Just over a year ago, around Independence Day, I joined eHarmony in hopes of finding someone to spend my life with. I could write volumes about my experiences there, and about how utterly happy I am that I took that step. Instead I’d like share a blog posting that I wrote and only shared with a very special woman. I wasn’t ready to openly share my relationship on this site then; I am now. Allow me to introduce you to Sibylle through a recounting of our first meeting, which happened the weekend of August 12 - 13, 2006.
Barefoot in the Fountain (originally written August 14, 2006 @ 6:42 am) Over the weekend, my relationship with Sibylle deepened; it stepped from the online world into the real world. At the same time it is wonderful, beautiful, and scary. I am one minute numb and the next tingling all over. Thoughts of her steal in to my focus and suddenly I’m smiling. Then self-doubt creeps in and makes me afraid again. I’m all over the map emotionally - and I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything else in the world.
On Saturday she had to be in town to pick up a friend. We agreed through email that if she came early we could meet before hand. Both of us posses a fear of “dating”, of that first conversation. For me it is a fear of rejection, a fear that the troll I feel like inside will creep out and I’ll be shunned. So rather than meet or have a date her idea was to simply be in the same place at the same time. Sit quietly together. Read. Not talk. With that thought in mind I set off for the airport and our first time in the same place at the same time.
Since reading was a part of the plan I had a new book with me. It might have well as been writing in Swahili, for while I could read the words my mind wasn’t capable of putting sense to their meanings. The designated meeting spot was terribly noisy so I didn’t hear my cell phone ring, but suddenly I noticed a new voice mail had been left. It was her. Calling to tell me when she’d arrive. I listened to the message again and again just to drink in her voice. It was beautiful. Then I got a text message asking me to come find her. Walking down the concourse my heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t hear anything else. Seeing Sibylle sitting, then standing and walking towards me left me shaking. As if we were too old lovers reunited, or long-lost friends together again, we hugged each other for the longest time. It was one of the warmest embraces I’ve ever felt. I think both of us were shaking a bit as we sat down together.
Any pretense at not talking, of just sitting quietly together was gone We spent the next several hours sitting quietly, or talking. Taking walks up and down the concourse. We tentatively held hands. Once or twice she started to put her head on my shoulder. I felt alive and numb, as fragile as freshly blown glass, and carefree as a leaf blown on the wind. I would have stayed seated there next to her forever had she asked.
On Sunday I drove to where she lives, and we spent the afternoon together. I was just as scared, maybe more so, this time. What if she’d changed her mind after seeing me in person the previous day? What if the previous night had just been a dream? Was I really here, was I really about to meet her for a second time? I ate something for lunch but cannot remember what now.
Our afternoon was beautiful, surreal. We walked through a park, Sibylle slipped her shoes off and waded in a fountain. We visited an old friend of hers, who teased her, and she gently covered my ears and told me not to listen, while smiling. Later she playfully pulled me out of the friend’s house as he had started teasing again. The casual familiarity felt wonderful. Sure we were both as nervous as long tailed cats in a room of rocking chairs, but there were moments of calm and clarity that felt oh so good. Even the nervousness felt good, in a way. Sibylle showed me her studio and home. It was eclectic and warm, a new facet of her personality - I felt honored that she would trust me in her space.
As was becoming our habit we started and ended our time together will a long, warm embrace. It’s like being bathed in sunlight and feeling a cool breeze at the same time. Holding her in my arms while being held in hers is simply amazing. I cannot wait to see her again.
In the months since then we have traveled thousands of miles, exchanged hundreds upon hundreds of emails, text messages, and phone calls. I am thrilled, honored, and beside myself with happiness that Sibylle is a part of my life, and I hers. And I am pleased to introduce her to all of you.
I’ve been using my iPod on a daily basis at my new job which has brought to a light a couple of quirks in how it handles smart playlists. For those of you who aren’t iPod and iTunes savvy, a smart playlist is dynamic; you specific parameters and the contents of the list are filtered through those parameters. For example, you might create a list that only contains music not played in the last month.
I’ve been using a variation of the smart play list described by Brad Root on Smart Playlists.com (Yes, there is a site for everything on the Internet.), called Floating Shuffle.
