Geeky Mama

Don't know much trigonometry...

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:36:00 +0000

So, here's what I'm thinking on the topic of school and how I got there.

I managed to get all the way through college (the first time) without realizing that I thought math was fun. In high school I took math through Calculus AB, with the inimitable Dr. Jalbert (aka, Uncle Butchie for you Prepsters out there), but only scored a 3 on the AP exam, probably because in high school I was a) lazy, b) distracted by boys, and c) lazy. So that meant I was stuck with a semester of Calculus at UVA in order to fill the math requirement; I think I earned a B, and was lucky to do so because my Egyptian professor was very nice but totally unintelligible.

Having "confirmed" that math was not for me, and having not yet figured out that computers and technology were eventually going to become a major obsession - which would have suggested I reconsider the math question - I walked away from math and spent the rest of college reading Great Books and being distracted by boys.

A year or two after I graduated, I was living in Tampa and working at my high school, and I started thinking about going into education. That tends to happen when one is surrounded all day by smart, passionate, dedicated people who love what they do and do it because they want to make the world a better place. So I took a Curriculum & Instruction course and a Statistics course at the local university; was mildly entertained by C&I, but loved Statistics. LOVED it. That should have been a clue. I then taught for a year and became more acquainted with the tolerance and patience (with the parents, as much as the students) required to be in education, and decided education wasn't for me either.

Flash forward a year or so: I'm living in Miami with my first husband, who's getting his MBA. By this point, I'd figured out that computers were the coolest things ever, and I started taking a few classes that might eventually prepare me for graduate school in computer science. (Note: this was 1992, so imagine how different that looked back then.) These classes included Calculus (again - do you know anyone else who's taken Calculus three times by choice?), Logic Design, and Discrete Math (taught by this adorable Dutch, I think, professor who often made the unfortunate choice of wearing black socks with his shorts and Teva sandals). I absolutely rocked the Logic Design and Discrete Math classes, and got yet another B in Calculus because, honestly, the professor - who was only 4 or 5 years older than I - was the cutest thing on two legs, and I spent an awful lot of class time looking at his behind while he drew equations on the blackboard.

Lest you think mathematicians are dorky guys with pocket protectors and poor social skills - take my word for it, THEY AREN'T ALL THAT WAY. My goodness. But I digress.

Divorce and an intense dislike for Miami interfered (and no, the divorce had nothing to do with the gorgeous Calculus professor). Next stop: Seattle. Still needing to scratch the school itch when I got here, I audited a geology class on Volcanoes at UW, figuring that if I was going to live in the land of earthquakes and volcanoes (even dormant ones), I maybe should know something about them. I started (but didn't finish, for a reason I can't now remember) introductory Chemistry at UW as well. Yes, for fun. No, I don't know why. And yes, I really enjoyed it. I also took an online Women's Studies class from the New School in NYC, back before pretty much anyone was doing that, and an early 20th century literature class via correspondence through the University of Minnesota. I considered medical school for about 2 weeks, decided that was a dumb idea, and finally settled on the Master's of Liberal Arts idea which took me to Harvard. LOVED that too, and even though my concentration was in Psychology, my favorite class while there was, not too suprisingly, Statistics.

We moved back to Seattle, had a baby, and then I spent four years avoiding my thesis and one year actually researching and writing it and referring to it as "that damned thesis". Best part was the statistical analysis. I was finally starting to get the message about the math. But I was tired after that, so I spent the next couple of years doing nothing academic - probably the longest dry spell ever.

And then, about a year ago, the itch returned. I've been trying to ignore it for a while, mostly because I had no time to go to school and therefore HAD to ignore it, but things in the rest of my life have slowed, and now I can think about this again.

So - math and science this time around. I should have listened earlier. I should have paid attention to all those aptitude and achievement tests that said I was good at math. I should have known that it was meaningful when my single favorite assignment or project in all four years of college was a huge spreadsheet programming project in Accounting. I should have found it significant when I started losing sleep because I was staying up until 2 in the morning playing on Khan Academy.

I'm interested in astronomy, more math - maybe applied math - and physics. Biggest problem: it's been almost two decades since I studied any kind of math besides statistics. All those semesters of Calculus are gone, lost in the haze of memory of a really cute professor's rear end. I've forgotten trig, geometry, how to solve quadratic equations by factoring, who the hell Pythagoras was and what his theorem was (although at least I remember he had one), and what the difference is between a degree and a radian. It'll probably all come back very quickly, but I certainly need to review.

The tricky part now is figuring how to get up to speed so I can, you know, take Calculus for the fourth time, since it's required for pretty much everything else I want to do. Practically everything beyond basic arithmetic either has prerequisites or requires a placement test, and I would be bored in about 10 minutes in the prereqs. But on the other hand, I'm not ready for a placement test. So I guess it's review, review, review for now. And the dorkiest thing of all is that the review will be fun.

Q1

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 04:08:00 +0000

About 27 years ago, my parents were in London celebrating my mom's 40th birthday. While there, they attended an antiquarian book fair (or maybe it was an antique show), and as they were walking down an aisle at the fair, they came upon a booth full of maps. My dad asked the dealer in the booth what he was selling, and the gentleman (probably thinking it was fairly obvious) explained that he dealt in antique maps. I've heard my dad tell this story numerous times, and one version of it has him then asking the dealer something like, "Why would anyone collect antique maps?"

Two hours later, Dad was the proud owner of a charming antique map of Canterbury, England. His interest quickly shifted to antique maps of Florida - his home state - and today he has what may be the finest and most comprehensive private collection of Florida maps anywhere in the world. (And presumably understands now why someone would collect antique maps.) The map of Canterbury hangs in their home in Florida, and in my dad's carefully-managed records of his collection, it has the designation "M1".

