fauxklore | Entries tagged with metajournal stuff

I am back from back-to-back trips, so it is time to work on catching up. First, I need to catch up on reading my friends' lists. After that, here's what to expect:

Science fiction storytelling
Two fringe shows
The ever popular celebrity death watch (and non-celebrity and non-human addenda)
Contry (the NPL con)
LoserFet - Niagara
Upstate New York

As usual, my life is a flurry of activity.

LJ and DW: I am planning to continue posting to both sites. If you are concerned about the future of LiveJournal, feel free to add me on Dreamwidth (under the same name). There are things I like and dislike about both platforms, by the way, but that is neither here nor there under the current circumstances.

Ink!: I got ink in the Style Invitational contest for fictoids about the financial world. My entry (which got merged with another person’s similar one) had to do with the Susan B. Anthony dollar being 82% the size of the Eisenhower dollar that preceded it.

Jewish Mustard: I went to a talk about Jewish mustard on Tuesday. The speaker was Barry Levenson, director of the National Mustard Museum I went to the Museum when it was still in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, but it has moved to larger quarters in Middleton, Wisconsin. It;s an amusing place and he was an entertaining speaker. Mostly, he recommended specific mustards to eat with various Jewish foods, e.g. mustard with dill to accompany lox (smoked salmon) or horseradish mustard to go with gefilte fish. Despite his suggestions, I am not going to start putting even the fruitiest of mustards on my cheesecake.

Sistine Chapel Exhibition: I probably would not have gone to this on my own, but one of my friends wanted to go and, as she’s been having a rough time lately for several reasons, I thought it would be good for her to get out. The exhibit is set up in an unleased retail space in Tyson’s Corner Center, which is a large shopping mall not far from where I live. Basically, they have large reproductions of the panels from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with explanatory plaques. The plaques are set up on easels, so they are not at eye level, and are, therefore, rather difficult to read for those of us who wear bifocals. More egregiously, the panels are not arranged in any particular order. They’re numbered, but they are not arranged in numerical order. That led to a lot of frustration as people were trying to find the next one in sequence. I suppose some people wouldn’t care if they see them out of order, but I am way too compulsive to do that. The advertising had led me to think there would be some immersive aspect (like the Van Gogh exhibit had), but that was not the case. They did show a few informative videos in the final room. Anyway, it was quite crowded and, between the crowds and the chaos, I was very disappointed.

We retreated to Coastal Flats (a good seafood restaurant in the mall) for lunch. After that, I did walk more around the mall, just to get some more steps in on a chilly day. It was more crowded than I’d prefer, but better than being cold.

Fairy Tale Variations - Little Red Riding Hood: Stories with Spirit did one of their Fairy Tale Variations storytelling shows on Saturday night. This one was based on Little Red Riding Hood. There were a couple of stories that portrayed her as a healer and mender. There was one in which grandmother and the wolf were long-time friends. My favorite of the stories was Cooper Braun’s version, which drew on Norse mythology.

Iolanthe: On Sunday afternoon, I drove to darkest Maryland (well, okay, Rockville) to see the Victorian Lyric Opera company production of Iolanthe which is my favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. I love the political humor of it and there are several songs I end up humming for days after listening to it. They did quite a good job. I will note that Claudia Finsaas who played Phyllis is extremely tall and towered over almost all the rest of the cast, which looked a bit odd. (But she did have an excellent voice). There was also some particularly clever costuming.

Jewish Magic: This morning I went to a very interesting lecture by Yoel Finkelman on Jewish magic. The talk was part of Jewish Book Week and included a lot of discussion about amulets, including documents with texts directly appealing to demons to stay away and bowls with incantations intended to trap demons. He talked about contradictions in the Torah about what type of magic is permitted. There is also a concept of letters being the building blocks of creation, which led to instructions on how to make a golem (a Frankenstein-like creature made from clay. Bu the way "golem" is also the modern Hebrew word for "robot.") He also talked about the differences between magic and technology. (In short , if it works, it’s technology.) Finally, he talked about Kav Hayashor (which translates as The Straight Measure) which contains a story about the demons who live in the basement of a house and cause trouble for the homeowners because they claim to have a deed to the basement. So the Rabbinical court has to get involved in this supernatural real estate dispute. I found the whole talk fascinating and wished it had been more than an hour long.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Don’t forget to get tickets for the Women’s Storytelling Festival. We’ll be performing live at Old Town Hall in Fairfax, Virginia on March 18-20th, but it is being live streamed so you can watch from anywhere. And you get access to the videos for an entire month.

