From seat 24-A I can just see the exhaust port under the wing of this Airbus A321. The sun has just set over the world and the thousands of miles of desolate brown heartland are now overlaid with a slowly brightening spidery lattice of towns, emerging in the accelerated dusk.

I'm on my way to Pittsburgh, where I'll stay through Saturday recruiting for Google. This will be the first time I've been back to Pittsburgh since I drove to San Francisco right after graduating in August of last year.

This trip resonates nostalgic in so many ways. Though it's only been a little over a year since I left CMU, virtually nobody I know is still there. I'm getting here a day before most of the rest of the Google bunch and so, like when I arrived in Pittsburgh two years ago, it's just me and the campus. Having built so many relationships with people during my time there, it seems eerie to think about walking among the buildings washed clean of any relationship I have with them. Rob and Kerry's offices are occupied by strangers now and the masters labs, still teeming with eager students who are probably bitching about their GOMS assignment in HCI Methods class, would only welcome me as a stranger, the ratty sofa and desk will refuse to acknowledge our all-nighters, but I'll visit anyhow.

A large city has just passed below. Given that we're about 40 minutes from touchdown, I'm guessing that it's either Cincinnati or Columbus. In about an hour it'll be 10pm local time and I'll be outside waiting for the 28X bus to take me to the Holiday Inn, across the street from the Cathedral of Learning; the same hotel that Marissa and Nate utilized when I interviewed with them a year and a half ago. It'll be at least 11pm by the time I'm checked in, and I'll probably walk in to Oakland to grab some half-priced dinner at Fuel and Fuddle amidst youth-heavy Pitt students.

In the morning I'll have a fair portion of the morning to myself and I'll start off with a walk down to Craig Street for some Kiva-han chai, then I'll see about getting wireless access for my laptop on campus and doing a little work and probably some more writing.

There's nobody in the center seat and the guy on the aisle has faxes and contracts spread out all over the place. God I have to pee...

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Now that the weather has dropped precipitously from 90 down to 50 in the last week, I'm nostalgic for Pittsburgh. I still follow the news there now and then. I'm vaguely pissed that Starbucks is moving to Craig Street, giving Kiva Han a run for its money, and I congratulate Michele, the CMU HCI program coordinator, on fulfilling her dream and moving to upstate New York to open a B&B!

I miss the leaves, wearing gloves, and walking through a leaf-strewn cemetery to the bus stop with my iPod in my pocket and feeling so very in-the-world.

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Wow, the day is here. I can't do it justince in prose, while simultaneously finishing packing (thank god for Rachel and Ammy and their help!!!)

With the help of the Sidekick Ammy and I may be able to post some from the road. I'm sure there will be more stories to tell, not to mention Alaska stories and pictures to post.

The AirPort and DSL router are the last things to be packed, and it's about that time.

I'll be checking in soon!!!

Next stop: Nashville

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So suddenly the five weeks I had to complete grad school has vaporized to one, two weeks spent in Los Angeles with family, one week back now, and leaving one week early to spend more much-needed time with family.

My life is suddenly thrown into fast-forward, a mixed blessing of keeping busy and of having to work fast enough to stay on my own life's train.

Within the next week I have a bunch of work do do on my masters project, and my independent study project, and I need to pack up my apartment to be ready for movers to come and take it all in their van.

Late next week Rachel and I head to Vancouver, with a 7 hour layover in San Francisco, where we can spend a little time with friends, then a week with family, then flying home from Anchorage by way of a redeye to Atlanta (can you believe there's a plane that goes from Anchorage to Atlanta?) where we'll meet Ammy and hop on another plane to complete the return to Pittsburgh. Then it's two days in Pittsburgh before Ammy and I drive off on a 12 day road trip back to San Francisco, with stops in Los Angeles, Vegas and the Grand Canyon for certain (not in that order), and a bunch of other destinations to be finalized, but likely including Mammoth Caves, Mesa Verde, and the Painted Desert.

Two days later is my first day at Google. Meanwhile I'll be staying with Ammy and Rick for a few weeks (or less) while I find an apartment and tell the movers where to appear with my stuff.

All-told I'll be living in six different environments over the next six weeks. Maybe my internal bolstering preparing for once again changing my total environment has helped a bit in dealing with the unexpected change in my life. I knew I'd be off-kilter, and so perhaps I'm a little more prepared emotionally, though just enough to keep standing, not enough to absorb the blow.

So much to do, and so little time. I need to compartmentalize. I need to make sure that when I leave next Thursday that school is checked off. I need to make sure that when I leave on the road trip, Pittsburgh is checked of. (I mean materially, not personally. Those I love here in the 'burgh will be with me for a long, long time, and do not have little boxes next to their avatars in my mind).

The last 10% is always the hardest.

Here we go!

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This is from a friend. Please pass this along to anyone you know in or around Pittsburgh who might want to take in a cat or kitten. Cats and kittens are great. You want a cat. You know you do. Here's your chance to save a kitty:

Subject: Immediate situation--felines that need homes asap

My neighbors up in Pine Township have been hospitalized and may not be able to care for the many cats that they have adopted and that have been dropped off at their house. They are both around 90 years old and very generous and compassionate people. Chas and I are fostering 2 kittens now. There are as many as a dozen and they range in age from kittens to adult cats.

The cats will be taken to a farm up north and let loose unless I am able to find homes for them. The family does not want to do this but has no other choice because they cannot accommodate them.

Please, please, please, consider adopting a kitten or young adult cat! If you are not able, then ask your friends and family if they know anyone who would like to adopt a cat/kitten.

They are beautiful creatures, and a bit shy at first. But now, just a half day later they are playing and are more comfortable with my presence.

The information on the felines is as best as I can give. They scatter away in the house and hide, so it is hard to tell if I have seen them all. I have seen what I think are two age levels on the kittens. One about 5-6 weeks, and one about 12 weeks. The kittens vary from almost all white with black tipped tails/faces/paws (like they came down a chimney! *smile*) to multi colors of white, black, grey, and some brown. I have not seen much orange, some may have a bit of orange but not alot. There are some adults also. There is a very affectionate black cat who may be 10 years old. There are a couple of multi color, or spotted adults, probably around 3 years maybe. I was told there was a black and white cat, but I have not seen it.

There are a number of them outside, but they are hard to see, most are young adults to adults from what I can gather.

Please be advised that these cats probably have never been to the vet. For the kittens it is not so much of an issue. The two kittens that we have adopted are great! A bit skiddish at first, as expected, but the older of the two is very lovable now. The young one is still getting used to us. They are both mostly white with black or grey 'tips'.

Let me know if you need any other information.

I really appreciate your interest and efforts...

If there's any chance you're interested, or know someone who is, drop me an email at hello@fury.com, and I'll put you in touch with the proper person. Feel free to pass this post along to anyone else who might be able to help.

Thanks!

