Archive for December, 2012
A new thing I hadn’t thought of…
I just realized, I need some advice. We’ve just moved from the Netherlands to a Portland, OR, suburb. I don’t have a job. So far, we’re leaning toward staying there a few years. I don’t plan to get a job right away; the idea is to spend a few months working on some writing projects […]
Happy
It’s Christmas Eve. Should be asleep. We’ve (me, Ted, parents-in-law, grandfather-in-law) had an excellent fan y dinner as a belated celebration of Ted’s birthday yesterday. The stocking presents are all snuck into respective stockings – well,my FIL was washing dishes at he time but he promised not to look. Tomorrow the weather is forecasted to […]
getting settled
We arrived in Oregon last Friday, and I’m liking Hillsboro so far; there’s a nice mall 5 minutes walk from our apartment and all the supermarkets and big-box stores anyone could want, but you can be driving beside planted fields in about ten minutes. There are just lots of things happening to us or that […]
This is the burden, this is the promise
Most years I post the lyrics of Peter Yarrow’s Chanukah song “Light One Candle”. Thinking about why that song hits me so hard, I think it’s because it’s about having the courage to fight, and also recognizing when not to – where the boundary is between righteous anger, which breeds justice, and hate, which breeds […]
a small thanks and two very different open letters
1. Thanks, everyone who gave advice on good games. Interesting: over the three places this blog is repeated (WordPress at my own site, Dreamwidth, Livejournal), I got a total of 18 comments, and the vast majority of them recommended one or more of just four games: Apples to Apples (6 recommendations), Fluxx (3 recs) Settlers […]
Half-marathon PR!
I set a personal record on the erg today for the half marathon, despite having also done one on Friday afternoon and 9km yesterday. I beat my previous record from December 2001 by 13 seconds. I’ve never really, really gone full out on one of them. This one had a split of 2:43; I suspect […]
Need game advice
I was just going to ask Maria, but figured other people may have good advice too. We’ll probably be spending New Years Eve with Ted’s parents and one grandfather (possibly two of them, though I doubt it). I need recommendations for a game that would be fun to play with four or five people of […]
rereading Charlotte Macleod
I’ve been on a bit of an orgy of Charlotte Macleod rereadings, in the last few months, since they started coming out in Kindle editions, and the effect of reading them in the aggregate is … rather odd. They’re definitely a bit dated; it shows most in the Kelling-Bittersohn books, because there are more of […]
IPod’s shuffle is not being helpful!
The book I was listening(1) to finished while I was 5km into through today’s 10km workout, so I decided to listen to music instead of starting a new audiobook. I set my iPod to random shuffle. Today’s workout was 1km warmup, then 3 sets of 1km hard, 2 km easy. (“Hard” is meant to be […]
our official (but not yet final) farewell
I am having homemade apple pie for breakfast, which is a very good way to start my last full work week here. (We each brought a slice into the office.) Our going-away party yesterday was fabulous. The food was excellent, the atmosphere was cozy, and everyone including us seemed to have a good time. Apparently, […]