May 2010

There were 2 posts published in May 2010.

I was waiting for the fire truck

I was waiting, today, for the fire truck picture, the photo of me in the fire truck, before I started typing here in the box. There’s always a reason I haven’t updated, but rarely a good one. Randolph Vermont is still in the lake. I have written a song about it. I need to get the neighbors together to record it. I have been struck down with a terrible head cold for the past week (week!) and I have been marshalling my energy to keep to my word count (successfully). At some point I just decide that a life with a headfull of terrible snot may be all that lays ahead of me for the rest of my life and I get off my ass and clean the house and do what I call “powering through it”

Other people call this “getting better” but I’ll believe it when I see it. I got a neti pot. It’s okay and fits my personal ethos of ridiculousness.

There was some drama last week in the MetaFilter world which I don’t have much to say about except that it raised a very interesting point about my job there. You can read more about it from the sources linked on this page. Thanks to the 24 hour news cycle there’s not much more to it. The women involved are safe and staying with some MetaFilter people in New York. Nothing bad happened to them. It’s tough if not impossible to prove that anything bad ever was going to happen to them, and a dramatic story becomes a non-story. I talked to a guy from Slate yesterday about who I could put him in touch with, to verify the chain of events, the actual threat, the urgency of the matter, etc. All of the people involved in big ways [lawyers, cops, government workers, aid agencies] can’t really say anything. And all the people from MetaFilter are people I know “from the internet” and it all goes from being a very interesting and dramatic and gripping story to being like telling someone about a comic book you read. “And then the really big monster, he has like these metal claws, and he goes up to the big fuzzy snakelike thing, which has these articulating teeth and goes GRARARARAR and sort of waves his tail around, and then….”

I’m okay being under the radar. And okay being under the lake.

underwater and full of dust

mt saint helens ash

My grandmother sent me a little packet of ash that had fallen on Mount Saint Helens back in 1980 when she was visiting Washington state, well before I’d ever considered living there. It stayed in my pink jewelry box [shut up] and somehow managed to come along with me this whole time until now it’s on the little shelf on my dresser along with a wire sculpture a friend made, a portion of a Buddha from Afghanistan and an orange fuzzy thing with googly eyes, all things that survived the many deaccessioning stages that I’ve gone through.

And today is the 30th anniversary of the main eruption (though the ash is from a few weeks later) and the internet can bring all those photos back, pictures that I only remember seeing in the Boston Globe, in print, back when I was eleven.

I am still writing. I’m in the word count range where the numbers of words I’ve typed can be represented as zip codes, moving roughly westwards, usually. I typed from South Bend Indiana to Flint Michigan today. Sometimes I wind up in Spain.

My town is, as always, underwater and I am out of ideas to get Google to repair it. I am working on a catchy jingle. I hope they like it.