![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Or perhaps, not quite so short....
My building is on the south side of a street that is mostly east-west. Given how far north it is, there are noticeable things about winter that aren't so in summer, due to the angle of the sun. The major down side: there's little direct sunlight on the sidewalk in front of the building, and what there is is early enough in the morning that temperatures are still fairly cold from overnight lows. This results in a greater chance for ice if we don't shovel really really well, as well as snowbanks that last far longer than the other side of the street (so noticeable last year, not so much this year, so far). The major up side: amazing sunlight in my kitchen in the late afternoon, warm and honey-colored, which always lifts my spirits. Strangely, I hadn't managed to connect the two until this year.
Last week I went to an informational meeting about SchedIt, a new social calendar that's going to launch this week. It's Boston local (for now), layering onto the Boston.com/Boston Globe entertainment section. It was fascinating to hear the marketing woman be all excited about something I realized I just don't want, at all. It's set up to have three kinds profiles: individual users, venues, and performers. Anyone can follow (subscribe to, watch, whatever) anyone else, and then you can see what your friends are doing. There's no way to have a non-public profile, which already makes me think twice about anything (I wonder whether the people designing this are young post-college people who just don't think about why someone might want to have information be non-public). They have it set up so you can see the gender balance of people who have said they're going to an event, which completely ignores the issues with setting that up as a binary system (I decided bringing the question of gender politics up wasn't something useful to do here); they saw this as a plus, while I couldn't care less for anything likely to be listed there. And I don't usually care what the most popular events in the city are, which they feature. I'm obviously not their target audience, though I can see how it could be useful for venues if enough people find it useful.
My back has been... unhappy for weeks now, but has become more so in the last day or so. I know the night that things started to go wrong, but couldn't say anything in particular I did that set it off. The one thing that's reliably good for it is walking; I need to be better about getting in a walk every day, if at all possible. Mentally, it's easier if I have a reason to go for a walk (other than "go for a walk"), a destination. Suggestions for destinations in walking distance welcome :-).
My Martin Luther King Day weekend included my deep winter share pickup, some Mystery Hunt time, a lovely Shabbat lunch with some Imperfect people, time at Arisia, and a shift at Artisan's Asylum. It was a good weekend, but felt a bit disconnected too.
* I'd planned to spend more time at the Hunt than I did; brutal wind Friday night kept me inside (especially since I'd had to fight some serious wind to get to the Westin the day before; I don't remember the last time I was pinned by wind....). This year there were fewer people I knew at all well, and the one puzzle I spent the most time on I didn't get past the first level on (it didn't help that when I saw the solution, it felt like something I never would have gotten, since it was based on flavors of chocolate bars put out by Vosges, which I'm not familiar with).
* I ended up at Arisia only on Sunday, and when there only went to two things on the program, a panel about Diana Wynne Jones and a 'trailer park' of genre movies coming in the next year. The rest of the time I was volunteering (feeling useful is good) or socializing (catching up with long-distance friends especially was lovely, with particular *waves* to a currently-NC-based writer and two NJ-based college friends :-). In any case, it didn't quite feel I was truly there, with a small multiplier for having to carry stuff around as a commuter.
* I've taken a weekly front desk shift at Artisan's Asylum. It's a lot of fun to see what people are working on, and be by all sorts of creativity. At some point, I'll end up taking a class too (decisions, decisions).
My building is on the south side of a street that is mostly east-west. Given how far north it is, there are noticeable things about winter that aren't so in summer, due to the angle of the sun. The major down side: there's little direct sunlight on the sidewalk in front of the building, and what there is is early enough in the morning that temperatures are still fairly cold from overnight lows. This results in a greater chance for ice if we don't shovel really really well, as well as snowbanks that last far longer than the other side of the street (so noticeable last year, not so much this year, so far). The major up side: amazing sunlight in my kitchen in the late afternoon, warm and honey-colored, which always lifts my spirits. Strangely, I hadn't managed to connect the two until this year.
Last week I went to an informational meeting about SchedIt, a new social calendar that's going to launch this week. It's Boston local (for now), layering onto the Boston.com/Boston Globe entertainment section. It was fascinating to hear the marketing woman be all excited about something I realized I just don't want, at all. It's set up to have three kinds profiles: individual users, venues, and performers. Anyone can follow (subscribe to, watch, whatever) anyone else, and then you can see what your friends are doing. There's no way to have a non-public profile, which already makes me think twice about anything (I wonder whether the people designing this are young post-college people who just don't think about why someone might want to have information be non-public). They have it set up so you can see the gender balance of people who have said they're going to an event, which completely ignores the issues with setting that up as a binary system (I decided bringing the question of gender politics up wasn't something useful to do here); they saw this as a plus, while I couldn't care less for anything likely to be listed there. And I don't usually care what the most popular events in the city are, which they feature. I'm obviously not their target audience, though I can see how it could be useful for venues if enough people find it useful.
My back has been... unhappy for weeks now, but has become more so in the last day or so. I know the night that things started to go wrong, but couldn't say anything in particular I did that set it off. The one thing that's reliably good for it is walking; I need to be better about getting in a walk every day, if at all possible. Mentally, it's easier if I have a reason to go for a walk (other than "go for a walk"), a destination. Suggestions for destinations in walking distance welcome :-).
My Martin Luther King Day weekend included my deep winter share pickup, some Mystery Hunt time, a lovely Shabbat lunch with some Imperfect people, time at Arisia, and a shift at Artisan's Asylum. It was a good weekend, but felt a bit disconnected too.
* I'd planned to spend more time at the Hunt than I did; brutal wind Friday night kept me inside (especially since I'd had to fight some serious wind to get to the Westin the day before; I don't remember the last time I was pinned by wind....). This year there were fewer people I knew at all well, and the one puzzle I spent the most time on I didn't get past the first level on (it didn't help that when I saw the solution, it felt like something I never would have gotten, since it was based on flavors of chocolate bars put out by Vosges, which I'm not familiar with).
* I ended up at Arisia only on Sunday, and when there only went to two things on the program, a panel about Diana Wynne Jones and a 'trailer park' of genre movies coming in the next year. The rest of the time I was volunteering (feeling useful is good) or socializing (catching up with long-distance friends especially was lovely, with particular *waves* to a currently-NC-based writer and two NJ-based college friends :-). In any case, it didn't quite feel I was truly there, with a small multiplier for having to carry stuff around as a commuter.
* I've taken a weekly front desk shift at Artisan's Asylum. It's a lot of fun to see what people are working on, and be by all sorts of creativity. At some point, I'll end up taking a class too (decisions, decisions).