Dear self —
If you botch one step in your morning routine, view that as a red flag and pay closer attention to the subsequent steps.
If you botch a second step, don’t curse and press on; stop. Breathe deeply. Regroup.
If you don’t, things might will get worse. If you’re lucky enough to end the process with only inadequate caffeination, a small steam burn, and an explosion of dry espresso grounds all over the wedding supplies, count your blessings and back away.
I just learned a new word from a piece of spam: sintering, to heat a powdery material (like ceramics or metal) below its melting point until the particles adhere into a whole.
Why did I open the spam? Because my Gmail’s gone wonky and won’t let me “mark as spam” from my inbox, only from the email itself.
Why did I continue reading it?
A) They didn’t actually indicate any way for me to throw large fistsful of money at them, and I wondered where the hook was buried;
B) sintering, dude. Strange words catch my eye.
After six weeks or more of nearly constant rain, even rainloving me finds it a bit wearying. The past few days, I’ve been kvetching about it.
But here’s where the complaining stops, for the moment at least.
Tonight, I’ll put on my comfiest, raggediest sweater and curl up with a book and a bowl of cream of tomato soup. Usually, July’s scorching heat means I can’t enjoy warm comfort foods. Mmm, tommmmmmatoes and cream.
Today, I got to wear boots! Honest-to-goodness boots, waterproof and warm and up to my knee! My back loves it when I wear boots, and normally by July, I’m resigned to less comfortable sandals.
Thunderstorms! We love thunderstorms.
It’s good weather for cooking, for breadbaking, for making six pounds of wedding cookies, for standing by the kitchen sink gazing dreamily out the window while washing up.
I resolved to stop romanticizing my sun-starved self as a puny tomato seedling struggling to grow without sun, and start thinking of myself as a hydroponic tomato sustained and nurtured by the life-giving water.
(We’ll see how long this lasts.)
Brides and grooms routinely kvetch about delinquent RSVPs. I’m no different. We dearly hope that our friends and family will come to the celebration, but we do need to know roughly how many people we’re seating and feeding and boozing up, and how many tables and how big a dancefloor and how many of this and how many of that.
Ten days before the wedding and a good three weeks since our RSVP date passed, we still have about 15% of RSVPs outstanding. So far this week, my sweetly toned query, “Oh, we sure hope you can you make it to the wedding! Can you?” has prompted the following responses:
“Of course we’ll be there!” They didn’t need to RSVP, because I’m psychic: I knew they wouldn’t miss it.
An offhand “Nah, we can’t make it.” They didn’t need to RSVP, because I’m psychic: I knew they’d have to miss it.
“Didn’t we RSVP? Uh… we did! I wrote you an email last week! Or a letter!” Did you? Hmmm. If you did,
A) I most likely would have received an email or a letter.
B) You’d know which one you sent.
With that in mind, I have a feeling that you didn’t RVSP, and I’m trusting that feeling, because — didn’t you hear? — I’m psychic.
My lack of God, it’s Trotsky The Flying Spaghetti Monster! You know, for kids!
At a pre-wedding tea party, my friend J was kind enough to take some photos. Because I’m The Bride, I figured in many of them. (Yikes.)
As J framed a shot, she poked her head out from behind the camera and chided me. “Elsa, every time I point the camera at you, you make a funny face.”
“I — uh, I think that’s just my face.”
There was a pause.
“Oh. It is. Okay.”
Click.
The whole house feels warmer thanks to our new Swiss chimney sweep who came by this evening. After he cleaned out the chimney and started a roaring blaze, we enjoyed an evening of conversation that bounced back and forth between English and Swiss-German. In one fell swoop we’ve found an excellent new acquaintance and brought warmth and luck into our new home. I couldn’t be happier.
I recently spent an hour trying to overcome some NoScript issues so The Fella could set up a Facebook account. To check things out, I signed into my own long dormant account
And I decided, despite my previous kvetching, to give it a try.
(I’m currently reserving Facebook, logically enough, for people I know face-to-face. It’s mostly to preserve the illusion of distance between the Elsa known to the professors and administrators and the Elsa who swears fluently and tells goofy stories in the hazy world inside the tubes.)
If nothing else, Facebook allowed me to message a friend who’s been otherwise unreachable, and to see the comment stream of a loved one who’s been too overwhelmed to use email or phone. I’ll cheerfully admit that’s handy.
Otherwise… well…
In a week or so, I’ve had exactly one flashing moment of illumination: I saw how this network could hook you but good, like buying scratch tickets or playing craps. I was idly looking up a grade school friend — a girl I hadn’t seen in 25 years and several thousand miles. To confirm that the profile was indeed my old friend and not someone else with her name, I check to see if her sister (also a one-time friend of mine) was among her contacts. She was…
… and the sister lives here, in my small hometown, a town neither of them had ever heard of when we met in Texas.
It flushed me like a win at roulette, this odd little nothing of happenstance. I shook my head and thought “What are the odds?
And then I closed both profiles without contacting either, because, y’know, what’s the point? If we’d wanted to be in touch in the past 25 years, I guess I would’ve made an effort earlier, or they would’ve. But I didn’t, and they didn’t, and so we didn’t.
This pretty well sums up my response to Facebook in general: cool! But what’s the point?
After 8 years with movabletype, we’re calling it quits, throwing in the towel, bidding them adieu. Hello wordpress, now everything that goes wrong will be your fault. Poor new patsy. At least comments seem to work over here, if I could just figure out this css with all the new tags…
JM just walked up behind me and said it’s kind of sad, but he’s so relieved! The many MT installs and problems fell to him and he rescued us on all occasions, however the latest comment breakage was the final straw. I’ll be slowly updating the design here when I can and fixing the many broken links as well. It’s like a fresh start, but with lots of baggage.
So not only have JM and I moved to Perth, but now Elsa and I have a new virtual home as well. Hope to see you, or you see us soon.
Elli
Elsa