She would be 38

20. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Today is my sister’s birthday. Some years, this day goes by like any other, coming as it does so close to the hustle and bustle of the beginning of the school year. Many years ago, I wrote about my sister in a post that captures most of what I remember about her. I’m so glad I wrote that stuff down. Those memories seem to fade with every passing year.

One thing I didn’t write about is how much her death changed who I am, in some good ways and in some bad ways. Right after she died, I keenly felt how short life really was and how important people were in that life. I cherished my friendships more, then, and made more time for them. In part, I’m sure, I needed to not feel alone. In part, I saw that each person in my life was there for a fleeting moment. I also threw myself into my work, finding a source of creativity and for good or for ill, a rich topic for my poetry. I felt confident in my work, took charge of my future, and felt ready to face the world after college.

But once I got past college, some of that confidence and those humanitarian feelings began to fade. People, it turns out, are not always magnanimous spirits and can be hurtful and rude. I had difficulty explaining why I didn’t have any siblings. So, I started saying I didn’t. Which felt very wrong. One thing about siblings is they often tell it like it is, but they also just listen–at least my sister did–and so you knew you always had someone to turn to and complain about life to. I no longer had that. And, to this day, I haven’t quite found someone who could replace that. Sometimes you need someone to talk to about your parents, your husband, your job. And though I have some people I can talk to about these things, it’s never felt complete.

I miss her at the oddest times. Holidays, to be sure, but also the kids’ birthdays and on visits to my parents. I’m about to go on vacation to the beach we went to as kids, where it was always just the two of us, having adventures, entertaining each other. I always think of her then.

It seems odd to think she’d be middle-aged by now. Would she be married, have kids? Would we live close together, far apart? Would we spend holidays at each other’s houses? I will never know, and it’s often that thought that makes me most sad, that I lost someone, sure, but that she lost a whole potentially happy life.

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WoW Wednesday: Tanking

19. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Tauren Tank CrossingImage by antifuse via Flickr

So, many of you know I’m a gamer, my most-often played game being WoW. I don’t write about it much, but I’ve decided if it’s a regular part of my life, it needs to be a regular part of my blog. Although I will write about the game as it’s played, what I find most interesting about playing are the personal lessons I learn and the social dynamics of the game. So, even if you’re not a gamer, you’ll get something out of these posts.

I’m currently playing a level 80 Death Knight. I’ve been playing her as a damage-oriented player, but she has the capability of playing what’s called a tank. A tank is a player that puts herself between the bad things trying to kill the players and the rest of the group. They generally have heavy-duty armor and the ability to keep the mobs focused on them rather than the rest of the group. Tanks also tend to set the pace of the dungeon and often set the strategy if they know a dungeon well. It took me a while to get decent enough gear (and I still need better gear), but recently I announced to the guild that I was ready to try tanking and would love some lessons and/or the opportunity to try it out on willing groups of people.

It wasn’t until our regular tanks were all gone that I finally got the opportunity to tank, and let me just say, it’s harder than it looks. Although I’d read up on strategies for tanking and what moves to use, theory is often far away from practice. First, because I’m slightly undergeared, I take more damage than I should, meaning I need someone to be able to heal the crap out of me. Second, we have a lot of really good players in the guild who have good attacks that anger mobs and then they get attacked and so I have to scramble a bit to recapture the errant mob. And third, let’s face facts, I’m not a 15 year old boy. I’ve had a few good runs that went smoothly and successfully, but I’ve had just as many where the entire group has died over and over again. This is a frustrating situation to be in as a tank since it’s often a tank’s weaknesses that can cause this to happen. While this hasn’t always been the case in my situations, as a new tank, I’m guessing it is the problem 95% of the time.

I find being a tank rather nerve-wracking as I’m learning. It’s a lot of responsibility. And the learning curve seems to be fairly large. My guild is patient with me, however, so there is that. I’ve learned that support goes a long way in making me feel comfortable trying this new thing out and trying it out under not so ideal conditions. I decided to try it, in fact, because I wanted to help out the guild since we seem to be short on tanks. Hopefully, I’ll get better at it so that I’m a bit more reliable and don’t get everyone killed so often.

Bonus: Read Sins of a Gaming Father.