Fast-forward to today... I have never settled upon anything (yet) that I'd like to collect, save a particular type of pottery made by a particular English potter and designer in the early 20th century, which at this stage of my life still feels unaffordable. I do, however, indulge - and I suppose it's become a collection of sorts - in the acquisition of beading books and kits which, by now, I'll need 17 lifetimes to complete. It could be said that my stash of jewelry - pieces both made by others and made by myself - are also a collection; they certainly take up enough space to qualify. Then last summer, I met a fellow jewelry artist at the Bead and Button Show who happens to live around the corner from me. We hit it off and became good friends; she is equally addicted to kits and books, and at least part of our relationship is grounded in the fact that we seriously enable each other in the obsessive acquisition of yet more kits and books that we'll never have time to complete. But oh, what fun it is.

It happens that Peggy - my enabler - works at a shop over in Bellevue that is part bead store, part quilting store (the result of two separate shops losing their leases and deciding to move in together). To make a long story short, in my many visits to her shop, she has enabled me right into a quilting habit that promises to rival my beading habit. Fabric and quilting books - and a shiny new sewing machine - now take up as much space in my studio as my beading gear (in my defense, fabric takes up much more space than beads). We took a quilting class together last fall which got me started on my very first quilt, and which I finally completed... TODAY!

So without further ado, I am extremely proud to present... Quilt #1 or, to borrow my dad's system: Q1.

The way it was originally designed called for seven of each of the four blocks, but as I didn't intend to actually use it on a bed, I saw no reason to make it that long. So it's now approximately 4 feet square and will probably be used as a wall hanging. All that remains to be done is to buy batting (the fill that goes inside a quilt) and the material for the back and then send it out to actually be quilted (that's the part where someone takes a special machine designed for the purpose and stitches a pattern over all the blocks - or perhaps does so by hand - neither of which holds any interest for me). Then I'll finish the edges and hang it on the wall.

The fabrics I used are batiks - which I love in part because one often doesn't have to worry about the direction of a print, so they're easy to work with. I also love the vibrant colors and the organic mottled appearance. And as is often my way, I didn't start with the easiest thing out there. But as a result I learned a lot more in this process than I might have had I started with a quilt that only required a bunch of straight seams. Here's a close-up that shows the fabrics better, as well as the applique I had to learn as well.

It's been such fun, and I can't wait to continue with the next one (which, of course, I started soon after I started this one, because I'm incapable of having only one project going at a time). There's little question that this is the first of many.

I don't remember having memory this good

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:21:00 +0000

I haven't been doing much (okay, any) blogging recently, mostly because there are only so many hours in a day to do stuff (and blogging is too far down the priority list), and because I can share most of what I want to in the space of a Facebook status update (or, even more efficiently, in a Tweet). Which is a sad state of affairs in itself, but that's a topic for a future blog post that I'll probably never write.

Occasionally, however, something won't fit in a Facebook status update, and it's usually something I find remarkable about my kid. That's not to say that I'll take the time to write about it, but when I do, it needs to be here.

He and I are nearing the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (aka, Book 4). We're both loving the experience of reading it together (at least, I definitely am and he seems to be), but I'm racing through them a bit faster in order to finish all of the remaining books by mid-July when the final movie comes out. This is so that I can stick to the rule we set that he has to read the book before he can see the movie without missing out on the opportunity to see one of the Harry Potter movies *in the theatre* with my boy, since this one will be my last chance.

But I digress. Back to the remarkable stuff. Tonight I was in mid-sentence, and he interrupted me with a question (as he does about every third line). The question involved clarifying some piece of trivia from Book 3 (which we finished 3 1/2 months ago) that had cropped up again, so we hashed it out for a minute or two, at which point he told me the name of the chapter in Book 3 in which the trivia had been mentioned.

I'm sorry, but that's just eerily weird to me. I can barely remember my name some days, and I get my kid and my dog mixed up regularly, but this little 9-year-old squirt (who forgets at least once a week to pick up his glasses off the bathroom counter at school where he leaves them while removing one of the four layers he insists on wearing each morning) can remember the name of a chapter that contained a particular piece of trivia in a 700-page book that he finished 3 1/2 months ago. Seriously??? Is that NORMAL?

He amazes me - really, he does.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Bead & Button 2011 classes!!

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:19:00 +0000

If anyone's interested, here are links to the twelve (TWELVE!) classes I'll be taking at Bead & Button in June. All twelve are beadweaving and/or stitching classes - no chainmaille, clay or anything else this year. I think that, finally, I'm getting clear on where my interests lie (and chainmaille is still way up there - I'm just mostly past the point of needing a class in that area). It also sure makes the supply list a heck of a lot smaller and lighter.

I'm particularly excited about taking a second class with one of my idols - Sherry Serafini - and a first class with Cynthia Rutledge.

Magnetic Focal Clasp

Token of Love Bracelet

Westminster

Romancing the Rivoli

Rainforest Pendant

The Rising Sun

Treasure Trove Earrings

Sea Nettles Necklace

RAW Architecture: Creative Engineering with Right-Angle Weave

Mermaid's Treasure Chest

Gerbera Pendant Necklace

Peyote Twist Earrings

CES Wrap-up

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 07:29:00 +0000

I'm home from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, having spent the past couple of days in hard-core geek mode and having had more fun than should be legal (and not in the way one usually expects when hearing "fun", "legal", and "Las Vegas" in the same sentence). There were roughly 150,000 other geeks choking the Convention Center and every hotel in town; we waited in lines for everything (beginning with one of at least several HUNDRED people to get a cab at the airport on Thursday); and the male-to-female ratio was more in my favor than it will ever be again in my life (not that I was looking).

