Not a lot to say here because it’s mostly “I hear squeaky noises when I blow my nose and it makes my eye hurt a little.” I am sorry that some of this is a little gross. I have spared you the Snot Slideshow. You are welcome. Part of healing from this sinus surgery is blowing out the chunks of leftover stuff, scabs and mucus, that are in your sinuses. I seem to be having trouble with this for whatever reason. So, after spending probably too long thinking “Should I call the doc back or just Try Harder?” I decided to make a phone call and I have an appointment to have my nose peeked at tomorrow. I get along well with most authority figures, even most policemen, but for whatever reason I am not great with the gauntlet of people whose job it is to keep you from pestering the doctor. Not that I don’t understand why the doctor needs to not be pestered, but I have a difficult time with the “These are my bona fides!” discussion convincing them that I have very sincerely done all the things that they suggested [sinus rinsing, vaseline, hot showers, staying hydrated, taking all the medicines] and it’s not doing the trick.

I know this tendency too. When someone’s explaining something they did to their computer, something that really should not be possible, and the two options are user error or something really broken, I find it easier to blame the user. Uncharitable perhaps, but true in my experience. However this has different ramifications with tech than with health, at least that’s what I tell myself.

Anyhow, my car was also weirdly broken last week–the transmission cable snapped, how weird is that?–and so I was home typing and reading and listening to music and rinsing my nose and there’s not that much to tell. Resolutions are going well. Car is now fixed, a cheaper and faster repair than I was expecting. The night before last a few of us headed out to go aurora hunting and that was a lot of fun. We saw a pink shimmer on the horizon, in the direction where there isn’t usually a town and were pretty sure that was it and hustled back to the warmth of the car. It’s been beastly cold out in a sort of “stay inside” way the past week or so. I made some ice candle holders. For some reason that’s more fun to do when it’s -10° outside than just doing it at home in the freezer. This photo is one of them. I’m teaching a class called How to use iPhoto and needed to start the class off with some pictures that weren’t the Snot Slideshow. So far okay.

Spent some time hanging out with the usual neighbor friends talking about resolutions. While in the past I’ve made more specific resolutions (2009, a while ago), lately the things I resolve are sort of short term things to keep doing better and not so much big changes. January is a terrible time for big changes. I find that my resolve is at an all-time low. But I’m home a lot. I have big stretches of time. My friends are around. So there are some pieces in place, pieces you can make things out of.

My resolutions are to try to finish more books, to take care of my health, to keep writing letters and postcards, to be creative and to nurture relationships with family and friends. To go outside more. To cook my own meals more. To help people solve problems. To not make anyone’s problems worse. I have one “don’t” type of resolution and it’s to not let fear keep me from doing stuff that I otherwise enjoy. Some of these ideas are hand-wavey and some are pretty targeted and specific. This past weekend Jim came up and we attacked the various little eddies of mess in my small apartment; took down some shelving that was not working, tossed out the old shoes I never wear that were too ratty to donate (I have trash phobia from growing up in the seventies and sometimes feel I’d rather store broken shit than put it in a landfill), got stuff out to the redemption center and cleaned and swept places that haven’t been cleaned and swept in longer than I’d like to mention.

That night we went out to dinner with local friends (on me, yay for getting paid in gift certificates to local restaurants) which involved driving over a snowy mountain together in the dark, had a great meal and then headed back to Randolph to eat gingerbread and listen to a CD together. Rachel had never heard Mitch Hedberg before and so we hung out at Forrest and Kelly’s and listened to a comedy album straight through, just sitting and laughing together in a warm, comfy room. And I’m no mind reader but I got the feeling that everyone there, in some way or another, was thinking some variation of “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” and my resolution, more of a story than a sentence, is: more of this.

So yesterday was the first and since I’d felt like I’d been totally social all week I had a don’t-leave-the-house day and just cleaned up all the silted-in crap that had been lingering on the “one of these days…” lists. So I got the vacuum out, and framed and hung some photos that had been sitting around, and piled all the “to read” books into one big pile, and cleaned the yik off of the dish drainer, and mailed off some overdue notes and papers and stuff, and put away some stuff that really should go away. It was great. I even got the rowing machine out and flailed around on it a bit. I was also able to blow my nose finally according to doctor’s orders. Gross but fascinating!

