Month: December 2002

but Tom, if you see this – I am at work today, but the number you gave me doesn’t seem to go to you! call me! update: my bad.

I’m starting to think about some improvements to make to my humble (virtual) abode. this time I’m not going to do the usual rough-shod tearing out and replanting that I’ve done in the past; I’m going to keep the content I’ve got, think about adding more, and do some things to visually improve the place. (a lot of inspiration from Patterns for Personal Web Sites.)

anything that anyone out there would like to see? (I’m not sure if my web form works. that would be a thing to fix.)

– vampire ecology
– smart mobs interview
– sarah vowell interview
– the disseminary
– fontlover
– istockphoto

I used to tell people that I moved to Washington state in order to take a long shower. and I was only sort of kidding…the great drought of the late 80s and early 90s in southern California fell smack dab in the middle of my adolescence. we didn’t water our lawn for several years, and I learned how to take very, very short showers. when I moved up here, the Pacific NW was also going through a much milder (relatively) drought – Mom & I cracked up at people complaining about brown lawns; they looked damn green to us.

since then, I’ve learned that this region may have rain, but the state of its water is nearly as precarious as it was down in So Cal. it’s all a question of timing and temperature, as gradually we drain dry the aquifers and rely on the snowpack.

I’m reminded again of it by Jonathon D’s posts on dishwashing tools and wildfires in Australia, also by November’s unseasonable dryness. (also, when Mark P’s friend says that its always ‘never like this’, he could be talking about almost anywhere, esp. in the last 10 years. global warming, anyone?)

all in all, I’m glad to see it rain again, but I think I’m going to start putting a bucket in the shower to store the “warming-up” water, though what I’ll do with it in this season, I’m not quite sure.

– Trodo: today I signed up and already I’m getting a copy of Rebecca Blood’s weblog handbook! 🙂 I’ve got a couple of old tech books & a solitare game listed, if anybody’s interested. as I told John Rhodes in my email, unfortunately, I’ve moved so many times that I just don’t have a lot of extra stuff to trade. but it’s a fascinating idea: a gift economy eBay.

a number of folks have been commenting on AKMA’s 16th anniversary of becoming a priest.

I was raised Catholic, but my paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. (my father converted to Catholicism, as did my grandmother, sometime after my grandparents were divorced and before my parents got married. most of mom’s family has been Catholic pretty much since St. Patrick killed the snakes.)

Grandpa Nelson was an interesting fellow, and one of the reasons why I, when I began moving away from religion, I didn’t go completely overboard the opposite direction. He was short, wore very thick glasses, and was a bit bow-legged. (also, in his later years, he looked much like Colonel Sanders, what with the white hair & beard.) The short came from his family; the glasses he’d worn since he was about 18 months old. Someplace there’s a photo of him with the glasses pretty much tied onto his head. The bow-legged, which Grandma gently teased him about, came from being hit by a truck when he was a teenager. He almost died, and said that the power of prayer helped save his life.

But he wasn’t an anti-intellectual Christian by any stretch of the imagination…in fact, one of the things that he said had drawn him towards the priesthood was his experience in the debate club in high school & junior college. He won awards for his debating skills (which is how he met my grandmother – an amusing story for another time, assuming I haven’t told it already), and loved literature, classical music and science.

And science fiction: when I was a teenager, he told me that he loved Dune. Also, it was on one of my trips to visit my grandparents that I first got into Twin Peaks, watching it with him after Grandma had gone to bed.

I loved hearing his sermons, when I/we visited them – he had a great warm voice, which he used to wonderful effect. The only sermon I remember now was one he gave when I was maybe 12: something about love, and Christian love, which went into a long fascinating digression about the different words for love in Greek and Hebrew.

He was also a story-teller, though he could tend to tell the same half-dozen stories over & over. I’m afraid this is one of his tendencies that I’ve picked up. Some stories, though, just never lose that sweet spot that you feel when you tell or remember them.

I can’t really think of him without Grandma. He adored her, and she doted on him. Well, they also teased each other, had deep in-jokes, and bugged each other about little household things.

