1. Not only do I have to get up and go to work at eight tomorrow morning (which is to say: Saturday), but there is a better-than-even chance that I will have to scrape frost off my car when I do. This is half my annual moment of "Maybe I should be looking for jobs in Maryland, this never happened in Maryland" and half my attempt to fix this fact in my mind so it won't shock me tomorrow morning.

2. Via The Infrastructurist, the American Planning Association has picked its Top Ten Streets in America and Michigan's got two of them, with Milwaukee also making the list. \o/

3. From DailyKos diarist Ministry of Truth, Florida Rep. Alan Grayson delivers a really excellent rant directed at members of both parties who stand in the way of health care reform. It's one of those beautiful moments when politics in the actual world look a little bit like they were scripted by Aaron Sorkin.

4. I'm reading Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free by Robert Kaplan & Ellen Kaplan. It outlines their teaching method for mathematics, which basically consists of allowing students (from ages 4-5 up) to collaboratively re-invent whatever mathematical concept they're trying to teach. For instance, they write 0 and 1 on a chalkboard and then ask the five-year-olds if there are any other numbers between zero and one, and when one of them offers up 1/2 - because he is five and a half - it goes onto the board, and leads to a guided exploration of the whole concept of fractions that doesn't involve drills and doesn't instill math phobia--instills, in fact, a genuine liking of math.

a) I got stuck at page 41 yesterday and spent ten minutes in the breakroom scowling intently at a notebook while re-teaching myself how to simplify the quadratic equation, with a minor detour into demonstrating to my own satisfaction that the square root of a fraction is the same as the square root of the numerator over the square root of the denominator.

b) I wound up having a couple of conversations with coworkers about when and how we came to hate math. Working from a pretty small sample size, it seemed to consist primarily of "I never understood [some concept] and from then on I was bad at math and I hated it." It was trigonometry, for me--it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I realized that I was really good at math up to that point and hated and dreaded it afterward. And maybe that wasn't my fault.

5. I have realized that my refusal/inability to spend time doing nothing but knitting (as opposed to picking up knitting while watching a tv show or stuck somewhere) means I will probably never, you know, be the person who knits all her Christmas presents. Attention span strikes again! Still, the buttonhole scarf is chugging gently along. I have decided that I am sort of entertained by the respects in which it looks like a stereotypical early knitting project, which is to say, I didn't rip back and fix it when I lost count and put one buttonhole further apart than the others.

Last Christmas, my mom gave me one of those little appointment books that I never know what to do with--all of the planning ahead I do, I do by keeping a series of electronic sticky notes on my desktop. But the book was too nice not to use, so I started recording things in it, instead of planning ahead: what I did, what I watched, whether and how much I worked out, what I read, what I wrote.

(This is me reinventing the whole daily diary concept. Look at me go!)

Anyway, the what-I-wrote notation is really interesting to me, because I never kept track of that before. It's a good motivator--I hate getting to the end of the day without anything to write down in that little corner of the day--and it's good to have the record.

So last October--more or less at ConClave--I started writing a novel. It went slowly. So slowly that the first notation I have, in January of this year, three months after I started, shows that on that day I wrote 48 words, bringing the total count up to 730.

I think I got up to about 8,000 words before I started realizing that I was in fact writing it in an insupportable way, and wandered off to write something else instead. The last notation I have showing I wrote anything on it is in March.

Anyway, all of this was a really long way to say that in August I figured out how ot make the story not-impossible to write, and three weeks ago I wiped the slate clean and wrote 500 words and then realized that wasn't working very well either.

Last week I started again, and on Monday night, intending to just put down a few words before bed, I got going and wrote 1500 words in about an hour.

So! Apparently all this story needed was first person POV, a gun, and for me to let go of the clever first line I came up with last October.

So, off we go. (To bed, because tonight I am cleverly writing about writing instead of actually writing. Of course.)