I woke up today in a house that didn’t seem like a project. It’s easy to blame the short grey days and prednisone and holiday eating for feeling sluggish and unmotivated, but that doesn’t really help with the actual getting up and getting stuff done part. Internet people have taught me that “fake it until you make it” tends to work for things like this, so I got up and got dressed as if I actually had stuff to do and sure enough, got stuff done.

The exercise thing is more of a small part of my life now than it was back when I was swimming at least a few miles a week. I had another shoulder problem this year which was probably brought on by NOT swimming as much (I think it corrects for some of my over-mousing). That, combined with the nose stuff and bereavement/travel stuff made it a pokey year, exercise-wise. That said, it looks like I didn’t even do an end-of-the-year exercise post last year. My goal this year is to do a few miles of something every week, and I’m happy that I have four pleasant choices of ways to do that.

Am also focusing on Albatross List tasks including things like Sell My House and Get Stuff from Indiana [formerly Seattle] and both are proceeding but if you have help/suggestions, I’m all ears. Thanks. And happy new year.

Here is where I stayed this year. Last year I said I’d be working towards less travel. And my travel-for-work was down significantly. However my travel-for-family was up a lot [for both good and bad reasons] and that seemed to level it out. Ninety-nine days away from home. Almost all of it in Massachusetts, but a few visits to Michigan and Texas and Maine. Did not leave the country.

As before, stars indicate multiple visits to the same place. Numbers indicate number of distinct guestrooms at each geographic location. Different beds in the same house are, for all intents and purposes, one “guestroom” but perhaps multiple photos. Past years: 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

Belmont, MA *
Westport, MA *
Austin, TX (3)
Somerville, MA
Danvers, MA
Stamford, CT
Cambridge, MA (2)
Portland, OR (2)
Hood River, OR
Boxboro, MA
Lewisville, TX
Decatur, TX
Irving, TX
Stow, MA
Lubec, ME
Bar Harbor, ME
Augusta, ME
Burlington, VT
Ann Arbor, MI
Milwaukee, WI
Kalamazoo, MI
Pittsboro, NC
Raleigh, NC
Grand Rapids, MI

So I was just getting around to the end of the year lists when I realized I haven’t said much about the end of December. Not a lot to tell. Classes wrapped up well, the general holidaytimes went just fine. The Solstice Bonfire was great as always. I finally took care of a long-standing sinus issue I’ve been having [since last year] and went in for outpatient endoscopic sinus surgery this Tuesday. I am home and I am fine. I am also superstitious, so I basically didn’t mention it to anyone except a few close friends and my family. It was a non-event but it sort of made me nervous since I simultaneously believe that something terrible will happen at something like this, but also that I am being totally irrational. So I have no useful way to center the reasonableness of my concerns as anything other than this 100% fine/100% dead duality, so I just keep my mouth shut. This is suboptimal but it’s what I’ve got.

Anyhow, I now have a “shaved down” turbinate which, once it’s healed, should allow me to breathe better through half my nose and also maybe not cause me random tooth and eye pain. Also maybe fewer sinus infections. Worst case, it’s about the same. I can already breathe okay through my nose and all the horrible warnings nonwithstanding ["thinking injury" warns the anesthesiology consent form, "blindness" warns the surgery consent form] I feel fine, have abandoned my prescribed pain medication after a day and made up a great chart for when I’m supposed to take all the other stuff [including the nasal rinsing, though no nose-blowing for three more days]. I’m happy I got it done and I should have gotten it done sooner though with all the stuff happening last year, this was about when I was ready to deal with big complicated things. I have to give big props to the Dartmouth Outpatient Surgery Center for not only being full of nice and easy to interact with professionals, but also for not being all Christmassed out on December 27th. This is my surgeon, he was great. He is also growing a goatee.

So I’ve spent the last few days laying low here and watching movies and taking pills and telling everyone I am fine. I wrote up my end of the year reading list over on librarian.net and I’ll be working on the other few lists over the next few days. Hope your holidays brought you peace and well-being. Mine are going okay so far.

