swingbug.net

Confession

Dear Blog,

I have a confession. You may have noticed that I haven't been around much. The truth is, I've been spending time with this other blog. No, it's not like that; I swear. It's a work thing.

So I was brave and I went to my 20-year high school reunion. The family calendar, busy as it generally is, left my husband and I double-booked for the weekend, so we had to divide and conquer. He went off to one event without a date, and I went to my reunion without a date.

So sad.

I sat there at the kitchen table the morning of the event, staring at the tickets, and wondering if I was going to go through with it and walk in the door that night or not.

Ten Thousand T-Shirts

We had a nice holiday weekend around here. Between canoeing and a ball game, I snuck in sometime with my fix-me pile in the craft room. I'd call it a "mending" pile, but most of the stuff perched on that small mountain require more than just a little TLC with needle and thread.

Here's one success story from the weekend. I won this t-shirt at a geography developers group meeting in Sacramento a couple of months ago. They give them out as trivia prizes for knowing things like how many degrees of longitude there are in a UTM zone. (It's 6, if you were dying to know.)

Radiolab Recommendation

This is just a short one. I was binging on the Radiolab podcast today, in so much as one can binge on Radiolab anyway. When I've finished one episode, I always feel like I need to stop and take some time to reconsider my outlook on life. Or at least to reconsider my outlook on my outlook on life, if you can dig that.

My Badass Week

For my birthday this year, my husband presented me with Flogging Molly tickets, which is hands-down my favorite living band. The concert fell on a Wednesday night in Oakland. We're not particularly impulsive people, and taking off and driving an hour and a half to see a concert mid-week like that, on a school night, as it were, isn't something we do generally speaking. The last time we did something like that was eight years ago when we decided that we had to fly to Vegas to go to The Star Trek experience before they shut it down. (Which. Was.

Javascript, Summer Camps, and other Decisions

I've been struggling with a javascript application at work.

I didn't really start programming until I met python. I love python. We understand each other. It's a very direct language. It runs in order, expects you to be specific, and cuts you no slack. It's very efficient and it loves making lists. I love making lists too. Python and I have a lot in common.

Miss New Orleans

There's music everywhere here. On any given street corner in the French Quarter there could be a band playing -- with dented up instruments and announced by cardboard sign -- that'll blow your socks off. They're playing for change and they have a box full of home-burned CDs enscribed in sharpee and wrapped up in binder paper. Then you go into the clubs on Frenchmen Street and your world gets rocked again. Everywhere you turn, jazz, brass, and blues.

Voter Registration Deadline is Today

Hey Californians, today is your last day to register to vote if you want to vote in the upcoming primary election on June 7th.

The Secretary of State website can hook you up. It's easy. It only takes a couple of minutes.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/

Please register to vote. Really. It's important.

That's all.

Pending

And I'm in an airport again.

Not my airport. But if you can navigate one well, you can roll with the others easily enough. And what I've learned from a year of frequent business travel is that you don't always end up in the airport in which you expected to find yourself when you booked your flight anyway.

Fireflies, Freshman, and a lack Flying Cars

Had a birthday last week. That's one more trip around the sun and natural selection hasn't gotten the better of me yet. Is good.