, driving. Hell, I wrote a whole post last week where I played with “crap” as a theme, but I somehow avoided using the word shit.
For example, I’d just like to point out that the word fuck appears to appear in only 4 posts in the history of this blog, which means just over 1% of the posts. (And one of those uses is on an image of a little candy heart. Doesn’t that make it sugar-coated?)
But I do use a lot of mild taboo words. My guess is that somehow, the ass in kick-ass, as in my tag “kick-ass women” is responsible. (Yes, I’m saying my ass is responsible.) It’s in my sidebar, so may count as being in basically all of my pages somehow. Otherwise, what do they consider?
Seriously, this makes me want to do an experiment. Anyone want to try adding some shit or something to their sidebar to see if they can inflate their score?
(Oh, and by the way, I’m back home. The conference and trip were really great. The presentations went well. I saw lots of people I wanted to see. And now I’m really fuckingfreakin’damn quite palpably tired and need to get ready for the next conference, now less than 3 weeks away.)
From the AP article:The Johns Hopskins University Center for Human Health and Technology Studies issued a report last Friday indicating that individuals participating in activities relating to the internet format of weblogs were at increased risk for a variety of health problems, including rickets, schistosomiasis, kuru, high blood pressure, Omphaloskepsis, and vitamin D deficiency. Many subjects further exhibited lethargy and reduced reaction times to external stimuli.Blogging practices most strongly correlated with risks to mental and physical health include the publication, reading and exposure to weblog entries on topics including, but not limited to, politics, humor, family, music, news and the personal lives of the weblog authors. The study identified the following practices as being most strongly correlated with mental health risks and cognitive deficits:
Spending upwards of 5 hours weekly reading, writing or contemplating writing weblog entries
Reading of multiple weblogs daily
Compulsive checking of weblog entries for comments or the checking of website visitor statistics
Posting images of one’s local domestic fauna and/or offspring
Posting lists of any kind
When asked for details on the concurrent study for risks associated with so-called “lolcats,” images of animals which have been augmented with captions using poor grammar, Dr. Percival Jones-Quinderpants replied: “The final results of that study are not yet available, but preliminary results show that subjects may be at higher risk for certain types adult-onset language disorder, such as Lolcat’s Aphasia and hyperacronymia.”Related studies also found that subjects who spent late-night hours engaging in various online activities (such as social networking sites) were more 5 times more likely than the control group to have decreased attention spans and reduced ability to focus, leading to an inability to complete a coherent
Jon Stewart: …and the award for the Most Distinguished Pants Blog, the coveted Golden Pants Award, goes to alejna of collecting tokens. [cue cheesy music]
alejna: [choking back the tears] I can’t believe what an honor this is for me. It seems like just yesterday that I first tried on pants blogging. Now with 31 pants posts under my belt, I feel that I’ve come far in the world of pants blogging. But I know that there are many more important issues of pants that need to be laid bare. I will continue to strive to dress them…I mean address them in the dignified manner which they so richly deserve.
I would like to thank the Academy of Pants. I’d of course like to thank my mother, who put me in my first pair of pants. I’d like to thank all my friends and family members who encouraged me in the pursuit of pants, with the occasional kick in the pants. Thanks to those who brought pants crises and pants celebrations to my attention. And thanks, above all, to my various pairs of pants, which were always there to cover my ass in times of need.
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This week’s Monday Mission, which I chose to accept in part because I have many other things which I should be doing and this seemed like more fun, was to write a post in the form of an acceptance speech. I’d also like to extend my thanks to Painted Maypole, for the specific inspiration for this post. When she wrote her pants entry for last week’s Mission, I told her I felt like I’d been awarded the Golden Pants Award. It seems only fitting that I should have my acceptance speech ready.
I’ve been feeling a bit funky lately. No, not that kind of funk. I seem to have been in a bit of a funk. And I want to give up the funk.
You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been writing so often. I’ve been really tired, and pulled in lots of directions. The result is that I’ve felt a bit like hiding away in a cave.
The good news is that several of the big deadlines are now behind me, and that most of them involved getting the planned tasks done. Data was collected, annotated, and analyzed. Abstracts were submitted for one conference. An accepted paper was revised and re-submitted for another conference. The class I’m teaching is rolling along, for better or worse. (Some days are better, some days are worse.) There are some more big work deadlines approaching, but they are not as oppressively immediately pressing, so I feel like I can relax a bit for a few days.
I ended up largely (or perhaps completely) flaking on the computational linguistics chapter presentation I had said I’d do. I don’t like flaking, and I felt pretty crappy about it. But by the time the abstracts were done Friday night, I had very little left in me. I still had hopes of throwing together a handout Saturday morning, but Phoebe would have none of it. She made herself quite needy that morning, and didn’t allow me to take my attention from her. So we (John, Phoebe and I) went to the group without a presentation. People had read the chapter anyhow, and of the other 6 people there, 5 of them knew more about the topic than I did. So as John points out, any sort of formal presentation would have been largely wasted. We all worked on the exercises from the chapter, which I think worked out better. But I still feel unhappy about the whole thing. I’m usually someone who somehow manages to do everything I commit to, even if I wear myself out in the process. I just have to realize that I’m not always in control of my time anymore, and I can’t go volunteering to do extra things. Or at least so many extra things.
I did end up getting some time to be a vegetable. By the time Phoebe was in bed Saturday night, I was too tired to focus on the paper revisions. So, I got to watch the two first episodes of the new Terminator TV show (”The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), which John had downloaded. I enjoyed the episodes, and now have another show to add to my kick-ass women list. (Last night we watched the third episode, too.)
Anyhow, I’m hoping to come crawling out of my cave now.
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(Oh, and by the way. I did update the Phoebe blog a bit. I decided to just publish the whole thing, even though it included unfinished drafts.)