I’m still sort of experimenting on what works here and what doesn’t. Uploading photos–such as the one above, of the ORCA Media studios–took about twelve tries to get right and I’m still not totally sure I like what I had to do to fix it [chmodding 777 for those of you who are curious, please ignore this for those who are not]. But anyhow, here’s a photo of what the space looked like when I was on public access television last week. A fellow teacher, Mike Abadi, does a public access show about blogs. Which is a smart idea around here because we’re still in digital divide-land. So I got to talk about my book and the digital divide and corporate ownership of the internet and all those things I like so much. You can see the full video on YouTube in case you’re not in the teeny public access coverage area (and I wouldn’t be able to tell you if you were honestly, being one of those no-tv-having goobers) of the station. Interestingly, I got to see a coverage map for the entire state and Topsham, where I used to live, has NO public access channel. I’m surprised that’s allowed but I guess they have no cable. Surprising. I am thinking it might be fun to have a public access show.

This weekend was a big weekend of cooking and walking around in the winter-but-not-snowy-winter. Jim and I finally checked out the bowling alley in town and it’s pretty nice. After a mercifully boring trip to the dentist (I have finally found the perfect non-chatty non-radio-listening dentist of my dreams) I am hunkering down, trying to get some sun and getting ready for the Christmas Bird Count which is this weekend. If you want to count birds in your area and help the National Audubon Society track bird populations, check out how to get involved.

I’m just going to update this place all the time now that I don’t have to deal with the dread of having something to say and then finding out that the site was down and would remain down for two days. Terrific. Today I was dealing with some annoying paperwork and scheduling stuff and decided I’d just chill out and work on my little moss gardens instead. I’ve made four of them this week–another project that has been backed up because I was out of spanish moss and having a difficult time motivating to get more, wintertime is all about achieving escape velocity, I’ve found–and they all came out nice in different ways. You can check out a few of them over on Flickr and if you’re a real bryophile, you might want to check out the moss photos I collect over on MLKSHK.

First and foremost, I’m on a new webhost. This is after… maybe fifteen years at eskimo? The timeouts were too frequent, the support too slow. I understand the reasons but it was no longer worth paying money for, so here I am. The site lives in a friend’s closet in North Carolina, up the road from where librarian.net lives at UNC. I think it will be happy there. Now that these things aren’t auto-posted to facebook, I’ll have to think about whether I’ll import them there or not in some other fashion. I get a lot of comments, people are clearly reading stuff, I’m not really afraid of facebook in any real way. But I’m also winter-lazy, so I may put it off. I had a list, called the Things You Are Putting Off list, aka the Albatross list, that had a lot of crap on it that I’d been putting of. Estate stuff, other paperwork, selling the place in Topsham, and switching web hosts. Most are done, house is still sort of for sale, I’m feeling less dread which is a good way to go into the shortest days of the year. Speaking of, here is a story in two pictures.

As you know, I work part time at a public school. I am also more Jewish than anyone else who works there. Every year the public school does a holiday display and we get into some light-hearted ribbing about how their idea of diversity is putting up a coloring book cutout of a menorah in the holiday stocking-and-tree display. I guess I could make a bigger deal out of it, but I’m not mad, just sort of “C’mon guys, try harder” about it. So two years ago when the menorah was stolen, one of the shop teachers actually made another one (very cool) which for whatever reason the principal forgot to make sure was part of the display this year. So I nudged him. And here we go. I could live somewhere else, but I really like it here, the pervasive Christmasness around wintertime is just part of being part of a more homogenous (and religious) community than I might otherwise like. There are many other benefits. I’m thankful for both my larger and smaller communities at times like this. Next update on the blog: Solstice Bonfire. Stay tuned.

Related: if you see anything weird happening here that shouldn’t be, please drop me an email. Still troubleshooting.

Depending on what circles you travel in, the title of this post is either just a normal thing that neighbors say to each other, or a reference to the first episode of the highly popular HBO series Game of Thrones. I haven’t seen the show but when I say it sometimes my friends will start riffing off of the tv series and I get all lost. Similarly, this costume showed up on Forrest and Kelly’s porch and I was all “Awesome!” and they were all “What?” [answer: Shufflebot, a character from LMFAO videos].