I have several other things to write about, which I will list below, but I want to clear off a few random odds and ends first.

Mostly Harmless: This article tells the story about a hiker who was found dead and the effort to identify him. I thought it was really interesting reading.

Another Lost Person: The story of somebody who shouldn’t have been allowed to travel alone was also amusing.

Vaccine! After a long and frustrating saga, I got my first Pfizer shot last week. I had registered with Kaiser back in January. Then Virginia decided to pull vaccines from everywhere except the Virginia Department of Health. There were some given to pharmacies but only for people over 65. Virginia waffled on registration, first doing it by county, then statewide, but Fairfax County (where I live) opted out of the statewide system. It took Fairfax County about a month to get through people who had registered the first day. Anyway, Kaiser then got an allocation from the CDC and I got a notice to make an appointment with them, which was successful. Of course, about 3 days later, I got a notice from Fairfax County. Such chaos.

At least they made the appointment for the second shot while I was there checking in for the first one. And, for those who are tracking side effects, my left arm was a bit sore for a couple of days, bt not a big deal.

Other Health Stuff: I had mentioned back in December that the bloodwork at my annual physical showed mild anemia. My doctor put in an order for additional lab work, which I did in January. That showed my vitamin B12 level to be quite low and my iron level to be somewhat low, so she told me to take supplements and get retested 6 weeks after starting them. I did that this week. The good news is that the supplements are working for the vitamin B12 and the test for intrinsic factor blocking antibody (which would prevent B12 from being absorbed) was negative. My guess is that the B12 issue was related to the known interference due to taking metformin (which I take for Type 2 diabetes). At any rate, continuing to take a tiny sublingual pill a day is no big deal.

The bad news is that my iron levels did not improve and, in fact, are somewhat worse. I have an upper endoscopy and colonoscopy scheduled in early April to see if there is any bleeding that could account for this. I am rather dreading the prep for this, which everyone says is far worse than the actual procedure. Hopefully, anything that is found will be easily treatable.

Other Stuff I Intend to Write About:

The rest of the celebrity death watch
Assorted storytelling events
The recorded sessions of the 2020 IAJGS conference (except I can’t find my notes from those)
Art history classes
Potential travel plans

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/488914.html

Celebrity Death Watch: Oliver Knussen composed an opera based on the book Where the Wild Things Are. Melanie Kantrowitz was a poet and activist, writing a lot about Jewish women. Marion Woodman was a psychologist who wrote The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, an excessively Jungian analysis of eating disorders. Peter Carington was the Secretary General of NATO from 1984 to 1988. John A. Stormer was a propagandist, best known for None Dare Call It Treason. Henry Morgenthau III was a television producer. Carlo Benneton co-founded the clothing company that bears his name. Nathaniel Reed co-wrote the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

Puzzle Follow-up: If you are interested in the puzzle I brought to the NPL con, here’s a link to it.
road to bocon puzzle

While I am Linking to Things - a Friendzy: Here is ghost_light’s birthday friendzy. Probably of more interest to the LJ crowd vs. DW but lots of us use both, n’est ce pas? And lots of people could use more friends.

Weather and Baseball: We had one hell of a storm yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, it was fairly brief, but my power must have gone out at home for a few minutes (based on the kitchen clocks) and there was a lot of flooding. It did stop hours before the All-Star Game, at least. I will admit that I don’t really care about the All-Star Game, but my obsession with Jewish baseball players has me happy that Alex Bregman was the MVP.

Speaking of Treason: I am not quite convinced that Trump’s remarks at the press conference with Putin, disturbing as they were, qualify by the constitutional definition. The question is how one defines an actual enemy. Without a war having been formally declared, I could argue that Russia is not officially an enemy, no matter how much I believe they are in practical terms. Lawyers complicate everything.

Further Proof I am Tired: I saw a reference to a DC superhero show and it took me a minute to realize they were talking about comics, not the District of Columbia.

Ch-ch-changes: I’ve decided to write about only new graze snacks, as I was finding it hard to find things to say about the umptyumpth bag of microwave popcorn.