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Our Technology Infused Life

18. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Via Chuck Tryon’s delicious feed (which, I bet he didn’t even know I followed), I found this New York Times article that describes my family as well. Basically, it says that nowadays, families hop on laptops and blackberries and iPhones over their coffee and cereal, barely interacting with each other. The morning isn’t as much of a problem for us as the hour before dinner. Because the kids have such a spread out schedule in the mornings, with Geeky Boy having to get up at 6, but Geeky Girl not needing to get up until 7 (even stretching until 7:30 without a problem), we’re kind of running around from about 6-8. I do hop on the computer while Geeky Boy is in the shower, but then I fix lunches, get him out the door, get Geeky Girl up, and this year, I *am* going to go for a walk (more on that later). So there isn’t really time to stare at a screen for long.

But before dinner, we all retreat to our separate spaces for about an hour, catching up on blogs, gaming, answering a couple of last-minute emails. It’s not terribly problematic, but our computer use in general has increased over the summer as we’ve run out of things to do. We’ve filled too much of our empty time with the computer rather than other things. In part, this is because our schedule is out of whack. Mr. Geeky, who was going into the office every day at 9, stopped doing that this past week, and what is he doing? Working on the computer. We had just gotten used to a certain routine that involved other activities and the presence of Mr. Geeky has thrown us off.

Grace mentioned in a comment yesterday that she had technology fatigue. Although her blog post is about not wanting to learn new technology that will be outdated the day after she learns it, my fatigue has more to do with using it. Will Richardson wrote a post recently pondering whether he was a slave to technology. I’m not sure what it would mean to be a slave to it; I suppose being unable to live without it. But I can imagine living without it. Sometimes I want to chuck it all and go become a chef or something. So, what do you think readers, when is technology too much?

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Women in Tech: Feeling like a Fraud

17. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

I have always been an avid supporter of women choosing to pursue technology degrees and careers. Through the summer program I used to direct, I encouraged young women to learn more about the technology we used, either on their own through their projects or by taking computer science classes or other types of classes. And many of them did further their knowledge. Some took graphics design courses. Some pursued computer science. Still others took internships that involved web or flash design and even ended up in first jobs that were heavily based on using technology.

So that’s a success story. But I personally sometimes feel like a fraud for not being even more geeky than I am. Yes, I know HTML and CSS and can figure out my way around most programs and even a unix system. But I can’t program and there are definite limits to my abilities. What I’ve focused on in the last few years has been the more philosophical aspects of our use of technology. How does it change our relationships, our schools, our government? And I can’t help but feel that the true technowomen out there think this is not hard core enough. Every time I look at web sites for organizations that support women in technology fields, they’re offering programming camps or money for your technology startup. And I feel left out. The irony!

I feel slightly less left out after reading this article on women who have leveraged technology in similar ways to my own. They are communicators, entrepreneurs, and policy wonks who have turned their love of technology into interesting careers that aren’t about being system administrators or php programmers. Now I should say that most of the groups that support women who do want to be programmers and the like are not excluding those of us who want to bridge the relationship between what the programmers make and the people they make it for. But they’re also not offering support for those of us who are technically savvy but haven’t taken that next step to learn to program. Programming camp for dummies, maybe?

Then again, some of us may not want to program. I’ve tried to learn for years, but I get bored pretty quickly or frustrated or sometimes both. I think in part, this is because I don’t want to learn for myself, but want to learn in order to establish more geek cred–a really bad reason to learn and obviously not very motivating. I’m just hoping the tent will widen instead of shrink.

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Settling Into Who I am Now

14. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Laura Blankenship, originally uploaded by Gardo.

The picture here is from a little over a year ago at Faculty Academy 2008. It’s one of my favorites despite the fact that my hair is askew (it’s always askew it seems) because I think it captures a certain image I have of myself. There’s the ever-present computer, the look of concern/passion (captured in several photos of me), and the fact that I’m obviously mid-sentence.

