All My Little Words

Despite the fact that I won’t touch Facebook with a ten foot pole, social networking and I go way back. It’s true. Before Twitter, there was Myspace and Friendster, and before that there was Livejournal, and even before that message boards like the one at Chic or Shriek (a fashion do or don’t website), and waaaaay back in the dark ages, we used to socially network with personal websites. I was the shit back then – I had my own domain (yes, I still have it) and hand coded my own websites, (yes, plural, I had many, they were legion) unless I was feeling lazy and used Dreamweaver, which back then was considered cheating, but compared to the ease with which we build websites and blogs now, it was a monster to use.

Instead of @replies, we painstakingly linked to our friends websites. There was no concern about privacy – there was no Google, and getting your photos on a webpage could take days, if you (like me) had as many as we anow throw onto Myspace in a matter of minutes.

Back then the internet was still a new thing that no one really thought would catch on, and the only people who used it much were geeks like myself. You couldn’t just do a simple search for friends in those days – yeah, there were chat rooms, but those were lame even then. You’d spend hours combing the interwebs for good websites among the giant piles of crap on Angelfire and Geoshitties, and even more hours keywording and metatagging your site/s so that other geeks could find you.

Or you could find friends on ICQ (I Seek You, hahahaha), which was omnipresent, always on, always ready for a late night/early morning conversation. At one point in time, I had far more far flung friends around the world than I had IRL. And I’ll tell you what, I hope many of them are working in the digital media/social networking industry today, as they put out some beautiful, amazing and complex websites the like of which you just don’t see any more.

These days, it is all about simplicity. We want clean, simple lines, easy to navigate sites, and a plethora of features at our fingertips, just a single click or tap away. And there IS a lot to be said for “User Friendliness”, I agree.
It is nice to be able to quickly snap a little blurb like this out while I’m cooking lunch or keep my friends updated on my whereabouts on the fly.

And that, my friends, is kind of what inspired this. Yesterday, I somehow came across @mashable, the Twitter for the CEO of – you guessed it – Mashable, a Social Media Guide. I slogged through a veritable onslaught of tweets, stopping to read this article or that, when I came across what stuck with me today as the most noticeable article I read on Mashable (yesterday, anyway), Yelp vs. Foursquare vs. Gowalla.

Turns out that Yelp just got into the “Check-In” game by updating their iPhone app to support checking in pretty much anywhere, much like it’s two predecessors, but without the points. Hopefully, they’ll add that soon, because, let’s be honest – stealing the title of Mayor, or getting your Overshare or Super User badges are half the fun.

So of course, I went straight to the ole App Store and updated my Yelp app, so that I could check it out. And today, I went out to play with all three together to see what would happen.

Let me start by saying that I don’t spend a lot of time at THE MALL, but my husband’s wedding ring was waiting to picked up after being re-sized, and what better place to test my ability to check in with so many places to do so?
I drove to Northgate and parked, and sat in the car to check in simply, AT THE MALL. Yelp picked up Northgate Mall right away, no problem. Ditto Foursquare. Gowalla wouldn’t even load, a problem I’ve been having with it from the start. I’m just going to kick Gowalla to the curb right here and now by telling you that I tried a few more times to get it to at least load up, but it didn’t do it anytime during the 90 or so painful minutes I spent at THE MALL, much less let me check in. I would be more than willing to admit that maybe I AM DOING IT WRONG somehow, but – see above. I’ve been doing this kind of shit long enough that I can figure out almost anything on a computer or my iPhone in a matter of seconds without even trying. And as also noted above, everything is supposed to be so easy these days, it shouldn’t matter if I am The Man Who Fell to Earth. If I could figure out how to turn the iPhone on, get to the app store, download and install Gowalla, it should be a snap to get it to load up and check in. Everybody else seems to love it, though, so who knows?!?

Finally out of the car, I went into THE MALL through the Forever XXI store. I was just there the other day, but it was kind of awesome to be in there when there wasn’t 850,000,000 teens, and the clothes weren’t dumped into heaps all over the floor. Side note: Going during the day does have it’s downside – TONS of little kids.
I browsed and wandered through while I tried to check in. No problem with Foursquare, but Yelp told me I was too far away! I tried again immediately, and then later right when I walked into THE MALL, and again as I was leaving and I exited the same way I entered. For some reason, Yelp didn’t recognize that I was IN the store, it seemed to think I was a little over a mile away. Curious. I even tried “Forever 21″, to see if it could match up with another (incorrect) listing somehow. Nope. -1 Yelp.