I need to get better control of my time and space. I am not sure how to do that, but I am thinking I should aim for leaving one unscheduled weekend a month. What I really want to change is the rotation of the earth, but I’ve been advised that is not within my bailiwick.

Crossposts: https://fauxklore.livejournal.com/422005.html

Celebrity Death Watch: Rose Evansky was a British hair stylist who popularized blow drying as a styling technique. Louis Harris was a pollster. Gordie Tapp performed on Hee Haw. Paul Peter Porges and Duck Edwing were both cartoonists for Mad Magazine. Robert Leo Hulseman invented the red solo cup. Piers Seller was an astronaut and meteorologist. Richard Adams wrote Watership Down among other novels. Vera Rubin was an astronomer, largely responsible for the theory of dark matter. George Michael was a singer before he went-went. George Irving was an actor, particularly well known for his work on Broadway.

Carrie Fisher was an actress and writer, best known for her work in the Star Wars series. She wrote interestingly about drug addiction and mental health issues in Postcards from the Edge and Wishful Drinking. Her mother, actress Debbie Reynolds, died the next day. Interestingly, Reynolds had co-starred with George Irving in Irene.

About 2016: Just for the record, I don’t for one minute believe that 2016 was a particularly horrible year with respect to celebrity deaths. There may have been more than in some other years (though that isn’t really clear, since there isn’t a set standard for who to count). But you should expect some statistical fluctuations and they really aren’t meaningful.

Dreamwidth: I see a lot of people moving to Dreamwidth because of the LJ servers moving to Moscow. I do have an account there and I should probably look at doing likewise. My recollection is that there were just enough annoyances about the site that kept me from switching there a long time ago, but I’ve kept the account in case there was some reason to. (Which was mostly a concern about DDOS attacks on LJ.) At any rate, I don’t expect to do anything before the weekend / new year if at all.

Chappy Chanukah: I went to the chavurah Chanukah party Saturday night. The drive was a bit scary as it was very foggy out. The party was fun, overall. My contribution to the white elephant gift exchange was a box of notecards, while I ended up with a few CDs. I’d made Moroccan orange salad (basically, orange segments, marinated in rosewater and cinnamon), which is kind of a pain since segmented oranges goes slowly. I really should make my mother’s potato latkes because, eating some at the party, reminded me that nobody else’s are anywhere near as good. I won't explain why, since I am sworn to secrecy.

Minor Vacation – Key West: I took a short trip down to Key West to thaw out a bit. I flew down on Sunday. I thought the flight would be emptier on Christmas Day, but I thought wrong. The advantage of going to touristy places on holidays is that lots of things are open. I’d arrived in the mid-afternoon and had enough time to do the Conch Train tour, which is informative, though a bit pricy.

I started Monday with breakfast at Blue Heaven, which a friend had recommended. Eating in the garden, amongst the roosters, was atmospheric, and the food was pretty good. Then I walked over to Hemingway’s House. I was glad I took the guided tour (included in the price of admission) as the guide was quite entertaining, particularly about Hemingway’s wives. After the tour, one could walk around and count the toes on the cats. Then I walked over to the Southernmost Point in the Continental U.S., where I waited in line an hour for a photo with the buoy, which marks 90 miles from Cuba. I got some key lime gelato in lieu of lunch, then browsed some shops for a while, buying a pair of Keene sandals to replace the last ones I destroyed.

After an afternoon nap, I had a light supper at Conch Republic. Then it was time for the ghost tour I’d signed up for. The tour was, alas, disappointing, with more emphasis on taking photos that might show orbs and ectoplasm than on the stories behind various allegedly haunted places. There were a couple of good stories, notably the famous one of Robert the Doll, but, overall, the guide just wasn’t much of a storyteller. There are several other companies doing ghost tours in Key West, so maybe one of the others is better.

On Tuesday, I had an exquisite breakfast at Sarabeth’s – lemon ricotta pancakes that actually tasted lemony. I walked up to the Butterfly Conservancy which was enjoyable, though overpriced for its size. I followed part of a walking tour I had downloaded, which took me over to the cemetery. Unfortunately, their office was closed, so I couldn’t get their tour map. I was still able to find a few interesting things, e.g. the graves of the victims of the explosion of the Maine and the monument commemorating that event. Oh, yes, I also stopped in at the Tennessee Williams exhibit. And had lunch at Margaritaville, where they were not, alas, playing Jimmy Buffett music.