In a nutshell this article describes how to nest several smart playlists to create a random sampling of music from your collection. Here are the five underlying smart playlists:
Least Recently Played (LRP) : Limit to 50 songs selected by least recently played Least Often Played (LP): Limit to 50 songs selected by least often played Most Recently Played (MRP): Limit to 50 songs selected by most recently played Most Often Played (MP): Limit to 50 songs selected by most often played Random (R): Limit to 50 songs selected at random, not in the other lists
A composite list, made up of the 250 songs selected in the five underlying lists is next. Finally a smart playlist that you actually listen to, Shuffle, which selects songs from the composite list provided the song hasn’t been played in the last 25 days. (The original article used 4 days, I’ve bumped mine up to 25.)
The Shuffle list was used heavily when I was toting the Powerbook to work every day, however it doesn’t work as well for me on the iPod. Smart playlists do update on the iPod even when you don’t synchronize with the base computer frequently. However, they only update when the end of the list is reached. Having 250 songs in the list means that list only refreshes when I reach the end of approximately 20 hours of music. Switching to an album or different playlist results in Shuffle starting over again at the top of the same set of songs.
So I’ve changed the settings on the Shuffle smart playlist to select only 50 songs from the composite list that haven’t been played in the past 25 days. Between morning and afternoon commutes, and severals hours listening at work each day I can traverse a 50 song playlist in day or two. Now I’m getting a better shuffle through my music.
In the course of my professional life I have changed jobs a number of times. In most of those instances there comes a point in time where you know you are going to leave the current job and a sometimes subtle, sometimes profound change occurs. I refer to this change as the blinders coming off.
While I am not a horse person I recognize blinders as a piece of the tack worn by the horse to prevent it from seeing anything to the sides. The “blinders” in this case don’t actually blind the animal but they do induce a form of tunnel vision; if it is straight ahead the horse can see it, otherwise it doesn’t exist. I think we go through our lives with various blinders on as well. Some we knowingly choose to wear, others are there subconsciously.
In my experience, most of the jobs I’ve left voluntarily have, in the process of leaving, contained a moment where the blinders came off and I allowed myself to see the little annoyances, or perhaps the larger hidden costs of the situation. It is as if once you are no longer dependent upon being satisfied with the position you can see all the things you don’t like about it clearly.
Turns out that moving has a similar blinder removal epiphany. My current living situation is in a gated community. The gate, and surrounding fence, supposedly makes the property more secure. And, while I suppose it does add a certain level of deterrence, the gate itself is a royal pain. In the three plus years I have lived here there hasn’t been a single week when one of the four gates (two in and two out) at the main entrance haven’t been out of commission. One night recently the entrance gate for my side of the property wouldn’t open; we had to manually push it back on its tracks to get access. And almost every time I come home there is a car sitting, idling in the guest turn-around waiting for a resident to enter so they can tailgate through the gate while it is open
That the gate provides any security at all is a joke; the only dwelling I’ve ever had robbed was this one.
I say all of this knowing full well that the new place has some hidden “features” that I am carefully tucking behind the blinders, features that won’t become obvious to my until it is time to move from there.
I get tired of endless popup notifications from the various denizens of the system tray telling me well-meaning but generally useless bits of information. One aspect of the Mac OS X interface that I truly like is that you are only notified when there is some action you need to take, not for every minor change in your operating system’s landscape.
The Wireless connectivity icon, and the Ethernet connectivity icon are the worst offenders in my book. I use a wireless broadband card to connect while I am at work, so both of these system tray features are constantly telling me that there is no connection. First the wireless connectivity monitor spouts off, and then the Ethernet one. It’s annoying to me.
So.
Thanks to Google, and this page, I give you these steps, recorded here so I don’t have to find them again.
Enjoy your notification free world.
In the autumn of 1987 I took my first cruise, a Windjammer trip, to the Caribbean. At the time all the identification that was required was your driver’s license. Two years later, in 1989, I took a second cruise to the Caribbean, this time with a passport in hand. The passport provided some cheap souvenirs; each new island (country) visited added their visa stamp to one of the pages. Martinique, Dominica, Guadalupe, St. Lucia, Grenada, and others all graced the pages in the back of that passport.
