6 posts tagged “jessamyn”

I liked playing with Vox but now I am done. I have a blog of my own over at http://jessamyn.com/journal (rss, atom) and I encourage you to read it if this is the sort of thing that interests you. I have photos at Flickr, a professional blog of sorts and I'm even sometimes on Facebook. I'll still be reading here, I just won't be writing here.

I don't ever want to have to unclick a box that says "This may be offensive or otherwise not for the public." again. I do not want to read the Welcome to Vox Design thread anymore. I want to size my pictures more than four different ways. I do not want to see a lock next to a "viewable by anyone" indicator. I want to copy and paste without copying line height and font faces and hyperlinks. I want to see a cursor. I want styles of my own devising. I would like more friends and neighbors, and fewer "friends" and "neighbors." Those of you who are both know where to find me, and I know where to find you.

More to the point, it's Spring and I want to type less and walk by the river more. This is part of that. Thanks for your kind attentions. Come visit if you're ever in Vermont.

I got my Flickr set of travel photos all up and running, in case you want to see a few more pictures like this and a lot of photos of odd caravan parks and sort of normal public libraries. I had a good time, but jet lag is a bear. Photoset is here: Australia 2007. My sister has a few more but she's a pokey uploader.

Just a few images from the MIT Mystery Hunt that ended officially today. The first team "found the coin" which is the official end of the hunt at 2:10 this morning. However, the people who made the puzzle [The Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight - Dan Katz is a co-captain] decided to let everyone who wanted to continue playing keep playing. They kept answering the phone and confirming answers until three this afternoon. The official wrap up was at 5:30 where we learned that Doctor Awkward had won the game. We also learned that Doctor Awkward had two of the crossword geniuses from Wordplay -- Tyler and Trip -- which is cool especially because the winners of this year's puzzle create the puzzle for next year.

I was a bit of help to the team but I have to admit, not much. I'm good with trivia and librarian culture stuff. In this case, being able to identify TV show screenshots and magazines by looking at one letter (part of a ransom note) were helpful but not crucial. I'm also better at on the fly anagrams than the average puzzler, which surprised me but seems to be true. Where I really shone though was in organizing stuff. I was the "puzzle devil" from 2 am to 10 am which means I was in charge of making sure people stayed on task, that everyone had a puzzle and that every puzzle had a person. I updated the team wiki which has all of our puzzles and solutions and links to the jabber chatroom and the Google spreadsheets for puzzles that required them. I also scanned and uploaded all the ephmera that we got. In this case, every winning round netted a certificate and usually a DVD that was its own puzzle. I got these or helped get these copied and on the wiki and this, in addition to my general cleanup and put-away and stay up late skills seemed to have the most direct team benefit.

The biggest fun of the whole event was just getting to meet a ton of neat new people who were, to a T, smart and interesting and usually really funny. I went in knowing a few of the organizers but not much of the team since I'd only puzzled remotely for this team in the past. Getting to be onsite and stay up late and eat pizza and scribble on chalkboards with a bunch of other smartie math, science and computer geeks is something I don't get to do very often and it was a start to finish joy.

A few more pictures at Flickr, as usual. Puzzles are now up in archived format. Seriously, look at these things. My favorite puzzle? This one.

I went to Bar 107 while I was in LA. They have this outdoor smoking porch that is bordered on four sides by tall buildings and has sort of a cage-match wire mesh over the top of it, I guess to keep falling debris (and rats?) out. I took a picture of Bryan standing in front of the full wall sign, including the part that says "please" and he sent me this picture that he took of me. I'm sure I'll find a use for it someplace online; I'm just stashing it here for now.

My sister and I have been hanging out at my Mom's place since Thursday. On Thursday morning she went in to the hospital to have a lung resection to remove some mystery lump they found when she was getting medical work done for another mystery lump elsewhere. The good news is she doesn't have cancer in her lymph nodes and they said they may never know if it's cancer or not. The good news is she's recovering nicely. The good news is that my sister is one of the people I'd most want to be with when I was in the middle of an emotionally trying time, especially if it was family related, and she's the one I'm with. The picture above is one of a series of photos we took to cheer my Mom up, basically re-creations of photos taken in the same house 30 years ago. She laughed until she had to put the pictures down, which we branded a success. She doesn't mind being a patient as much as I mind her being a patient. She shoos us out of the hospital in the evening.

My Mom is in the ICU where she has been since the surgery but the ICU label is deceptive. She's alert and awake and feeling okay, just sore, bored and cranky. In fact she's always felt fine, through the month of dealing with the "what do we do about the mystery lump?" discussion, and now she feels lousy. She should be moved to the normal patient wing sometime soon. Then she'll come home. She lives alone so my sister and I are coordinating with neighbors and other family members to take care of cats, mail, phone calls and whatever else her life entails, which we're learning as we go. I know I have a place to go back to in Vermont, but the difference between feeling at home there and at home here is really striking.

It's been weird. I haven't been in my Mom's house without her -- the house I grew up in and where I lived for about 15 years -- since high school. I haven't been here with my sister for any extended period of time in maybe 20 years. Coming back to the town I grew up in, where I've visited but not really lived, has been an experience. The town was on its way out of being a farming town when I lived here, it's now firmly a tony Boston suburb. The people in the supermarket look bizarre to me. The traffic is ridiculous. And yet, the house is still totally quiet at night. The place where I took swimming lessons is now a nature preserve where Kate and I went hiking. The hospital where I was born and later worked in high school, has wifi and some darned nice ICU nurses.

I haven't told almost anyone about all of this because I have no idea how to bring it up. After someone says "How are you?" do they really want to hear "Oh my Mom's in the ICU..." Some people do, and some people I've told. Some people I didn't tell until I had to and felt weird not telling them earlier. Some people I gave loose outlines "a family member... a medical problem" and didn't know how specific to be. I haven't written about it on my main blog because my Mom reads it -- though she's not reading it now -- and I know she'll be critical of whatever I write, we have that sort of relationship. I have a hard time figuring out how to behave here, it's been nice to hang out with my sister who doesn't care how I act.

I'll go back to Vermont, and then head out to North Dakota for a library talk in a few days. I have no plan, and it's unusual for me to have no plan. I'm not sure what to say, and that's pretty unusual for me as well. This is a start.