Accessories for Apple gear seemed to dominate the "little products" areas - the number of iPhone cases, iPad stands, fancy earbuds, etc. was mind-boggling. Apple's going to have to keep cranking out the devices just to give people something to put all the accessories ON. (And it occurred to me that I might be able to combine my two passions by creating beaded, bling-y accessories for geeky girls like myself - not that I'd be the first one to do so.) I had a good time watching the "pods" where people could try out the Kinect, although I refrained from participating in such a public setting - strangers don't need to see my mediocre dancing skills. We had a nice chat with the Tivo people (an iOS app is supposedly imminent), spent a long time drooling over new developments in televisions (even though I'm still not rushing out to buy 3D anything), and watched one rep demo a cordless blender which worked when she positioned it over a tiny dot the size of a pin head on the counter. I also saw a very nice-looking washing machine that was a top-loader without a post - wish that had been out a couple of years ago.

One question I was hoping to answer for myself over the weekend was whether anything was coming out in the foreseeable future (say, two to four years) that would necessitate (or simply make too appealing to resist) new electronics to replace anything I put in the house in the past two years. Fortunately, the answer seems to be, generally, no. Which means I can spend all my money on beads. :)

I had a truly spectacular time. So, so much fun. Almost makes me want to go back to work in the tech field again. Almost.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Mercer Island, WA

Hello, hotel room mini-bars? This is technology calling.

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 03:41:00 +0000

I had to comment on this because (in my experience) it's so unusual, and there isn't enough room in a status update. So - my room at the Wynn Encore in Las Vegas has a mini-bar, which includes a small fridge full of overpriced alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and a tray of overpriced but probably still tasty snacks. As with pretty much all mini-bars, there's a nicely printed card that indicates what the options are (including the increasingly-common-everywhere-but-de-rigeur-in-Vegas "Intimacy Kit") and just how overpriced they are. ($30 for the Intimacy Kit, by the way - and for that price I hope it includes something more interesting than just a condom - although you can't put a price on safety. But I digress.)

In addition to the nicely printed card indicating prices, there's a nice man (or presumably, in some cases, a nice lady) who goes room to room checking to see what's been consumed and needs to be replaced. I know this because he showed up 5 minutes after I got into the room this afternoon.

But these nice men and women who do the restocking aren't the ones responsible for reporting to the hotel what you've consumed so you can be charged accordingly. Oh, no indeed. The hotel knows when you've consumed items because EACH ONE IS RESTING ON AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE THAT KNOWS WHEN YOU'VE REMOVED IT FOR MORE THAN 60 SECONDS AND IT GETS ADDED TO YOUR HOTEL BILL AUTOMAGICALLY.

Seriously.

And apparently, if you store stuff of your own in the fridge, you might incur some charges too, presumably because it would require moving the existing items around. But there's a solution (see below).

Lest you think I'm kidding... there's a pic:

Is it me, or is that a little creepy?

The first of a thousand conversations

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 07:03:00 +0000

I talked to Christopher about 9/11 a few days ago. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but it wasn't out of the blue... it was related to something we were already discussing, and the conversation seemed to naturally progress to that. I think it might have had to do with God, and what different people believe, and how other people sometimes act when you don't believe what they do. I guess on some level I figured he was old enough to start hearing something about it.

Because he kept asking questions, I went into a fair amount of detail, explaining about the planes getting hijacked (and what that meant) and flying into the twin towers and the Pentagon, and then the plane flying into the ground in Pennsylvania. I explained that, ultimately, these things happened because some people in another place think that we are evil and wrong. I started to cry in the middle of the explanation, and he looked at me for a few moments and then started to laugh, but it was the laughter of confusion, of discomfort.

"Why does your voice sound that way, Mom?"

I told him that it was because I was crying - which seemed obvious to me (I don't cry delicately), but then I realized that he'd never seen me cry, and so I said as much. I tried to explain that I was crying because it still upset me, still scared me, even though it happened a long time ago, before he was even born. I was trying to help him understand that sometimes bad, scary things happen in the world, and those things hurt and upset people; but I was also trying to reassure him that his daddy and I would always do everything we could to protect him and take care of him.

Fortunately, I think he knows that, through and through. It was oddly reassuring that his life has been so happy, so calm, so sheltered that - at almost nine years old - seeing his mother cry was a new experience. In the end, he didn't seem disturbed or distressed, although at the same time he clearly didn't understand the enormity of what had happened, of the impact it had on all of us.

A few years ago, I heard a consultant talk about how to discuss sex with your children; she made the comment that it's "a thousand one-minute conversations, not a single thousand-minute conversation." It's magical to have one's child reach the age when substantive conversations are possible, but on the other hand, it means that one has to be prepared for conversations such as this one.

Dubai: This will have to do for now

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:16:00 +0000

I've started several entries about my reactions to Dubai, and each time I've ended up erasing them because I just can't get my head around what I've seen. So I'll just say the one thing that I keep coming back to: I have never been so entranced and so appalled in my life - especially at the same time - and this place makes me want to never buy another gallon of gasoline again.

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan" - while out of his mind on opium - he was writing about Dubai. He just didn't know it, and it hadn't been built yet. It is fantastic and very disturbing. It is gorgeous, a miracle of engineering and sheer force of will and more money than anybody *I* know can really understand.

I thought I knew how the other half lived. This is how the other other half lives.

Think About What You Saw

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:29:00 +0000

I spent half the day today at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC - a powerful, sobering experience. I'm still not really sure what to think or how I feel... there's a big part of me that can't grok how evil of that magnitude can exist and even thrive for a bit. Maybe that sounds näive - after all, my 43 years have been witness to other atrocities. Perhaps it's because I don't internalize such things very well - the fact that they're "far" from me and don't touch me directly is just fine with me.

I remember asking my parents once why we never really talked about the Vietnam War when I was a child. They're well-educated, well-read people who watch the news and pay attention and think and talk about current events. I was born in 1967, and my brother came along the next year, so it seemed to me that it would have been in the front of their minds. When I was younger, I found their response puzzling: in short, they said, they had other more pressing things to worry about that were closer to home: their still-young marriage, their two young children, the stresses and obligations and joys and delights of their very-full lives. At the time, I was more focused on being embarrassed that I knew so little about this significant piece of recent history, so I was dismissive of and unsympathetic to their explanation.

