From the category archives:

Just Life

Not abandoned, exactly

August 5, 2008

This blog, that is. It’s just that right now, most of the action is going on over here: Set Your Guts on Fire. Grad school is going well; the second quarter’s been rough overall but is ending with a little less panic than the first one. I go back down to Santa Barbara next week to see my school peeps for 10 days, which is a very welcome reunion, and I’m looking forward to dreamwork and film classes for the fall quarter, which sounds really interesting. Even the research class seems to have a new twist on presenting the essentials; we get Tao of Writing instead of Elements of Style, which must count for something.

Other than that, most of the summer has been spent canning up a storm; we have enough jam, chutney, and relish to last many years (or at least one solstice gift for each of our friends), and we’ve also ben experimenting with goat cheese and fermenting (sauerkraut & kimchi have worked out well and we’re trying out dill pickles currently). I’ve even seen most of the big summer movies. Free tip: if you have a chance to see Mamma Mia as a sing-along, go to that show; we did and it was so much more fun not to have to sing along quietly.

And that’s the summer so far; it looks like I’ll finally get to go on a work-sponsored trip in the fall, to Prague, so I’m looking forward to that. Otherwise, it’s pretty much all about school and making sure I get to see Deb and my friends once in a while. Oh, and that work thing. No wonder I don’t sleep much…

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Catching Up

June 4, 2008

You can tell, probably, that my first quarter of grad school ended recently…May was a pretty dry month here, but rest assured that lots of writing was happening elsewhere. Almost 20 pages of high-quality academic prose flew from my computer in the 2 weeks before Mother’s Day.

Results? Straight A’s, for the first time ever. I’ve always been a decent A/B student, but this was a nice surprise and good validation that I’m in the right place. Lesson learned, though: grad school is not the place to be putting off papers until the end of the quarter. Turns out that at 40, sleeping is so much more important than it used to be.

The summer quarter is underway, and I’m already looking forward to seeing the rest of my cohort in August—it’s really weird to start the quarter without seeing your classmates or meeting the instructors, but that just makes for a more joyous reunion/introduction later, I figure.

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New Chapter

February 2, 2008

The new year has come and gone, and this blog has been dormant (as usual) for quite a while. The good news is that the situation’s about to change. Partly, I suspect I’ll have a lot to talk about, and partly, it will be because writing on the blog is going to be part of [...]

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Me

April 15, 2007

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

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Happy Belated Birthday

November 5, 2006

…to this website. In all the hubbub of the year so far, I completely forgot. My little baby here turned 6 in September, which like most parents I can hardly believe—where does the time go? She’s learning her RSS feeds along with the ABCs and all the other TLAs that are a part of our [...]

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Finished

June 29, 2006

I think I will have to take my Dad’s approach and just say this simply: Mom passed away at 7pm last night. Ever the captain of her ship, I think she tried to time it (if such things are even possible) so that she wouldn’t go on my birthday on Tuesday, or my parents’ anniversary, [...]

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Going Home

June 25, 2006

Well, it’s late Sunday night, and the news for today is that I’m going home. Mom is still here, though I think we really have reached the beginning of the end (or the beginning of a beginning, depending on how you look at it). She’s been very weak all day, is having more trouble scooting [...]

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Looking for the Switch

June 14, 2006

How it is today: pretty much more of the same. Mom seems a bit weaker every day physically, but still lucid and very much herself, which is to say loving, funny, and very sassy. She’s stopped taking visitors now except for family, but is still enjoying occasional phone calls and laughing with friends. And I’m [...]

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Reason #1 I’ll Miss Her

June 8, 2006

Mom Mojo. We’ll still be talking, but it’ll sure be a lot different. Hopefully the mojo still works from wherever she’s going.

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Winding Down

June 8, 2006

It’s a weird time. I mentioned limbo a few entries back, I think, and that’s still where we are, although the pace of limbo continues to slow. Mom made the decision earlier this week not to have any further treatment, so there will be no more blood transfusions, and she’s on only minimal medication. This [...]

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