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So it's only two days until I turn 30, but nature's present came early. I walked outside tonight at about 9:30 to go see a free showing of Goldmember in the park. Stepping off my porch, I stopped in my tracks. Between one warm evening and the next, the fireflies had come out in force.

From my first visit to Pittsburgh over a year ago, I was clear on the concept that I wasn't in California anymore: Bright sunny 80-degree days are no guarantee against a quick thundershower before sunset. When I came here to live last August, I learned about the cacophonous cicada and their 22 year cycle. Fall introduced me to the colors of which Pennsylvanian nature is capable, followed unusually quickly by Winter's blankets of snow, applied again and again. With the Spring came the rain, lush green grass right outside my window, and an ocean of dandelions. Approaching the end of the full circle, I thought that I knew all of Gaia's gifts to Pittsburg, but stumbling upon thousands of glowstick-green fireflies softly lighting and fading while weaving in front of, behind, and around tombstones in the twilight struck me dumb in a way I suddenly realized I had feared I was becoming incapable of as I enter my fourth decade.

I've often used the cemetery as my emotional soundstage over the last year, whether surreptitiously placing easter eggs on the statues with Rachel, picnicking on the grass, following foot-deep foot-holes in the snow on the way to the bus or striding hom, weaving through the headstones beneath the midnight moon with 'Rest in Peace' blaring in my iPod's earbuds. This felt totally different though. Tonight the graveyard was alive.

...

It was exactly 20 years ago today that I had last seen the faerie. A half a world away, in a vineyard an hour north of Florence, I was just two days away from my 10th birthday, travelling through Europe with my mom and sister. The fireflies were everywhere around the trees and the vines, flicking on and off, talking to each other, and speaking to me as well. It was a magical night outdoors, eating a fine dinner, feeling the Summer warmth, and walking a path under a waterfall reputed to take a decade off the ambler's age (a completely different prospect to someone not quite ten yet).

As we waited for the tour busses to take us back to reality, I urgently found a jar and caught a few of the fireflies. I was so proud. Mom told me that I could keep them if I wanted to, but I should know that they'd die within a day, and they would never glow again. I let them go just before I climbed the steps onto the motor coach. Mom smiled.

...

The faerie have changed in the intervening decades, but then so have I. In 1983 I was spastic with youth, and the fireflies reflected this with their fast binary blinks. Somewhere on their abdomen they were flittering their shutters open and closed, sending precise signals through the dusk.

Nature, digitized.

Today's gift was so different that at first I didn't even recognize it. A sine-wave of brightness in the corner of my eye, another floating above my car. I literally rubbed my eyes to clear these errant embers floating senselessly. After one travelled right in front of me, I realized what they were, so different from what I expected. Focusing out beyond the grass and to the headstones beyond I could see hundreds of them, brightening, peaking, and dimming to invisibility, seemingly constant lights drifting between this dimension and another. Seeing headstones literally lit by their passing glow, I thought to myself, 'Buffy can't touch this.'

Reality, smoothed.

I had to share, so I called Rachel to tell her that she was right and the fireflies had indeed come. "Of course, silly!" 'Will they stay? or is it a one-night deal?' "They'll be around all month! It's what they do."

Feeling the magic lift me, I got in my car and drove to the movie, seeing only one or two fireflies the whole way. Apparently the dead get first dibs. Well, them and their neighbors.

Tomorrow I'll see how well the video camera can handle this unique low-light setting. For tonight, I'm cherishing my first birthday present.

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Last weekend Rachel and I ventured across Pennsylvania to attend a wedding where, incidentally, Rachel was the Maid of Honor. We left early Friday morning with a map and a timetable in hand.

Trying to make the most of my time left in the strange and foreign land known as Pennsylvania, I couldn't pass up the chance to drop in on the Pennsylvania Dutch, and so we planned a 30 mile detour just past Lancaster and deep in to the heart of Amish and Mennonite culture. In this case, a rural town called 'Bird-in-Hand'.

At the urging of the buggy company's web site, www.amishbuggyrides.com, we took the "quickest, then most scenic way" in to town, in defiance of Yahoo Maps's directions. It's a bit of a quandary, when you think about it: Who knows more about the optimal route? The computer that warns you that roads it tells you to travel on might not even exist, or the Amish who are forbidden to drive cars and haven't travelled more than 15 miles from their birthplace? In this case, Yahoo had the direct route right, though the way we took may have been a bit more scenic.

We were already behind our tight schedule that would bring us to Reading (well, Hiedelberg, but who's counting?) in time for wedding rehearsal prep (involving the bride, her mother, bridesmaids, and a distinct absence of moi). Still, we made it, and the Buggy Ride bird was now in our hands, and we weren't going to let it go. Thankfully there was no line, just a buggy, a horse, and a driver (footnote 1). In 10 minutes we were underway. With a family of four fellow travellers sharing our buggy, I sat right up front on a small wooden footstool, right behind the horse. Unfortunately, the previous sentence isn't the only one that uses both the words 'horse', 'behind', and 'stool', but seeing as this sentence fulfills that prophecy, I don't have to bring it up later, but it happened, and at a trot, no less.

The first bit of the ride was along the highway, in the 'buggy lane'. I was impressed that the horse looked both ways before merging in to traffic, a good thing since it turns out that because horses aren't machines, there's no license or age required to operate such a beastie on the open road. We quickly turned off the main road on to a smaller road, where our guide pointed out the ways to tell whether a given house was occupied by Amish (dark-curtained, unadorned windows, no wires leading in to the house, often simple clothes on the washline) or by others. We passed a carpenter's studio with a sign declaring that he would be happy to make custom furniture to order. A few moments later we were passed by a large tour bus. I got a momentary insight in to the Amish lifestyle as twenty tourists crowded to the windows and pointed at us, the presumptive Amish they had come to see through their tinted panes.

It wasn't too much further when we pulled on to a dirt road, heading towards barns and silos. It turns out that this was the first day in a month that they'd been able to take this path, as the earlier rains had made the path too muddy for the cart's narrow wheels. We drove between fields, seeing a horse-driven plow team here, a person tending to a garden there.

Amish look Amish all the time.

The average Amish family has about 10 children, which is why every day is laundry day. It also explains their culture's survival. the Amish culture has just about zero population growth, since so many of the kids leave the farm.

Driving past a barn and scooter (Amish will ride push-scooters, but not bicycles), we came upon three girls working in the family garden. they were probably 20, 14, and 3 years old. When the buggy came, the middle girl came out and offered us chocolate chip cookies, three for a dollar.

Amish know their cookies.

We went on our way, and continued between fields, with silos in the distance, and grazing cows near the path. Trundling by the cows, I wondered: Does our horse know he's a horse? Does he look down on the lazy fat cows as he works for his daily fare, or does he lament his position? Do the cows laugh at him? Is there a parallel to be found here between the Amish and wider civilization? Are we the cows?

