laurelfan

What advertisement made you think this year?

Bet you were expecting another rant? Nope. Here's my favorite ad of this year, and of all time. Lyrics are NSFW.

It has been pointed out to me that I did not post about our baby's gender to LJ.

For those of you who don't follow me on Twitter, Flickr, or facebook, here is a peek at the baby Benson's private business from our 20 week ultrasound:



To give an LJ quality entry in relation to this photo...

As reported, it was my plan to put a report of the baby's gender into a Christmas card for my parents to open with the rest of their gifts on Christmas morning. This did not happen.

What happened was this: I let them see the non-gender related ultrasound photos 2 days before Christmas as we ate chocolate and drank wine (well, some of us drank wine) after dinner. My father asked if we were absolutely certain of the baby's sex. Buster said that we were. My father then screamed, "WELL THEN IT'S A BOY!!"

And after days of keeping it cooly to myself and not letting anything slip. After days of being coy and making jokes and playing with people's minds to convince them that I was having one and then the other... my red face (of course) betrayed me to my family. The secret was out, and it was hilarious.

I had no secret to put into a card. Oh well.

Web tool. It came into your work flow this year and now you couldn't live without it. It has simplified or improved your online experience.



Picnik, specifically its integration with flickr, and more specifically the "auto fix" tool. Yet another application has moved to the cloud.

Learning experience. What was a lesson you learned this year that changed you?

I'm still learning how to listen. I love this story from a parenting book that illustrates how hard it is (I'm paraphrasing). It shows just how hard it is to really listen to others:

A mom took her son to a daycare to see if it was right for him. He went into the classroom and looked at a broken truck. He said, "Who broke this truck?" His mom quickly said, "Honey, let's not seek to blame other children." The teacher said, "In this classroom, it's OK if children accidentally break toys." She knew he was really asking, "what will happen to the child who broke this truck?"

Next, the boy went to the easel and looked at a painting another child had done. He said, "This is an ugly painting." His mom pulled him aside and said, "Honey, that wasn't a nice thing to say about the painting." The teacher replied to the boy, "In this classroom, it doesn't matter how well you can paint. We're all learning how to be better artists." She knew he was really asking, "what happens to children who can't paint well?"

The boy looked pleased, knowing that this would be a classroom where he'd be accepted for who he is.

Gift. What's a gift you gave yourself this year that has kept on giving?



MacBook Pro. Technically, work gave me this gift and technically it's not even a gift because it doesn't belong to me. But in a way, I gave it to myself by switching jobs.

Insight or aha! moment. What was your epiphany of the year?

Nobody has a clue about what they really want.

Social web moment. Did you meet someone you used to only know from her blog? Did you discover Twitter?

Pretending to be Urban Phantom (the bear) on Twitter.

Stationery. When you touch the paper, your heart melts. The ink flows from the pen. What was your stationery find of the year?

I'm using the same stationary I've used for the past 15 years. From my mom (she has a stationery business), with an embossed Goldberg at the top. If you've ever given me a gift, you've probably gotten a thank you note written on one.

Laugh. What was your biggest belly laugh of the year?

This:



And pretty much any other time spent with Amy Barr.

Top 10 Reasons to ring in 2010 at the Labyrinth party

1. It's a fundraiser for Lifelong Aids Alliance so you're partying for a good cause.
2. Open bar all night (i.e. all you can drink)
3. Skillet is catering (so all the bacon jam you can eat)
4. The Adventure School is planning the party so you know it's going to be amazing
5. Burlesque dancers, along with other performances (but who cares about the other performances when there's going to be burlesque dancers)
6. The Beta Society is doing a super secret art installation
7. DJs playing dance music all night and everyone will be in masquerade attire.
8. It's Labyrinth themed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VppuD1St8Ec)
9. I'll be there (hopefully this isn't a reason not to attend!)
10. If all the above still haven't convinced you, here's a discount code which makes the ticket only cost $99: codeword "bowiespackage"

Buy tickets at: http://www.labyrinthNYE.com (use the discount code at checkout)

At 12:07 this morning I got a call from my grandfather. When he calls, I answer. He’d passed out in the hallway and had called paramedics. He assumed they would take him to Swedish like they normally do. There’s a “normal” course of events when Gramps has a heart attack. This is his 5th or 6th in 13 months and he has another 3 or 4 hospitalizations in addition during the same time frame.

So I did my normal course. Get dressed. Make coffee. Call Joe. Dawdle on the internet for 15 minutes. Then leave for the hospital. I got there 15 minutes before they did.