I was four months pregnant with Christopher on 9/11, and (like most people) I remember exactly where I was that morning, when my husband ran upstairs to turn on the television. I called my mother, sobbing hysterically - she was on the East Coast, so she'd already been watching for hours, whereas both towers were down before we even turned on the TV in Seattle. I only remember one thing she said: "You need to think about the baby and calm down." I'm sure she said other things as well, but that was the only thing that stuck.

I spent part of that day watching TV with friends, but I remember reaching the point at which I couldn't keep looking any longer at that footage of the plane flying into the tower - I couldn't afford to have the image in my head. I went to New York a month later, on an already-scheduled trip, and even went down to Ground Zero (or as close as one could get then), walking along eerily-quiet dusty streets with my mother, but I remember very little besides the silence, the dust, and the forever-altered view of the Manhattan skyline from the Staten Island Ferry. I returned home, and life went on as "normal." A month after that, my son arrived unexpectedly early, and it was some time later when I started to get it: I had other more pressing things to worry about closer to home.

When I think about the Holocaust - and honestly, I don't think about it hardly at all - it's such a distant, abstract thing for me. I'm not Jewish, I'm not German, I don't know that any of my friends has a family member who's a survivor, or for that matter, who wasn't a survivor, although I'm sure someone I know does. I studied the Holocaust briefly in high school in whatever class covered 20th-century history but managed to dodge it in college. I finally saw Schindler's List about a year ago, more than 15 years after its release, because I had actively avoided it to that point, knowing it would be horrifying. It's something that happened to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time, and I didn't want those images in my head.

It's easy to feel ashamed about that. I was ashamed today, reading about all the actions my country - which bangs the drum about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - could have taken to help the Jews in Europe, but chose not to. I was ashamed at what I didn't know, at what I hadn't set out to learn. I was ashamed at how much I had ignored or, more passively, simply hadn't considered.

Sometimes we do have more pressing things closer to home that require our immediate energies and attention. None of us can take up every cause out there. Few of us have the time, the resources, the freedom from existing obligations to drop everything and charge off to help save the world every time some horrifying atrocity or disaster or evil attacks a person or a race or a nation or a cherished belief we hold. But we do have an obligation, as human beings, to not stick our heads in the sand. I'm grateful to have the chance to go back and learn and understand and appreciate, even if it's after the fact. It will give me the tools to help me guide my child as he starts to learn that the world is full of horrors as well as of joys. And I will think about what I saw.

How I spent the end of my winter vacation

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 06:11:00 +0000

Wow, three months since my last post? What a slacker I am.

I've been on a beading binge since I got home from California on Wednesday - which is not to say I've been doing much beading, but I've been doing lots of beading-related things. Which totally counts.

It started when I picked up a copy of this while visiting the oh-so-impressive Scottsdale Bead Supply last week. There are two projects in the magazine which are reminiscent of work by Sherry Serafini or Heidi Kummli, both of whom do highly elaborate and fabulous bead embroidery. This isn't an area I've explored at all, although I'm not a total idiot with a needle and thread - it's just one of those things I haven't gotten to yet, like polymer clay, PMC, and a dozen other addictions-in-the-making. I'll also admit to being intimidated at the mere thought of bead embroidery, which you will understand if you take a look at Sherry's and Heidi's work - the idea of starting small clearly never occurred to me.

So I spent some time drooling over the projects in the magazine, which in turn impacted a project I was working on while traveling: choosing the classes I'll take at the next Bead & Button Show. Class registration opens this coming Tuesday at 10am, and I'll be sitting at the computer hitting the refresh button at 9:57, as if I were trying to get U2 tickets or something. The show starts on Sunday, June 6 and runs for 8 days... there are as many as (I think) 14 class slots if I don't pick any multi-day classes, although if I fill up every slot, I'll be bleeding out of my eyes by Wednesday afternoon. When I left for my trip, I had managed to whittle down the 600+ classes to about 40 I just HAD to take, but clearly I needed some more work on that.

(Are you guys bored yet? I know that just because I think this stuff is fascinating doesn't mean you're not all saying, "You're spending eight days in Milwaukee for the WHAT show?")

One of the dilemmas I was running into was whether to fill up on classes that cover techniques new to me, or stick with what I know and expand my skills in familiar areas. For instance, a well-known chainmaille artist is teaching for the first time this year - a whopping EIGHT classes - and I'd love to take at least one of hers, not to mention a couple from the awesome chicks at Blue Buddha. To be honest, though, I've gotten good enough at chainmaille that as long as I have a pattern to follow, I can implement almost anything but the seriously advanced weaves. So as much as I'd enjoy following these women around like a puppy, basking in the reflected glow off the super-cool clothing (I think that link will work) they wear and trying not to come across like a chainmaille-obsessed stalker, I probably should maximize my money and my child-free-travel time and learn something else.

So I've pretty much decided to branch out again this year and take some classes in new areas, including one by the aforementioned Ms. Serafini (who is totally as stalker-worthy as my chainmaille heroines). And that in turn leads me to the obnoxiously-large order of beading books I placed at Amazon on Thursday and for which I paid extra for shipping so I wouldn't have to wait until Monday for them to arrive. (*ahem*dork*cough*) The problem with classes in new areas is that I need to make sure I'm up to speed on prerequisites, because it's going to be some kind of embarassing if I show up to Sherry Serafini's intermediate-level bead embroidery class having never even held a piece of Lacy's Stiff Stuff and not knowing what to do with ultrasuede. So there's research and practice to be done.