1. Bubble Spinner. Don't actually click! The url is at addictinggames.com! Save yourself!

I can't decide whether it's teaching me about angles of incidence and reflection, or devouring my soul--but weirdly, as much as I keep going back to it, I never play for long. Uh, probably because I am so discouragingly bad at it.

2. Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-four Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. IT’S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT. I’m sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

And so on, fascinatingly and creepily and deliciously.

3. I've been trying to get back on the working-out-regularly wagon, and it's easier if I'm watching something while doing the tedious bits--lately I've hit on watching up-tempo fanvids. The best ones are the ones that make me want to dance the whole time they're on, and the very best also make me grin like an idiot the whole time. Tonight's winner: Say Hey (I Love You).

4. In keeping with my recent theme of pining for my home state, today I finished reading Bruce Catton's Michigan, which I picked up from my public library (while looking for Daniel James Brown's Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894, because the Minnesota and Michigan history sections are like right next to each other) mainly because hey! Bruce Catton! Wrote a book about MICHIGAN!

It was written in 1976 (when it was apparently totally appropriate to talk about red Indians) as part of a Bicentennial History of the States series, and covers mostly just up to the end of the 19th Century--but Catton has a lot of interesting thoughts about Michigan's history, particularly about it being a place that, through the huge mining and lumber industries, which were indirectly subsidized by state and federal construction of the railways and canals necessary to make them profitable, the state developed early on a spirit of rugged individualism that was always propped up by government support. Yea verily, a lesson for our times.

Also, it made me want to go read Charles Mann's 1491 all over again.

5. Umm. There really ought to be a fifth thing here.

Oh! All I had to do was look at my open tabs! I have been browsing this etsy shop for days now. I want ... a really large fraction of all of those buttons. And I DO kick ass at Scrabble!

After my last post, I found a job posting, rather as if I had called it into being, and applied for it, so. Fingers officially crossed and now I have to spend four weeks not biting my nails over it until the actual deadline for applications passes.

Ahem. So! Pictures of things in my apartment!


Sunday morning I woke up and went to get a glass of water only to discover a shelf of icicles growing sideways across the pitcher. So I guess turning the fridge temperature all the way down was a bad idea.


This is--or eventually will be--the scarf I talked about knitting last winter, with buttonholes and eventually, one hopes, buttons, to make it easy to secure across the face when arctic wind comes howling across the prairies. Somehow working on it--or anything knitting-related--did not seem appealing over the summer, so I just recently picked this up again and started working on it. You can see the line where I a) kind of had to remember how to knit all over again and then b) discovered that you should absolutely not try making a buttonhole when you're on the purl side. In case you had been wondering.

(I remember reading, in some book or other about How To Write, that a reader cannot tell anything about the writing process from the finished product, including at what point the author walked away from the story for months or years before picking it up again. I have found that to be pretty true with writing, but, clearly, not so much for knitting.)


I rearranged my living room the other night, because there is some kind of wacky fuse situation going on in my house, and the outlet where I had my TV/DVD player/VCR/Nintendo/cable box/modem/router plugged in had become unreliable. I moved all the entertainment electronics to a different wall and a different outlet (and, hopefully, a different circuit) but this resulted in an unsightly--and, me being me, moderately dangerous--line of cable running across the floor.

taimsesasta suggested that a rug might help, a suggestion Julie ratified, so the next day I went to KMart at lunch and bought the first rug that was kind of cool looking for $30. Judging by the packaging it's intended for a small (male) child's bedroom, but hey, I like it. And it covers up that cord pretty nicely, too.

For more or less as long as I've been living in Wisconsin, I've been wanting to move to Michigan.  It's home.  My family is there, I have friends there, I grew up there, it's got Faygo pop and four of the five Great Lakes and all my favorite kinds of pizza and Chinese food and, of course, the country's highest unemployment. 