So my neighbor next door has a large pile of logs in his yard and I just saw that there’s now a wood splitter out there. I am hoping that maybe a team of people is going to help him get through them in a reasonable amount of time but when I mentioned this to another friend of mine he said “Nah that’s a week’s worth of wood cutting for sure.” So I am in nervous mode wondering when this place is going to erupt in wood-mauling noises and hoping it overlaps with my trip to North Carolina next week. Or maybe Thanksgiving. We didn’t get any of the bad weather that the southern New England states got. No power loss, almost no snow up where I am. I was enjoying a quickie trip to Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids for the Michigan Library Association conference but was, again, mildly concerned that my plane was going to be landing in some weather. It’s been a nervous set of weeks.

October was the busiest month I’ve had all year and back around a time when I was ready to be busy. Highest grossing too, which shouldn’t matter but does somehow. Now I’m back and teaching weekly Mac classes and I have what seems to be a staff retreat at the library tomorrow [thought it was going to be a short meeting until I was asked what I wanted for lunch] which I am really hoping goes well and does not include trust falls or other nonsense. I have to reassure myself that if I think most team-building exercises aren’t great, the three people who have been working at the library together for the last decade probably think they’re awful. Anyhow, we’ll be doing some strategic planning and I am sort of a little psyched about that.

So the days suddenly got short which is weird for sleeps-late me since MY days got really short, really quickly. In the “one more thing on the ‘positive self-talk’ list” shorter days means less time for wood-splitting action next door, though it may also mean it starts earlier.

Ultimately though I’m trying to pay attention to things that matter which include finding a new dentist [mine retired, I never thought I could find another one I liked, this new one is smart, nice, in town, and has a seashore print in his office that I swear my dad had in his house], a courduroy party with my fella tomorrow for 11/11/11, and a fridge full of soup I made myself [since the dented can store is closed for the forseeable future I have to make do]. Winter is coming. Maybe I can watch some of Game of Thrones.

Managed my first epic travel event since my brain went away and I have to say it went pretty well. I’ve even got to the point where I’m not using my ancient backpack for traveling and I got a proper travel bag (thanks to the world of social media, I got it at a discount, thanks Tom Bihn folks!). The bag was waiting for me when I got home so even though the zipper of my backpack failed and my soggy bag of toiletries fell out and was jammed back in where it didn’t belong, I could look past it and say “This is the LAST damned time this is happening…” and mean it.

So the trip took me down to Westport to start shutting down my dad’s house for the winter. Kate and I will be back and forth there (we’re keeping the house for the forseeable future) but the place needs thermostats set and outside spigots turned off and with a big house there is always Shit To Do. Then I flew out of Providence, really a great airport for travel, and headed to Ann Arbor where I did two programs for the library. One was a panel on community moderation which I got to be on with a librarian, a UMich professor and CmrdTaco formerly of Slashdot. The next day I got to do a long presentation about running a Q&A community at a staff development day which was fun and went well. You can see slides/notes here if you’re interested. This is one of my favorite talks. The next talk was in Milwaukee and so I decided to head there via train which was a really great way to spend a day, staring out the window looking at the midwest. I gave the closing keynote, a talk about the digital divide to folks at CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) and got to stay in a beautiful old hotel. From there it was back to Providence, back to dad’s house (when does it stop being dad’s house?) and some hangout time with Jim including a four mile hike through the Weetamoo Woods. I gave a talk on Monday at Olin College to undergrads and faculy about the digital divide which was also pretty fun and then scooted home after a great dinner and chat with my pal Deb.

Came back late at night to a Vermont that was nearly leaf free and have been trying to get on a normal [i.e. not 4 am til noon] sleep schedule which may be a losing battle until I get back into my routine here. All in all I was away for twelve days, went to nine states and while I was happy to get home, it was also a really nice time away seeing friends and eating food and roaming in new and familiar places.

The photo up top is something Jim and I saw when we were in Fall River. There is a street that we walked down, up the road from the Aroma Grille which is my new favorite food find, which is literally covered with these pencil scribblings. They seem to internally cohere, but I have no idea what they mean and I assume they are perhaps they are the notes of someone who is a little unhinged? They are on every building for a few blocks and have dates going from the 1970s to the present and a lot of initials that seem to be people. Curious, and a decent metaphor for all the things I still don’t know.