Just a few months ago, I was at Faculty Academy 2009, my third FA, and I was delighted to be there, but I was feeling a little unsettled. I’d just finished teaching and was looking ahead to being “just a consultant” instead of a part-time teacher and a part-time consultant. It felt a little daunting. I felt unidentifiable. The only other time I’ve felt this unsettled was right after we moved to Arkansas and I was a stay at home mom. I attended my 10 year high school reunion and I wasn’t sure how to identify myself and what I did. It felt really odd to say I was staying at home because it didn’t jibe with my image of myself as a career woman. Now, I have no hesitation saying that part of what I’m doing is managing the home front.

I still consider myself a teacher in addition to my roles as a consultant and a mother. I hope to always have a foot in the classroom by teaching a class at least once a year, but I also see the role I play as a consultant as being primarily about teaching, about helping people learn something new, learn to navigate an ever-changing technology landscape. I think it’s just in my blood.

I feel a certain sense now of knowing what I’m doing without knowing everything about what I’m doing and being okay with that. Consultant work has slowed down a bit, but I feel confident it will pick up with the school year, the economy, and continued effort on my part. I still keep an eye out for interesting teaching possibilities or jobs in the education technology sector. In the ed tech world, most of what I’ve seen is about tech support, not teaching, which is, I think, the direction many of the jobs, outside of directorships, are going. In part, I think this is because there are more faculty using technology in interesting and pedagogically sound ways and they are taking the role of sharing that knowledge with colleagues, a role formerly played by Instructional Technologists. And this is a good thing overall. But it means that that kind of job is a job that doesn’t quite offer someone like me the combination of skills and opportunities that’s appealing. So I’ve created that for myself. And while I felt tentative about it at first, it feels more right every day.

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Graph of the weight, wealth relationship over time

13. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,


Heh.

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Coins, Money and Banks

13. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Polish Złoty and Euro CoinsImage by schoschie via Flickr

Every day Mr. Geeky comes home from work and puts his keys and wallet in a little secretary that stands by the front door. He also puts any change from his pocket into a jar. When the jar got full, I suggested taking it to the bank. Not yet, he said. He needed to check for “valuable” old coins first. He added another jar. That jar got full. I made the suggestion again. Again he protested that there might be coins worth saving in there. Months passed. He didn’t move on to a third jar. By this point, there wasn’t room. Finally, I insisted, suggesting that the kids go through both jars and set aside anything they thought might be worth something–old coins, foreign coins, gold doubloons. So, they sat themselves at the dining room table. When they found their first old coin, they got pretty excited. Geeky Boy has books that hold old coins that he hasn’t looked at in years. He got out those and filled a couple of slots. Geeky Girl remembered she had a state quarter set. She got the folder for that and began filling out that collection. All in all, they only found 10-15 older coins, but they’re going through another container we found in hopes of finding more. They’ve been returning to the project periodically without my having to ask. Geeky Girl, especially, having not paid much attention to money before, exclaims when they find something unusual, something she’s never seen before and listens patiently when Geeky Boy explains what the D and the S mean on the coins.

They filled a medium-sized bowl with coins suitable for taking to the bank. Yesterday, I filled a bag with about half of the coins and trudge to the bank on my way to the farmer’s market. The bank lets you estimate how much money you have and if you’re close, you win a prize. As I poured the money into the machine, I saw mostly pennies. So, I estimated about 7.50. When it was all said in done, I had slightly over $52 in coins. Mostly dimes, it turned out. I’m really bad at estimating, especially now that I rarely handle cash, much less coins. All my cash is digital, exchanged either via electronic transfer or similarly, using my debit card. I used to keep tips in a mayonnaise jar on my dresser, saving up for the deposit on an apartment in graduate school town. I know about how much was there, in part because I knew how much I made in tips, but also because I dealt with cash all the time.

I spent a little more than half of my new found cash at the farmer’s market. Even though I always take cash there (most of the vendors don’t take other forms of payment), I felt a little giddy at having such a large amount, created, it seemed, out of thin air.

Money now does seem to come out of thin air, arriving in bank accounts without anyone having to touch anything. I used to work at a bank during the summers. One summer I filed loan applications, the 3 attached parts left after everything was signed off. Another summer I filed the checks people deposited into their accounts, checks that were then sent to other banks to be filed and then placed in an envelope to be sent to the customer with her statement. Even then, the real transaction happened electronically, with a machine reading routing and account numbers, a human inputting the amounts, which were then coded onto the check to be read by another machine. For a brief time each summer, it was my job to count money coming in from the vendors at the annual summer festival. Bags of coins and dollar bills showed up at the bank and I stood behind the tellers, counting it all by hand, recording amounts on deposit slips, amounts that were later entered into computers while the money itself went into the vault, to be redistributed to banks or to customers withdrawing money.