Next, I headed over to Ben Bridge to pick up the ring. Yelp found that one okay, but no one had entered it on Foursquare yet. I checked in without adding it, (I know, I know, what’s the point of being a Super User if you’re not gonna add stuff? I add a lot of stuff, but unfortunately, it is sometimes unexpectedly difficult to add businesses, and I didn’t feel l like messing with it while I was standing in the middle of the mall.) thus, missing out on the points for that stop. -1 for Foursquare.

Honestly, I was a little lazy and forgetful because I wandered into a bunch of stores for a minute or two and didn’t check in. It didn’t seem worth it when I was just passing through on my way to another destination. At least I’m not a big cheater, I could have checked in at every store I passed! (I know people who do this sort of thing.)

After checking out the food court to see if anything looked good for lunch, I went to get a coffee from Starbucks. Checked in here just fine with both Yelp and Foursquare (Gowalla still down for the count), then used the Yelp app to see what was up at Blue Fin Sushi for lunch. I’d been there for dinner, and thought maybe I’d go shovel in some all-you-can-eat sushi for lunch (it’s better than you might think). First, I got really confused and thought they were closed, because the app shows the lunch and dinner hours, and next to them whether they are CURRENTLY open or closed. As it was 11:28am, it said “Closed” next to the lunch hours, which begin at 11:30, so I was like “WTF Blue Fin??” and I got a little annoyed. I ended up looking again a few minutes later, which cleared up the confusion, but then I took the time to see how much lunch was and ended up deciding that I didn’t feel like spending $16, although I totally would have if we weren’t having dinner at home tonight, and that was going to be my major meal for the day.

After I realized that I am a dumbass and forgot to order my venti latte iced instead of hot, I kind of just felt like going home and pouring it over ice instead of going to the At&T store to look at iPhone cases and to Payless to check out cheap purses. I also skipped looking for jeans in The Gap, and bypassed Macy’s even though I still have a gift card to use there. I ended up deciding that I should just leave and try checking in at a different location. First, I was going to try to go to the new orchid store in Ballard, but I was still hungry, so I opted to just go to Safeway on the way home instead.

I successfully checked in there, on both Yelp and Foursquare while I was waiting to turn left at the light that takes forever to change (oh, the irony) and after getting a few things, came home to write this while making and eating my lunch (Stir Fry!) and drinking my (now iced) latte.

I checked in at home (La Casa) on Foursquare (this is my friend Erik’s fault – he just joined Foursquare the other day and the first thing he did was add his house, an entity known as “The Sausage Ranch”, something which had previously never even occurred to me to do. I won’t add La Casa on Yelp, that just seems too weird.)

Conclusion? The social networking combination of “Tag” + “Hide and Seek” is fun. I got a few Tweets in there while I was at it, too.
I think Yelp is going to give Foursquare a run for it’s money, once it works out the bugs, but only if it becomes more of a game with points or some other reward. GoWalla can go suck it. To be fair though, I’m going to continue this little experiment by trying to figure out what’s up with my GoWalla app so I can give it a fair shake.

Okay, kids, I’m off to go check out some more articles on some of the above mentioned sites and maybe try to fix my Gowalla app. Until next time…

I just realized (like, an hour ago) that it is nigh upon the 2nd anniversary of my friend Bobby’s death.
To this day, I honestly don’t really know if he died on the 18th or the 19th. He was in New York at the time, and it happened sometime in the middle of the night. I got a phone call at about 4am. Phone calls at that hour are never good.

I tried to go to work that day. I don’t know how long I lasted before I became so overwhelmed with emotion that I had to leave. I don’t remember much about that day except that I went straight from work to Liz’s house, where I spent the whole day with her and Eric. I think we played Monopoly. Grant may have been there. Other people may have been, too. But mostly it was me and Eric. It wasn’t too long after that that I sent Eric to rehab.

