Direction Connection

I would love to be checking my email right now, but unfortunately, I can’t. That’s because the folks at google mail (”gmail”) simply cannot seem to get their act together these days. Often when I try log onto my account, I get either a cutesy littel “Oops” message or the following message:

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

Yeah, right. A few minutes. Sure, I’ve tried that. For about a half hour. In the past when this has happened, I’ve tried emailing the gmail people once I finally am able to log on, so that I can tell them just how much their product sucks. They sent me a lovely little email that basically said, yep, we were having a problem, but it appears to be fixed now. But let us know if it happens again. Super. So now I imagine I’m supposed to save the gmail customer support email address in my hotmail account so I can email the gmail people from hotmail, because if my gmail isn’t working at the time, that’s really the only way I’m going to be able to contact them, isn’t it?

Rebecca just emailed the gmail customer support people, copying my hotmail account so that they can get in touch with me to rectify the problem. Which begs the question: Why don’t I just migrate my email life back to hotmail and forget gmail ever existed? The bells and whistles of gmail are nice, sure, but only if the basic email functionality actually WORKS. Which it doesn’t right now. So what’s the point?

The bottom line: Can the bells and whistles, gmail, and just develop an email interface that actually does what it’s supposed to do–allow users to log on and send and receive messages.

We went to see Pilobolus at the American Dance Festival at Duke University last night with our friends Molly and Susanne. (Here’s the program.) I don’t know much about dance, so our conversation afterwards was somewhat limited to “wasn’t it amazing when …” and “that was so impressive when they …” and “that one with the chairs was unbelievable,” and I found myself wishing that my sister was there to offer her movement thoughts. She was responsible for my last modern dance excursion, when our family went to see Alvin Ailey at Christmas time in NYC, for free, because my sister is cool like that. Anyway, my point: if you have a chance to see them, you should.

It’s been established that Melissa is the more voracious reader of the two of us — I’d be embarassed to calculate the ratio of the books she’s read since we started dating to the books I’ve read since we got together, and avid readers of the blog will note that she is the only one who ever updates the “Now Reading” section. However, a month or so ago we made a trip to The Regulator, a Durham independent bookstore, and I bought a bunch of books in hopes of improving my numbers. Right now I’m in the midst of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I bought because the cover looked cool and the title was neat and I think I’d heard of it somewhere, and I am already three quarters of the way through it, and this is impressive! After I finish, I know that Melissa wants me to read I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe, because she is dying to have someone to talk to about it, and I have discouraged her from talking about it so far, because I don’t want her to ruin it for me. I like Tom Wolfe, a lot — I remember snagging The Right Stuff from my parents’ bookshelf when I was young, and then reading it again when I was older, and I also enjoyed A Man in Full and Hooking Up, a book of short stories. The bad news for Melissa is that, before I’m done with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I am likely to receive two other books I ordered — Ambient Findability and Everything is Miscellaneous. These are non-fiction books, which I know Melissa secretly frowns upon for leisure reading; worse, they are geeky books, and so we will see how I negotiate this delicate situation.

After spending lots of weekends at home, we planned a few weekend getaways for May. The trips occurred on consecutive weekends, but they couldn’t have been more different.

First, we went to the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF). It’s a music and dance festival held twice yearly in Black Mountain, NC. I hadn’t been to LEAF in nearly 5 years, and was excited to go back, particularly because Rebecca had never been there before. We had a really good time camping, listening to good music, contra-dancing, kayaking, and eating bad-for-us festival food. We even bought some jewelry and a hammock that was made by Mayan Indians on the Yucatan Peninsula (or something like that–and yes, I know there’s supposed to be an accent on the second a in Yucatan, but I’m not up to figuring out how to add diacratic marks in WordPress). Now we just need a house where we can set it up (more on that later).

We went back to work for three days, and then headed out to Las Vegas on Wednesday night, to attend the wedding of a long-time friend of Rebecca’s. We arrived at the Luxor very late on Wednesday night (12:30 Las Vegas time, which was 3:30 am East Coast time), where the nice man behind the check-in counter “upgraded” us to a nicer room than what we had reserved. Instead of a room in the pyramid (which is the main part of the hotel, where the casinos are), he set us up in the tower. This ended up being fine (and perhaps preferable in some ways to the room we’d reserved), although he gave us a smoking room with two double beds instead of a King bed. I’m sure he assumed we’d prefer two beds to one, but he could have asked…

In addition to attending the wedding and reception, we saw the Blue Man Group at the Venetian, had some good food, and gambled. I decided that my relationship with money does not support a true gambling habit, so I spent (notice that I did not say “lost,” although that is essentially the truth) $20 on one day and $25 on another day. I played slot machines and video roulette, and I wasn’t very lucky, probably because I didn’t play  very “riskily.” Rebecca dropped a whole lot more than that at the craps tables (I’m convinced she knows the total on some level of her brain, but she’s clearly not dwelling on it).  She demonstrated good beginner’s luck at both craps and video roulette, but enjoyed playing so much that she didn’t leave with money in her pocket.