I am always fine when I get the call. Driving up Lynn is fine. I start to get worried this will be the last time I see him about the time I get on the freeway. By the James St exit I am a wreck and near bawling. But I pull it together while climbing James St. And I’m all business by the time I get to Swedish.

That is my “normal” progression.

My main concern is Gram. She has dementia and stress makes her worse. So this morning I walked to meet her at the ambulance and took charge of her while the paramedics wheeled Gramps into emergency. They thought I worked there and were surprised I couldn’t tell them the access code for the emergency doors.

Gramps was admitted overnight, though now it has stretched into 2. Gram cannot stay by herself though she thinks she is fine. So I am crashing on her couch for the second, hopefully less sleepless, night.

The docs who downloaded his pacemaker data confirmed a heart attack. Without the builtin defibrillator, he would have died. It’s the 3rd or 4th time it’s saved his life.

The neologism making the rounds this winter is snowpocalypse referring to the big snowstorm that hit the east coast. The Lede a blog at the New York Times, attempted to track down the origins of the word snowpocalypse. They tracked it back to Seattle last year, and a few other places in 2007 and 2006.

But they didn’t really find the origins.

Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that.

DCist claims they first used it. In 2005.

But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005.

Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find.

I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders.

Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived.

Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!.

What's a business that you found this year that you love? Who thought it up? What makes it special?



Lala totally rocked my world this year. It completely changed the way I discover, listen to, and purchase music. I believe those statistics that say music spending is up among those who use file-sharing. Although Lala isn't file-sharing, it's a similar technology and I bought more music this year than in any other year since I got high-speed internet.

I wrote a bit about it earlier in the year, so I won't write much more. Apple recently bought Lala, so I hope they don't screw it up.

I started thinking about how to best reflect on the year, and the decade, as I do every year. And every year I am dissatisfied with what's available. Reflection works best when it can build on reflections from the past, year over year, etc. We are changing, slowly, over time, in ways that none of us can really tell from up close.

I mentioned the idea a while ago, and have since started on this "Best of 2009" meme which has been making me feel pretty unsatisfied in the reflection department. I met with Carinna and Michael a couple weeks ago to start coming up with ideas on how to make yearly reflections more fun and more satisfying.

This is the first draft:

http://bigcheckin.com

I'm leaving for Delaware tomorrow morning for a week, so this is as far as I got. It has 15 questions, varying from checkbox selection to adjective listing to inner-circle creating to goal contemplation. The answers are stored in ways that I think will make it easy to create aggregates amongst people, and also in ways that will make it possible to chart your own changes over time.

It's not yet possible to publish your results, but it will save your answers and I promise that results will be made available as soon as possible when I get back.

This is another long-term project. I want to launch something in January that will include charts and graphs and statistics and ways to post your Big Checkin to places people can see it, ways to make some parts private, etc. But while I'm gone (and won't be near a computer) it would help if some people felt interested enough in the idea to post their own thoughts and reflections, it will help me better able to figure out what's interesting and what's not.

So, yeah, there's no report at the end yet. But I'm bringing my sketchbook with me to start thinking about it. Any ideas you have as well on better ways to ask the questions, ways to visualize the answers, etc, would be awesome.

Help?

Hairdryers in Eilat are weird

At the end of my last post, we were about to leave for Jordan. We got an earlier start than we wanted, as we were woken up by thumping bass music at 5am. We took advantage of the time of day, and stayed up to watch the sun rise and book a place to stay in Aqaba (leeching someone's wi-fi). We chose a Dive Village on the South Beach area of town.



Crossing the border into Jordan was fairly easy, considering the history of the two nations. We tried to walk from Eilat to the border, but it turned out to be really far, really dusty, and totally lacking shade. We got a taxi for the last leg and walked across the border, paying our 95NIS crossing fee (used to discourage people from leaving Israel). We walked across this eerie no-mans-land between the two nations, as you can see above. It felt like a prisoner transfer or something from 24.

On the Jordanian side of the border, things weren't as organized. We were passed from window to window, getting the necessary stamps and visas into our passports. We were the only two people not part of a tour group, which we should have taken as a sign.



Finally, we had the documents necessary to get past the guard post and into the dusty parking lot on the Jordanian side of the boarder. Beyond the dirt lot was desert, with a single road stretching eastward as far as the eye could see. We were immediately accosted by taxi drivers, asking where we were going. We took a cab to downtown Aqaba, since we read that cabbing directly to the South Beach is more expensive than splitting it into two voyages.