In 1994 I traveled to Europe and added stamps for Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Flipping through the pages at home made me feel like a world traveler.
In 2002, in preparation for a Hawaiian cruse, that would include a stop at the Republic of Kiribati, I renewed my passport. At the end of that process my original was returned to me, with (I believe) a hole punch in the number to mark it as expired. I liked that I was allowed to keep my cheap souvenirs, the record of where I had been in the world. The 2002 cruise was disappointing, mechanical difficulties on the ship prevented us from seeing Kiribati so I didn’t add stamps to the new passport.
In two months time, however, I am returning to Europe and was looking forward to adding new stamps to my passport. Only I can’t find the blasted thing anywhere. Moving in 2004 resulting in a lot of boxes in storage. And since professional packers were employed to fill those boxes I have only a vague idea of what is where now. Over the past several weeks repeated trips have been made in vain to the locker to sift through the boxes looking for the one that has my passports hidden away. I’ve racked my brain again and again trying to remember the last time I knew for certain where my passport was located in the Illinois house, hoping that memory would give me a clue as to which box to search. Short of emptying each of dozens of boxes piece by piece, I have no way now of finding that little blue book.
The United States is changing their travel requirements, no longer will US citizens be able to go to places like Mexico or Canada, or US holdings in the Caribbean without a passport. This change has resulted in a huge backlog at the State Department as thousands upon thousands of new passport applications have been made. The newspapers have horror stories of people who have waited months to get their passport.
I have 61 days.
Over the weekend I downloaded and printed off the various forms I need to present. First is a form explaining that my current passport is lost, next is an application for a new one. Of course, without a passport I need to prove who I am all over again. A quick web search and $33 spent should get me a certified copy of my birth certificate from New York by the end of the week. Next will be new pictures, and then a trip to the post office. In addition to the passport fee ($97) I’ll have to pay for expedited service ($60) and then I’ll have to wait.
The hardest part will be stopping the search for my missing passport, once I set the wheels in motion for a re-issue of it, I assume it would royally screw things up to find the missing one and try to stop the re-issue process. I figure that a day or two after the new passport arrives in the mail, the missing one will fall out of a previously searched drawer or box. Which will actually be okay; I’ll still have my visa stamp souvenirs.
My favorite ice cream topping is a toss up between caramel and butterscotch. Part of the attraction, for me, is that the cold of the ice cream changes the consistency of the topping, making it gooey, then gummy, and finally brittle.
This thickening of the topping is the best analogy I can think of to describe how my back feels when the arthritis flares up. Normally my back is fluid and flexible, like warm caramel topping. Some days it is a bit thicker, like topping freshly poured over cold ice cream. I can still move, but there is a band across my lower back, about the height of a tuxedo cummerbund that feels sticky and prickly. It is sort of an itching sensation.
A moderate arthritis episode resembles the caramel or butterscotch when it has been on the ice cream for a while. It is thicker and far less pliable. You get the feeling that if you moved to fast or too far something would break. The itching sensation is more of a burn, and tends to be localized in one spot rather than across my entire back.
A bad episode, like the one I’ve had the past couple of days, results in loss of mobility and flexibility. The arthritis “coating” has now hardened into a rigid shell that cuts and bites when I move. Relaxing actually helps to lessen the sensation but as that is often accompanied by a change in posture, and movement equals pain, you are left trying to hold still, hardly daring to breathe.
Where the thickening ice cream topping analogy breaks down is in the treatment of a bad episode. Heat, which would soften the topping, is the wrong way to treat arthritis. In my case the nerves are pinched in my bad due to degenerating disks; the pinch makes the muscle sore. Sore muscles contract and, since they are attached to the spine, they pull the vertebrae out of alignment, pinching the nerve even harder. This spasm builds on itself - a really nasty feedback loop. Using ice to numb the muscles and deaden them to pain allows them to relax breaking the feedback loop. A strong all-day painkiller is truly a Godsend.
