Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
K. likes Grave Robbers From Outer Space. We've already played two games, and she's clamoring for a third. This makes me very happy.
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03:51:59 PM,Monday 24 August 2009
I think I'm going to set my steno definition of "I am" to OEUPL, pronounced "Oim". I have two reasons for this. First, I don't yet have a definition for that extremely common phrase and the lack of it is getting irksome; second, it will make me feel like one of the moles from Redwall.
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07:58:40 PM,Sunday 23 August 2009
Those little Hasidic kids know what they're about -- riding through the 190th Street tunnel on a Razor scooter is insane amounts of fun.
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02:29:11 PM,Sunday 23 August 2009
When I started this blog (thanks to the prescient and generous Moss) back in 2000, it was tied to my university's email login page. So every time I logged in to check my email, I got a prompt to write a few words off the top of my head, which was then posted to the web. I was usually in a hurry to get to my email, so my early blog posts usually consisted of fragments from whatever song was playing in my head at the moment, or sometimes of a few words from the subject headers of my email, which I could see below the prompt. Then Moss added the option to update from the web, and I used it to write little updates on my inner state, whenever I had thought up an idea or wanted to bitch or vent or was avoiding a paper or wanted to send a message to a friend who I knew read the blogmass. For a long time, it was my only public written outlet, so it got all sorts of different kinds of posts. There were still song lyrics and random two-line braindumps, but also long discourses on my music collection (with which I've been obsessed ever since I started ripping CDs to mp3s) and links to strange things I'd found during my net trawlings and bits of doggerel I made myself write whenever I felt especially dull and uncreative. Now I'm still as obsessed with the blogmass as ever, and the blog tracker is always the first page I go to, after gmail, but I feel like my blog keeps getting the short end of the stick these days.
I still comment on other blogmass blogs, but I think this sort of dispersal has happened to a fair number of us. The short braindump one-liners now go to Facebook or Twitter, and a lot of my non-Johnny friends and several of my Johnny friends have Livejournals, which either supplement or supplant their other blogs. They have email notification for responses to one's own posts and comments, but not to other posts and comments on other people's blogs. Those you have to check for manually, and it's impossible to keep up with all of them. Photos go on Flickr (though I'm always happy when they're blogged as well), links frequently get shared through Google Reader rather than blogged explicitly, and I find myself going to subject-specific forums like Depoman to talk about my steno stuff, just because I worry that if I post it here I'll either baffle or bore my audience.
I've still got the Plover blog, though it's been largely stagnant since I made it. (I'm definitely planning on hiring a Python tutor this fall, though, and I'm going to start using it as a Python blog as well as just an idea blog for Plover.) I've got a Twitter account that I use as a work log during the day, set to private, with no followers and not following anybody. But I'm starting to wonder whether I should make another one to have as an online presence for StenoKnight, since that seems to be the way people keep in touch with their clientele these days. I feel scattered in several different directions, and it makes me feel guilty every time I look at this blog and see that I haven't written anything in a week or more. I don't think it's that I have less to say -- though maybe that's part of it too; certainly I have less to bitch about than I did when I was a paper-shirker in college with no girlfriend and no idea of what I was going to do with my life -- but mainly that it's hard to decide on what stuff should go here and what should go elsewhere. I've also got to keep away from anything that's too controversial or alienating or incriminating, because my blog shows up above my website, my resume, and my Google profile when you google me (and people google me all the time; lord knows who or why, but I get the notifications). So I have to watch my tongue to a certain extent, and I think that's also part of my decreased posting pattern. I dunno. I don't want this thing to go to waste. I've kept it for nine years, and I love it, and I love what it's part of. I've just got to find my groove again, I think.
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12:39:42 AM,Saturday 22 August 2009
Wow, I would really like to go to some of these.
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04:32:52 PM,Thursday 20 August 2009
Hildegard Behrens is dead. But when she was alive... Hoo boy. Here's her Elettra from Idomeneo. Start around halfway through for the real fireworks, or at 4:10 for utter dementia.
No luck. It's a tease.
The windowscreens wheeze
through lumps of wet cheese.
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06:45:53 PM,Wednesday 19 August 2009
I have arrived in Minneapolis. Which, I realized on the plane to my slight alarm, is a steno conflict for "minute yams". Not that the latter has come up in conversation, nor is it likely to. But still.
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01:07:39 PM,Saturday 15 August 2009
It's gonna be sad to leave my parents and my brother and my nephew and my weird little town, but I can't freaking wait to see K. again, and it still boggles me how lucky I am to live in a place like New York, with a job and a cat and a family. My mom's going to be spending some time in the city this fall, and I can't wait to show her around in more detail than I've been able to on the short visits she's had so far. Agh, for a teleporter. But having two homes to go to, where I'll always be welcomed and fed and given a place to sleep, in not just one city but two... It's hard, but it's a damn sight more than most people have. I'm happy and I'm grateful.
