Happy Friday!

I am working from home today, and it is beautiful in SF! I just walked to the gym, and I swear to god, had I whistled a little tune, a tiny bird would have alighted on my finger - it is just that kind of day.

The gym itself was delightfully empty, but the scene in the locker rooms was weird. Naked old ladies, lounging around, rubbing cream (just a guess - could have been lime jello for all the time I took to look) in places that were mercifully hidden under rolls of skin. I guess I was on their turf, a nude-but-swimming-capped bizarro world populated only by the post-menopausal.

Now I am off to drink iced caffeinated beverages and squint at my computer screen in the sun. And I am going to wear a sundress, without boots, without a scarf, without a blazer, and only with a cute little cap on my head if I really feel like it.

Working from home is the BEST!

Gerry, we need to talk. Or email.

Gerry Brennan, you are driving me nuts. I am sure you are one of the motherland's finest headstone engravers, but you need new business cards or something, because I am getting weekly emails from people with specifications for their loved ones' gravestones. Today it was for Ireland's first ombudsman, who apparently had a long and fruitful life, a loving daughter, and a job title that I just cannot take seriously.

Aside from the strangeness of getting emails with subject lines like "Gravestone specifications", the primary problem with this situation is the response - do I just delete the email? No, because who knows how long it would take before they call Gerry to ask why he hasn't written back. So what do I write? So far, I've stuck with, "I'm afraid you have an incorrect email address. My condolences." It feels weird to throw in that last bit, but I can't not acknowledge the fact that this is some weighty stuff they're working with.

The worst part is, I don't know his correct address, so I can't write to him and tell him to knock it off. Gerry, Gerry, Gerry - what am I going to do with you? 

Barley

Here is my ode to barley: barley is awesome, barley is tasty, barley has a really nice texture, barley would make a great prom date. I realize that is not particularly poetic (or sensical), but that is how I feel. I like barley because it is healthy, it is easy to make, and you can throw pretty much anything in with it and it will come out dandy.

Case in point: yesterday my coworker gave me a whole bunch of tomatoes from his garden, so I boiled up some barley, plucked a mess of basil from our plant, and made a barley, tomato and fresh mozzarella salad with basil dressing. It was durn easy, and delicious. 

My iPhone keeps taking progressively crappier pictures, but you get the idea - tasty healthy make you strong like bull.

I was just thinking about...

One particular set of table tents from Stone-Davis dining hall, first year of college. They were ads for an all-night dance-a-thon benefiting some org or other. The best part was that they featured two dance instructors named...wait for it...Seymour Johnson and Cristina Pujol. Give that last one its proper Spanish pronunciation, and you have a recipe for laughing your ass off every time you sit down to eat. 

Not very mature, but it still makes me giggle.

Sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits

Um, I kind of love that line. If you haven't already seen Hillary's speech from the convention, you totally should. It's up on the NYT.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh

I just sent an email to a publisher that had some insulting account notes at the bottom - including how disorganized the company is, and how my contact (the email's lucky recipient) applied for a job on our team and got shot down. Ahhhhhhhh.

The only upside is, they weren't my notes - I was just working off them for my email. I have a feeling that isn't going to help, though. Damn you, technology, for making communication so easy! And so mortifying.

Has anyone else done this?

I like charts.

If you do too, check out Perspectv, which pulls in political info from polls, news sources, blogs, and Twitter feeds. There are charts and maps and timelines, and I feel like Josh Lyman would have loved this thing, had he been a real person.

On a related note, Mike and I finished the last episode of The West Wing last night - sad! Jed Bartlet, you will always be my president!

Butterfly in the sky

I can fly way more than twice as high. Because I just went for a flight in my boss's plane! And we didn't crash or anything. We took off from Palo Alto airport, flew up the peninsula, over the city and Marin, then back on down. I got to listen to all the tower and pilot people T(ango)A(lpha)L(ima)K(ilo) over the radio.

Here's the view as we were coming in from the Pacific and about to pass over the Golden Gate Bridge. That's the wing in the lower right hand corner. Yeah!

Outside Lands

It was a serious concert-going weekend: 3 days of music, crowds, and eating. In all, we saw significant portions of sets by:

• Manu Chao
• Beck
• Radiohead
• Liars
• M. Ward
• Regina Spektor
• Primus
• Tom Petty
• Toots and the Maytals
• Andrew Bird
• Broken Social Scene
• Wilco

Friday was a little overwhelming, and almost everyone that we met up with we lost in the crowd, but Radiohead was amazing, as expected. M. Ward gave a shout out to Primus, Broken Social Scene gave a shout out to Wilco, and everyone seemed very happy and relaxed, on the whole. I still don't really like people, and most of them talk loudly about things that are boring, but it was worth it to spend the whole weekend in the park.
Highlights included tromping around the park from stage to stage, a hard rocking toddler flashing the devil horns at Primus (I have the video up on Flickr), and a super drunk girl slow dancing with the bewildered stranger behind her in the bathroom line during Broken Social Scene. The bike ride home each night was pretty fabulous, too. We flew through the park with dozens of other riders, through the fog, down the deserted, winding path through the Panhandle, like some ninja bike gang.