A severe arthritis episode leaves you flat on your back. Literally. Fortunately I’ve only experienced one of these, and it was the result of some well-intentioned massage that was done without awareness of my condition. At the time I thought I was still experiencing the lingering effects of a pulled groin muscle and that a massage would help. Instead it produced massive pain as every muscle, and every nerve, in my lower back was sore at once. Had I known that I had arthritis I wouldn’t have had the massage. And I would have used lots and lots of ice afterwards.
The other thing that is not intuitive about this condition is that some movement is good. When it hurts to inhale deeply and you aren’t able to bend forward to put on your own socks and shoes, the idea of moving to feel better is very counter-intuitive. However, movement that doesn’t add to the pain helps to circulate blood and the body’s natural responses to pain to the afflicted area. Talking a short walk can make a huge difference in how tight or painful the hardening shell of arthritis feels.
Today my arthritis is nice and warm, loose, not impeding me at all.
Now that I am working downtown I park in an underground ramp. My employer is nice enough to offset the cost of this (roughly $60 a month) so all I have to do is slow down at the gate while my token is scanned by the overhead reader and enter (or exit) the garage.
The entrance I use off of Washington Street has a booth that is manned for those visitors who don’t have monthly parking passes. In the mornings it is manned by a very cheerful woman who, if you smile and wave to her, will smile and wave to you in a manner that suggests she is delighted to see you. It puts a smile on my face every day.
We need a word for those strangers in our lives that we see on a regular basis, that we have some interaction with, but whom we don’t really know or maybe even speak to.
Recently I’ve been using a new email client, which means I’ve been training a new spell checker to the foreign and technical words I use commonly. The one word that the dictionary didn’t recognize, which really surprised me was OK, or as I am wont to spell it, okay.
Curiosity got the better of me, so here is more than you ever wanted to know about okay.
Yesterday we installed a new digital thermostat, replacing an ancient, mercury filled model. Usually I’m not one for reading directions, trusting instinct and dumb-luck to see me through whatever it is I’ve undertaken. Since I’ve never played around with thermostats before, and on the assumption that there might be electricity involved, I actually read through the instructions before starting.
Turns out there is some electricity involved, but that wasn’t the highlight of the directions. No, the highlight was the line that suggested wrapping the wires disconnected from the old thermostat around a pencil to prevent them from falling back into the wall until they were attached to the new thermostat. A seemingly simple step but one that defined the whole experience for me.
We employed a small screwdriver in lieu of a pencil, and between the two of us held on to the wires while reattaching them to the new unit. Thanks to the directions we avoided a wire fishing expedition, and moreover, we were successful in making the thing work.
There are lots of situations in life where dropping the wires into the wall could happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of them came with directions to warn you ahead of time?
For the past several years I’ve been actively reading numerous blogs on a near daily basis. At first it was just a handful of sites that I liked for one reason or another. Over time links these sites had led me to other sites, and so on. Being moderately organized I keep all the blog URL in a folder on my Bookmarks bar in Firefox so when I want to see what everyone has to say I can just right-click and select “Open All in Tabs.”
Unfortunately the list has grown and grown until there are some 220 entries in the blogs folder. Firefox is capable of opening all of these sites more or less simultaneously. Selecting “Open All in Tabs” results in 100% processor use and a jump in memory allocated but it does eventually work. Trying to consume 220 sites, however, doesn’t work. Not all of them change on a daily basis, and trying to find the new signal amongst all the unchanged noise made the experience less and less enjoyable.
(Yes, I know about RSS and have at various times employed a RSS reader. However, I much prefer to read a site as formated for the web. As much as I enjoy the content I enjoy the look and feel a site employs.)
In an effort to make my daily read list more manageable I went through all 220 sites yesterday and culled out the ones I really like. Sites that hadn’t been updated in the past six months were left behind, as were those that no longer scratched the aesthetic itch that originally caused them to be included in my list. In the end I reduced the list to a mere 75 sites. The full list still has it’s folder, and once in a while I’ll load it just to see if any of the “b-side” sites merit a return to the “a-list.”
You can see my “a-list,” and all my other bookmarks over on del.icio.us; at my del.icio.us.