No, I haven’t been blogging much original content lately, and here are a few reasons why.
Work. It’s changed a lot in the last few months, and I no longer am allowed to be on the Internets tubes during working hours, unless I’m on break or logged out for lunch. I’ve got a new leader, and am feeling a fair amount of tension at the moment during the shakedown period. My previous leader was pretty accomodating, the new one is still formulating a leadership style, and it’s best to not push matters. Sadly, I can no longer filter out the GAWD-awful noise from some of my noisier colleagues by listening to iTunes while waiting for calls to come in. So my stress levels are up, but I can’t blog about them very effectively. By the time I get home, I don’t feel like writing about my day, because frankly I’d rather think about something less stressful.
The iPhone. Since I’m not using a work computer to access the Internets Tubes, when not busy, I now scan my Google Reader feed and “blog” by clicking the “share” or “share with note” link. Unfortunately, now is the time of year when I’m pretty much always busy or get a lot of multiple hotel or international bookings in batches, so I’m rarely caught up; I’ve always got something to work on even if the phones are dead and my teammates are chattering away (see “GAWD-awful noise” above). Yes, sharing newsfeed links is lazyblogging, but it’s all I’ve got time for. Also, the iPhone is fun to play with, especially when I can turn it into a lightsabre and spar with my husband David.
Family. Have to be careful here. But here’s some stuff we’ve done with family lately that’s been fun, or interesting, or worth doing.
- We get together with David’s parents frequently, enjoying each other’s company
- We visited our niece Melissa a few weeks ago, who lives downstate
- We got together with more family for “Hanukkah,” by seeing “The Buddy Holly Story” (music plays) at the Drury Lane Oakbrook
Basically, we don’t have very interesting lives, so there’s not much to say other than rant about politics and current events, and rather than raise my blood pressure brooding on the excesses of the current administration, I go play on Second Life.
Second Life. Yes, I spend a fair amount of time online, listening to live music and attending various events. Also, shopping and treasure hunting (looking for freebies that virtual store owners hide around their shops). I ought to be online right now, in fact, because there’s a big thing going on in conjuction with the Netroots Nation 2008 convention (formerly known as Yearly Kos).
But we do have interesting experiences. Thursday night, David and I were reminded by his dad that we’d promised to check out a friend’s castoff bike as a possible replacement for our niece’s bike, which kind of got messed up by well-meaning friends. So in spite of a rather nasty storm (plenty wind, lightning, and rain) we drove over to Steve’s house. It was a pretty dramatic sky, and then at sunset the sun found the edge of the clouds and everything lit up with this incredibly baleful deep red. That was enough to cause gasps of amazement from us, and also just at that moment we had to turn east, away from the sight. I didn’t have a decent shot at a cameraphone picture, either. But then as soon as we turned, of course there was a rainbow – more sky drama, as it was mostly red and purple, and doubled too. That was enough to cause us both to holler “Whoa!!” which of course is reserved for only the most mind-bogglingly cool things.
After that, things settled down. We met up with Steve at his parents’ old house (a property he won’t really be putting on the market for a while) to pick up his mom’s old Schwinn, which seemed to be in decent enough shape. Steve had been using it to take his dog Polly for runs, along with this spring loaded gadget that attached to her collar. But he was willing to let it go in the hopes that our niece would get some use out of the bike. I’m happy to report that yesterday, she was able to ride it around near her home, as her grandparents got it to her in one piece. Yay!
After dealing with getting the bike in our car (with a girl’s frame, it didn’t really fit on the bike rack), we all went out to the Pita Inn (pretty decent Middle Eastern music plays). The food there is really good, and they’ve got a lot of different combinations. Basically, it’s a fast-food place, but you’d pay a lot more for the same thing at a sit-down restaurant. It’s always busy, and even on a stormy night like that night, it was packed. As we ate, fire trucks went by, and also went to a nearby business – there was a lot of stuff going on with power lines and branches and roofs and whatnot.
In general, I’ve been keeping an eye on my newsfeed, and sharing a lot of stuff (sometimes with comments, often without). When the WordPress app for the iPhone comes out, I’ll be able to actually blog a lot more, since I don’t currently have a way to start a new post from whatever site I happen to be at (in other words, there’s no way to “Press It” or “Blog This”). I don’t actually know if the new app will do this – it seems to be focused on using photos from your cameraphone, rather than my more typical pattern of blogging about a particular site or news story. There’s still no copy-and-paste, apparently.