We were dropped off in downtown Aqaba, and figured we could walk south until we got to South Beach. It wasn't until later we learned that South Beach is actually about 10km south of the city, past a huge industrial area, cargo port, cliffs, and generally a bunch of things that don't make for a relaxing walk. We walked past a large P-Patch that bordered the Red Sea. A promenade along the water took us past idle blue-collar types, people wanting to sell us food or boat excursions, women bathing in full black hijab dress.


Not where we stayed

There's something I'm having trouble putting into words in a respectful way, and I was tempted to leave it out as to not sound stereotypical or prejudiced. But it impacted our time in Jordan more than any other thing, so as imperfect as it may be, it must be said: every man in Jordan stared at Venessa as if they were just ejected from a spaceship or tossed overboard and could only breathe through their eyeballs if the oxygen would somehow flow out of Venessa's hair, breasts, hips, and legs through their gaze. EVERY man. It was disgraceful and disgusting. The unceasing, unrepentant stare of a man who's been told his entire life that he has no control over his body, his masculinity, his urges, and the only recourse to prevent society from degrading into a grinding mass of rape, orgy, and incest is to have the female form hidden from his view, so he never needs to exercise his own God-given power of restraint. I'm fully aware that this is my own culture speaking, and these men probably thought we were "disgraceful and disgusting," walking around in shorts and showing a modicum of affection towards each other in public. I'm curious what my friends with mid-Eastern backgrounds have to say about this, or those who've also traveled to Arab countries. It was one of those things where you knew what was coming, but reading or hearing about it just couldn't prepare one for actually experiencing it.


A nice photo to cleanse the palate from the above rant

We took a cab the rest of the way to South Beach, and found the Diver's Village. The Village itself was just across the main highway from the beach, and only about 5 minutes walk up a rather steep hill (which afforded an amazing view of the Red Sea and Egypt, but was unshaded and thus rather uncomfortable to traverse). The hotel area was appointed like a sultan's palace, with low, cushioned seating, lots of tile, and small cabins with a rooftop deck. The A/C was engaged in a fierce battle against the sun, and only upon sundown did the A/C unit win its nightly pyrrhic victory. The cabins themselves are under-priced as loss-leaders for more expensive scuba excursions, so we just enjoyed the views, did a lot of reading, and partook in the amazing breakfasts each morning.



The cabins were set in a slight valley, so on 3 sides was the sight you see above: a small dirt hill with a pack of wild dogs playing, scavenging, and yapping. The area seemed to be in an eternal state of unfinished construction projects. The hotel had a restaurant, where a meal for two can be had for 5JD ($7).



We spent the day snorkeling and swimming. I struck up a conversation with a group of boys, but the language barrier and the ambient noise made it rather futile. They wanted to know if Venessa and I were married, where we're from. Anyone who's spoken to teenagers in a foreign country knows the standard questions. I played the part of the gracious guest and told them that Jordan is the highlight of my trip, and mostly downplayed the Jewish/Israel portion of our voyage.

While Venessa was out snorkeling and I was on the beach, I met a young Israeli couple from Tel Aviv, the only Israelis we encountered in Jordan. I told them we were heading back into Israel in a couple days and we'd be in Tel Aviv the following week. They recommended Gordon Beach and after I thanked them for the recommendation, the woman said "See you there" without a hint of irony.



As the sun set it became bearable to sit outside in an unshaded location. I spent the final minutes of daylight on the rooftop deck, watching the sun set behind the Egyptian hills, and reading a novel in the fading twilight as the dogs' muted howls competed with the constant whoooosh of the wind kicking up sand from one hill to the next.

Tomorrow will be the long trip up to Petra.

Word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. "2009 was _____."

Kablamo

Shop. Online or offline, where did you spend most of your mad money this year?

A plurality of my money went to a little boutique called Chase Mortgages. Additionally, I spent a lot dining out, and on bike/biathlon stuff.

Car ride. What did you see? How did it smell? Did you eat anything as you drove there? Who were you with?

Driving from Safed through the West Bank to Eilat over a couple days. We ate Hit wafers and fruit stolen from breakfast buffets.

New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

I didn't meet too many new people.

Project. What did you start this year that you're proud of?

I'm in the middle of a big project to scan old photos. The secret toothpaste tube project is still ongoing. Owning chickens is kind of a never-ending project. I guess you could say the same for parenting.

Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What's yours?

I should have read all the prompts before agreeing to do this I think. What kind of person do these prompts lead us to try to be? Tea? I think it was that curiously strong tea that comes out of my French press. For sure.

Word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. "2009 was _____."