Geeky Boy asked the other day if people still traded things. I said, sure, happens all the time. But money became more convenient at some point and then banks became a place to store that money and now, they are the place where most of our financial transactions actually occur. And they make their own money off of those transactions. What a weird little system we’ve created, making banks the middle man for our exchange of goods.

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More on Exercise and Food

11. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

It turns out my ideas about exercise aren’t entirely off the mark:

Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. “You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles,” says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. “The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don’t have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day.”

A friend told me about this article yesterday and I bumped into it this morning and read the whole thing. It’s ultimate conclusion is that it’s your food choices and not your exercise routine that does the most for your weight. That doesn’t mean you can be completely sedentary. It suggests, as the quote above notes, that we should just all move around more within our daily activities rather than scheduling a trip to the gym. That’s something that’s easy to incorporate for many people. I can walk or ride my bike to many places instead of driving. And most people can. Even parking far away from entrances and taking the stairs instead of the elevator can make you healthier. Things people have said all along, but which now makes a lot more sense.

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Swimming

10. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

So that exercise thing? Barely made two laps. I’m out of neath. Sad.


– Post From My iPhone

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Ignoring time

10. August 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

I really appreciated seeing this post this morning about not focusing so much on the clock. I have a real tendency to do this, scheduling every minute of every day. Today, for example, Geeky Boy and I had to go to the high school to rework his schedule, so I started my planning from there. I decided I would go to the high school at 10, followed by a trip to the grocery store, lunch, cleaning, and then a trip to the pool, exercising either there or when I got home. I planned free time in the hour before dinner, dinner, and then just open time. Sounds oppressive, doesn’t it? The other thing that happened was that I didn’t wake early enough so a few things I wanted to get done on a writing project didn’t happen until just now. And, though I should be cleaning, that’s not happening now because I wanted to post this and read a few other blogs, which is not quite leisure, not quite work. So, you see, my schedule is easily disrupted and then I feel bad about not getting things done, etc. Bleh.

Jonathan Mead (author of the above post) echoes this sentiment:

Trying to constantly manage and monitor my time has only led me to greater anxiety, and always feeling like I’ve not “done enough.” I’m always thinking about how I could have “spent that time more wisely.” But the purpose of life is to enjoy it, is it not? So can’t we perform highly without the anxiety of counting every minute?

He makes a lot of good recommendations for being productive without feeling pressed for time. My favorite is having a theme for the month. Although I didn’t quite consciously think about it, my theme for this month is about getting organized and eliminating clutter. I wanted to be prepared for the new school year with a house that’s more streamlined and with everything in its rightful place. I think the idea is that, while I might schedule time for cleaning, if that’s the theme, then when I have the time and motivation during each day, I can tackle a cleaning project.

Next month, I’m going to tackle exercise, something I’ve struggled with forever. I really hate structured exercise–going to the gym, being in an exercise class (except for yoga; I like yoga classes)–but it’s not like I’m a total lump. I don’t mind walking instead of driving places. I’ll play soccer or tennis with the kids. I like gardening. Generally, moving around on occasion, even every day, is not something I’m opposed to. But it’s extremely easy for me to make excuses. It’s too hot, too cold, too wet. I have this that or the other that I need to do. I’d rather read, play games, watch tv. You know the drill. So I’m going to make some effort now, but really focus next month on moving at least a little every day.

The exercise thing is partly why I’m not as fond of Mead’s advice to follow your rhythms. That’s easy enough for me to do with intellectual activity, but inertia keeps me from doing physical things that I find unpleasant. And that’s where I think a schedule can help. And I suspect some people find the same is true of other kinds of work. Certainly people can schedule those activities for times when they know they’re more motivated, but they might have to semi force themselves to at least getting started.

I’m trying, then, to find a good flow for myself where I feel productive, but don’t feel anxious. Easier said than done, but I’m giving it a whirl.

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