a few people I met, remet, or just enjoyed seeing in SFO

Hey, that photo that I put up yesterday was on Serious Eats, check me out! It may also interest you to know that MetaFilter was one of Time magazine’s top blogs and that I was interviewed for an article on Ask MetaFilter that was in Slate this week. Here’s another AskMeFi story you might like.

The big difference between hanging out up in Vermont and hanging out in San Francisco is that most of the people I met or hung out with have URLs I can point people to that are live active websites. Most of my friends here have websites that are sort of functional. I am somewhere in the middle. Here are some URLs that go to people that I met.

Peter – his website has been the same pretty much since I’ve known him but now he’s married and has a kid.
George – actually a lady, she is looking for work after doing cool things at Flickr for a long time.
Mike – I sort of met at SXSW and now we’re twitter buddies enough so that when I had a few free hours I could tweet “you free?” and he was like “sure” and we chitchatted about drupal and web nonsense and it was totally fun.
Judith – my long time friend and owner of Lyle, who always shows me a good time.
Bryan – probably the person I’ve known online the longest without actually meeting. His indy junior map graced my travel page for a while. Now I use DOPPLR.
Courtney – I met her briefly at Burning Man but got to eat burritos with her She created the cloud bed, she is a genius.
Liz – is at the Berkeley ischool, we talked about library stuff. She knows my friend Aaron.
Mike – used to work at Adaptive Path with a bunch of people I know, we yammered on for a long time about… transportation systems.
Mike – another Mike who, towards the end of the party when I finally said who I was, said “oh, from MetaFilter?”
Erika – went to Dartmouth and is taller in real life than she seems in her headshots.
Molly – I met again at SXSW this year and we talked about academia and Princeton and pneumatic tubes.
Jennifer – gave us a sober ride home from the party for which I am eternally grateful.
Yorvit and Roswell – part of the household that took me home when I was trapped at the airport and fed me snacks and watched the Oscars with me. Wonderful folks, maybe without websites?

That’s who I know off the top of my head. I figured I’d drop this all here in case people were curious.

noisy

I have this idea in my head that the city is noisy and my place in Vermont is not. This is probably true in a general average sense, but I stayed on Vermont avenue in a third floor apartment and it was pretty silent except for the ocean-like noise of distant traffic. Today, because there was a snowstorm over the last few days, Terry the roof guy is here taking snow off the roof any way he knows how. So, my little treehouse is all BANG BANG CRASH CRASH as snow and ice get broken up and hurled a few stories to the ground. Like me, Terry doesn’t get started too early, so this is mostly fine.

This photo is a beef tendon that was in the pet food store near where my friend Judith lives. I’ll do a longer bla bla “what I did and who I did it with” post about my trip to San Fran, but I liked this photo and my alteration of it. When I go to San Francisco I get to hang out with people who laugh at all my stupid nerdish injokes (“oh hey they said Craigslist at the Oscars!”) and always have the “hang with friends or stay in?” option in a more real way than I do here where sometimes friends are not an option due to the short number of people who are a reasonable drive from here.

Every time I visit the city I feel like it’s a bit of an interview process where the question in the back of my mind is “would I want to live here again?” I’m still at the “not really, no thanks” point but I can feel that tipping ever so slightly towards “not yet”

the year of saying yes

Jim and I took a quickie side trip to Burlington because he had never been there. Since I’m not much of a shopper or a money-spender we drove down to the lake to just look at it. Turns out it was frozen sufficiently hard that people were out messing about on the icy surface — skating, sliding, photographing, walking pets, kicking ice. It was a festive and sort of surreal mood. We walked around on it. I, of course, took a few photos.

Yet another of my unstated resolutions is to try to get around my normal cynical overthinking brain and try to say yes to stuff more often. Yes to people coming to visit, yes to invitations to do things, yes to couchsurfers dropping in (hi CJ and Alison!), yes to more work (within reason), yes to “can you help me move?” and yes to “would you like dessert?” among other things. I have a tendency to talk myself out of doing new things because I’m actually pretty happy with the old/existing thing. This is a pop culture thing to do apparently, but I like to think I came up with it on my own.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow for a quickie meeting and some burrito eating and by the time I get back on Sunday movers should have gotten all of Kate’s stuff out of Casa Highland. Even though Kate’s move makes all the sense in the world, I think we’re all a little in denial of how great it was to have a clubhouse (and a parking space!) in the city. I’ll miss the old place.

love & taxes

I spent today in slackjawed head-shaking bemusement at what a crazy mess my taxes are. The good news is that last year was a windfall year and I made more money than in the past 2-3 years combined. Yay me. The bad news is I can’t remember what combination of magical keystrokes in TurboTax helps me find the depreciating computers in my taxes from last year. Yeah, that’s not really bad news.

