playing scrabble

I'm trying to get better at scrabble by playing online. I've got my two-letter wordlist, and my wordfinder program at hand. Each game takes about half an hour – so four games later, i'm sitting here with the sun going down. This post will be full of random things because I can't seem to tell a consistent narrative today. The project for a party did not work out as planned, so now I am just going to use what I cut out by hand. No letterpress. It was just a little disappointment, but probably it saved me a bunch of stress in trying to work out a trade. I also partially cleaned up the leftover pear mess. Stupid fruit flies! I have some sourdough that is progressing nicely. I put in a call to a woman who might have chickens for us. I am very excited to get new chickens. Scott even accepted getting three.

marriage

With engagement a lot of women feel there's enormous pressure to show their worth. I read this article today. Getting married is a crazy process – I changed my name, invited my estranged father (who didn't show up) and my biological father, (who stole the show) and was witness to my mother's first meeting with my father since before I was born. There was that, and all the getting married parts. Now that I've had some time to reflect, the event went well. I spent time on the things that I cared about (cupcakes, postcards, art) and with the people I wanted to spend time with. I enjoyed most of the planning, and none of the aftermath. We didn't go into debt. Watching a friend's wedding unfold gave me a little insight into the way other women view the marriage process — the culmination of years of work and training. The execution of childhood fantasies. A recognition of one's worth. They are so happy. My experience was just not the same. There was joy, but no overwhelming validation. I think what's different was that I questioned my participation in every thing, except creating the vows. When we made our vows, I was aware and in the moment. Otherwise, I think that I let the situation run away with me.

descended from basques?

Myths of British Ancestry I've never been interested in geneology – the kind where you do research and visit large libraries containing long, long lists of dead people. But digging out clues about ancient people from mitochondria in currently living people is amazing. That ancient Britons came from Basque country, and that scientists figured it out, is one little bit of inspiring scientific trivia that makes me go nuts and say i want to be a meteorologist. Was that a non-sequitor? What I mean is: its the learning, people. I love the learning. And yes, I did in fact say “I want to be a meteorologist” just the other day. I would love to be one of those people pouring over big maps and solving big equations to find trajectories of storms. Or, I'd love to be a person who studies micro-climates and writes lots of stuffy-seeming reports about the state of the weather. Just the other day I was thinking that graphic design was so interesting. But then I tried to read this 8-page document on typefaces and was completely bored by the end. I can totally see that typefaces are very interesting — I mean, c'mon the father of computer science has written a million books about it. I now know that I will never be *that* into it. I like the part of graphic design that is the presentation. “Hey look at me over here doing something useful that people can see!” I think atmospheric science (seemingly paradoxically) offers something along those lines… maybe in the form of maps? Something TANGIBLE at the end that I can share. So much of the work I have done in the past 5 years is unsharable. Marketable, but unsharable. Maybe its all that damn open source shit going to my head, but I really want to give something that's worthwhile. I'm not sure that meteorology is going to be it, but it's got to be better than installing telephone sets.

backtracking

S. hates backtracking. Today, he told me his theory of “lolipopping”, as he sees it. This is a way to make long runs seem less repetative, you have a loop at the end. * i just laugh at this now * used to be argument provoking * good change to be able to laugh and understand rather than get angry

recipes

I put together the recipe project today and finally put them into their chrome box. I wrote 5 or 6 of them out, and then realized that it would be a much nicer present if the authors of the recipes wrote them out themselves. I brought in all my wedding photos yesterday for duplicates to be made. It was a nice feeling to finally have them done. This Friday I should be getting them back. I also thought that I should talk to Bosco more. I read through a ton of blog entries by rms and wondered why I was so obsessive. I spent about 4 hours with chickens yesterday. It felt good.