And THAT, in turn, leads to what has been occupying the bulk of my non-parenting time since I got home. I'm running out of bookcase space in my office, due to (among other things) ridiculous numbers of jewelry-making books and (more significantly) dozens of back issues of Bead & Button, BeadStyle, Beadwork, Stringing, Step by Step Wire, Art Jewelry, and a handful of publications imported from the UK and Australia.

I KNOW. I obviously have a problem.

But as I was saying... the way I've decided to address my problem (see? I'm being responsible...) is to embark on a project I've been considering for a while, which is to scan all of the projects I might want to do someday from all of the magazines, and then recycle the magazines. Woo hoo! How practical. And the fact that I get to (essentially) reread all the magazines as I'm going through them is just a bonus. Really.

I've probably cleared six inches of shelf space so far (enough to accommodate most of the books that arrived from Amazon yesterday), and my little Fujitsu ScanSnap is wheezing a bit, but bravely hanging in there, and progress is being made. I've made a Bento library to organize everything - that'll take a while to implement, but it will eventually be a great resource.

And lest you think its all academic, with no practical experience at all, I also started working on this piece yesterday, designed by the fabulous Judy Walker, from whom I took "Beader's Boot Camp" at Bead & Button last year, and whose skill in teaching peyote stitch is going to help save my ass when I get into Sherry's class in June.

One positive side effect of this orgy of beading madness is that it's keeping me distracted from how sad I am to not be in Las Vegas indulging my other obsessive interest at the Consumer Electronics Show. I was going last year as someone's "employee" (only way to get in, since I'm not industry) until the opening of my dad's history museum got delayed to the Friday night of CES and I had to be in Tampa instead of Vegas. So, so happy for my dad, but so, so, SO sad to miss out on what was probably my only shot at CES. Oh, the misery.

Next up (and hopefully not three months from now): which classes I'm registering for on Tuesday, and how I plan to swing a week in Tucson next February for the Gem Show, which apparently makes Bead & Button look like a dinky little street fair.

I am INWINCIBLE! Sort of. (name that movie...)

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:11:00 +0000

So apparently, I've been too busy going to the gym to write about how much time I've spent going to the gym. But I have a few spare moments tonight, since I'm at Steven's house, staying with our child, while Steven goes to Curriculum Night at school, which he's missed the last two years because his own school scheduled its Curriculum Night on the same night as our son's school. Rude of them, but of course, we weren't consulted. If that last sentence makes no sense, I blame it on the lack of carbs (interesting ones, at least) and Diet Coke.

Despite my griping - the program is actually going quite well. I'm in my 5th week (that makes it sound sort of like pregnancy) and am now eating lean protein, veggies, low-fat cheese, and fruit. As of last Friday I'd lost 12 lbs, and at my weekly check-in tomorrow, I'll likely be down close to 15. That's about 25% of the way to where I'd like to be, which sounds great until I remember that the first 25% is always the easiest! Duh. My trainer checked on a few things yesterday, such as body measurements and percent body fat, and I was tickled (yes, tickled) to see that my percent body fat has dropped 15% in less than 5 weeks. Wow. That's a nice number.

It's still freaking hard, but in a manageable, sustainable sort of way. I haven't started loving my workouts yet - or even liking them, really - although I've had one or two now during which I felt really strong, so maybe the liking it will come soon. Maybe. I would give my left arm for a Taco Bellgrande about now too, even though I'm happy to report that that's only a mental craving, not a physical craving. That's my only real beef with these people... they pretty much swear up and down that if you walk the walk that they lay out for you, your food cravings will go away. What they don't tell you is that they mean the physical cravings. The mental cravings are your responsibility. PSYCH!

For some reason that reminds me of the Introduction to Philosophy class I took in college, which was taught by this total jerk who was obsessed with Kant - who was ALL we studied all semester - and who used to stand up at the front of the room with his graduate students during our exams and kind of snicker at us. Seriously. Just a little short of pointing and giggling. Why the physical/mental cravings issues reminds me of this, I don't know.

In other, somewhat related news... after the first two weeks of this new, hardcore exercise program, when my much-abused feet and ankles were saying, "STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT THIS MINUTE!", I decided to get myself to a podiatrist to see if we could do something about the chronic discomfort I often have, which was being aggravated by the exercise. After a round of x-rays and lots of poking, prodding, and wiggling of particularly my right ankle, he said, "Well, I can fix it, but it's going to take surgery. And you shouldn't wait very long for it."

Wha...?

I just figured he'd give me some neato high-tech brace and tell me to get some new shoes. But no.

So the deal is... my right ankle is so trashed from years of multiple sprains that there's a whole bunch of bone fragments floating around in there (oh, so THAT'S why it hurts...) and the ligaments (tendons? I forget... one of those...) are essentially not doing their job at all, which is to hold the bones together so I can stand up without falling over. He can take a ligament from elsewhere in my lower leg and use it to hook up the various bones so they'll hold me up. So that's cool.

The thing is, he says I need to do this in the next 18 months to 3 years or so, because if I wait much longer, it'll become arthritic and at that point, it will no longer be fixable. (Besides that, the longer I wait, the more likely I am to throw a few more sprains into the mix, which won't help things.) The surgery will require me to be completely off my foot for a MONTH (not bed-bound, but no weight on it - no driving, no walking, etc.) with a boot cast, then learning to walk on it for another month, still with the boot cast, then waiting another four to five months for the swelling to go down. Nice. So, time for a second opinion, but I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to hear the same thing. But if it means I can walk down the street without ending up on my behind if I step the tiniest bit wrong, it will be worth it.

In the meantime - no incline on the treadmill, definitely no exercise other than the low-impact kind, and preferably bikes or ellipticals. It also pretty much shoots my plan to do the 3-Day Breast Cancer walk before I'm 45. Maybe before I'm 50.

And on that note, the ex is due home any moment, so I'll be heading back to my own house and a computer with a decent-sized screen and this past Monday's episode of House on the DVR. Goodie!