Amish Factoid Time:

• Amish don't work on Sundays. Sunday is God's day.
• Weddings always happen in October and November, when they interfere the least with tending the land.
• An Amish man shaves until he is married, then he grows a full beard, but never a mustache.
• Weddings are always held on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It takes a full day to prepare for a wedding, and a full day to clean after a wedding, so mon-TUES-wed and wed-THURS-fri is the only way to ensure that nobody misses a wedding while preparing for another.
• After the wedding, Amish newlyweds go door to door to collect their wedding gifts.
• Amish aren't permitted to drive cars, but can be passengers.
• Those Amish who require phones for their business keep the phone in the shed, a fair distance from the house.

I forgot to ask if the Amish vote.

Coming back to the terminus after our 30-minute ride, we saw a field trip of 20 kids in identical blue t-shirts. they were all going buggying. We asked how they'd handle them all, and sure enough a long buggy with lengthwise benches emerged to the kids delight.

A quick gift shop pit stop later and we were on our way to the rehearsal, plus a jar of blueberry syrup and a slab of rocky road fudge.

Amish Mennonites know their fudge. (Know the difference between Amish and Mennonites? Check the FAQ!) Actually, truth to tell, we thought they knew their fudge, and we wouldn't know any better for another two days, but that's another day, and another story.

Footnote 1: Driver is an interesting term. I was having a conversation with Ammy a few days ago about words that persist in our culture, after the literal meaning of the word has been surpassed by technology. Her example was an article about TiVo where it talked about taping shows, as if TiVo has anything to do with tape. I tried to think of others, but it's not easy to do off the cuff. 'Driver' is definitely such a word, as it derived [npi] from the person who 'drives' the horses forward. (go back up)

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So last Tuesday Rachel and I went shopping for some stuff at the Murray St. Giant Eagle (fyi for the non-yinzers, pretty much all supermarkets around here are Giant Eagles). Walking down the sidewalk back toward the car, we heard this guy yelling, I mean really yelling, about two blocks away.

At first, I thought it was a fight in the making. I was reminded of one of the people I was most happy to leave behind in Berkeley, this guy who just roars incredibly loudly on Telegraph, encouraging others to try to roar as loudly as he does, at least three times a week for 7 years. Anyhow, as this guy got louder, I spotted him: a guy yelling in to his cellphone. I was just wating for him to break critical mass and fling the phone into a nearby building when, less than half a block away from us now, he yelled "OKAY! BYE!" and pressed the end-call button.

The wierd thing was that he wasn't mad at all. His phone conversation ended without a torrent of emotion, but still with a great deal of volume. It's hard to explain: He wasn't yelling in to the phone as though he was trying to make himself be heard through a faint connection, and he wasn't yelling (as it turned out once we could hear the context) in fury, but he was just yelling his words.

Rachel and I both looked at each other and talked the rest of the way to the car about how weird that was.

Today, walking down Walnut Avenue, Rachel and I heard someone yelling and, sure enough, here he comes down the street again, cellphone in hand on ear. In his wake he left a path of people turning to each other (even to nearby strangers) and whispering "what is that guy doing?" A few minutes later he'd turned around and passed by us on the sidewalk, still at full volume.

This time we were ready.

Keep in mind when watching this that the microphone in my camera is intended for close up use, and that to be heard when he's 20 feet away, and facing the opposite direction, he's actually a lot louder than implied in this clip.

Shopping in a nearby store, we heard him pace back and forth several more times over the next 20 minutes. Spectators speculated that he wasn't actually talking into the phone at all, and that his mock-tirade about multimillion dollar business deals was just a show. Me, I've seen a lot of crazy people who spout endless solliloquies off the cuff, and this guy seemed more natural than any of them, like he wasn't making anything up.

Still, just because there's actually someone on the other end of the phone doesn't make you any less of a freak. Thank god the guy sitting three rows behind us in X2 last night, whose phone went off five times during the movie wasn't such a loud talker, though even so, grrr.

The idea of picking up a cellphone jammer the next time I'm in Japan sounds more and more tempting...

Oh yeah, and I love my digital camera. Unexpected movies are the best.

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Walking to the bus yesterday, I found that the recent rain had yielded tens of thousands of dandelions across the street. Later in the day I got to take a few pictures.

(See the others)

Let me know if any of these particularly strike you and I can make up some desktop pictures and post them.

So many potential wishes out there, and I really only need one.

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I just had a phone conversation with someone who was accepted to both the HCII and SIMS programs, just as I was two years ago. He's agonizing over whether to leave Berkeley (where he owns his home) and move with his wife to Pittsburgh for a year, or study at Berkeley SIMS for two years.

I don't envy him his decision. I know how hard a decision it was for me. In fact, the relocatioon factor was probably in no small part responsible for my decision to defer from CMU for a year to work at Yahoo. I remember that a year later, when I again had to choose, this time between Yahoo and CMU, the fact that I'd have to move either way (the 50 mile commute from Berkeley to Sunnyvale was just too much) made the idea of moving to Pittsburgh a little bit easier.

In the end, what made my decision was the Hogwarts factor: HCII is the best place to learn HCI. SIMS excels at information systems, and would teach me perhaps 70% of what I wanted to learn in HCI, but the idea of being limited only by my own bandwidth was just too attractive.

It's really a kind of risk aversion: I worried about spending two years at SIMS and leaving thinking that I could have learned more about my own focus somewhere else. On the other hand, unless the HCII underdelivered, Carnegie Mellon offered me exactly what I was looking for, with people who shared my focus and passion.

Other pennyweights on the scale were the idea of spending a 'year abroad' in the East, to experience something other than 'California seasons' (and last Winter didn't disappoint on that cold front), and getting an advanced degree from a different school than my undergrad. Having TA'ed Marti Hearst's UI prototyping and evaluation class (after taking James Landay's version of the class) I felt that I already experienced the single SIMS class closest to my interest.

In the end, I just needed a big change. 12 years in a city can build up a lot of plaque, expecially when the reason for not leaving is fear of change. This last year is a yo-yo on a string. Ship out, gather experiences, and come back the wiser. All in all, (and I'm a little surprised) the experience has been gratifying in many of the ways I theorised when fretting about the decision to come out here. (By the way, the post I just linked to has become one of my all-time favorites; a real turning point.)

A year ago last January I was living in the middle and now I'm not. I'm headed down a certain path with a few forks to navigate, but I'm moving fast and with definite purpose.

Everything's just moving so fast. How fast? Next month I have two days of interviews with Google, I may be flying to Seattle to talk with Amazon, and there's still Yahoo and eBay to think seriously about.

I've never really had so many parts of my life change at the same time, as they will in August. I don't know when Rachel's leaving (neither does she), be it late May, after I go in August, or any time in between. I'm blessed to have found such a great person to share the second half of my year here with. Every time I carry something up the two flights of stairs to my apartment, I think about having to carry it back down in a few months, or daydream about hiring movers.

I'm starting to yearn for the open road again. The week with Ammy last August, gunning across the top of the country was amazing, and we're deciding between taking the Canadian high road or the deep South on the way back. I'm working on so many projects right now I have scant time to think, let alone dream, but the future is pretty well packed with options. We'll see how it all pans out.