I remember all the time I spent thinking about Bob, and all the people I talked to about him, and shared stories and memories with.
I proved that misery brings out the best in us by writing the best thing I’ve ever written – about Bob. I was reading it just now and unlike many other things I’ve written which I thought were brilliant at the time, and later realized were just embarrassing, I realized that what I wrote about Bob is still every bit as good as I thought it was the day I wrote it.

I wish I knew him more, so I could write more things about him. He was a great subject. He was handsome and funny and honest. He had THE. BEST. ADVENTURES. EVAR.
How many people do you know who went to Dive School and became underwater welders? He wasn’t working when I met him because his arm was broken, but every day of his life was just as interesting as the ones he spent underwater in the ocean with the sharks, off the coast of South America or wherever he may have gone to work. We had soooooo many adventures together. I don’t know that I will ever know anyone else as fun or engaging or charming as Bob. We missed him when he wasn’t here, and always looked forward to the times he’d get off the boat and come flying back into town with $5 in his pocket after making $30k (or whatever) in something like 2 or 3 months. Whether he had money or not, he was always somewhere interesting. When it wasn’t here in Seattle, it was Chicago or New York or LA.

You know how sometimes you come up with crazy things to do, but then you never do them? Bobby did them, without even thinking twice about. Whether it was dressing up and pretending to be someone else, or getting into a bar brawl followed by a car accident which he would miraculously survive, he would tell me his stories in this offhanded manner, not realizing that they would be unbelievable coming from anyone but him.

One day when he’d been gone for months, he just showed up one day, SURPRISE!!!! at my house, and came right in and started calling out my name. Too bad I wasn’t home! But he was at home at my home. He told me the most delightful story that visit, when I asked about the new scar on his head. It was from a car accident that he miraculously survived, after a drunken bar brawl, if I recall correctly. He went to the hospital and they asked him where he lived. He said “At Bella’s house in Seattle!” as if he were surprised that there were people who did not know this.

After all the things I’ve written about Bobby, I imagine that some people think that we were lovers, that we dated, or at the very least, that I was secretly in love with him. I loved him very much, but as much as I found him handsome and delightful, never like that. I suppose it could have been that way, but it wasn’t because everything about Bob was perfect, and it was perfect that we were never that. Being involved that way might have ruined it (doesn’t it always?) although every woman I ever talked to about Bob loved him, still loved him, and I think always will love him.

I didn’t realize until after he was gone, and a number of girls contacted me about him, and what I’d written about him, that he literally had a girl in every port. That makes him sound like a real asshole, but in talking to these woman, I realized that he made each and every one of those women feel like she was the one. The ONLY one. Whether they were aware that they were not didn’t seem to matter. They all loved him, and he loved each and every one of them. He wasn’t playing them, they weren’t conquests in any way. He was a loving person, and he loved people, and people loved him. While most of us can’t handle “managing” multiple partners, it worked for him because, again, it wasn’t something he thought twice about. He took it all in stride. Every city was like a separate life, and Bobby was a rolling stone, and why should he not enjoy the company of different women wherever he went? It made him happy, and it made THEM happy. The world is a better place for all those women having known him, rather than if he’d only “dated” one at a time, and therefore only been with a few women in his too short life.

I left a comment on his Myspace page, and then I looked down at the last several comments before my new one. It had been a while since the last, but I was glad to see a lot of familiar names in the last half of last year. I was glad to see that he has not been forgotten.
Wish you were still here, mang.

I do not spring clean. This is because I Winter Clean. I New Year’s Clean. I Post-Christmas clean.
Like I said to someone in an email just this morning: “Who wants to clean in Spring?!? Spring is for GARDENING!!!”

It all starts with taking down Christmas. Then we got a new piece of furniture, so the whole living room needed to be rearranged. And cleaned, of course. I’ve had some issues with the kitchen, and how the cabinets over the countertops are too low to out things under, so I had the brilliant idea that removing one that was kind of orphaned on it’s own on the far side of the sink would be a good idea.
Commence with the kitchen rearrangement!

And we switched bedrooms months ago, and I never finished cleaning arranging the bedroom. The process of doing that took ALL DAY TODAY and I am exhausted. But the process of removing the stuff from the room that used to be our bedroom into what is not our for real bedroom caused that room to be cleaned/rearranged as well. So at this point fully TWO THIRDS of our home has been completely cleaned and rearranged. IN THREE DAYS. Holy furniture polish, Batman!

