It was all meant to be, me working from home today. It's going on 4:30. I've been working since about 8:30 with a short break for lunch. I checked Nick to see what episode of Arnold is on, just for yucks, and there it was... the Romeo and Juliet episode.
In case I haven't had a chance to sell you on Hey Arnold! yet... Ignore the film, it's stupid. Sit yourself down when the show is on tv and give it a try (apparently it's on for an hour at 4PM on weekdays and it's also on at 7PM, at least on the East Coast). Especially if it's an episode that features Helga prominently. If Helga goes to the dentist, or maybe even better--a psychiatrist--definitely watch. And then there's the one where they go to the opera... and the valentine's episode.
Nice article on introversion in The Atlantic. Though I have to wonder if this line is supposed to be a joke:
Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts.
Interesting and somewhat scareyinterview with Seymour Hersh on Pakistan. According to Hersh, they assisted North Korea's nuclear program, aided Al Qaeda, and lied about what they knew about Daniel Pearl, all after 9/11. Still, he argues that keeping Musharraf in power is better than letting fundamentalists get the bomb. I don't personally think that propping people up will help long term.
One of the reasons why I keep Terri around is the endless succession of names she invents for me. Tonight, I was listening to Robyn Hitchcock with the lights off, and was informed that I was a fruit bat. If that's not love...
We're back from Phoenix. A full report to follow. Rather than dealing with the hassle of trying to travel during the big storm, we got up early on Monday morning and re-booked our flight for today. We decided was much better to pre-emptively get stuck in Phoenix than to get stuck in Cleveland mid-route.
It was sunny & 75 in Phoenix. I've never seen this much snow in Cambridge. Our sidewalk is a trench.
There were thunderstorms in Phoenix last night, so our flight was delayed. But after spending longer in Houston than I ever hope to, ever, we made it.
There's something about first whiff of a place just as you get off a plane. You're stuck in recirculated, pressurized air for many hours; it inevitably smells like carpet cleaner and breath. And then you step off the plane into the jetway, and there's the smell. You're desensitized to it once you've been breathing the air for a few minutes, but for the first second, it's intimately tied to that place. My strongest experience of that was in Ireland, which smells green-- very strongly green. I don't know how to describe it other than that. Pittsburgh (the new airport, at least, which is farther in the boonies) smells like trees. Boston smells like ocean and industry. If Indianapolis had a smell, I missed it. Phoenix smells like wet rock. At least it did last night.
The cat cam appears to be down, and there's nothing I can do about it from here, since it was running on the Windows machine, which I can't get into remotely. Rats.
Our rental car is a red Mustang. Perfect for Valentine's Day, really.
Terri and I are going to Phoenix for her cousin Michael's wedding party tomorrow. I set up a web cam to keep an eye on the cats while we're gone. And you can, too.
Sigh. Today we had a big education team lunch to bid a fond farewell to our fearless leader, Jane, who is taking some time off to spend with her family and to reassess what role she wants to play in college publishing. She has been such a great manager, and everyone in my group has learned a lot from her and just benefited in a lot of different ways from working with her. We're really sad to see her go, but happy for her--this is a good move for her, no question. Her last day is Friday, but my last day with her will be Thursday since we're heading out for Phoenix Thursday night.
Side note: We went to No. 9 Park for lunch and it was so so good. Nice restaurant find. Not cheap, but nice.
Two bizarre explanations for the Columbia accident: an Azerbaijan expert claims that it was
crushed by a UFO, and Camille Paglia claims that it's a stunning omen:
Anyone who thinks symbolically had to be shocked by the explosion of the Columbia shuttle, disintegrating in the air and strewing its parts and human remains over Texas -- the president's home state! So many times in antiquity, the emperors of Persia or other proud empires went to the oracles to ask for advice about going to war. Roman generals summoned soothsayers to read the entrails before a battle. If there was ever a sign for a president and his administration to rethink what they're doing, this was it. I mean, no sooner had Bush announced that the war was "weeks, not months" away and gone off for a peaceful weekend at Camp David than this catastrophe occurred in the skies over Texas.
"Having a Sunday" is an idiom in the Terri & Ezra dialect that I have become fond of. It's Terri's coinage, of course. It means exactly what it sounds like: having an intentionally slow Sunday.
But if you have a phrase that means that, you cay say things like this:
"What are you doing?""Having a Sunday".
It sounds like a good thing to be doing.
Today Katherine made us a delicious brunch. And we had a Sunday over at her place for a while, before we came home, and continued to have a Sunday. As soon as Terri gets out of the shower, we're going to watch A Streetcar Named Desire, which I've actually never seen. I've seen it live, at least once, but I've never seen the Elia Kazan version w/ Marlon Brando. I have only seen it once. It's The Glass Menagerie I've seen twice.
Terri measures the snow at 11 1/2 inches. Woo hoo! We left work at about 2pm and made it home at 4pm. It was one of those driving experiences where I was not steering so much as suggesting which direction the car should slide in. Probably would not have driven, but the prediction was only 5 inches.
Now that we're home, I'm doing work (well, I was until I started writing this) and Terri is finding lots of cool cooking sites for the upcoming links page.
Watched the Frances Ford Coppola movie The Conversation last night. Really good. Very creepy and unnerving. Gene Hackman is great as an extremely tightly wound surveillence expert. People don't seem to talk about it as much as the more iconic Coppola movies, but it's really engaging and dense; definitely made before he started making dumb movies.
It's also kind of exciting to see so many reel-to-reel tape recorders in one movie.
Lots of movie connections. Biggest one that grabbed my attention was John Cazale, who played Fredo in The Godfather ; he plays Gene Hackman's assistant. Apparently, he was only in 5 movies, each nominated for a best picture Oscar, before he died of cancer.
So Ezra and I had been looking at houses in Nashua. It was fun to think of having a whole house, but as time went by we started to realize how much we would miss Cambridge and how big (and unhappy) a change it would be for us. Basically, when you factor in the cost and time of commuting and the property taxes, it's not worth it for us right now to move there. So, we're going to start looking into buying a condo in Cambridge instead.
Did a lot of work on the site today. One of these days you'll get to see it (nudging Ezra's side). This is my first entry using the Movable Type news thingamajig. I thought I should try it out. Also, we all need to pause a moment and think "huzzah!" as Ezra's birthday was on Sunday, and Ezra's birth is worth at least a huzzah a year.
We went to the Wrentham outlets yesterday. Now, I'm not generally one to get all frothy about any sort of retail experience, but outlet shopping really makes me happy. I really only get the initiative to shop twice a year, and I generally go outlet shopping, so that I can go to a variety of places at once; malls make me feel psychologically bombarded, and I always feel ripped off when I pay retail for mundane things. Outlets are in their own way just another manifestation of the experience economy (like warehouse stores, they're trying to give you the "getting a good deal" experience), and you have to be constantly vigilant in any place that's engineered to separate you from your money.
As for the Terri & Ezra outlet...
As we've mentioned, we've been working on a site redesign for a while now, and this page is now in the new design. More coming soon. Terri has been doing most of the work, I must confess. She's been digging up lots of amazing stuff for the site, and she designed the pages. I set up the new news weblog using the wonderful Moveable Type software. Blogger is fine, but Moveable Type is more feature-rich, it runs on my own server, and it automatically creates RSS feeds. I've come to be a big fan of RSS, but I'll save that for a future post.