And now I've taken this post down three or four different paths, with little cohesion. Funny how there's an inverse relation between the directedness of my life and the directedness of my writing. Well, I'm sure that's enough for now.

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Kerry and I saw Tori Amos in concert last night, and the performance was fantastic.

After acclimating myself to the fact that I was about eight years older than the average audience member, and that smoking appeared to be legal inside the auditorium, we sat down and enjoyed a truly impressive show.

Held on the campus of Duquesne ('Doo-caine') University, there were probably fewer than 3000 people in a half basketball arena where they clearly stuffed in Tori's stage and lighting grand enough for a crowd five times that size.

The show was all about the music. Bassist and drummer in the rear corners, and Tori nestled between a full grand piano and a stack of synth keyboards on the other side, I don't see how people on the ground seats off to the side could see her through the instrument racks, but second row balcony worked very nicely.

The lighting for this show was spectacular. Tori's all about communicating emotion through song, and light effects were used to augment the emotion. Rich colors, patterns that silhouetted each head in the audience giving them golden halos, and multi-spectrum spotlights turned the hundred-foot high cube of smokey air into a visual sensorium that James Turrell would have been proud of.

Each song went the same way. Notes would start, small cheers would rise, the song would wander to the main theme when it became clear to the rest of the crowd which song it was, and the cheering would rise threefold, then die down as people just watched, rapt.

The ground floor folks were standing in front of their seats the whole show, just watching. Entranced.

Tori's a flirt, but didn't talk much. She's inches away from becoming a Diva if she wanted to and she knows it, but she holds it in check. Still, this didn't stop her from performing a beautiful solo of Madonna's "Live to Tell" that showed that even new, voice-trained Madonna can't hold a candle to Tori's raw talent.

In short, I really enjoyed this concert. I wasn't star-struck, but it was a great emotional experience. Somewhere between Ani DiFranco and Enya, every song floated with no-holds-barred emotion. I saw an interview with Janeane Garafolo on Conan O'Brien the other month, where she complained that artist are realizing that sex can substitute for talent, and there's a direct relationship between the lack of clothes and the lack of talent in most pop stars today. All I can say is seeing Tori powerfully and expertly playing a Grand with one hand, an synth behind her with the other, and singing in perfectly pure tones with a big smile on her face, she's the real deal. Just amazing pure talent.

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I had my first dream about being dead last night. not dreams about dying; that happens to me all the time. no, in this dream I was living in the underworld, which was represented by a jail where nobody ever came to visit, everyone was grey and listless, and I had to fight inside my own mind to try and find relevancy in this (under)world.

I tried to rally others into original thought again, I tried to get them to pick up and read the letters that had been written to them by the loved ones they had departed. Some greater power was trying to keep the status quo, though, and I found myself with my head in between prison bars, with pulsing and ringing coursing through, trying to abolish original thought.

I kept trying to fight it, trying to think free, and trying to find meaning in existance beyond death, and trying to bring it to others.

It was odd, because it felt different than many of the other dreams I've been having, it fel like it had a flavor that came completely from outside myself.

It didn't occur to me until this afternoon that I do live less than a hundred feet from very real graves, and maybe my dreams aren't entirely my own.

Maybe I'll bring them some poetry tonight.

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Pittsburgh is a sad place today, with flags at half-mast all around. Mr. Rogers lived in shadyside, and it was his neighborhood.

There's a memorial service on campus tonight, and the local station is airing a 3-hour retrospective...

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Did a lot of great work on my Game Design project. I now have a dice game that, packaging issues aside, I feel is actually ready to be pitched to small games distribution houses. All I know is that people with no vested interest enjoy playing the game enough that they really want their own sets.

In other news, it's snowing tons. It snowed about a foot in the last 24 hours, and another 6-8 inches in on the way tonight and tomorrow. Add this to the fact that the City of Pittsburgh ran out of salt. Last week they dusted the roads with cinder, and today snowploughs and bravery were the city's only salvation. With tonight's storm, the Pittsburgh weathermen are calling this the worst winter on the books. Last month's average high was around 20, compared with the 40-year average of 36.

Htet Htet, Dana, Rachel and I all went sledding down the hill at Homewood Cemetery, about 200 feet, stopping jst before the frozen pond. I have a little video I'll try to get up once I finish the considerable assignments due tomorrow and Tuesday.

I had a very nice Valentine's Day with Rachel. We stayed in, cooked, and watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I also had a bad crick in my neck, and the doctor said it could take 10 days to get fully better, but backrubs were the best thing for it, so I should get out of the medical center and find myself a valentine. Thankfully I was prepared.

Also, for those of you who use the RSS feed, I did a little code work on the feed, so it shows the first two paragraphs of each article on Fury, with a link and a message showing what % of the post is currently displayed, if it's longer than two paragraphs.

and amazingly, I still like the snow. I've rediscovered the wonder of more-than-four-inches of snow, when the pillowey yet nonslippery powder means you can stop being so careful with your step. Heck, I even jogged to the bus stop.

Now it's time to go to sleep. My game prof is going to mail us by 9:30 to let us know if class is delayed or cancelled due to the snow. Officially, CMU never closes for weather. But then, I wouldn't expect any less from the only institution I've every worked for or attended that doesn't observe President's Day. Apparently that's more common in private East Coast institutions. In California, pretty much all offices close (Am I wrong?).

Well, maybe Mother Nature will enforce what CMU doesn't.

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I just saw an accident. not a bad one, but a car rear-ending another and mashing its hood. I should keep my big mouth shut.

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It's easy to ridicule a city's drivers, or make funny jokes about how Bostonian 5-second-after-red-light runners would get killed driving in red-yellow-means-green-in-a-sec Amsterdam, but Pittsburgh drivers scare me.

They're not exceptionally fast or slow, and the Pittsburgh Left isn't so bad once you get used to it. No, what scares me about many of the drivers here is that they drive as though everyone else is fully aware, has fast reflexes, and is a good (err, nimble) driver. In fact, the existence of the Pittsburgh Left is probably evidence of this.

It's all about taking right of way instead of waiting for it to be given to you, but in more of a "I borrowed a quarter from your change bowl and I'll give it back tomorrow" instead of pulling someone's wallet out of their pocket.

Either there's a Pittsburgh hivemind I'm not yet aware of, or folks here just have a lot of faith in their fellow drivers. Come to think of it, though I've heard about three accidents secondhand, I haven't seen a single one in the six months I've been here. How odd is that?

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I love that there's a major city in Pennsylvania called State College. It makes me want to name a place 'town.'

"Where do you live?"

"I live in 'Town'."

"Ahh. I'm thinking of moving to 'The City'."

"Do you know Batmanuel?"

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With a wind-chill temp of -7.

Oh yeah, and that's Farenheit. That's -16/-22C.

Brr. Arg!

