Fascinated, lazy, and lamenting

This will be a completely link-free post, so don't go looking for any hot tips.

Fascinated

I just spent a few minutes catching up with friends' and coworkers' blogs. OK, there's overlap there since all of the co-workers as friends. Everyone seems to have had lovely summers. There was much grilling and knitting and travelling and mysterious finding of hard boiled eggs. I was also pointed toward an unknown blog of a coworker/friend. Thanks blogrollers! So I got to see a little food and flyfishing porn as well. Conclusions? These folks are all cooler than freon.

An earlier fascinating part of this week was learning that the home institution has been bequeathed an estate that includes a blog and a personal computer. Currently there is debate about how, exactly, to archive said blog as well as the email held on the PC. How cool is that? In 2001 I had an extremely prescient conversation with a UW professor on exactly this topic. Was this an iSchool prof? Nope. It was an extremely hip history professor who was speculating what 'going through personal papers' was going to look like in the future. I guess the future is here.

Lazy

I'm lying on the couch with the laptop. I should be packing for the coast or preparing for the start of school next week. But no, I'm in full avoidance. I'm already intimidated by the road ahead. China is looking very far away. Sanity even further. So I will just lay here and type. I'm reading a popular nonfiction business book as well. I've never read a business book. It's really weird. Each chapter has a 20 word sub-heading, an executive summary, and ends with a bulleted list of take-home points. It's so weird.

Lamenting

The loss of my palm pilot. I walked into a handrail with it in my pocket. The screen is kaput. I'm currently debating the relative merits of ebay vs downgrading.

The end of summer. The summer squash is on its way out (thank god). I don't think the tomatillos will ever ripen. The parkway flower bed is slowly being shorn. One iris bed is completely put to sleep.

The lack of summer. Don't get me wrong: I fished approximately 400% more than last summer, spent time in Chicago and Boston, and had a pretty successful garden. Still, there were a whole bunch of Saturday nights spent in the office and far too few days when I left at 5pm (or came back after dinner). That's not supposed to happen.

OK, enough whining. I have to pack for the coast. Parental weekend.

Blog worries

My email tells me a got a little comment spam, but blogger's emails that inform me when a comment comes in don't list which post has been commented on. In the meantime I've turned on comment moderation, which will slow down things for you loyal commentors out there.

I've been trying to grep for the comment text, but with no results. Dangit. I wish I remembered more unix.

On a related note, does anyone know how I can consolidate my archives down so that it's not such a long list over there on the right hand side of this here web page? I'd love to see only this year's months displayed, and then a link to a list of years. Or maybe a nested menu of some sort.

Labor of miscellany

L is up in PDX for the weekend, leaving me to work on a presentation for later this week. I have always found holiday weekends are perfect for catching up on paperwork and filing. When doing the latter, I found a bunch of postcards from recent travels that were supposed to serve as reminders to write about more art.

This year's trips to Chicago wound up being pretty well described. One bit of art that got skipped is Zhang Dali's show at V Walsh. (Or is that Walsh V?) This Chinese artist has put together a show of what I can only call information art. He has tracked down the original negatives for photographs of Chairman Mao and other Cultural Revolution-era icons that were used in publications from the time. He has printed them and hung them side-by-side with the doctored versions that were circulated. Really compelling work--although it made my head hurt after a while. It was a huge show, and there was a lot of text.

Boston provided me with a great trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I really missed out when I lived in Boston: although I knew the story behind the museum, I can't say that I had ever been there. This is perhaps the most eclectic place I have ever seen art (and for those of you who know me, I've been to some pretty freakin eclectic shows). I'm convinced that the reason she was so adverse to hanging wall cards is because she had all her own stories to tell about the art. You know the memory trick of taking a walk and memorizing your shopping list (or epic poetry for those of you classicists out there) by associating items with locations along your walk? I get the distinct impression that Isabella's life-story is caught up in her collection. Someone has to come up with a 3-d Isabella avatar that can lead tours, which I can vividly imagine her doing after luncheon parties.

Someone please remind me to tell you about the Harvard Map Collection and the Levanthal Map Collection at BPL. Right now I have to check the temperature on the grill. I'm attempting to slow cook with propane today.