Tuesday night, I had dinner with two high school friends (one of whom lives there; the other was visiting her) and their children (one has a son, the other a daughter). We had an excellent meal at Hogfish Bar and Grill on Stock Island. And even more excellent reminiscing, going back to junior high. (They lived at the other end of town, so we didn’t go to the same elementary school.)

I had enough time on Wednesday for a stroll through Harry Truman’s Little White House and a walk along the harbor front before going to the airport. My flight home was fairly uncrowded and would have been on time had we not had to wait for the gate at DCA. Overall, it was a good few days away.

1) I am (obviously) not doing Holidailies this year. I feel vaguely guilty about that, but I am just too swamped with things to attempt it. I haven't even come close to meeting other goals and I just can't take on anything else. But I'm going to experiment a bit with seeing if I can do slightly more frequent entries based on just a few things at a time.

2) It's rare that I tell stories that other people tell, but it happened at Saturday night's swap. I wanted to run through The Most Precious Thing, which is the story of the clever innkeeper's daughter who marries a wealthy landowner. When she questions his judgment, he tells her to leave but take with her whatever from his home is most precious to her. She, of course, takes him.

One of our young tellers told a different version of the same story. The differences were fairly superficial, e.g. the exact riddles she has to solve to win him and some of the details of the setting. (And, in her version, the husband was a king, not just a rich landowner.)

Had she told before me, I probably would have told something else, so I thought it was interesting she went ahead with what she had planned.

3) I had a dream the other night which involved some event at MIT with set-up involving a truck creating a circle of portapotties. It is probably a good thing that I believe dreams are often random electrical discharges and not of deep psychological significance.

The usual apology for not writing. I have been crazy busy, to the extent that I have still not finished reading the Sunday Washington Post. (Normally, I figure I am doing well if I finish it on Monday.) So just a quick list of things to write about:

- 2 storytelling shows I did, plus a weekend workshop
- what is it about Williamsburg and pancakes?
- why I need to retire sooner, rather than later
- assorted rants about customer service

In short, every project at work had big things happen at the same time. One did finish but then I got something new I need to get done this month, on top of the three big on-going projects (plus the normal background stuff).

And I have been doing a lot of storytelling related things. Why did I agree to Sherpa events that are on consecutive weekends?

I also had a weekend out of town, with all the exhaustion that implies.

I have a long list of things to write about, but they will have to wait.

In other news, I have decreed November to be NaTraWriMo and plan to really get travel writing done. Except, of course, when I am traveling which is about a third of the month for various reasons.

Can I borrow a cup of sleep?

Let's start with a celebrity death. Andy Williams was most famous for singing "Moon River," a song that is notable largely for having a range small enough that even many people who can't sing can get away with it. I have to admit that he fell into the (large) category of people who I hadn't realized were still alive.

My other news tidbit is that Jason Varitek has been named a special assistant to the general manager for the Red Sox. I am very pleased. There are few players nowadays who play their entire major league career with one team. (Tek did do a minor league stint with the Mariners, and had also played for the independent St. Paul Saints. But all of his time in the majors was with the Red Sox.) He is, by all accounts, popular with the players and I hope this move will improve their performance next season.

My main topic today is social networking. I've done this for a long time, having been a big user of Usenet (and a few local bulletin boards) starting around 1985. Back in those days, computer access itself was a significant barrier. And Usenet generally required some familiarity with text editors that had a certain learning curve. I was unusual in not being a computer scientist, though I am an engineer. I remember what a big kerfuffle it was when AOL first gave Usenet access to their users.

For me, being on-line had a lot to do with finding other people who had at least some of the same interests I did. No matter what you were interested in - be it Celtic music or detective fiction or Jewish genealogy, there were people out there to discuss it with. I hung out mostly in a few places - soc.singles, soc.women, rec.arts.books, rec.travel - but no matter where I went, there was interesting conversation. I went to boinkcons and met net folks in person, too. I am, in fact, still friendly with many of those people.

As the net grew, so did the number of spammers and trolls and a lot of interesting activity retreated to private mailing lists. There are plusses and minuses to that. The big minus is, of course, the barrier of entry having changed from knowledge of a subject to knowing the people to get you hooked into those lists and communities. I do use one semi-private board somewhat regularly and I think it could come across as cliquish to newcomers. But, if one opens things up, the trolls follow quickly.

