Loxosceles

I posted this as a comment at Ask the Readers: Advice for College Grads over at Get Rich Slowly. The question: what financial advice would you give a recent or soon-to-be college grad?

When you’re unemployed, and interviewing for jobs, remember that the light at the end of the financial tunnel does not come when you start your job. Not even when you get your first paycheck, since that check will be paying last month’s bills. It takes a couple of paychecks, even a couple of months, to get a comfortable cash flow going. Resist the urge to celebrate too early!

Ask. Negotiate. Do not wait for perks, raises, or fun assignments to be handed to you. While you wait, they are being given to people who had the guts to ask.

Do not buy lots of stuff to fill up your empty first apartment. Your future self does not want your poor ass student self picking out furniture.

Similarly: when you buy stuff, consider its whole life cycle. What will you do when the item goes out of fashion? When you give up that hobby? When you move? Go through a couple of moves and you’ll realize that every time you are trashing stuff that you once thought was worth spending money on.

Career-wise, figure out what you WANT to do, not what you feel like someone with your major should do. Remember there are always more opportunities in the world than anybody has thought to tell you about.

Develop a hobby that could, theoretically, pay the bills. This may become an alternate career path, OR you may be able to blend your expertise here with expertise in your regular field. Similarly, if you change majors or careers, don’t forget that your former field left you with skills that are still useful in future jobs. Real world jobs/careers/opportunities are rarely contained within exactly one field.

Photo by Chris

Check it out! Just a month after deciding to take up running - and despite having a cold - I entered and ran a 10K race. Woohoo!

My time was 1:08:08 (according to the photo, thanks Chris) which is an even 11:00 min/mile pace. Slow compared to most runners, but fast enough that I'm quite proud of myself.

There are a few more pictures on flickr. Chris was my support crew, waiting to see me at the finish line and wearing a ridiculously bright colored shirt so I'd be sure to spot him. Together we watched about 5 more people come in after me, which means I wasn't last. Yay for me!

Fun fact: the skunk cabbage race is just as old as I am - this year was its 27th running. It's so called because near the turnaround point there are some skunk cabbages, sprouting and stinking to herald the beginning of spring.

Speaking of which - it was a beautiful sunny day, one of very few we've had. When we got home I noticed flowers in the front yard - the owners must have planted them last year. Hello springtime!

Hi everybody! I'm still alive. Here's an update:

• I am a full-time professional freelance writer. (It takes a long time of doing that before it feels right to announce it as your profession.) I write nonfiction. My favorite stuff is science and technology writing. Until I can fill my schedule with that, I do newspaper articles and copywriting. Need something written? Hire me. I'm really good.

• I am a roller derby addict! This is my team, this is my league, this is me jamming. We are recruiting players and referees! Join us, it's a ton of fun.

• I still swing dance.

• I have taken up figure skating. I'm not very graceful, but I can land a decent waltz jump and toe loop without usually falling over too much.

• Yesterday I went for a run, and liked it, so I'm going to keep running. This year, I have resolved to keep things fun by varying the lengths of my runs, and entering 5K and 10K races (not to win, just to finish) every couple of weeks.

• I posted to the Sustainable Food Blog today. This resumes another regular trend.

• Shortly after I got my SLR last year, my pocket camera broke. OK, fine, who needs it, right? Well, that effectively ended the photo-a-day project, since I'm not going to lug something heavy and expensive around everywhere just in case something catches my eye. But last week, I couldn't stand it anymore (I was at the mall parking lot, and every branch on every tree was totally coated in ice, in that magical you-never-know-when-this-will-happen-again sort of way, and me with no camera) so I broke down and bought the cheapest digital camera they had at the mall. It's brown (who makes cameras in brown, anyway?) and now I'm back.

The semicolon is not used enough; the comma is used too often. This is an awesome T-shirt. I was such a semicolon addict in high school; I started misusing commas on purpose because it seems less stuffy (I don't know why, it just does.)