So those were our May trips. We have more tentatively planned for later in the summer. These likely will include the Blue Ridge Parkway, New York, Cleveland, and Asheville. I’ll also be traveling to Portland, OR (via New York) to see my brother and his family. Note: We will visit Ft. Collins after my sister-in-law has my first little nephew, but probably not until the fall.

Well, in addition to Rebecca’s recent gardening craze, we’ve also gotten quite into birdfeeders lately. There’s this local feed and seed, which has pet food and gardening stuff, as well as lots of birdfeeders, birdseed, and suet. So we got a birdfeeder. And a suet cage. The birds loved the feeder, which we installed by hanging it from a tree using a bungee cord, to discourage the squirrels. The squirrels were delayed, but not deterred. They loved the birdseed–and the suet–they weren’t particularly picky. So Rebecca bought a thistle feeder (really small seed that the squirrels either aren’t interested in or can’t get to because the holes on the feeder are so small they only accommodate beak). She also bought a feeder that suction cups to our window, which she thought would keep the squirrels away because there’s no way they can climb to it.

I was really disappointed that the first feeder had become the Squirrel’s (I’m convinced there’s only one, very evil, squirrel, but Rebecca insists that there are multiple squirrels) domain. So I began googling, and googling, and googling. And I found-a-ha!-the perfect solution! Add cayenne pepper to the birdseed, and the squirrels will stay away (apparently, the birds don’t notice it). So we did. And Rebecca was lucky enough actually to see the Squirrel discover the cayenne pepper. She said it immediately dropped to the ground and began rubbing its face into the grass while she laughed sadistically–I mean, hysterically.

Satisfied that we finally had the squirrels outsmarted, we left for a weekend getaway (more on that later). When we returned, we found the first birdfeeder (the one to which we’d added the cayenne pepper) lying on the ground. The Squirrel had actually gnawed through the cord it hung from (which was connected to the bungee cord)! I now refer to this particular incident as the Revenge of the Squirrel. We haven’t yet fixed it. We think we need to get a small chain, or perhaps coat a new cord with cayenne pepper?

Who would have thought the Squirrel could be so crafty? Or so acrobatic? It’s crazy watching it practically hang upside down to jump onto the birdfeeders, or head-butt the window birdfeeder so the little trays will pop out of it and spill all over the ground. We have a few choice nicknames for the little…bugger, but they’re not appropriate for our blog.

It’s a long story that starts at the farmers market and ends with unexpected mulching, but I think it’s best just told in pictures.

This is what the flower bed in our front yard looked like after I spontaneously decided to weed it. As usual, we neglected to take a true “before” picture, so you can’t see all the junk that I pulled out of it. I disturbed an ant nest and found lots of other critters while I was at it. I may have also killed the rose bush our landlords planted, we’ll see.

This is what it looked like after we planted things:

We bought the plants at Barnes Supply Company, which is a feed & seed store that’s less than a mile from our house. We get our pet food there too, and the Josie-dog always likes to tag along because they give her even more biscuits than I do. We actually made two trips there yesterday — the first to buy herb seedlings to plant (my attempts at seeding them myself failed yet again), and the second, post-mulching, to buy flowers for the flower bed and a birdfeeder for outside the office window.

I hadn’t intended to mulch, you see, much like I hadn’t intended to weed, but our very nice neighbor saw us working and came over and offered us mulch from a pile he has in his back yard from getting some trees cut down. Melissa did the shoveling and I dislodged the mulch with a hoe, and we used the trusty wagon to haul it from his yard to ours.

[We first spotted the wagon at the Atlanta Pride festival, being pulled by a woman in a gaggle of lesbians, and it was love at first sight. It has since been dubbed the lesbian wagon. Every time we use it, we get to make use of a new feature, it seems -- yesterday's feature was the sides that swing down. If you line the wagon with a tarp, fill it with mulch, take it to the place that needs mulching, and then swing down the sides, the mulch sort of falls out like magic, and it is exciting. We do know that we could also use a wheelbarrow for this purpose, but it would diminish the joy.]