Foodstuffs

Last night Olivia and Kari came over for dinner, and we drank 4 bottles of wine, oh yes we did. I made:

• bruschetta
• baked brie
• sauteed brussel sprouts
• oven-roasted "fries" with garlic vegan aioli and curry ketchup
• eggplant rolled with tamari-basil goat cheese
• crepes with plum port filling and vanilla ice cream

It all came out tasty, but I really wish I could stick to a recipe.

Copyright

An appropriately fuddled definition of "copyright", courtesy of a Japanese copyright association:

"As a result of mental operations, the right that the creatress exclusively uses the work of art and literature, Academic, the art, and the music invented is defended by the Copyright Law."

Mangled English is always funny to me.

A thing I love:

Wiretap shows. There's always the same core group of 10 or so people that I really only see at Wiretap events, and who are so darn fun. Then there's the added benefit of watching the San Francisco hipster in its native habitat. Spending a night at Thee Parkside is like being on safari: you know ahead of time that you're going to see lions and tigers and bears, but it is still delightful to spot them in their finery.

It is a very specific aesthetic, and I think there's a lifestyle to go with it. The people at the show last night liv in a hilly old Victorians with 4 or 5 roommates, sinks full of dirty dishes, and lots of spider plants. Their houses smell like pot and occasionally cat pee, and they share t-shirts all the time, regardless of their gender and size. They trade pants, too. Some of them have crappy jobs and spend all their money on music equipment, and some have really cool jobs that they do not talk about much.

All of this is to say, there were some really awesome outfits last night, outfits whose complete avoidance of anything flattering made me feel ashamed for the fact that my shoes matched my belt (shut up) and that my hair is neither short nor very, very messy.

Is that mean? I hope not. I mean, they do it all intentionally; clothes are costumes, so they say, let's just go balls to the wall with it. It's amazing that while the rest of the world is trying to look pretty pretty pretty, in this city, at this time, these people are running in the complete opposite direction. If you are a very tall and skinny guy, and you are wearing a kid's teeball shirt, it is just not going to look sexy, or manly. To me. But to that chick with the she-mullet, off the shoulder shirt, and super tight red jeans, you may be Hot Stuff.

Speaking of hot stuff, I am kind of in love with Chinese Bookie (MySpace), and I told her so. She does what I would do if I could sing: gets up on stage by herself, does little dances, makes faces, puts on a monocle, and sings her head off. If you get the chance to see her live, do it.

Mike stands on street corners. For civil rights.

Mike totally out-allied me last night - he spent 3 hours in the Castro, soliciting money and volunteers for Vote No on Prop 8. Apparently all the other campaigners had personal stories about why they support gay marriage - Mike's explanation was that this is the defining civil rights issue of our time. He got a couple dollars, several volunteers, and a few date proposals. Coincidentally, the volunteers were briefed in the offices of the Human Rights Campaign - which is the first charity I ever gave money to on my own (i.e. without my mom making me).

When Mike was done harassing passers-by, I met him for dinner at Nirvana. This place has absolutely amazing grilled bread that comes with a coconut curry dipping sauce, and the top of the bread is all glazed and crackly. It is SO GOOD. So way to go Mike, way to go tasty bread, and way to go gay marriage.

Ultramarathon man!

Today I'm going to have lunch with Dean Karnazes, who ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. I guess he is pretty insane, and I am excited to ask him questions like, Don't your feet hurt sometimes? and, Don't your knees hurt sometimes? and also, How much do you have to eat to make sure you're getting enough calories?

I also feel like I am going to come away from lunch feeling much less proud of myself for running 2 miles in 17 minutes last night.

UPDATE: Dude was not the greatest public speaker ever, but that's ok - what I wanted from him was not anecdotes, but information. He orders Hawaiian pizzas delivered to him on the road when he runs (good call Vanessa!); during a 262-mile run, he ate 28,000 calories in two days and still lost 5 pounds; he may go as slow as 18 minutes a mile uphill, but the 262nd mile of that run took less than 6 minutes!

He has some physiological advantages - his steps are solid, without any pronation or whatever is the opposite of pronation (supination?), and obviously he has the kind of slow-twitch muscles of which long distance runners are made. It's still unbelievable that he's never been injured, though - and he no longer takes chemical painkillers (ibuprofen etc). He said that when he ran the 50 marathons in 50 days, the last one - the New York Marathon - was his fastest. In short, his body got stronger along the way. He chalked it up to the power of the human body to heal and adapt blah blah blah, but I really think that he is just freakish.

Name help

I have to come up with a name for my fantasy football team at work, and I am feeling pressure to have something clever. My boss' team is the Kickass Ass Kickers, so there is at least some room for rudeness. Any suggestions?

If you are good with naming stuff, I could also use help with a bike gang name for me, Mike and Leslie - and you, if you like the name you create so much that you want to take up cycling. Velo- cycle- and bike- stuff preferred, but Bikes & Brews is the best we've come up with so far, and it's pretty weak. This is priority #2, though, if you are adding things to your to-do list.

Ok, side note: do you call things on your to-do list "action items"? Because I do, now. I feel like my vocabulary is getting taken over by MBA-speak. Last week, in an Important Meeting, I introduced a project proposal and said that I had built in room for flexibility, so that we could expand and adapt the project on the next go-round. At least three people nodded (That Girl behavior!) and involuntarily muttered, "iterate". It was positively Pavlovian - at Google we say iterate, iterate, iterate! I'll iterate on your ass, man.

Woah, should my team name be "Iterate Your Ass"?