So now I’m going to sink into a coma for the next 12 months, then I’ll do it all over again, I’m sure.

december2009misc 032

Originally uploaded by violetblack

Ayuh, we’re cute, a’ight.

Trying desperately to distract myself from what I am sure is a recently broken tailbone.
I really wanted to start the year out with a BANG! so on January 1st, I did the most memorable thing of the year (so far!) and somehow slipped and fell in such a manner that I have spent the ensuing 5 days in varying states of discomfort. I’m not completely disabled, but it’s really hard to do stuff, and the discomfort is really distracting. I’m back to work tomorrow, something which I’m sure will be a joy to behold. In the meantime, I’m finding it difficult to do even the simplest things, such as pay for my Flickr membership for another year.

I thought this would be the year I’d write something every day, but I already fucked that up. It’s probably the year I did a bunch of dumb shit I shouldn’t have done. Oh wait, I already did that one. Like, 30 times. Fuck.

When I was a kid, I think I was pretty well behaved until I was about 3. At that point, perhaps I became a little more…
self aware, perhaps? Because for some reason, at that point, I guess I started testing the waters to see what I could get away with.

As I had mentioned in the other post about spanking, when I was a kid, all kids knew that if you did something bad, you’d get a spanking.
It was definitely the norm back then, although I think the tide was just starting to turn, as I think I thought that I would NOT
get one, simply because I hadn’t ever before. I was really probably just too young for one, or too young to have done anything to
“deserve” one.
I “got away with” stuff for probably about a year before my parents must have realized that reasoning with me was not working.
They told me not to do stuff and why and it went right in one ear and out the other, I guess.

One day when my dad wasn’t home, I was hanging out in the kitchen while my mom had something going on the stove, maybe hard-boiled eggs or something because she left the room with the pot still on. The cookie jar (which I had been warned repeatedly to NOT get into for a number of reasons) was on a shelf above the stove, probably to make it inaccessible to me. I had also been warned to stay AWAY from the stove, ALWAYS, because it could be hot and I could get burned. I saw my opportunity though,
and dragged a chair over and reached OVER a hot stove with a pot of boiling water on it to get that cookie jar, and in the process,
the jar fell and broke.
Of course, I was caught. But I wasn’t worried, because I knew I would just get a talking to, which I did, from my mom.
Then my dad came home, and I didn’t think anything of it when they went to talk in the other room. Then my dad sat me down to give me a talking to, which again, went right in one ear and out the other. Until he flipped me around and started spanking me.
It didn’t hurt, but I was shocked. I did not know what to do at first, but then it occurred to me that I’d heard that kids cry
when they got spanked, so I started crying. I think I wanted it to stop because it made me realize that I was bad. And I didn’t want
to be bad anymore. No one wants to be bad at that age.
So I started to cry and my dad stopped, and then he hugged me and I could see that he felt bad. My mom felt bad. I felt bad for
making them feel bad. But that was the end of that, and I knew now that I could get a spanking if I did wrong. I still did a few things
that I shouldn’t have over the next year, and I got a couple more spankings, but after only one or two more, I stopped doing stuff I
had been told not to.

But I didn’t stop getting into trouble. I think things were fine until I was about 6. I was well behaved, now understanding the
consequences of my actions. I didn’t intentionally do anything wrong, and in fact I made really sure to not do anything
accidentally wrong either.
One night my parents had a party, and I guess they decided that I was well enough behaved that I could just stay in their room
and sit on their waterbed and watch the little tv in there. All fine with me, the waterbed was fun, and I had stuffed animals.
After a couple of hours, I must have gotten bored. My mom had a bunch of posters push-pinned into the walls which I was fascinated
by, so I stood on the bed to take a closer look. I don’t know if I was bouncing and screwing around, or if the bed was just sloshy,
but I must have knocked one of the pins out of the wall. I didn’t even realize it. AT ALL. The poster was over the bed, so the tack
probably landing right on it, and then as I squooshed around on there, it probably bounced and rolled to edge, where it fell
between the mattress and the frame, and poked a hole in the mattress. But it would have been a tiny hole, and I was a tiny kid,
so hours passed with no visible evidence. It probably wasn’t until my parent’s much heavier combined weight was on the bed hours later that it really started to gush.