Anyway, here are some of the flowers and herbs that we planted. The herbs I can identify; the flowers I picked based on how pretty I thought they were, with no regard to whether they would actually grow, let alone thrive, in the setting I’ve chosen for them, so I’m afraid you’re on your own for figuring out what they are.

Thyme

Parsley

Flowers & herbs in planters

?

Some kind of heather

Not sure but it looks good with the marigolds

Birdfeeder; bird came separately

OK, now that we are really and truly very near the end of Buffy, we need to replenish our Netflix queue. I noticed tonight that we had only one movie in our queue, and it was not even one that sounds particularly interesting to me. So I raided the queues of my only two Netflix “friends,” Julie and Ange. Now I am up to five movies. Help! Does anyone out there want to be our Netflix “friend”?

The last post was Rebecca’s attempt to encourage Josie to communicate about her relationship with Rebecca’s new toy. The new toy is a robotic vacuum. Yes, my techie-geek girlfriend has actually insisted that we invest in a robot to vacuum our floors (avid readers of our blog will take note that this is in keeping with the pay-someone-else-to-mow-our-yard theme). The contraption is called the iRobot Roomba Discovery Vacuuming Robot. Rebecca convinced me to make this purchase because (1) we got 20% off at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and (2) she put it on her credit card at 0% interest, so we don’t actually need to pay for it until August.

I was initially unconvinced of the wisdom of this purchase, but it’s turned out to be a very good thing for me, because Rebecca is now taking an unprecedented degree of responsibility for the welfare of our floors. I will now be researching any and all gadgets that might motivate her to clean other aspects of the house…a scumbuster for the tub? A gadget related to scooping the cat litter? The possibilities seem endless. Stay tuned…

Hi. This is the Josie-dog. Now, I know you’re thinking that I am a dog, and so I can’t use a computer, but I have been watching the people, and it is not that hard. Plus, there is something that I need to say.

See, a couple of months ago, the people got some new animals. I was jealous, I grant that, but I made my peace with the cats. They were afraid of me at first, and I didn’t even try to use that to my advantage. I’d lived with cats before, and while they are snobby and not nearly as devoted as I am, and they get to be on the furniture and I don’t, I do get to go on trips with the people while the cats stay home and clean themselves, or whatever it is that cats do when they are alone. So it is not all bad. Sometimes Myster (the people think they are clever, spelling her name like that, but really it used to be spelled Mister until the people realized that Myster was actually a girl — silly people) will give me the time of day, and I think we have formed a special, if unspoken, bond in the time we spend watching the people eat and hoping they will feed us.

So anyway, the cats. The cats, the cats were fine. But now there is this new thing. It is smaller than the cats, and white, and round, and it sits quietly in the corner most of the time. I am pretty sure it is not another cat, and it may not even be an animal, but it is very hard to understand what it could be. Every morning for the last three days, one of the people has gone over to it and touched it. And when the people touch it, it starts moving and beeping like magic, and then it makes this awful noise. And then it wanders around the house aimlessly, running into things (including me!) and then changing course arbitrarily, like it has no idea where it’s going. Can’t it see I am a dog and it should be afraid of me like the cats were? The people act like there is nothing strange about this, and I follow them around the house trying to tell them, but they don’t seem to understand. It is very disconcerting, I tell you.

I have noticed that the people (well, the person — only one of the people ever did this) haven’t been pushing around the loud scary machine since this thing arrived, so that is good. When the loud scary machine comes out, I get shaky and try to hide, whereas if this thing will just stop running into me, I think I can come to terms with it. Plus, it seems to unnerve the cats, and, secretly, I kind of like that.

About a week ago, Melissa and I realized it was time we admitted something to ourselves: we were never going to mow our lawn, and we needed to suck it up and find someone who would. I was tasked with sending an email to the neighborhood list in search of an unsuspecting teenager who would tackle our overgrown lawn, and whoa! There are a lot of people in our neighborhood who want to mow lawns. Kids, grown-ups, people’s neighbors — within a day I had more emails than I knew what to do with. We settled on Ellie and Sam, who made a very convincing pitch to do the mowing for $5 less than we were offering. They’re still getting the full $30 (actually, for this first time they’re getting $37, because we feel guilty for letting it get so overgrown, and we have seven extra dollar bills between us) so perhaps they were just clever that way.

The point of all of this is: we are the grown-ups who hire teenagers to mow their lawn. I am sitting here at my desk, doing work, and Sam is outside mowing our lawn. This is a strange sensation. And, as Melissa says, that is all.