Books vs. Kindle (sort of )

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:43:00 +0000

My dad sent me this link earlier today and asked, "What do the 40-somethings think of what Cushing intends to do? You can imagine I am appalled." My response is below. I'd welcome other comments. (Please forgive the slightly scattered structure... the lack of carbs is getting to me...)

------------------------

Ah, one of my favorite topics...

In short, I think the plan to get rid of all the books in favor of Kindles (and, apparently, fancy cappucino machines) is a huge mistake, just as I think getting rid of pens and paper in favor of keyboards would be a mistake. But as a supplement to books, as a resource, Kindles (and devices like them) are outstanding. (More rambles follow below, if you're interested.)

I see Kindles as very much like email: they are *incredibly* practical tools (and that's despite the fact that they haven't begun to reach their full potential), but just that - tools, and should not try to replace books any more than email should replace the fine art of letter writing. I take great pleasure in the look and feel of books, in browsing bookstores and libraries, and so forth. That being said - as someone who a) is a very fast reader, who reads dozens (and sometimes dozens) of books in the course of a year, and b) travels a fair amount, the Kindle has truly changed my life. I can carry the equivalent of 1500 books on something smaller than a hardcover book, and a huge majority of what I want to read is available in that format.

I would also offer that not many people (in fact, probably very few people) are as book- or reading-centric as the members of this family are, and no amount of wanting them to be so will make it so. I am very supportive of any method - technological or otherwise - that will make information/literature/books/

etc. more accessible and more appealing.

A practical comment... it takes an awful lot of paper to make books (some number of which probably aren't worth the paper on which they're printed). There are many books I buy because I might want to read them again, refer to them over time, etc. (as is the case with many of the books I own). But there are other ones that are perhaps just to pass the time on an airplane or sitting in a waiting room somewhere. It's nice to be able to choose the format based on how "significant" the book is to me - I can save the paper and some of the money by buying the digital copy when it's appropriate.

Another topic I often hear discussed in relation to digital readers is the issue of textbooks. They are very, very expensive, in part because (at least in some disciplines) the content is out of date only several years after the textbooks are published. The opportunity for authors to update their works and "republish" as needed in a digital format would allow for greatly reduced costs to both students and schools.

And on a tangential note... "They worry about an environment where students can no longer browse rows of voluptuous books, replete with glossy photographs, intricate maps, and pages dog-eared by generations of students." (Except most of them don't.) "They worry students will be less likely to focus on long works when their devices are constantly interrupting them with e-mail and instant messages." (Kindles don't have that capability, and the presence or absence of a library of "real" books is unlikely to have any impact on whether the students' phones or PDAs distract them.) "They also worry about a world where sweat-stained literature is deemed as perishable as all the glib posts on Facebook or Twitter." (I don't even know what the author's point is here.)

In closing - this particular school's choice seems to reflect the unfortunate "either/or" attitude that governs the choices of so many individuals, groups, and organizations these days. An enormous library full of expensive, bulky "voluptuous books, replete with glossy photographs, intricate maps, and pages dog-eared by generations of students" is not without its problems, nor is it going to address in the most effective and efficient way the educational and research needs (or even the entertainment needs, for those of us who find browsing such a place entertaining) of today's scholars. On the other hand, 18 Kindles, three huge flat-panel TVs, and a high-end coffee maker aren't going to take care of that very well either. Both approaches have their use, and we would all benefit from judicious "picking and choosing" from the available resources, be they technological or not.

(Aren't you sorry you asked! :) )

Not dead yet...

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:38:00 +0000

It definitely got worse after Monday - Tuesday was its own special kind of hell: headaches, nausea, sore muscles, and epic grouchiness. But yesterday was much better, and for the most part I wasn't hungry. My trainer told me to stop being so psycho about my food choices since I haven't even met my nutritionist yet (that's tomorrow morning), so that gave me license to eat a few carbs yesterday (oh, thank the gods....). There's a prepared dish one can buy at the Pro Club's cafe that's high-protein tofu with hoisin dipping sauce, and I think it's absolutely awesome (although I don't think I've ever met anything with hoisin sauce that I didn't like). Last night I steamed some asparagus and wrapped them in a whole wheat tortilla with greens and the tofu tossed in the hoisin sauce, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Maybe it was mostly the tortilla that induced such ecstasy, but I'm sure the hoisin tofu played at least a little part. Yum, yum.

My body's really complaining today about the abrupt shift in exercise frequency from basically zero to everyfreakingday. Nothing specific... just overall stiffness, soreness, and general lethargy. I'm sure there will be many days when I have to force myself to get in the car and drive to the gym - this is just the first of them.

In other news, some of you might remember a year or so ago when Christopher had a very strange fainting spell. Well, it happened again yesterday, and there's not as much I can point to this time as an explanation. He had just gotten up, and hadn't eaten anything yet, but all he was doing at the time was giving me a hug - he just slumped, eyes sort of rolled back. It helped that I was able to catch him this time, unlike last time. He bounced back quicker than he did the first time it happened - said he felt dizzy and nauseous for a few minutes, but then seemed to be fine. I didn't call 911 this time, since I could tell what it was and since he recovered so quickly, and also because we already have his annual physical scheduled for today, so we can ask his doctor about it again. Freaky stuff.

The last diet

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:02:00 +0000

I decided a month or so ago that it was time to do something about my too-large behind - as well as the too-large rest of me - once and for all. (This is not to say that I only realized a month ago that something needed to be done, just that I decided it was time to do it.) I have had the extreme good fortune to have enjoyed very good health in my life to date despite my inability to ever fit into a pair of skinny jeans, but given that I'll hit 43 on my next birthday, I suspect that somewhere along in here my bad habits are going to come back to bite me on that too-large behind.