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Just a pic of me in my all-weather gear. Note the resemblance to the 'Stop' and 'Yield' signs in the background. I hope that's not the message I'm putting out there! Maybe I should get some green pants to make the effect complete. Thanks to Kerry for the pic.

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After my bitching about the cold to Rachel today at lunch, she forwarded me this:

Subject: That just ain't right....

Ok y'all: What is up with THIS!?

Right now, at the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antartica it's 33 F
Right now, at the Esperanza Base in Antartica it's 38 F
Right now, at Ago-1 in Antartica it's 47 F

.....and right now, at Pittsburgh PA it's 16 F. IT IS WARMER IN FREAKING ANTARTICA THAN HERE.

Okay, okay, granted it's Summer down there, but it's darn cold here, as weather.com can attest:

Brrr... Wind chill....

Thanks for the parka and gloves, Mom!

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As previously mentioned, today was an incredible day. I thought I'd share a few pictures in hopes that it wold help convey the wonder:

(click to enlarge)

Hopefully this helps show the beauty I saw today...

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So today is my last day of classes for the semester. I still have a final on Monday, and a final presentation the day after, but as far as class goes, I have my last session of Communication Design Fundamentals in a little over an hour, and that's it.

I'm sure it's partly the snow, partly the fact that I'm coming off an all-nighter, after coming off 4 hours of sleep (6am-10am) on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning), and partly having far more exciting stuff to do than time to do it, but it's literally incredible to me that the semester's essentially over. Incredible, as in not credible, as in I understand the concept, yet cannot give credit to the prospect of its validity. Sure, I still have work to turn in in three of my classes, one of which I haven't started yet, and sure I have a final that could snap me like a tiny twig of logic, but I'm not the only one. A lot of people are in a daze, looking vaguely like they should be passing their yearbooks around for people to sign, but they forgot to make yearbooks in the first place.

Okay, enough with that. Time to enumerate stuff:

There's snow on the ground and lots of it. I checked Weather.com at 4am and saw Pennsylvania covered in dark white (heh, 'dark white' makes sense if you look at a precipitation map). I looked out the window and saw the world covered in softness. Don't worry Ali, I got your snowscaped graveyard picture. I just need to get home to download it. I forgot to bring the cable. The snow's about 5 inches deep; just enough to change a road from a right to a privilege. The forecast is pretty clear for the next week, but the temperature will sway from 36 to 8, so I don't see much of this stuff clearing away before I take off. I hope my car likes its snowbank.

My powerbook came last Tuesday (wow, two days seems so much longer when you were conscious for 49 of the intervening 53 hours), and I've barely had time to give it its due, much less revel in it here. Fittingly enough, I'm typing on it now in the UC center, its frosted silver mirrors the suddenly winterized world just outside the double-paned glass. I haven't had time to install enough apps or docs on it to feel comfortable giving it dominion over my digital well-being, but somewhere between Tuesday and Thursday I'll be loading it up with my 20gig mp3 dowry, 4gig photo tome, and assorted other data vaults. The thing is truly freaking beautiful. I don't know what more I could want in a machine. I can't reasonably ask for faster than a 1Ghz G4, and the screen constantly seems bigger and brighter than this svelte machine should be able to house. Internal wireless is also a dream come true. Joy.

When I brought the box up from the FedEx guy Tuesday morning, I gently patted my newly-old powerbook, telling it that it would always have a place with me. I have an affinity for my portable machines. In contrast, I'm planning on selling my Quicksilver G4 tower, its noise and continuing depreciation outweighing the little unique utility not duplicated by my sibling powerbooks.

I should have treated my sidekick so well. Nestled in my pocket yesterday, it decided to make a plea for attention, no doubt feeling neglected and threatened by the new baby. It decided to deactivate every other vertical line of pixels, and dim several of the others. Cajoling, rebooting, and eventually slapping it briskly (think baby's first breath, not crying toddler over the knee) to kick'start the display, but to no avail. The true irony (if one can extend anthropomorphosis this far) is that the temper tantrum is backfiring: T-Mobile is sending ad advance-replacement my way this morning, and it'll be here early next week, so the sidekick that wouldn't shape up will now ship out, replaced by a new doe-eyed machine that's never known a world without the G4PB. Now I just have to make sure the powerbook doesn't get jealous. Oh, and a name for the new powerbook? I'm leaning towards 'Sendai.'

What else can I tell you? For the first time in memory I have both of my Congresses of Vienna blocked out for a Gaskell's Ball that's still over two weeks away. Not bad for a country boy. Now I just have to make sure I can still dance.

The Great Blogger Diet hasn't been forgotten or abandoned. On the contrary, there's quite a tale to tell on that front; one that might just rival this post in length, and may even rise to the level of the mythic laundry story, so you'll understand that I want to take my time with it. Some time this weekend. (I just want to add how cool it is that searching for that url was so easy

It's amazing how everything's quieter in the snow. It's like hanging tapestries on the walls, all over the world. Busses driving by no longer chug, but shoosh, and traffic moves slow enough that you don't have to look both ways, just walk with the traffic, going at a downstream angle, just like how they told you to escape a running river.

The air is so quiet, and everyone looks like a student. It feels like a weekend on campus, which is just like a weekday on campus, with authority figures removed.

But I still have a few miles to go before I sleep, and more upon my next waking, so I'll cut this short (even though it's anything but). I could write all day, but I need to turn it to more scholastic ends at the moment.

And yea though I had to trudge through powder to get to a packed damp bus early this morn, I do still so love the snow.

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I was up all night working on a presentation I'm giving in five hours (with three hours of class between now and then), so you'd think that some time during the night I might have peeked through the blinds to take a look at the world outside, but no. If you thought that you'd be wrong.

And what would I have seen if I'd looked outside?

Six inches of snow that fell in the last four hours, shutting down elementary schools, but CMU never closes.

I'm puttin' on the snow pants, walking down to the bus stop, and waiting to see just how rugged the Pittsburgh Port Authority busses really are.

I just have this feeling that Winter wonderlands are all the more enjoyable when you actually got some sleep the night before. *Yaaaawn!*

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It's 3:25am, it's 17F degrees outside, and I'm at Kinko's with my three teammates printing 36 color pages for HCI methods. Between this and next Monday's final, over half the semester's points are just waiting to be won, here on the burgh is right! (where right = really, really cold and late)

Hell yes I'm punchy.

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It's snowing again, harder than last week. The forecast threatens 2-4 inches by morning. I'm still enthralled by it. :-)

Just glad I'm not driving anywhere for Thanksgiving...

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Like an Easterner caught in their first California earthquake, I'm just fascinated (though probably quite a bit less frightened) by our first true snow of the season.

I knew it was coming. The weather forecast and ominously ring-like radar picture made it clear. Nevertheless, I was still eager with anticipation as I walked to the bus stop at around two in the afternoon.