"Commit yourself to taking enough risks that you will fail some of the time." -Scott Berkun

I've sent out tons of queries and letters of introduction since going freelance three months ago. Some queries get a flat-out no, and most disappear into the ether. But surprisingly many come back with a yes.

So how's the business doing? Pretty well! I've had 6 pieces published so far, with more in the works, not to mention 75+ posts on the Sustainable Food Blog.

Best productivity tool: a book called The Now Habit. I tried GTD, but it made me dread my work. The Now Habit helps me to look forward to it - thanks to Dave Harding for the recommendation.

Moxie relaxes in the backyard of our new place

This weekend, Chris and I moved into a new house! It's beautiful, has a yard for the dogs, and man are we exhausted from moving all those boxes.

My biggest news, though, is that Friday is my last day as a professional computer geek; next week I strike out on my own as a full-time freelance writer. (I'm available for hire - contact me.)

I've also got another project in the works, but more on that later. It'll launch in a week or two.

Yay for Ithaca Festival! Swing set had a performance at the "Swing & Salsa Dance Blast" along with some other awesome, talented dancers. (I LOVED the girl/guy salsa dance-off, btw.)

In the evening we went to the Silent Film Festival held at the State Theater. It's a beautiful, sorta run-down old theater, and we sat in the front row of the balcony.

The show was straight from 1916, with news clips, cartoons, and a Beatrice Fairfax double feature preceded by a singalong ("Oh Beatrice Fairfax, what shall I do? I want the bare facts, the truth from you...") The movies were filmed in Ithaca. In the silent film days, the Wharton brothers had a movie studio in the place that's now Stewart Park.

Best of all, there was live music - provided by a pianist whose specialty is playing for silent movies, and a singer/assistant who provided sound effects.

I'm convinced now that it's wrong to watch a silent movie in silence. The accompaniment transformed the film into a really engaging performance. The plot became crystal clear.

The show opened with some news clips. There would be a description of the newsworthy item, then some film of it. The pianist would change the mood of what he was playing usually as everyone was reading the caption. (Typically he would stop playing the melody but keep up the upbeat rhythm. When he decided what to play next, he'd work the new melody back in.) One caption mentioned the French army, so he worked a little Marseillese into the music, and the audience laughed. Another was about Harvard's crew team, and he played "row row row your boat". Sing! he told us. Now just this side! Now the other side! We got in a few verses in the round before the clip was over.

During the Krazy Kat cartoons, we got sound effects of the Kat's airplane and meowing for his serenade. For dialogue, an empty speech bubble would appear, and words would fill it in as the character said his piece.

The two Beatrice Fairfax stories barely involved Beatrice at all. They each started with three sets of characters: Beatrice and Jimmy, at the newspaper office; a young couple in love; and a handful of villains or suspicious characters. Jimmy would investigate the villains (he was a reporter) and soon enough an important clue would come when half of the lovelorn couple would write to Beatrice. Beatrice wasn't so much a character as she was a plot device.

I had thought that silent movies explained all the dialogue on little cards of text, but there was actually very little text used in the movie - just a little bit to introduce the characters or to deliver a very important line ("You'll find the murderer inside the vault!")

You don't really need much dialogue to show that a couple is in love. One card would identify the lovers, and then we'd see them chatting on the phone. The guy, smiling. The girl, giggling. What more do you need to know?

The piano didn't just set a mood - it really amplified the mood of the characters. When someone is worried, she doesn't say "I'm worried" or show it in her face; she shows it with her actions, and the pianist plays music that makes you a little nervous.

The sound effects were right there for the gunshots and phones ringing. There would be a "ding ding ding!" and a character would run across the room to answer the phone. Or somebody would open a door, and you'd hear the BANG as they were shot.

In one scene, the actors managed to convey "let's draw lots to see who has to kill these people we've captured" without saying a word. In another, one villain snuck up on two of the heroes listening at the door while his fellow villains discussed their plans inside. Why face them alone when five of his friends are on the other side of the door? He went downstairs and tapped on a drainpipe ("tink tink tink!") Inside the upstairs room, the villains all gathered around the pipe with hands cupped to their ears, listening, curious. So they opened the door to go downstairs, and the heroes tumbled in.

Now that is good storytelling - without a single word.

Lots of people get bored enough to read my website. Some people get bored enough to complain that I don't post often enough on my website. Marty got bored enough to contribute a post for my website.

Yesterday was a day, so I swung danced. Actually, I deejayed while other hepcats swung danced. It went good. Also I'm going to make shoes.

It's all true, except for the shoes. Only crazy people make their own shoes.

Chris and I no longer outnumber the dogs in our house. Meet Pandora - the one that looks just like Santa's Little Helper.



She is, as her name suggests, the world's biggest troublemaker. Argh.

Just in case family members are poking my blog for gift ideas: I have a list here of things I think are cool, and I've got a wishlist on Amazon.

But, I already own a lot of stuff. More than I know what to do with sometimes. If you don't know what to get me, how about a share of a cow or water buffalo in my name for somebody who will use it to feed their family and start a small business? I'd love to get a card on Christmas morning saying I made it possible for somebody to have their own buffalo.

Here are the results from my first month on the photo-a-day diet, presented now as sort of late birthday gift for myself.

I'm really enjoying this project. The fifth day of the project was a Sunday, and I had slept in, and as I headed out the door to take the dog out, I remembered the rule to always have your camera with you. "Even when I take the dog out to poop?" I thought. What could it hurt? So I took the camera, and took my best-ever shot of a running greyhound.

Looking at my month, I remember a lot more interesting things than in my usual retrospective: "Where did november go?" or "I haven't done anything interesting lately". I went dancing, I learned to make soap, I voted, I traveled, Chris printed his first Hello World on his development hardware, I saw Dan Savage, I discovered a great bread recipe, I helped to make an almost-prizewinning chili, I learned to use my narrow-hemmer, I saw a surprise rainbow at sunset, I went to the glass museum and saw a live performance of the New World Symphony; we had our first snow of the year, and I tried my first camera toss.

A lot of the pictures have their own little stories, like when I climbed a staircase in the Willard Straight ballroom to take that day's photo. Suddenly people looked up and realized there was actually structure to a wall where they thought there was only a lot of wood paneling and molding. I had a small crowd follow me up there to check out the view.

I think I may understand historians' interest in diaries: day-to-day happenings, even if they're boring to the person they happen to, can add up to be something worth reading about. Decades or centuries later, they're very valuable; the things that seemed boring at the time (how you spent your day, where you lived, what chores you had, what news you paid attention to) are exotic and fascinating.

I'm a fan of old photos that show the cars of the day, the clothing, the architecture, the styles of advertising. Somebody has to take those photos! How often have you stopped to snap a random everyday view of your favorite street corner? Now, for contrast, what's your reaction to an old postcard showing a familiar street corner as it appeared 100 years ago?

I found myself wondering recently why I sign myself up for seemingly needless obligations: like making all my own clothes, or only running free software, or not eating meat, or taking a photo every day no matter what. Once I switched the keys on my computer to the Dvorak rather than the Qwerty layout, and used it that way for a year.

Mainly, it's because I'm curious to see what it's like to live under that obligation, and what I might learn from it. Simply having a camera in your hand changes how you look at the world; making yourself look at the world in that unusual way, once a day ("what here is worth taking a photo of?") leads to all sorts of intriguing trains of thought. Eating vegetarian raises interesting questions about what's on the menu and why. Swearing off purchased clothing really makes you think about consumerism and commerce - how can I support this charity except by buying yet another shirt sewn in a sweatshop in China? What would I have to do to not support those sweatshops? (Somehow I doubt buying fabric from JoAnn's is the answer.)

Meanwhile, plenty of people don't own cameras, and don't have much choice in what they eat or what they wear - so this is still sort of a rich person's parlor game. If you want to deprive yourself of something for fun and profit, but where the profit goes to someone who actually needs it, try the Knitters Without Borders Challenge. (You don't have to be a knitter.) It goes like this: for a week, or the time period of your choice, stop buying unnecessary stuff. At the end of the week, take the money you saved, and send it to Doctors Without Borders. (They won a Nobel Peace Prize. They're legit.)

And when you're done with that, pick up your camera, or not, and start thinking about the world around you.

I was at work, and Marty was rushing out the door with his coat. He asked if I had my camera - "because there's a giant-ass rainbow outside. Go look!"

The person on the left here is a mother showing the rainbow to her kid. They pointed out to me that it was actually a double rainbow (not really visible in this photo).

Here you can almost see the second rainbow - it's above the first, very very faint. The rainbows arced all the way across the sky, and as I took pictures the sky started to turn orange and cloudy.

I took a break from gawking to turn around, and saw that almost everyone in the courtyard had whipped out their cameraphone to snap a picture of the rainbow. Here is the rainbow with one of its admirers.

Shortly after I took this photo, gray clouds covered the rainbow and then night fell.

I'm taking a statistics class. I somehow got through college without taking one, and it's about time I learned this stuff.

I'm also taking a swimming class at some ungodly hour in the morning on Fridays. I never had any trouble keeping myself afloat, but now I'm learning how to do swimming strokes properly (like how and when to breathe in freestyle). [Helpful links: how to keep water out of your nose, Retro swimsuits from the actual Esther Williams, swimming tutorial with bonus links]

Chris and I have also been taking dance classes, but there's not much to say about that; you kind of have to be there. If you want something to read about, try the catalog of swing dance styles on streetswing.com, a great time-waster where you can read about what dances influenced other dances or were combined with other dances, when and where they were invented or popularized ... Here's one place to start, just click everything.

These are the beginnings of my latest sewing project: the awesomest pair of homemade jeans ever to grace my butt. (They don't have much competition, really). The pattern is from Sew U. It's a good book that comes with a fabulous pants pattern; the only alteration I made was to make the thighs a little roomier, the better to accomodate my fat massive muscles.

Today the hamlet I live in was having a yard sale. I spent $11, and look what I got:

The dresser was $10. I was calling Chris to ask him about it, when I noticed another woman at the yard sale also calling someone about a dresser. I didn't want to take it from under her nose while she was thinking about it. I hemmed. I hawed. Finally I asked her what she was looking at; she had her eye on a different, smaller dresser! Perfect.

It was full of spiderwebs (and spiders) and was falling apart a bit in the back, but we cleaned it out and fixed it up. It's going to hold my sweaters and perhaps some sewing supplies.

See what's on top of the dresser?


That's from another sale - fifteen brand-new patterns, a few Vintage Vogue but mostly Butterick Retro (I didn't know there was a Butterick Retro!) ... 15 of them for a dollar, and all in my size. I picked them from a big bucket of patterns, and the lady was so happy to sell them to somebody else who enjoyed sewing that she offered me fabric for free! I exercised great self-restraint in saying no. Really, I'm better off without a fabric stash.

1. I just saw bees having sex outside. Just two little bees, on a dandelion, gettin' it on. That's not supposed to happen!

2. The other day at work, I downgraded a debian system from testing to stable. It worked without errors. That's not supposed to happen either!

Maybe I'm just going crazy?

I have so many pictures of the stuff I saw this weekend at the Strolling of the Heifers in Vermont. Here's a peek:


A strolling heifer.

Of course I had to knit something in the car:


We visited an alpaca farm. Chris bought the fleeces from (I think) these two cuties:


That's it for now. More later, when I'm less tired, or more tired, or not sneezing as much or something. (I think I've either got allergies or a cold. Not sure which, but it's unpleasant.)

It seems that whenever we buy thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment, at work, the company sends us swag. Penguin Computing was the best - each server comes with a little stuffed penguin. They also sent mousepads (is there some part of the world where people still use those??) and t-shirts.