I have been on about 42,784 diets in my life, some more extreme than others. Very few of them worked at all, and the few that did work produced results I was able to maintain for about 7 minutes. I try not to beat myself up too much about this, especially since I learned recently that, nationwide, only 1-2% of people who lose weight keep it off. Horrifying statistic, that.

Quite a few people I know have had spectacular results with the 20/20 Lifestyles program that operates out of the Pro Club in Bellevue, and its comprehensive approach to helping people improve their health and fitness sounds like a sane, multi-dimensional, sustainable, grounded-in-reality solution. Won't be easy, though - 5 workouts a week (3 with a personal trainer), weekly group sessions and meetings with a nutritionist, periodic visits with a counselor and a physician, hard-core food tracking, and having a pedometer all but glued to my hip make for all-consuming endeavor.

I had my first session with my personal trainer this morning, which actually felt very manageable - 25 minutes on the treadmill at a moderate pace, followed by strength training and stretching. I'm sure it will get worse - it's his job to push me, after all - but it felt good to come away from the first session not totally freaked out. I stopped by Whole Foods on the way home and bought chicken breast, salmon, asparagus, broccoli, and a few other healthy items that should get me through until my first nutritionist appointment on Friday, at which point I start a week of mostly lean protein and meal-replacement shakes. Ugh. But it could be worse.

A few people have asked me if I'm excited about the program, or said something like, "it's going to be great!" I can't quite get to that point. I admire people who get all "rah rah" about tough stuff - you know, the disgustingly positive, always-enthusiastic psychos who are just impossible to be around! - but I'm not one of them. On the other hand, I'm also not the kind who freaks out and wants to crawl under the desk. Rather, I find that I take a "retreat and regroup" approach - think of a snail, or a hermit crab. I'll withdraw into a little ball and marshall my resources, then just put my head down and inch my way forward. Inch... inch... inch...

To bead or not to... er...

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:23:00 +0000

I've spent a lot of time in the past week thinking about this whole jewelry-making thing, and feeling a little angst that I'm having a tough time identifying, much less articulating. Several people close to me have said I'm good enough to actually do something with it (by which I think they mean charge actual money for the things I make).

I'm not prepared to offer an opinion on that either way - I don't know if I'm good enough. Actually, let me clarify... I think of myself as a good craftsman, or technician - I'm great with details, have considerable manual dexterity, and possess enough patience (with jewelry materials, at least) to soldier on through a project that requires it. I also follow a pattern well. It's kind of like cooking... all it seems to take to be a very respectable cook is the ability to follow a recipe and have reliable enough taste buds to know if what you're sampling tastes like what it's supposed to be or like, say, garden fertilizer.

What I don't know whether I have is the capacity for original creations. And isn't that what being an artist is primarily about? And beyond that, is the life of an artist something I want? I mean, gee, it sounds great, particularly if I don't have to rely on it as my primary source of income. But then how authentic will it feel if I'm "just dabbling"? (Strangely, I could make a dozen pieces a day and I'd probably still feel like I were just dabbling if it was only for fun, for personal use, or for giving to friends.)

This all sounds suspiciously like a variation of the old "I am not worthy" refrain that I've struggled with off and on all my life. Recognizing that, I'm inclined to kick it in the teeth, knock it down, and do a tap dance on its head before blithely going on with whatever the heck is I want to do. But that's a little hard sometimes.

If anyone knows any great books out there titled something like, "What It Really Means To Be An Artist," I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Peyote, peyote, peyote

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:29:00 +0000

I had a great first day at Boot Camp, although my back and eyes are feeling the strain a bit. Hopefully they'll be more "in shape" in a couple of days. (Funny to think of having to get my eyes in shape.)

The entire focus today was on Peyote Stitch, which has a few different variations (odd vs. even, tubular, etc.). The instructor, Judy Walker - who is fabulous - has us using perle cotton (i.e., embroidery thread) and big rubber Perler beads. They don't make beautiful bead weaves, by any stretch of the imagination, but they come in a billion colors, fit over perle cotton and easy-to-use tapestry needles, and let us see very clearly what the weaves look like when assembled. I left all my samples in the classroom, so I don't have them with me tonight to photograph - I'll bring them back tomorrow so I can post some pics.

I took a little time tonight to finish up a chainmaille sample I started on a while bit - that uses different muscles than I was using all day and the big rings were easier on my eyes than anything small. (I can also do it while watching TV more easily than I can weave beads.) The picture is in a Facebook album, but I stuck it up on Flickr as well (here is the Jewelry set).

Off to bed now - 10 hours of class tomorrow (more Boot Camp, plus a three-hour class tomorrow night). Whew!

Bead & Button starts tomorrow!

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Sun, 31 May 2009 03:24:00 +0000

Quite a few people in the last week or two have asked me, "Milwaukee? What's in Milwaukee?" The Bead & Button Show, that's what! Some of you know that I make jewelry (a little, in my "free" time) - it's purely a hobby, and I have no real reason to think it'll ever be more than just a hobby, but I really do enjoy it. I've explored it off and on over the past 15 years or so, and in the past couple of years I started subscribing to Bead & Button and BeadStyle magazines, which only enhanced the interest, as well as started taking up increasingly large quantities of space on my bookshelves.

I heard about the Bead & Button Show a while back - it claims to be the biggest consumer bead show in the world - and I attended part of the show last year. I had so much fun that I promised myself I'd come back this year for whole show, all eight days of it - no easy feat given that it coincides with the last week of school and two days when Christopher has no school, no day camp, no babysitter, and a dad who still has his own classes to teach. I would normally recruit my mother to come be on Nana-duty, but she's out of the country, so my fabulous Aunt Judy will fly all the way out from Washington D.C. on Tuesday to spend some quality time with her great-nephew while his slacker mom is playing hooky in Milwaukee. I'm nothing if not motivated.