My word of the year, determined early on, was "frugality to the max!" I suppose that sort of sums it up for me... an attempt to reign in the unbalanced nature of my life from the previous year. Back to basics, build from the strongest part of the foundation, make a plan for a sustainable and balanced future while still thinking big and taking well-calculated risks.

Shop. Online or offline, where did you spend most of your mad money this year?

Lawyers, landlords, credit cards, and the IRS. I guess the offline shopping world wins again.

Car ride. What did you see? How did it smell? Did you eat anything as you drove there? Who were you with?

Another silly question. I don't have a car. But the scene from the window of a taxi is usually pretty exciting. I also enjoyed the bus ride to Vancouver this summer. My Zipcar errands were more about the destination, and our mini-roadtrip to Orcas was more about the people in the car.

New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

I'm very happy to report that my unsung hero of 2009 wasn't a customer service rep. That would be sad. I didn't so much get swept up by any new people this year as grow more solid relationships with the people I already know and love. Kellianne deserves special props for weathering our third year of higher highs and lower lows with me. I feel like I also got to know several of my friends a lot better this year too. You know who you are.

Project. What did you start this year that you're proud of?

Locavore, Enjoymentland, and project Baby Benson.

While I'm away on my trip look for me here:

http://marytoad.wordpress.com/

I am so homesick right now! I guess it's good that I'm going the Philadelphia way in a matter of days. I hate it when Nor'easters happen without me! I have super special memories of every blizzard that ever hit the home coast during my lifetime, and always smart to think of the ones that somehow happened without my help and delight.

I always felt that the two best times to be in NYC are during the first rash of spring fever, and during any blizzard. Nothing like a bit of joyful weather to inspire great community happiness! Ah, and home in good old Delaware during a snow! The kids! The snow forts! The sledding! Icicle Alley! The best.

Info has been slow to come in and it's all rather vague, but it sounds like there's going to be a David Bowie themed pub crawl tonight on Capital Hill.

Here's what I know:

The Adventure School will be having a BOWIE BAR CRAWL tonight to pump up Capitol Hill for the Labyrinth NYE Party! Join us in your Bowie finery! If you make it the whole night you get 1/2 off your Labyrinth NYE tickets (which are $125)!

Schedule as follows:
8 – 8:30 Meet the Adventure School 1205 E. Pike (free drinks)
8:30-9 – barrio & tavern Law 1406 12th Ave
9-9:30 Grey Gallery/PURR - 1512 11th Ave
9:30-10 Cha-Cha - 1013 E Pike St
10-10:30 Quinns/MOE - 1001 E. Pike
10:30-11 Rosebud - 719 E. Pike
11:-11:30 Lindas - 707 E. Pine
11:30-12 Kurrant - 606 E. Pine
12:12-30 Capitol Club - 414 E. Pine
12:30-on Eagle (Fringe) - 314 E. Pike

Check in with Cori at 1am for the discount code to get your 1/2 NYE tickets.

*Call the Adventure School hotline for updates throughout the night 206-802-8048

Male, Female, Hermaphrodite
Child, Adult, Young, Middle aged, Over the hill, Old
Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, Aunt, Uncle, Grandfather, Grandmother, Son, Daughter, Pet owner
Wife, Husband, Boyfriend, Girlfriend, Friend, Friend with benefits, Flirt
Gay, Straight, Bisexual, Lesbian, Monogamous, Open
Student, Employee, Boss, Entrepreneur, Unemployed
Ill, Healthy, Fit, Slovenly, Unhealthy, Sporty, Accident-prone, Lucky, Alert, Slow, Calm, Stressed, Focused, Distracted, Energetic, Lazy, Passive, Agressive,
Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat, Independent, Activist
Religious, Spiritual, Agnostic, Atheist, Humanist, Lost soul, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim
Extrovert, Introvert, Intuitive, Sensing, Thinking, Feeling, Perceiving, Judging
Proud, Greedy, Lustful, Angry, Gluttonous, Jealous, Lazy, Sarcastic, Cynical, Cheating, Lying
Sincere, Polite, Trustworthy, Frugal, Industrious, Fair, Moderate, Clean, Chaste, Humble, Loyal

I'm looking for generic kinds of categories that people can put themselves in. Not either/ors, necessarily, but demographic kinds of things that are more about who you think you are than who you really are. Some serious, some silly, etc. Can you think of more categories? Help!

Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What's yours?



I'm not much of a tea drinker (I prefer hot water when I'm cold, or chocolate when I need a stimulant), but when I do drink tea, it's Horny Goat Weed! Come on guys, who doesn't need a dose of kidney yang restorative?