Claiming geek credit

Randall Munroe, author of xkcd, visited the office today... here he is painting a small Black Hat on the wall about 15 feet from where I sit.





I know you're probably thinking that working where I work is almost cheating, when it comes to the geek culture points game. You're right! And I do so love a good cheat.

It's all kind of a blur

Do you ever have a crazy night, one of those ones where you eventually stumble home thinking I can't believe I actually did that!?

So do I.

May flowers

Work is going swimmingly these days. My boss went away for a while and you know what they say... when the cat's away the mice will wrap everything on his desk in aluminum foil. Helping to do this was quite rewarding -- I'd heard stories of foil-wrapped dorm rooms and so forth, but never actually gotten to see it done. So I'm delighted to share the very pink results with you:



As you might guess, the new arrival is a baby girl. :)

Also, here are some earrings I made last night, out of pieces of other earrings I didn't like so well. Before you go giving me points for being a good recessionista, I should confess that this got me thinking about earrings, and so yesterday I went out and spent $30 on a pair of new ones as well. This was more just about having fun making things, which is a kind of fun that can be had with many, many media, leaving nothing terribly special about jewelry-making. Wires and pliers do offer a lot in the way of fast gratification though, and every year or so I find myself having a little spree like this one.

Spring balancing act

In April we got actual acrobalance classes started up in Cambridge! Okay, it's not as good as a full circus school with dedicated handstand classes, but it still fills me with joy and is good enough to pull me away from working late on Tuesdays.

Here I am standing on top of Zac Diener, the teacher -- and this image is worth clicking to see the large version, just for the sheer bliss on my face. (I also look pretty big here, in an acrobat way; am I on my way to having real acrobat shoulders?) Zac is very nice to stand on.



Here's a harder pose that very much represents what I do in acrobatics these days. Since I love to fly and base, and am of medium size, I'm a good middle person in three-person tricks.



I've been prioritizing pretty strictly lately, trying to keep everything together so that I can work hard and play hard without exploding. After many weekends of extra effort I'm all caught up on email, and I've been sleeping enough that I'm actually off caffeine. So that's success, for now. :) One of the many things I'm explicitly allowing to fall by the wayside is cooking, which is why I had to take a picture last week of my most successful assemblage in a while: banana slices, with Nutella and an almond and some cinnamon on top.



I also made taro fries tonight on a whim, after spotting a taro root in the grocery store and thinking vaguely of Terra Chips. It's a bit sad, isn't it, that I'm proud of making a one-ingredient recipe? Any time that I actually apply heat to food these days, it's a tiny domestic triumph.

Resneakered, refinanced, and people reclined on my feet

March is bonus-time at Google, and my self-imposed spending freeze is over. I really did buy sneakers... and, much more excitingly, we refinanced the mortgage on our condo, because interest rates are low these days. It went smoothly, with really none of the drama or possible consequences of buying the condo in 2004. We were pleasantly surprised to find that both our credit scores are way higher now than they were at the time, but it makes sense when you realize that it's a measure of credit use over time. Five years of regular mortgage payments turn out to help.

(It was interesting to see the new tools that have popped up for homebuyers in the last few years. Zillow.com knows quite a bit about our place, and their "Zestimate" is quite close to what the professional appraiser said after $300 and a few hours of work. Check out our Walk Score, too -- walker's paradise! Yeah.)

I'm heading to NYC this weekend for a pair of acroyoga workshops. I'm looking forward to these, a little nervously -- I'm getting pretty good at acro by Boston standards, but I know there's much more advanced scene in New York.

Here I am basing someone in our class last week:



I'm looking forward to learning more counterbalances -- I seem most naturally inclined to do things with people my own size, since I don't really have a preference for basing over flying, or flying over basing. Even thinking about it feels strange, like trying to choose whether I prefer inhaling or exhaling.

Jeans or a T-shirt? Ketchup or mustard? BOTH, PLEASE.

Spiky, spiky spending

I was thinking lately about a daydream/daymare scenario I used to have when I was a kid (doubtless fueled by all that SF reading)... the one in which I'm in a bunker or spacecraft, sometimes all alone, and surrounded by all the supplies I could need for the next X years but with no way to get anything else. Well, I looked around my house yesterday and realized I'm nearly in that situation. Not with respect to food, of course... but I have do have clothes, dishes, a stack of books I haven't read and hundreds more I would enjoy re-reading, yarn enough to knit for maybe a year or so before running out, video games I haven't played or have barely played that could keep me entertained for many hours apiece, exercise equipment (minimal, but I could stay fit at home if I HAD to), a computer that alone offers hundreds of possibilities. Huh. I practically have my bunker.

With thoughts like that in my head, I was going through my old email today and found something I thought would be dry as dust: my credit card's year-end summary from 2008. To be really clear, this is not remotely a complete picture of my finances and does not include any expenses that are joint with my husband; it's basically my discretionary spending.

Here's my timeline for the year. Wow! Look how spiky this is! And what a weird little story it told me, when I looked in more detail at the months that were further away from the mean. (Original chart was just for 2008; I added January '09 in with Photoshop.)



The purchase of the elliptical machine sets the scale for the year a bit falsely, because that was a joint expense, but even without that, doesn't it look to you like I'm on an every-3-months kind of spending cycle? Something is going on that I don't recognize, because that graph doesn't look anything like the graph of my happiness for the year. You can even see from my labeling that I spent extra money, and also didn't spend money, for reasons that both positive and negative. (As a side note, June was my lowest month, and I made TONS of purchases in that time period. Small ones, in the Merchandise category. This is apparently the way to have a low credit card bill while not feeling deprived.)

2009 is going to look a little different. I'm starting off my year trying to live on 40% of my salary for a little while as 60% goes into retirement savings, which isn't a budget I can actually balance without cramping my husband's style too. So I've been writing down the things I want to buy instead of buying them, and actually enjoying the break from consumerism; as I said, I haven't run out of books, so all is well. Maybe I'll start doing this "virtual bunker" thing every year. That said, it really isn't sustainable (my sneakers have holes in the toes!) and the graph says I'm overdue for a spending spree in March. How odd... that's right when I'm expecting an extra check. :)

I shall spend it on sneakers and Starbucks.

Home or office? Please stay home.

On the subway this morning, I was treated to an ad that really made me worry about work/life balance in America today. I managed to get a picture with my cell phone:



Can you read that blurry writing? Yes, under the nice, pretty pregnant woman it says "Save $10.00 on your first home or office delivery". Home or office?... home or office? Shudder.

Sometimes I think I've missed my calling as a proofreader / editor.

(Edit: In case you have not missed such a calling, the ad makes it sound like there's a good chance the woman is going to give birth at the office. Delivery, get it? And women, I beg of you, don't do this. It's just not work-appropriate, unless perhaps you are an OB/GYN.)

Luckily, someone in the subway system was on the job. This Peapod ad (for it is a Peapod ad we are mocking, and I don't think they were making a "pea in the pod" type pun) appears with a grade and some advice for the ad-writers directly to its right.



D. WATCH YOUR STEP.

Of course, part of me is afraid that if I did have a proofreading or advertising job I would take too much pleasure in mishaps like this to correct them or let a near-miss actually miss. I might be the very person to slip this kind of thing into a grocery ad, or refer to customers of plus-size clothing as "a large and growing segment of the population." (That's one of my favorites of all time, from a research article when I worked in retail analytics.)

To round out this visual amusement-fest, here is a photo-comic about our new President that made me laugh today:



Oh sure, he is closing down Guantanamo and all that, but now we know how he blows off steam in between those things... laughing at kitty-cats. Barack, you meanie!