Waiting for the bus, I felt small pinpricks of water. So tangible was my impatience that I held out my gloved hand, trying to tell if the tiny droplets were crystalline, or just really cold. They weren't really floating, still mostly pelting in their occasional pinpricks of cold.

After a few minutes it started picking up a bit, to where I could look into the distance and see the array of lines, each one a tiny droplet of freezing rain. I lamented (in my own tiny way) the fact that a digital camera couldn't capture the beauty of the falling water, and I thought for a moment whether I had my videocamera in my backpack, but as irony would have it, Adam was returning it to me at the very meeting I was progressively becoming later for, as the bus obstinantly refused to arrive.

Though I've been in snow several times (skiing, mostly), I've never lived in the stuff, and so didn't have a concept of the many faces of snow. My eskimo vocabulary would probably have about four words: fresh powder, packed powder, slush, and that stuff that turns a three hour drive from Tahoe to Berkeley into a 12-hour tour past accident after accident.

The interface between this cold, cold rain and true snow was something of a mystery to me, and I idly wished that I did have my video camera on me, so that I could point it into the distance and focus it a little closer, so that I might capture this transition that was clearly imminent.

Then, silently and without fanfare, between one heartbeat and the next, the entire array of falling droplets stopped. I don't mean that the rain ceased; I mean that the droplets stopped, instantly turned white, and progressed at a far more leisurely, and less linear rate. The world became hushed, as I never really noticed the white noise that the small rain was making until it was replaced with visual white noise.

It was just magic. I'm sure in my happy wonder I looked like a goof to the people driving by me, no doubt accustomed to the wonder, or perhaps having seen it earlier, just down the road.

Me, I enjoyed the snow, for the five minutes that it lasted, almost as much as I enjoyed again on the bus ride back home, when it made Forbes Avenue look like Manhattan in the movies, for just a few minutes.

But I have to say that right now, at two in the morning, when it's been snowing for several hours, nearly an inch of the white stuff has blanketed my car, and the world went from Fall to Winter overnight, that I enjoy it most of all.

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Snow keeps threatening to fall, or rather the Weather Channel keeps promising, with nature underdelivering. I'd complain except I expect she's saving it all up for a blizzard, and I'll wish I'd kept my mouth shut.

In the meantime, I've hardly got my camera locked up. The Fall colors here were (and, lingeringly, still are) stunning, and I took plenty of pictures.

For most of you, Fall is still in full swing and Thanksgiving, that cornucopia of Autumnal bliss, is just around the corner. With that in mind, I'm turning some of my better pictures into desktop pictures for those who want a little of the Fall spirit in your computer, without the worry of soggy leaves actually shorting out your screen.

Here's the first. I'll put the rest up one every couple days. for those using Mac OS X 10.2, you might want to try out the nifty new auto-change feature that can fade in a new desktop picture every day, hour, or 5 seconds, as you like. If you're on a PC, Wall Random does pretty much the same thing.

Choose your screen size:
800x600 | 1024x768
1280x854 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200

Lemmie know if I missed any important screen sizes. The 1280x854 is for G4 powerbooks, and I figured (hoped) nobody was still running 640x480.

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So I know I've mentioned before on here that I live across the street from a cemetery, but those bare words don't do it justice. In the same way that Californians naively refer to 60-year-old buildings as 'old', most of use are used to nice neat cemeteries in nice neat rows; plots marked with plaques or short headstones following a common style guide: anonymity in all but the literal sense.

That's why places like the Black Diamond Mine cemetery, a true 'grave yard' is so nifty; the placement of the plots, and the headstones themselves tell far more about the character of a person, (or the people they left behind), than a bronze plaque could convey.

Come to think of it, I want my URL on my headstone.

Buffy was here.
(no, I didn't do it)

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So after a nice, warm weekend (66 degrees! woohoo!) there's a huge storm coming in tonight, and now there are news special reports of a tornado watch in western Pennsylvania tonight.

I live in an attic!

Well, if things get crazy and I can't get to the basement in time, I'll be sure to say hi to the Lollipop Guild!

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I haven't gone to sleep before midnight... Ever.

Well, at least since I got to Pittsburgh, three months ago (yes Virginia, it's already been three months!)

Right now it's 10:49, and I'm going to turn off the computer, take out my contacts, read in bed for a while (Susie and Karen: the book's getting past the slow part now), and go to sleep before midnight. And I don't even have to get up before 8! Nice.

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*Just* started, and only tiny flakes, but real, honest snow! Yay!

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Yay!

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The leaves they are a'changin' round these parts. Here and there it's as if a tree has burst into flame amongst its still-green brethren. More and more the trees are giving up this year's ghost, losing their chloraphil and letting their keratin shine through.

The leaves are changing, and changing fast. After a summer that stretched further into October than it ought'o've, Fall looks to be compressing itself into a few short weeks, as temperatures have been dipping from the 80s three weeks ago into the 30s and 40s now.

I think the trees were just hanging on until the cooldown, and are now feeling pressured for their wardrobe change before winter sets in, casting the city into a moder-world Narnia of snow and limb.

And they're rushing, too, perhaps because they're aware that the season's first snowfall is forecast to come as early as Friday.

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Ahh the life of a grad student: Go home from campus at midnight, get to sleep at 2:15am, get up at 7:15am, get to campus again. That's what they mean by early to bed, right? Because somewhere around 1am it stops being late.

The scary part is that's more sleep than I've gotten any other night in the last week, except for Sunday, when I slept in until 11, making a deposit in the sleep bank. I think funds are getting low, but judging by how I'm alert, happy, chai in hand and early for my 8:30 class, I guess my check didn't bounce today. Or maybe I'm just overdrawn...

So it was so cold last night that I carpooled a couple of fellow students home after one of my project's group meeting. I offered Kerry a ride home and she said she'd be fine walking, but 5 minutes later she IMed me back and took me up on the offer. Seems she went outside and discovered just how cold it really was outside.

So it was about 38 degrees (err, Fahrenheit) at around 11:30 last night, clod enough to make your ears burn a bit. This is about as cold as it'll usually get during sane hours in the Bay Area. Every once in a while you'll get ice on the windshield in the morning, but that's just a message sent from a nocturnal place most of us Friscans witness evidence of, but never actually experience.

Yeah, 38 degrees. A stone's toss from freezing. Great. The funny part is go ahead and drop that stone to 32 degrees, and you'll have the average high in February here. Yep. Half the days it doesn't even get that warm! (Yes, I know I'm amusing a bunch of you who grew up with this stuff and live with it every winter. ("Snow? Falling from the sky??") But I'm not going to let the jadedness of others ruin it for me. I cherish my incredulity, however banal it may be to others.

Okay, now I've squandered my earliness, but the day already has a positive spin, and my iPod is churning up nothing but favorites this morning (all hail the 5-star smart-playlist). I hope your morning feels at least half as good as mine does.

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Walking off to class this morning, I almost tripped over this guy on my porch:

Here's lookin' at you, kid.

I got another picture of him in prayer, but I like this one because I can't tell what he's thinking.