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(3)
02:27:19 AM,Saturday 15 August 2009
The other day I was emptying the dishwasher and listening to the Pavarotti/Sutherland Lucia, and my mom asked me who my favorite sopranos were. I realized that I could spit off a dozen or more of my favorite mezzos past and present, but when it came to sopranos, I was like, "Sills, Te Kanawa, Dessay, uh..." and trailed off. That just ain't right. By way of beginning to rectify this, a link to a fantastic post about Dorothea Roschmann, who I'd never heard of before I read this. She is a bit of all right, huh?
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02:10:02 AM,Saturday 15 August 2009
Sam Pepys: Kind of a dillweed, but dude knew how to party.
And at last our businesses being most spent, we into Mrs. Mercer's, and there mighty merry, smutting one another with candle grease and soot, till most of us were like devils. And that being done, then we broke up, and to my house; and there I made them drink, and upstairs we went, and then fell into dancing (W. Batelier dancing well), and dressing, him and I and one Mr. Banister (who with his wife come over also with us) like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom's, like a boy, and mighty mirth we had, and Mercer danced a jigg; and Nan Wright and my wife and Pegg Pen put on perriwigs. Thus we spent till three or four in the morning, mighty merry; and then parted, and to bed._
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01:31:21 AM,Saturday 15 August 2009
This spider is me! (picture by the wonderful LucyLou.)
Now I'm in the Rattlesnake under a cloudy sky, so even though meteorites are blazing, we can't see 'em. Still beautiful out here, anyhow. But I spent the last several hours working with my brother on a Python program and I'm damn happy. I miss my girl like crazy (And I especially miss walking around while she takes pictures; there were so many things I wanted her to take pictures of today), but I think it's been good to come home for a while and tread some of my old haunts again. Though I love living in a huge-ass multivarious city, I love being from a weird little town.
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03:47:11 AM,Thursday 13 August 2009
Via Kalichan: "Handlebars", a songvid that brilliantly encapsulates what I love about Dr. Who, and the Tenth Doctor in particular (he's right up there with the Bakers in my Theta Sigma pantheon) -- all the whimsy and terror and blistering giddy seriousness of him. Spoilers for all Tenth Doctor episodes.
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04:28:39 AM,Wednesday 12 August 2009
What does it say about me that I get unaccountably nervous when I'm obliged to use liquid hand soap for shower gel? What is the earthly difference between liquid hand soap and shower gel?! Branding, thou insidious tentacle...
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03:26:18 PM,Monday 10 August 2009
Rockbox now has PictureFlow. I spent an absurd amount of time last night adding album art to about two thirds of my 63 gigs of mp3s, and I'll probably finish the job sometime later this week. But my two-year-old Gigabeat, now with a disk wipe and repair (it had been hanging and having weird freezing problems), a fresh install of Rockbox, and a careful selection of albums I actually want to listen to, is feeling like a million bucks.
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04:05:08 AM,Monday 10 August 2009
I just deleted 96 Jussi Bjorling mp3s from my computer.
It felt strangely... cathartic.
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(7)
03:55:59 AM,Sunday 9 August 2009
An apple falls down.
A slug stands still in the grass.
This is my old home.
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08:27:24 PM,Thursday 6 August 2009
How to spend the rest of my time in Missoula? My brother's birthday is next Monday, so we're going to a restaurant to fete him. We'll probably go tubing on the river when the sun comes out again. (It's been close, cool, and misty for the past few days.) And the fair starts next Tuesday, so I'll definitely take a day out for that. But what else? I've been doing a bit of transcription work, hanging with the parents, riding around like a dork on my old Razor scooter. But perhaps I should sample some of the cultural treasures that my home state has to offer. Let's see...
There's the Porcupine Avoidance Clinic this Saturday in Miller Creek.
On Sunday, there's the model cannon shoot in Cut Bank, for muzzle-loading black-powder cannons of one-half scale and smaller. Just as well I didn't bring one; Airport Security probably would have given me a hard time. Fascists.
Oooh, free weevils in Florence! Not sure I'll have the time to drive all the way out there, but fortunately the posting also says, "If you are unable to attend this program and would like to obtain some weevils, call Steffany at 258-4211 to reserve a batch for a nominal charge."
You people think I'm making all this up, don't you?
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04:20:23 PM,Thursday 6 August 2009
So I'm in the waiting room of the St. Patrick's Hospital clinic, waiting for my dad's physical to be over. I idly look over at one of the magazines and read the headline "Why You Miss Greens". "Why do I miss greens?" I say to myself. "Because I've been eating godawful greasy salty airplane food since 6:00 this morning, all cured meats and smoked peanuts and processed cheese food product. Some self-protective biochemical pathway is probably screaming bloody murder right now. Man, I could really go for a salad. I bet the article is about the nutritional imperatives that drive food cravings. Interesting stuff." I lean over to read more and see that... It's a golf magazine. D'oh.
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06:09:08 PM,Tuesday 4 August 2009
Off I go from my Washington Heights home to my old Missoula home. I'll be back here on the 15th. Catch y'all on the flip side.
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01:35:44 AM,Tuesday 4 August 2009