But they were divorced for nearly 30 years before they met again and re-married – what was that like for him, as a minister, in the 40s, 50s and 60s? Okay, not all of that time: he re-married once before they did (she remarried twice? three times?), a woman with 3 children of her own, with whom he had another son. They were divorced before Grandma and Grandpa met.

A complicated story, but that’s part of what I always admired about my grandfather: he was a complicated person.

He had a stroke that left him nearly blind, not too long after Grandma died. He couldn’t read, drive or use his telescope anymore. He died in 1998.

After he died, I decided it didn’t matter how or even whether I got married, since he wouldn’t be there to perform the ceremony. (Even when I was a good little Catholic girl, I wanted to be married by my grandfather. Don’t ask how I thought this would happen.) Oddly enough, we got married about two years later…in the back room of our rental house, with my best friend “officiating.” (gotta love the ULC.) We almost wrote her title in as “First Level Cleric.”

I wonder if Grandpa would’ve been horrified, proud, or both.

OnePotMeal says:

Now the furnace folks will come and say, ‘Hello, son. Is your father home?’ No, not really, but long story short, which is my point, that’s what I always expect to happen at times like this: someone will see through my disguise and call me out for the kid I am.

um, yeah.

I’ve been following this “girlism” thing with much interest, but as I said in an email, I’m too mistrustful of generalizing to jump too quickly into the fray. but this week a couple of tangentially related items collided in my head, and I want to write down the result before it’s lost to the sands of item.

1) a long time ago, Dorothea blogged on the topic of fantasy, grownupness, and the book Killing Monsters. at the time, I thought, hmmmm. that sounds like a maybe interesting book. then again, I’d just finished moving.

2) something reminded me of it. I’d thought it was another post by Dorothea, and maybe it was this one, but I’m not sure. in any case, I put in my order at the library.

3) last week’s girlism thing, some personal stuff that comes into play later. a long weekend with enough time to tear through a book in a single sitting, pretty much.

4) Shelley blogs about karate…let’s call that the last straw.

I was not an athletic child, nor did I love rough & tumble sports. I was last picked for every sport, ever, even in high school. more than that, I was in special ed gym from 2nd through 8th grades – a strange experience in elementary school, and one of unrelenting despair in junior high. (with the particular exception of my friendship with Thao.)

rough-and-tumble, with my sisters, was fraught with problems. more fighting than anything else…and anger was something that just got out of hand, and quickly.

When girls don’t feel free to play at open agression, their desires to play with power and conflict don’t go away but take other forms.”

I was afraid of roller coasters until I was 12 or 13 (at which point I discovered I loved them), and terrified of horror movies, even when most of my friends loved them. (I still remember decamping from a slumber party where friends were watching Friday the 13th, with older brothers, and hiding out with Thao and talking very seriously about life and the world.)

the less said about the brutal social world of girls, the better, I think. what comes to me now, after reading this, and thinking about it, is my own burst of interest in violent media in junior high. James Bond, Agatha Christie, and Sherlock Holmes…okay, not too terribly violent, but they were a release for me.

being un-physical in my play has had lingering effects.

there was a better essay in my head while riding on the bus & washing dishes, but it’s not writing itself down now. (and that’s with 2 attempts.)

– Digital domesday book unlocked: “The Domesday Project highlights the problems of digital preservation.” (also see Why PDF Sucks)
– all religions are wacky – amen (so to speak) to that.

I’ve been thinking about making calendars for loved ones this year…and when I’ve tried it before, one of the most daunting parts is just generating all the months. and since I no longer have the hard drive that had PageMaker, I was looking forward to creating all of this in Word. and we all know how much I like dealing with the advanced features of Word. (um, that would be almost not at all, esp. when it comes to tables.)

but yesterday morning, in my bleary half-awake walk to the bus, it occurred to me that I already know a script for generating calendars, and that if I generated a calendar in HTML, I could import it into Word (IE will copy with style, Moz w/out) and that would get me most of the way there.

so, here’s my starter file – I’m going to play around with some CSS to get it reasonably close before copy/pasting into Word. now I just need to find a cool picture in a large enough resolution.