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It's 63 degrees in my apartment and it feels so good, after weeks of warm-to-hot and varying humidity. It just feels so crisp. Okay, enough rambling. I just have the kind of general optimisim this morning that only a good night's sleep can grant you (and it's been weeks since I got a good night's sleep. In fact, I only got 6 hours last night as well, but I went to sleep before I was exhausted, so I suppose that has something to do with it. Interesting...)

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We all make our own pockets of space, through sheer force of will.

By one perspective, Pittsburgh, or at least my personal existence in it, is a pocket, grown from a mental void into a small life bounded by dwelling, school, and nascent social structures forming in much the same way as must have happened in the big bang, with particles forming, exploding, reforming; eventually cooling into stable states.

My own 'real-world' pocket, which I feared would be too small for me, has turned comforting. Not so big as to be cavernous, not so cramped as to be claustrophobia-inducing.

But of course that's only one of the pockets I live in.

Fury's grown from a tiny pocket that I and a very small number of other people frequent now and again, to a larger room, anchored by the ley lines of regular visitors. It has conduits to other pockets: when someone leaves a comment it gets pushed into email, in itself a bridge between an ether-formed pocket and the physical. SMS messaging punches straight through to the physical pocket directly (to my literal pocket, if you will.) Geographically removed from most of what I would call my life, I share an individual pocket with each person whom I'm close to.

For Ammy, it exists as an instant messaging window, where semantic meaning is laid bare through conversational text, or flat innuendo that is none the less subtle for the medium, but perhaps too subtle, as a ';)' of acknowledgement can be as coarse as a bursting laugh arising from a whispered comment during a movie.

For my mom, the pocket exists between my ear and my closed eyes. As I talk to her on the cellphone, thee's a part of me that concentrates on making the signal stronger by sheer force of attention and attenuation, while the rest is acutely aware of the narrowness and length of this pocket, shouting across a long, but ultimately thin, cavern.

For each friend there is a different pocket, unique in both texture and timbre. The characteristic they share is the geographic disparity responsible for their existence. Were I local, the person in question would live in real-world pocket, and any other pocket would be of the moment, and not the salient characteristic.

As it is, I'm amazed at the diversity of pockets I've found, made, and maintained in the past six weeks. Be it instant messaging, short email pingpongs, heart-to-heart phone calls, or emails so rare yet beautiful as to be works of art, their very nature calling for a commiserate work of art in response, they are all pockets, and they all hold jewels most valuable. Who could have known that the things I most lamented leaving on the left coast would be my most precious possessions here?

I know: Everyone but me.

Thank you.

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I like that in Pittsburgh, they don't care on which side of the street you park. In residential areas, at least, I can pull in to a space facing the wrong way and nobody cares.

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Wow. This is the first time I've been full-time at a new school in eleven years. One thing's for certain: It's a lot different than starting at Berkeley in '91.

On nearly every axis things are different. At Berkeley I lived in the dorms, surrounded by other freshmen; here I live alone in a quiet neighborhood (across the street from the aforementioned cemetery). Before I came in not knowing what I wanted to do with my life; this time around I'm tightly focused: I know exactly what I want to learn and I have a clear idea of how I want to apply those skills when I finish. Back then I took a lingering academic dalliance that would, over the course of a decade, traverse between academia and industry no less than eight times; this time it's a straight 12-month shot, from Yahoo to my Masters in HCI, back to industry.

I also realize how different a person I am. Always the first to jump to the proverbial wall (you know, the one coated with flowers), shy around strangers while trying so hard to fit in -- a juxtaposition that leads invariably to a palpable social awkwardness far worse than shyness: When you're shy, people overlook you. When you're socially inept, people avoid you.

Luckily 18 year-olds are different than the twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings) in grad school, not to mention our shared interests and complimentary backgrounds.

It turns out that we have a huge leg up on last year's Masters students in that most of us got to know each other before classes, and being a social bunch, we had gatherings pretty much every night the week before classes, so now most of us already know a lot about each other, and hang out together, in sharp contrast with last year, where one of the Masters students told me they spent the whole first semester getting to know each other, and even then they didn't really know everyone. We already feel like a team.

So, first day of classes! More pragmatic and slightly less stressful than Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon condones (or, at least tolerates) 'shopping' for classes: signing up for more classes than you could realistically take, to find the ones you like in the first week or two, then drop the others. This is a nice change from Berkeley where you can't sign up for more than max units, so you have to crash all the classes you want/need. The difference is subtle, and probably all in the student's mind, the distinction between trying to crash into a class and trying to stay in a class, but at least it postpones the despair for a few weeks.

Of course, as a grad student the situation is different. I'm taking one or possibly two classes that are taught at the undergrad level, and are heavily impacted, but as a grad student in the department that offers the class, I got an email today saying I'd been enrolled in the class even though I was #21 on the wait list. It's not as unfair as it sounds, considering that undergrads sign up for Fall classes in April, and incoming grad students sign up in July, so naturally allowances have to be made for impacted courses. Still, it's nice.

Oh, the wireless network: It's great. Every foot of lawn, every lounge, classroom, hallway and broom closet is blanketed in 802.11 goodness. I keep my laptop with me as a matter of course now, pulling it out whenever I'm taking a break on campus, eating lunch, or otherwise want to check in on the ether-world which, month-by-month is where more of my work and communication takes place. It's a wonderful thing to have my distal friends so close, even when they're so far.

I'm making a lot of new friends here, too. Despite the pressure-cooker drive to find new people to share experiences with, I'm making some good friends, and a lot of acquaintances. I still feel odd naming names, since I'm made more aware daily of how many of my costudents read this, but I'm sure I'll feel more comfortable with it as we all get to know each other better.

As soon as I finalize my class load, probably by the end of the week, I'll post the list, and describe each one. You long-timers probably remember the left-hand nav module listing the classes I'm in. Well, I'll bring it back, and I'll try to open it up wider, writing all my assignments in HTML so I can share my voyage of discovery with you.

Well, that's probably it for the moment. I'm struggling to get DSL at home so I don't have to plug and unplug dialup whenever I want to check email or movie times. I also need cable, and a bank account, all of which beg the question "why are you blogging until 6pm when you have domestic things to sort out?" Well, you guys come first.

The apartment's really shaping up, and now that I have a hammer I can finish making my space up just the way I want it. Once I do, I'll take 'after' pictures to go along with the 'before' pics I took last June when I signed the lease.

Oh! And I have a new cellphone number! Okay, call me just too clever, but if you know my old Berkeley home # and want my new Pittsburgh cell #, type the Berkeley home # here (no spaces , parentheses, or dashes):

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Wow. So today was the first day of orientation for the grad students in the CMU HCI program. I had more than my share of trepidation.

