Weekend by the numbers

[magid]

1. • new person met
     
   • yoga class
     
   • sinkful of dishes done
     
   • pound of strawberries forgotten
   
   
2. • new books read
     
   • tea and ganache guests
     
   • loads of laundry done (and folded and put away!)
   
   
3. • college improv groups
   
   
4. • Shabbat dinner guests
     
   • hours packing Pandemonium
     
   • interesting conversations
   
   
5. • cups of tea (note to self: need more Earl Grey)

Comments

[gingicat]

BTW, the message from Wolf on your answering machine was because we called to invite you to have dinner with us and the parents. We went to Shalom Beijing (Shalom Hunan under new management); it was quite good.

[magid.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I was out at a yoga class, so at least a good excuse :-).

I didn't know they'd gotten new management; when did that happen? (Has anything changed?) (And I hope you had a lovely dinner.)

[gingicat]

Apparently they got a new chef as well. This was in December.

It was a nice dinner; I reviewed it in kosher_cooking. :)

Computer... tea, earl grey, hot

[coorr.livejournal.com]

mmmm.... earl grey...

thanks for getting the tickets to the improv show, library_sexy and I had a really good time.

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

Re: Computer... tea, earl grey, hot

[magid.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed it. Most of the shows I've seen at the Ex have been pretty good, and even the ones that weren't were at least interesting...

[magid.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many zuzim a partridge in a pear tree would cost?

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

Okay, okay, maybe I'm a little too hasty to plop images down in comments. I suppose I resort to it in cases where the allusion is relatively obvious, so the interesting part is in the method of making it. I could have said "And partridge in pear sauce for Shabbat dinner, I hope?" In person, I could have hummed a few bars. This has the added bonus of implicitly commenting on how much is already out there on the web — well, at least with the zuzim, where it wasn't obvious the desired image would just be sitting around.

I like this pic enough that I think I'll make it another LJ icon (poof), though I have to admit I'm hard-pressed to think of what other circumstances will make it as appropriate as it was here.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean that to be a criticism; it was just what I thought of first, seeing the two pears and thinking of the two zuzim you'd shown me recently. (Plus I couldn't resist the cross-culturalness of it, with all the parallels in song structure involved.)

I could imagine using the partridge for posts/comments about... hmm... Xmas or other gift-giving extravaganzas, meals with wild game or other interesting food, medieval food or other period entertainments, avian flu, horticulture, illuminated manuscripts...

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

I took it not as a rebuke, but as an excuse for public introspection. And yes, the cross-culturalism aspect did occur to me before I did it.

Excellent ideas, and far more likely than "anything which involves counting backwards". I'll be ever vigilant.

So why do you eschew graphical identification, anyway?

[magid.livejournal.com]

I like "eschew graphical identification" (makes me think of the bumpersticker "eschew obfuscation").

As for reasons, it's a lot of little things, not one big thing. When I started, I could have only 3 icons, and I couldn't imagine how I could have a blog for years and only need three of them. Swapping out didn't seem like a good idea either, leaving old posts/comments with the wrong picture. I now have a lot more icon spots available, but the bits of me that like consistency aren't so interested in bothering now, after years of icon-free posting.

I didn't know what I'd choose, and as I looked at the icons I saw, I realized that in some cases, what I read as negative were meant as positive; I didn't want things that would obfuscate meaning or imply that the words were shaded in some direction or another based on the icon. And how do I choose, if I've got icons for both X and Y, and a post covers both? Do I make a half-half icon? (Too-much-Talmud syndrome suddenly appears :-). Etc.

Some of it's technical: I don't (yet) have the right knowledge/programs to make my own icons, and I'd want to be able to do that if I used them.

Some of it's stupid: too much urging to do anything turns me mulish, and I've been prodded about using icons (by others) a lot (or at least, it felt like a lot in a short span, now long over).

Plus, of course, a dash of laziness.

oh, and

[magid.livejournal.com]

I also had the idea that this was more a word medium, that if my writing and my titles were clear enough, then the icon would be superfluous. (Which is not the same as images in the body of a post/comment. I see those as more integral, even though I don't do that much myself. [Partly because I don't think in images much, partly because I'm much more likely to use images I've taken/of me, but I don't have many in digital format, and partly because I'm on dialup at home, so I bias towards more easily downloadable text.])