I don't know what it is about this week--being mad at a TV show for being wrong about Detroit, reading too many Detroit blogs, or just the absence of viable jobs to apply for back in the Mitten--but I seem to be spending a lot of time contemplating quitting my job and running away to live out on the urban prairie and subsistence-farm a vacant lot. 

(When I was a kid, of course, I fantasized about living anywhere but Michigan:  I dreamed of working as a long-haul trucker, or spending a summer walking across the United States on a diagonal that steered clear of the upper central midwest.  So I guess I'm getting old.)

I am forever and always making up stories.  When I was a weird loner six-year-old and sat by myself on the playground, I used the scraps and sticks I found on the ground to construct imaginary villages and told myself stories about them.  At the same age or a little older, when I learned to play solitaire (patience and clock, mostly) I would likewise make up elaborate stories represented by the quest to reunite the suits in correct numerical order--each was a royal or noble family, scattered in some disaster, scrambling to find all the children and heirs and get them to safety.

So now I kill a lot of time and brain cells playing Chain Rxn [sic] on Facebook, which in addition to being vaguely pretty and making pleasant chiming noises, calls to mind something like the growth and spread and death of civilizations or species--the precariousness of the chain at some points, the sudden blooming spread at others, the unpredictable and uncontrollable caprice of it.  Or maybe I just have terraforming on the brain.

I read Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a few weeks ago--someone recommended it somewhere, in a thread discussing The Thirteenth Child and the fail ascribed thereto.  It was wonderful and fascinating and possibly broke something in my mind (or maybe that's just the spring, or being twenty-seven, or helping my friends move from one apartment to another one time too many).  I am spending more time than usual thinking about having an environment to shape, and shaping it to one's own use, and the use  of future generations.  I play a lot of Chain Rxn and think about how much I'd like to have a garden.

What with one thing and another I have just today started playing around with LibraryThing for the first time.  I'm using it for my non-fiction books and my surviving textbooks (mostly from undergrad, a double handful from grad school, three from high school), so that I can integrate them into a more rational order than 'alphabetical by the name of the department I took the relevant class in.' 

Which means I have to choose a call number system.

Currently both the library where I work and my local public library are on Dewey, and I must admit to some degree of aesthetic preference for it. 

OTOH, Library of Congress is ... Library of Congress.

Decisions, decisions...

A few weeks ago I had the anxiety dream where I was desperately searching for clothes to wear to a job interview, complete with bizarre choices that would never occur in reality and a lot of running from room to room and digging through piles of clothes that, even if I could find the right ones, would have to be ironed, etc. etc.

You know, a right proper anxiety dream, the kind where you wake up and realize that isn't happening and breathe a sigh of relief.

Last night, on the other hand, I had the most tepid anxiety dreams imaginable: I was in an airport (I actually generally feel pretty comfortable in airports) and there were bugs (I hate bugs) including a millipede (I really hate millipedes) and some ants (ants don't bother me that much) but they were all on the floor several feet away from me, so in the dream I just turned down another row of seats so I wouldn't see it.  Problem solved.   Then I dreamed that I'd gotten my utility bill (they've gotten kind of fun and exciting lately, since they keep going down as the weather warms up) but it had gone up... by about twenty dollars.  And in the dream I thought "Hmm, I'm going to have to adjust that in my budget." 

I didn't even remember that I'd dreamed any of it until I was brushing my teeth, and then concluded that ... I guess I'm not very anxious?  But my brain feels it should make the effort anyway?

Seriously, though.  Weak.

Occasionally I run across a journal article title that makes me stop and go "Wait, do I know the person who wrote that?" (One time, I actually did.)

Here's today's, from Communication, Culture & Critique:  "Darth Vader Made Me Do It! Anakin Skywalker's Avoidance of Responsibility and the Gray Areas of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Star Wars Universe."

As far as I know I don't know Joshua Atkinson or Bernadette Calafell, but I feel I would like them if I did.

Abstract: