photo:good morning, sunshine! – Arvada, CO, July 2008

Okay, let’s just call this a cop-out right up front. I simply haven’t had the confluence of time and mental energy to write anything substantive in the last few months. To keep some reasonable flow of new content into this site, I’ve resorted to photo galleries (some from trips I never got around to writing up before, so actually all-new material), song translations, and a story I wrote ages ago for another purpose but had never published.

It would have easier to do a diary-type blog, simply telling you what I’m doing day by day, but that hasn’t really been my style up to now, and I don’t expect most of you to be that fascinated with me as a person(ality), or my life, however weird and unusual it is.

For those who are that fascinated, there’s Twitter, where I’ve been “micro-blogging” for some time now – jotting down little snatches of my life at random times and frequencies, for the edification and occasional amusement of those who “follow” me. When I first joined Twitter (it’s been a while), I had heard about it from my videoblogging friends, so my first followers/ followees were videobloggers.

Now there are also Italian friends and Sun colleagues. I mostly follow people whose lives and thoughts I’m actually interested in hearing about, with a few informational/marketing entities such as Amazon and Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008 blog. I mostly don’t follow people who don’t follow me, with a handful of big-name exceptions (who, if they follow proper Twitiquette, follow me back even if I’m only one among thousands of their fans and followers).

It’s interesting (and, given Twitter’s poor UI for it, irritating) to go back and see what I wrote two months ago. My days are moving so fast that they’re becoming a blur, but I can refer back to my tweets (as updates via Twitter are called) to try to recapture what I was thinking and feeling a month or two ago. (Apparently I can’t go any further back than that. I hope that Twitter kept all our tweets from the beginning and will manage to make them available to us some day, in some sort of searchable/saveable format.)

So here’s the first installment of the Twitter diaries. The original tweets (limited to 140 characters) are in bold below; I’ve added some explanatory commentary.

July 1, 2008: back in the USofA, jetlagged and awake at 4 am. hoping to avoid planes for at least 6 weeks. The insanity begins again in September.

Ross and I flew back together from Italy to Denver. I was expecting a mostly travel-free summer. Turned out I was wrong.

maybe someday, or at least in some other lifetime, I will manage to go a whole entire month without experiencing jet lag.

Ross spent a couple of days lounging and shopping while I caught up at work, then…

3: enough blog stats – it’s time to blow this popsicle stand and head for New Mexico. With a box of beer and wine…

We drove to Las Vegas, New Mexico, together to spend the (American) Independence Day holiday with a bunch of Woodstock friends. Hmm, that’s a photo gallery I haven’t done yet.

I’m glad we spent the “patriotic” holiday in the unique culture of New Mexico. Everything was red, white, and blue – but in Spanish. I don’t think I could have taken a more typical American celebration – overweening patriotism gets right up my nose.

Shilpin (in the orange shirt), Deepu, [Tara, Dorien], Ross, Sharon – listening to one of many great bands that played throughout the weekend in Las Vegas’ town square.

7: back in the office, 10 hours on the road yesterday. Need more coffee…

The long road trip was my diabolical plan to force Ross to spend some serious mother-daughter time. As anticipated, I had barely seen her during the three weeks we were in Italy together – she was too busy catching up with her friends in Lecco.

Sunday, July 6th, we drove straight from Las Vegas to Denver airport, where Ross was not allowed to carry on board the cow skull she had bought in Santa Fe – it was considered a dangerous weapon. She took off for Austin without Bob; I had to mail him later (which cost more than it had to buy him).

9: I suspect I’m heading for collapse. Maybe I can make it through Friday and then sleep all weekend.

I was getting sick, the sinus infection I’d been trying to fight off for months was demanding attention.

to my multicultural friends: Jim @jimgris poses an interesting question (and don’t miss the comments!)

Sometimes I (and many others) use Twitter to alert people to things I find interesting.

our turtles will have a new home at a wildlife park near Bergamo. We simply travel too much to take care of them. Kinda sad.

@Boh yeah, I’ll miss them.

[She asked: can’t your husband take care of them?]

@Boh not when he’s in Colorado twice a year visiting me!

[She wondered how the whole situation was working out.]

@Boh I’m very happy in my job and everything else. Remains to be seen what will happen in the long term with our long-distance marriage.

I think I’m going to invest in art by people I know like Rick Mobbs

I had just met him through our friends in Las Vegas, LOVE his work.

10: painting of the day:

By my colleague Dwayne Wolff, whose work I look forward to seeing in person. I had seen this painting on his site before, but understood it a lot better as I had my first up-close experience of Sun’s periodic layoffs. Even when you’re pretty sure your own job is safe, not knowing where the axe will fall is discomforting. Finding out later that it fell on people you know and like (and I have yet to meet anyone at Sun whom I don’t like) is… well, the painting expresses it perfectly.

11: it is frighteningly easy to increase one’s credit limit

I thought I was going to pay Ross’ tuition with a credit card, and wasn’t sure, with all the other spending I’d been doing, that I had enough credit left that month to cover it. A two-minute phone call, in which I made a statement about my salary that they could not have substantiated so quickly (though it was true) was all it took to increase my credit limit quite a bit. Given the state of American credit… well, that’s how American credit got where it is!

le avventure di Rossella nel Texas: http://www.fotolog.com/rossella

Ross published a series of very amusing essays (in Italian) on her fotolog, but I am no longer allowed to translate them.

12: would be very quiet around here if not for neighbors mowing their lawns. Which make no sense in Colorado. Xeriscape, people!

The homeowners’ association has all sorts of requirements about what your yard can and must contain, which many in this neighborhood interpret as a need for lots of green lawn. Which is completely out of place, wasteful, and expensive in this semi-desert environment. One neighbor seems to mow his lawn twice a week, which, in one of Colorado’s driest years ever, implied a hell of a lot of watering.

13: still sleepy, dunno if it’s allergies, cold, or just sheer exhaustion.

just finished watching Rang de Basanti – in tears

Great movie, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so heavy. One of many DVDs I bought in India, most of which I haven’t had time to watch yet.

14: my new baby

a little nostalgic fangirl indulgence: Elfquest prints, get ’em before Warner Bros. takes it all

An old favorite comic of mine will finally get made into a movie, but that means the creators/publishers can no longer sell their own schwag. Still available as of this writing, though, so get it while you can.

15: how did this Yahoo shit get into my Firefox and how do I get rid of it?

A toolbar mysteriously appeared, I have no idea what I installed that did that.

I only see TV news in the gym. Thankfully. I miss out on most of the utter rubbish they try to make into “issues” and “big stories.”

Don’t remember what “big story” got on my nerves that day, but every time I see the TV on in the gym, the stories seem about equally stupid, and the media opinions about them even stupider. And this is on CNN, which I used to think was an intelligent news organization.

@firefox_answers thanks, I did figure that out. Really annoying that they can sneak in like that!

What was interesting about the toolbar incident was that someone is clearly covering Twitter for Firefox and answering questions like mine as they arise – a clever use of the technology to reach out to customers (and Firefox is free – I’m not paying anyone for this service). Very good example of service-as-marketing. If I were still doing frontline support for Incat/Adaptec/Roxio, I’d be doing the same.

bought Season 1 of The Tudors. Sounds like the TV equivalent of an epic costume romance novel – about what my mushy brain can take today

Haven’t got around to watching much of this yet, but what I have seen has lived up to expectations.

Dr. Horrible part 1 was fun. Nathan Fillion does a good Elvis imitation.

As did this.