And my dad got really pissed. And he yelled, and it scared the everloving shit out of me, even though I didn’t even know what had happened until he started yelling at me about how horrible I was for puncturing the bed, and on and on and on.
This was WAY WAY WAY worse than getting spanked, and I hadn’t even done anything. (not intentionally anyway, or that I was aware of.)

I must have been too old to be spanked at that point, so instead, I was grounded. For 6 months. No friends, no tv, no dessert.
That was a billion times worse than the spanking that only lasted a few seconds. Even worse was the fact that my dad didn’t believe
that I didn’t do it on purpose. Even worse than that was the fact that after that, I don’t think he trusted me at all.
Because I didn’t intentionally go against my parents for years, but there were a few more times when I accidentally broke things
(things I was allowed to touch or whatever) that I again got the yelling, and even worse, the long term grounding.
This continued until I was a teenager, and I was accused of increasingly more and worse deeds over the years, and I
probably spent half of every year for the next 8 years being grounded. No wonder I became socially stunted, overly shy,
self conscious and overweight.

So, I guess, in short, spanking worked to straighten out my behavior, but I also got to experience the other side of the disciplinary
coin. I’m not saying that anyone would advocate verbal abuse in any case, as an alternative to spanking or not, but I think
even in the cases in which I was wrongfully accused, I would have taken the spanking over the verbal abuse and grounding.
When I was spanked, I felt like I had hurt my parent’s feelings and it made me feel remorseful.
When we moved on to the groundings and yelling, I didn’t feel like my parents had hurt feelings – I felt like they were angry and
wanted to hurt MY feelings. The pain on my butt would have faded long before the pain in my heart would have, as it obviously
still exists.
Again, I’m not trying to say that no one out there has a better disciplinary plan than verbal abuse or spanking – I’m sure many of you
do. My only point is that, in my case, the spanking wasn’t that bad.
And if I knew anyone today who was whaling on their kid on a daily basis, or for shit they didn’t deserve, or was actually
doing any sort of lasting damage (physical or mental) I would be sure to do something about it.

It is officially less than 4 days ’til Christmas proper, and the house is clean, I’ve finished decorated, all the presents are wrapped and I have been begun baking and am still on schedule with that, and no disasters so far.

WHAT ALTERNATE UNIVERSE AM I LIVIN’ IN, Y0??!?

I mean seriously, no matter how organized I think I am, I am usually pretty deluded about that matter.

And it is a Holiday Wonderland in here. We have yet to achieve “Griswoldness” outside the house, but we’ve got two Christmas trees, one in the front room and one in the back, BOTH FULLY DECORATED! as of today. We’ve got wreaths and garlands, and fancy pointsettia lights, and knickknacks and all manner of Xmas shit. More Christmas music than you can shake a stick at. It is sparkly up in this bitch.
I love it.

Other than that, I don’t have a goddamn thing to say, really.

Imma gonna go bake ham and cinnamon rolls and bread pudding, and throw some photos at Flickr, and I don’t even know what else.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

After successfully cleaning up my Xmas mess in the attic yesterday, I decided it was time to attack my “paperwork nightmare” that has ended up in the dining room. That would not have worked out well for Thanksgiving.

There are so many reasons why no one in their right mind would want to tackle sorting and filing and storing 5 years worth of old bills and receipts that I didn’t even realize what the real reasons were until I was in the middle of it.