My history with Livejournal is more complex. I first became aware of on-line journals via someone I knew from storytelling who was keeping one. I began reading other OLJs and writing my own at Areas of Unrest to document my preparations for my mid-life crisis. There were a mailing list and a couple of websites for people in that world. And, eventually, a number of those people migrated to LJ, largely for its ease of use. I admit that the ability to tag entries easily was also a big factor for me. At any rate, there were people I knew from other connections on LJ and many of them continued writing interesting things. Some of them still do, though some have stopped writing anything longer than a facebook status.

I resisted facebook for a long time. When I did join, I found it useful for tracking down people I'd grown up with. (Keeping up with local gossip cuts down on the length of phone conversations with my mother.) It's also been fun to reconnect with people from various other segments of my past, e.g. summer camp. I find that some of the groups I've joined function somewhat like Usenet did, with interesting and surprisingly in-depth conversations.

So where am I now? I use facebook a lot. I still post long entries here. I check google+ only sporadically because, frankly, there just isn't a lot there. (I do have a couple of friends who use it and don't use facebook.) I check dreamwidth for the few folks who don't auto-post things from there to LJ.

But what I find most interesting is the growth of specialized sites, many of which have grown away from their specialty. Flyertalk (and, to a lesser extent milepoint) provide useful information for frequent flyers, but also have general social aspects (some of them limited to people with a certain amount of time on those sites). When I first joined Ravelry, I intended to use it to catalog my yarn stash and find patterns. I still intend to get around to that someday, but I spend most of my time on the site on a few of the groups, most of them travel related. (Oddly, Library Thing doesn't seem to have gone in that direction. Maybe book people are more focused?) Anyway, I think those sites work because there is some common bond to start with. Back in the Usenet days, having a modem was enough of a common bond.

I'm not sure what any of this means, but I figure I'll keep doing it as long as it's fun. If nothing else, social networking has helped me meet numerous kindred spirits along the way. That's good enough for me.

I've been absurdly busy but I did want to post at least a partial update before I go off-line for a few days.

Celebrity Death Watch: Major celebrity death of the past several days is Sidney Harman. Aside from having made lots of money in audio equipment and then gone on to buy Newsweek for a dollar, his major claim to fame in the D.C. area is that the theatre used by the Shakespeare Theatre Company is named for him. He and his wife, former Congresswoman Jane Harman, were long term patrons of the arts here.

Random Trivia: 14% of our troops who have been medically evacuated from Afghanistan have had altitude sickness.

Taxes: Virginia ended their free file program after last year. The idea was that people with lower incomes would get to use commercial providers free, while others could pay to file electronically. Being a cheapskate and noting that the feds at least have free fillable forms, I intended to file on paper. But Intuit saw a marketing opportunity and provided a prepaid code for all Virginia taxpayers, making it free to use their turbotax product. This meant that I used turbotax for the first time in my life (for both federal and state taxes). I found it fairly annoying that things are arranged in a different order than they are on the forms and call for more information. For example, I don't have to enter the info from 1099-INT and 1099-OID forms in separate sections on Schedule B, instead of just separate lines. Nor do I have to list each of my charitable contributions with the exact date. Overall, I wasn't super impressed and wouldn't bother to pay for the software. People who are less compulsively organized or more intimidated by tax forms may find the experience more satisfying.

Social Media: I've been getting some odd LJ comments. They aren't obvious spam, but they just say things like "this was an interesting topic." Which, of course, is completely generic and doesn't bear any particular relationship to anything I wrote. In all cases, when I look at the commenter's LJ, they have no entries, no friends list, and just a bunch of comments. Has anybody else experienced this and what could somebody be aiming to gain out of it?

House Envy: I went to a friend's housewarming party this past Sunday afternoon. He bought a condo in Crystal City towards the end of last year and moved in right at the beginning of January. He has already replaced the dining room floor, decorated with his vast collection of antiques (e.g. hung several old maps, arranged a lot of glass objects in curio cabinets he inherited from his greatgrandparents, etc.), arranged an assortment of stuffed animals on the guest bed, and so on. More to the point, he appears to have actually unpacked everything. Now, admittedly I didn't open up closets and maybe he has a messy storage locker somewhere, but I've lived in my condo for over 3 years now and my den remains the Black Hole of Vienna and I haven't hung most of my pictures. (Partly that is because I am looking for some display cabinets and haven't had time to find ones I like.)