I logged out of my computer for the first time in quite a while in order to set up a guest account for some couch surfers who are coming through for the NOFA conference this weekend. When I logged back in, the login window (which I never use normally) said “good morning, I love you” which is, I think, a note to me from me, written and forgotten back sometime when I first set this computer up.

I’m heading out later to fetch my fella from the bus station. He’s up for a short weekend of snowshoeing, backwoods gourmet eating and some northern New England R&R. I sent out some postcards from this NYPL gallery earlier today and haven’t heard from much of anyone. It’s been a real radio silent day, perhaps the Superbowl equivalent for my set. I am wearing a t-shirt with a little heart on it and that’s about as far as I’m going in the hearts-roses-<3 direction today.

empty! full!

Sometimes I think I have a tapeworm, eating like I do. This weekend I helped cook a 5 lb. hunk of lamb, went out for BBQ at Blue Ribbon BBQ and wrapped it all up with a carne asada burrito. It was a delicious meaty weekend which is just what I tend to be looking for at about this time in February. The flip side to this is that I spent the rest of the weekend running up and down stairs carrying heavy objects.

My sister is moving in a few short weeks. I’m that friend who will always help you move. I’m not so great at being the second person hefting the hide-a-bed, but I’m really great at taking whatever shamehole you have been putting off dealing with and turning it into a few labeled boxfulls and a bag of trash. I’m often modest about most of my abilities but I think I excel at this. This weekend I helped deal with Mount Laundry, the Poison Closet, the dreadful Neglected Closet and a few other miscellaneous spaces. Each time I managed to empty something out — I put aside the ticking timer when Kate had a rather strong reaction to the ticking sound, I find its urgency a little motivating — I put a sticker on it as shown above. Apparently the stickers are a little tough to remove, sorry about that.

I drove home to Vermont today with a car full of stuff. One of the magical qualities of my car is that things placed into the back of it simply … disappear. This is good for people who need to get rid of clothes or old computers. This time my sisters’ disappearing stuff is actually mostly winding up in my house. I took home a few bags of clothes (seriously doubling the bulk of my everyday wardrobe), a fold up spare bed, a few things to eBay, a fruity teacup with my birth month on it, a typing table with a little lamp on it, some placemats, some bubblegum and a great big bookshelf. People keep talking about the recession and I know it’s true objectively, but it’s been a bountiful few months for me.

better!

So hey, I went to the doctor. I like living someplace where I can call the doc when I wake up and have an appointment scheduled for after lunch. The doc said my lungs sounded weird so he gave me some antibiotics which seemed to work. I spent some days resting and a weekend boyfriending and then I went to Toronto for the OLA Superconference on Wednesday and got back last night. I had incredible travel karma considering that I flew out of Burlingotn on a day when most flights were cancelled and Vermont got 18 inches of snow. I gave a talk about the digital divide and it went well. I saw a lot of librarians that I know and like from around and did some quality conferencing and couch surfing and meetupping. I also ate enough food to keep me nutrified for another few weeks, so it’s back into the pool tomorrow. I had the chili poutine in this photo, David had the bacon poutine, John had the pulled pork poutine. I like poutine, squeaky cheese and all.

As of now my roof at home appears watertight so I’ve moved out of the living room bed and back into my room. I have developed an attachment to sleeping in the living room — when I lived in the Odd Fellows Hall in Seattle it was my favorite place to sleep — so if you come to visit perhaps I can put you in the silver bed and I’ll sleep out here.

My current projects involve getting a mix CD out the door, trying to learn to use a drain snake, helping my sister move (happy story that, bug her for it if you don’t know it) and getting ready for a quick trip to San Francisco for a steering committee meeting later this month. I have a small flurry of tax forms to dig through real soon now (“a success snowstorm” as Richard Brautigan would say) I think 2008 may have been my most lucrative year ever which is a good news/bad news situation if I’ve ever heard one.

abada abada

twenty-seven years of jessamyn

February 2009