I'm taking a whopping eleven classes over the next eight days - most are either three- or six-hour classes, but the first one is twenty-one hours over the next three days. Intense, to be sure. It starts tomorrow morning and is called "Beader's Boot Camp": an in-depth workshop on a half-dozen or so bead weaves and stitches. The instructor told us to bring a 3-ring binder for the 100+ pages of handouts (eeek!), and the list of materials in the class kit sounds like I'm going to need to shop for an extra suitcase before I go home next weekend. I hope to post some pics somewhere (Flickr, Facebook, something...) of the things I'm making - I did bring the camera, so there's at least a chance.

It's almost 11:00 here and I need to be very coherent in the morning, so I'm off to prepare my bags for tomorrow and rest my eyes - more later.

Taking responsibility

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:42:00 +0000

I feel so heartened when a company owns up to a problem, apologizes, and says they'll do their best to make sure it doesn't happen again, as Google did re: this morning's Gmail outage. No excuses, no blaming some other tech company/higher power/alien space bat. Just, "an error in one of our systems" and "very embarrassing" and "we're very sorry" and "we'll be working even harder." I'm already a fan of Google and therefore inclined to cut them some slack, but even if I weren't... this would impress me. We could all learn something from it.

Testing, yet again, this mobile blogging thing

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Are there people who write whole blog entries on the itty bitty screens that exist on mobile phones? Seriously?

Sitting outside a church waiting for Christopher to finish Cub Scouts, listening to Freezepop's "Swimming Pool" and Massive Attack's "Teardrop" on repeat and wondering why people don't leave song obsessions behind with their teenage years. Or maybe they do and *I'm* the strange one.

I (finally) love Paris in the springtime...

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:27:00 +0000

We've spent a very enjoyable week in Paris - I'll be a little sorry to leave on Tuesday. It's certainly easier to be here with a fluent French speaker (my ex-husband) and a particularly charming seven-year-old boy who has no qualms about marching into the hotel lobby after dinner each evening and cheerfully saying to the people at reception, "Bourgeois!" (We keep telling him it's "bon soir", not "bourgeois," but that hasn't stuck quite as well as "merci". Fortunately, they seem not to have taken offense yet and appear far more amused than irked.)

I've been to Paris half a dozen or so times, including one summer in high school when I spent a month and a half here on a study program, and I know it better than any other city outside of North America except for London, but it's taken me a long time to warm up to it. Of course, it's a spectacularly beautiful city, the history and culture are rich and deep, the food is unrivaled, and so forth. And yet I still get a bit stuck on the general dirtiness (that might just be "big-city syndrome" - it's not like New York or LA or London are any better), the pervasive cigarette smoke, the total lack of regard for personal space, and the unbelievably haughty and superior air of (at least some of) the French. I've lost track of the number of times I've heard someone say, in reference to some particularly baffling regulation, system, or attitude, "Eh... it's just the French being French."

On that subject, I try pretty hard while in a foreign country to, if not "go native", then at least interact with the natives, attempt little bits of their language, eat their food, respect their customs, and so forth, and I have been gratified in my travels to far-flung corners of the world at how gracious those natives tend to be. (So gracious, in fact, that some Americans could learn from them.) This is also true of French people outside of Paris, but for me, the Parisians took some getting used to.

Interestingly, though, at a time when anti-American sentiment has been rampant, I have found the Parisians to be almost universally welcoming. Steven says that based on what he's read recently, it's because we finally got rid of that bozo who's been in office the past eight years - and on top of that, we elected a minority. It certainly hadn't occurred to me that our electing a minority would mean so much to other countries (apparently it indicates that maybe there's hope for them too), and I hadn't really thought that international opinion of us was so closely tied to the guy in office; rather, I assumed the French (in particular, but not exclusively) didn't like us because - as a nation - we're fat, loud, and ill-mannered, as well as (additionally) guilty by association with that bozo and his not-so-winnning foreign policy.

Anyway, the point is that I've found Paris to be particularly enjoyable this time around. I still don't want to move here (to Steven's dismay, I'm sure), and there are a lot of places in the world I want to visit before I'd choose Paris again, but I finally got a real inkling of why so many people think Paris is so incredibly fabulous.

We interrupt this trip to Paris for an important update...

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:55:00 +0000

I just had to take a moment to point out what is perhaps the coolest thing I've seen this year (so far, since the next iPhone update is due out before long):

Academic Earth

It's a wonder I ever leave the house.

My well-seasoned traveler

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:16:00 +0000

My well-seasoned traveler, originally uploaded by lhtouchton.

Momentous decision

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:55:00 +0000

So - I'm moving this weekend. Which means that I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of decisions to make in the coming weeks, such as which drawer the flatware goes in, where do my fiction books live (since I no longer have one big room for all my books), and on which of my many towel bars do I hang the hand towels.

But one of the most significant decisions involves renaming the computers. I KNOW. It's GEEKY. But it's important. I've always had themes before - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffy, Spike Angel, Giles, Willow...), mythology (Zeus, Apollo, etc.), astronomy (Galaxy, etc.). Right now they're a hodge-podge of naming conventions (Spike, Galaxy, MacBook) because I've been waiting for the move as an opportunity for redoing the network.

So - I need a new theme. Gossip Girl? Battlestar Galactica? The Twilight series? English monarchs? All suggestions welcome.

When you just need to chill out a little...

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:39:00 +0000

For all of my fellow ambient music junkies out there, this is a neat webapp that streams looped ambient music patterns. The ultimate in soothing. In the new house, all of my audio/video/Internet/etc. stuff will be wired together so I can put this on in my room at night and go to sleep to it. Blissful. Might be great for parents with fussy babies...

First post on the new White House Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Lavinia) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:30:00 +0000

EOP - Blog Post - Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

This is cool. The geek in me likes that our new President wants to join those who are "taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future" by using a blog - and WhiteHouse.gov in general - to "expand and deepen this online engagement."