He also has an awesome view of the airport, the river and much of the District. There's a part of me that envies the view but I made a concious choice of where to live and I prefer my neighborhood. I realized that much of my envy had to do with the orderliness of his place. And that is something that is within my control. I'm not going to ever achieve a clutter-free life (nor would I really want to) but I can do better.

Travel Planning: I believe I've mentioned before that I am planning a trip to Iceland and the Faroe Islands. The news this week noted that the Phallological Museum in Iceland has finally gotten a human specimen. This sounds like such a bizarre museum that it may be worth adding to my itinerary.

Reviews to Come: I saw Pink Martini (with the NSO Pops) on Wednesday night. Last night, I drove to Herndon for the Elden Street Players production of the musical, Thrill Me: The Story of Leopold and Loeb. Expect reviews some time next week.

Upcoming Calendar Items: I have mailed in my registration fee and made my travel arrangements for Convidence. On a completely different note, I have almost decided to enter the 2nd annual Virginia Tall Tales Championship.

I wrote a long entry about the past week, including various things that amused me and my brief review of Anna Deveare Smith's Let Me Down Easy at Arena Stage. And, somehow, it caused things to not load right here.

It's fixed now (after a support request), but the entry is over at my dreamwidth site instead.

1) I'm not entirely sure what a bandwagon is, but I have jumped on the latest and have a dreamwidth account now. I still plan to be here, not there, but it's never a bad idea to have a plan B.

2) My trip to Los Angeles was mixed. The actual travel wasn't too bad. The actual meeting on Tuesday was not a great use of my time, but I was able to have some productive conversations with people who were there. Both of my meetings yesterday were pretty good. And it was nice to be able to get together with

cahwyguy in between them.

3) I have managed to misplace two things which I thought I'd put in particular places so that I'd find them. I think I may need to do another round of desk cleaning at home.

4) I am very pleased that Signature Theatre has won the regional Tony award. I really enjoyed the Kander & Ebb series they did last year and I have tickets to both of their shows this coming weekend. The category that I think will be the toughest to decide is featured actress in a musical. Karen Olivo was excellent as Anita in West Side story but Martha Plimpton was a real scene stealer in the less spectacular Pal Joey. By the way, I am surprised that Jerry Herman has waited this long for a lifetime achievement award.

5) My first great-grandboss at circle-A died last weekend, as did another person who had an office down the hall from me back then. The former was a surprise (sudden massive heart attack while playing tennis). Then I got home last night and had an email from Jane with Sherry Geyelin's obituary. Sherry was a big supporter of storytelling in Washington and I was honored to get to know her when she hosted a weekend workshop with Donald Davis at her house.

You all stay healthy out there.

Just to reassure people that I am alive and well, despite recent silence, here is a list of the things I will write about real soon now. But sleep is a higher priority. I am hoping it snows enough for me to get tomorrow off.

1) The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
2) Why finishing 265 (out of 684) may literally make me float
3) Pal Joey
4) Differences between NY and DC
5) My progress on knitting a sweater a month
6) The Amazing Race

There may also be some items on travel planning and general kvetching about the weather and housework and other quotidian matters (like my recent obsession with the word "quotidian.")

It occurs to me that I never explained what "fauxklore" means.

You have to parse it as "faux" + "klore" which makes it pronounced like "folklore." Except it's less folk than faux-k. It's a word I made up a long time ago (i.e. more than a decade) to describe some of the stories I tell. They sometimes start out as actual folk tales. But they tend to morph and I often look back months later and am astonished at how little of what I tell is actually in the traditional story.

I have been meaning to set up an LJ account for a while, largely because so many of my friends do. I am somewhat skeptical of social networking in general, despite how many people I met (and still keep in touch with) from the early usenet days (back in the mid-1980's). Someday I will get organized enough to ask the rest of the folks I know who use LJ to friend me.

Anyway, I do plan to keep up Areas of Unrest but I need to move my templates over to my new computer so it may be a few weeks before there is much there beyond link to here. And I do like the concept of tagging entries, so there may be a bunch of short things showing up here.