Highlights? Well, at various times through the afternoon, three of my classmates-to-be came up to me and said, "Kevin Fox, eh? I know all about you. I've been reading Fury." Scary. Or should I say, "umm. Hi!" Now I just need to get to know them

I was a little disappointed, as was another classmate I could (but won't (ahh, blesed privacy)) mention, that the interaction seemed so strongly one-way. I'm triply glad that I started the yahoo group three months ago, so we knew each other to a degree already, becuase other than a go-around-the-room introduction and a big group lunch, all the info has been them telling us, without consideration for the fact that we left pretty much everyone we knew, and it would be nice if we spent a little of our orientation week performing teambuilding exercises, or at least breaking off into groups for something so we could talk through something other than the perogies in our mouths...

It's all good though, and I'm sure it's going to be better. My friends that I have here have all been here between one and three months, and so have had plenty of time to crest the isolation wave, emerging on the other side as re-adjusted people.

I know I'll get there soon. 'Till then knowing I'm not far is hopefully good enough.

The other realization of the day is that I didn't leave Yahoo to get my masters in order to get a better job when I get out than I could otherwise have gotten, but to get a better next job after that, or after that. Basically, I expect that this is the last time I'll be in school, and once I know that I'll have the steady income-stream, unterrupted by educational dams, promising power and clean energy (oops, unstretch that metaphor, sir), anyhow, once financial constancy is assured, I can work towards the finer things in life, like a home, and maybe a family (though I, err... well, I'm not there yet. There's that whole girlfriend thing to deal with first, let alone wife thing).

Anyhow, getting my Masters should give me the rest of the educational cards I need for my deck, so I won't feel like I have to go back before moving up to a director role somewhere.

And, of course, I'm going to learn a hell of a lot.

And my apartment is shaping up nicely. My mom and I are the masters of IKEA assembly. We find mistakes in the manuals now.

Final note: How odd is it that my mom picked me up after my first day of (ahem, graduate) school? Well, I'm dropping her off at Greyhound tomorrow morning, so then it'll just be me and me...

...err, and you, of course.

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The word of the day is: Assuage.

Specifically, 'Assuage guilt."

I just got back from Columbus, Ohio, from the Buckeye Invitational Chorus competition. Mom did fabulously, as did the other 63 members of the Verdugo Hills Chorus, taking the grand prize for entertainment, boards, and overall. I'm really goad I drove out to see them. They're a really great bunch. It doesn't hurt that it serves to assuage future self-inflicted guilt for not being a good son.

Right now I'm writing to assuage my other guilt, writing on the weblog. It's really frustrating that every minute is occupied with something, most things of which are directly related to making my existence on this distant not-quite-coast habitable, both physically and emotionally. At the same time, I need to post because I want to write the trip up, day by day, and post the pictures (which I know Ammy is waiting for (even though she has other things on her mind at the moment)).

My fear is that you guys, my bit of social live that's ultra-mobile, happy to jump online for the journey, will get bored and drift off. Don't do it! Give me a couple days and real content, real stories, and real insight and imagrey (the kind where I know I'm doing something right because Trisha calls me on a sentence and asks me if I knew that sentence was great when I wrote it). It's all in me, and the strain of it bursting to come out is just even with the strain of improving my physical surroundings, not to mention spending time with Mom, who's here (helping with the aforementioned physical surroundings tasks) until Tuesday morning.

So, I hope I've successfully assuaged my blog-guilt for another day or so, but I'll only know by your comments.

It's amasing how isolation fosters insecurity. Pathetic, huh?

Oh, and my cellphone's dead. No explanation, and so far no resolution, so if you know my Pitts phone, I'll try to remember to plug the phone in when I get offline, and if you want the # and should have it, email me.

Take it easy. It's Sunday!

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Hot off driving 3500 miles, driving another 190 to see my mom's chorus perform in Columbus, Ohio doesn't seem so bad. I'm taking her back with me tomorrow afternoon, to show her around town, and she's promised to help me put together the rest of the IKEA furniture.

I feel bad though: now that I have a thermometer and hygrometer in my wall, I know that it's the 78% humidity in the mornings along with the 78 degree temps that make this place so uncomfortable. Window fans aren't going to arrive until Monday, and my job this morning before going to Columbus is to get a futon for my living room.

Still, the current discomfort is only temporary: Next month the average high dips from 82 degrees to 74, and on to 64 in October, until January when the average daily high just inches over freezing at 34 degrees. I'm sure I'll long for days like today soon enough.

Only two days to orientation. I could use some orientation...

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Ammy posted some more trip details.

I'm still settling in to my apartment, but will be writing on Friday or Saturday, as well as organizing photo galleries.

Video editing will commence when my desktop (firewire-equipped) computer arrives via UPS. Definitely sometime next week.

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Fun for today:

Sitting here, vegging on the computer, twiddling my virtual thumbs while doing a little bit of cleanup waiting for the nice young men in their clean white coats who are coming to take me my furniture.

I'm eagerly anticipating, both with vim and a little trepidation, the moment when, lugging up my queen-size mattress, my delivery-folk (god I hope and pray it's 'folk' and not 'person' (is 'folk' always plural? (is folks merely a hypercorrection, trying to pluralize a plural? (but I digress (even more) ) ) (wait for it...) ) turn the corner and realize that the stairway up to my attic-apartment (which shall henceforth be known as 'the loft' because I like the way it sounds, and because 'loft' is the last four digits of the phone number here) resembles the typical home-type staircase nowhere near so much as it does the skinny, steep stairs that grace the deep centers of medieval cathedrals towers; stairways intended to help the devout ascend, and little else.

Certainly not queen-sized mattresses and assorted other furnitures (speaking of hypercorrecting plurals into plurals).

The $69 delivery sounded like only a marginal benefit over renting my own truck to get these things home until I found out that it includes delivery to my apartment, not simply to the front door.

Word of wisdom for the day: The glory of IKEA is not that you assemble it yourself, but that you can, as the need arises, disassemble it as well. I seem to have this habit of living places where full-sized furniture has trouble getting through...

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The thing that's keeping me sane right now is looking at the bare walls and floors of my apartment, and remembering that it was just 10 days ago that my Telegraph apartment looked the same way. Remembering how alien and sterile *that* looked is making me feel better, giving me inspiration to make *this* space into a home, and realizing that the empty room I'm sitting in right now isn't my home, but just a canvas.

Luckily, IKEA is delivering the paint some time between noon and 4pm today which means, among other things, that I'll have a real bed to sleep on tonight, instead of a mattress formed of pillows and blankets, which has been my three-day fare 'till now.

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I just drove to Cleveland (130 miles) and back, dropping Ammy off at the airport for her flight home. Now I'm back in my apartment, with all my West Coast friends on, or heading back to, their coast, and my few local friends out of town. This is the part where, if I'm going to panic, I'll panic.

Meanwhile, it's 85 degrees out with about 70% humidity, and there are these bugs outside that like to scream.

Gonna take a little decompress break, the first in about two weeks, before regrouping and writing. (By 'break' I mean a few hours, not days or weeks.)

Talk to you soon...

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Okay, pity my lack of posting, but revel in Ammy's.

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