Then I came across all the old leases and moving out documents for the last several rentals I/we lived in before buying our house. I came across the lists of things that were “wrong” upon moveout, my copies of letters I wrote stating why I shouldn’t have to pay for this or that. I was a good tenant. I was responsible, paid my rent on time EVERY time, I didn’t trach any of the places that I lived or otherwise violate any of my lease terms. yet somehow, I ended up getting screwed by people who had acted sweet as pie and like we were friends for the most part while I was still living there.
The lady who made me pay hundreds of dollars to replace a 15 year old carpet, and wasn’t buying it when I told her that Landlord/Tenant says I only have to pay for the life LEFT in the carpet, not an amount equal to the total value.
The people who charged me for painting the walls – just regular old in between tenant painting, NOT painting because I had painted weird colors and not painted back or because I had damaged the walls. The people who charged me something like $70 for a SHOWER CURTAIN. A shower curtain, people! Who spends $70 to replace a shower curtain when they are selling the house anyway? Especially when it didn’t need replacing? Someone who pockets the cash, that’s who. And all these people ran me through the wringer over the cleaning when the law says you only have to leave the place “broom clean”. Not “scrubbed with a toothbrush on your hands and knees clean”. Some of these places were cleaner when I left than when I moved in, YET I STILL DIDN’T GET MY FULL CLEANING DEPOSIT BACK. And they all got away with it because they all know it’s just too much work to go to small claims court over it.
So I was like, the world’s best tenant for nothing. #anotherreasontoownahouse

Then I came across all the paperwork for the only time I’ve left a job that they didn’t beg me not to go. Because I got fired.
It’s not like I never think about that whole fiasco, but you forget how bad it really was. I always tell people that I own my own business because it’s good to not have someone else just take half the money you make, but really, I did it because I was tire dof being treated like shit. I was at that job for a LONG FUCKING TIME. And again, I was a perfect employee, just like I was a perfect tenant. I always showed up, never late, called if I was, worked hard, did my job well, no one ever complained about me.
And as sometimes happens with growing businesses, the place went downhill over time, and when I expressed my concerns, I was treated like dogshit, rather than someone who cares about the place she works. I was somehow denied unemployment even though there were a lot of instances of sexual harassment.
So seeing all that stuff again was super hard. I found a few good memories in there too, but not many.

It took six long hours to go through a mountain of paper which I will probably never need unless I get rid of it. Thank bob for the attic so I won’t have to see it again until it is time to shred it all.

It is truly the most wonderful time of the year.

Now that we have been in our house for a whole year, I feel like I have a handle on it. And by IT, I mean everything.
It’s amazing.
It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet, and I’ve already gotten a bunch of my Christmas shopping done. With that in mind, I headed up to the attic, where I have what could be referred to as “A Christmas Mess” – years and years of random decorations and wrapping supplies, some of which I haven’t seen for a decade. One of the greatest things about owning a house (to me) is that I finally have a sense of belonging. I know how things are, and how they are going to be. I finally have the ability to look at things and know that I don’t need them. There is no more doubt, no more “what if”. There’s no uncertainty as far as where my Christmas tree will go next year and what items I will have room for and not, what will go with everything and what won’t. Now that I am here, I just know, and that is the greatest feeling.

That said, I’ve only gotten rid of a few of the Xmas items I’ve accumulated over the years, but now that I know where everything is going to live for an indefinite period of time, I have finally taken the time to work on re-organizing it all. It’s great to have a space to just open boxes and start pulling stuff out and seeing what’s what, and finally being able to properly store all of it, cozily tucked away under the eaves.

Another project for today is to finish the planning of the Thanksgiving meals. That’s another thing I love about this time of year – the abundance. ‘Tis the harvest season, and shopping yesterday yielded 20 pounds of the biggest russet potatoes I’ve seen. There’s a giant bowl of apples on the table, and three turkeys in the freezer. Yes, three. And yes, I said MEALS when I mentioned Thanksgiving. We’re having our annual Day After Thanksgiving Dinner again this year, and to me it’s a bigger deal than regular old Thanksgiving. Not only will the standard Turkey Day fare be present, but also a giant pork loin roast on the smoker, more pies than you can shake a stick at, and time willing, a bunch of lovely snacks made from the day before’s leftovers. I’m thinking pulled turkey sliders made from the dark meat, and tiny turkey salad sandwiches from the white. We shall see.

It’s also a beautiful day out. I actually enjoy the sunlight in the fall, when it is filtered through clouds, and beams into the yard from a delightful Southern angle, rather than the glaring overhead sun of summer. Everything outside is soaked from the rain, and steaming in the sunbeams, too. It’s brilliant outside, far lovelier than any summer’s day could ever be.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

May the road rise to meet you, little friend.
I am truly sorry that your time here with us was so damn brief.
I sincerely hope that I was able to make your last weeks as comfortable as they possibly could have been.
I only wish I could have done more for you, that anyone could have known what was wrong.