More recently we got a bunch of AMD stuff. No stuffed penguins, just totally ridiculous things, like a pair of binoculars with an AMD logo on its carrying pouch. Perhaps so we can spy on people in the building next door? Oh, and a couple of business casual polo shirts. (For context, our official dress code here is "Nothing illegal." This means that, thanks to NY state law, I could come to work in a pair of underpants and nothing else. Shirts are totally unnecessary.

And the shirts are always in a size that fits nobody, like a Large. (we only have small, medium, and extra-large bioinformaticists). So I was thinking..

You could cut a square out of each shirt, making sure that the square contains the logo. Sew them together into a cube, and stuff. Then, whenver you have a computer problem, roll the cube! Whoever's logo comes up is the company to blame. The more ill-fitting T-shirts they send, the more likely it'll be their fault.

Chris and I took a class last night in West Coast Swing. Apparently the Californians never stopped doing swing dance when everybody else did, so the dance stuck around, evolved a little, and I guess it still gets danced to current music.

We signed up for a crash course that condenses a 5-week class into about 4 hours. Sounds like fun, right? Well, not many people showed up, so the class was cut short - a 5 week class in 1.5 hours. That's "oh wait, let me show you three more moves before you go home" short. Chris's brain was kinda fried, but we went home and practiced. I think we're ready for the intermediate class tonight!

In West Coast Swing, the leader (Chris) stays basically in one place, while the follower (me) dances all over an imaginary track. I told Chris he would like this dance, since I'll be doing all the work. Well, it seems that his job is the harder one! At one point when we were practicing last night, he just stepped out of the slot entirely and watched me dance back and forth. It was late. He was tired. His brain may have just melted out through his ears.

Anyhow, the reason I'm blogging this is that I just had to share these pictures of west coast swing dancers. I guess the ridiculous outfits are required once you get to some higher level.

You're probably familiar with the male red-winged blackbird:


The females aren't as easy to recognize. Most bird books either skip the photo, just mentioning that she's brown, or else show a picture like this:


But I had a lucky day with the camera yesterday, and got a good look at a female who was flying around. She's got red patches on her wings!


Pretty cool. Let's see them together:


I wasn't really there for the birds, though. I was there to take pictures of this:


In spring, you see, a young toad's thoughts turn to love.

Have you ever had a neighbor who had sex really loud? I mean, really really loud? Just be glad they weren't toads. They would have sounded like this.


I didn't get any better shots of the toads than what you see above. I had slightly better luck with the birds. Here's a house sparrow (you can tell it's a female, since it doesn't have a little black beard):


And an OK shot of a robin. Not the first one I saw this spring, but probably the first one I took a picture of.


Just before I ran out of space on my flash card, I got this portrait of a goose. Unlike all the others, this one actually filled the frame! (In the shots above, I didn't resize the images; I just cropped them. Perhaps Santa will bring me a zoom lens next Christmas.)


Not a bad day at the pond.

Remember that petticoat I said I was making out of old pillowcases? I finally got a chance to model it for the camera (Chris is getting to be quite the fashion photographer).



Photo location: the arboretum section of the Cornell Plantations.

Its length and floofiness were entirely dictated by the amount of fabric I had to work with.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with trilobites:


And I started a new project (shh):


This is totally random, but Chris and I signed up for a monthly box of farm-raised meat . Here is a recent steak dinner (I promise I won't become one of those weirdos who takes a picture of every meal).



My browser crashed when I was writing this post, and I remembered how awesome it is that I use Powerblogs. How many blogging systems save your work every 5 minutes, just in case? Not many, that's how many! (Disclaimer: I'm married to Powerblogs's CEO, but that doesn't make Powerblogs any less cool).

This morning I got up early to go to the book sale. Ithaca's book sale is ginormous, and is organized around the idea that the earlier you get there, the better the pickings. (For an idea of the scale of this event, check out this page that gives tips on camping out in line, how many books you can buy at a time, etc.)

People who are really serious about the sale - mostly book dealers - get in line the night before. Books start at $4.50 for hardbacks the first day, down to $1 a bag on the last day of the sale. I was #174 in line this morning, waited maybe 20 minutes to get in, and unfortunately was unable to find any of the particular titles I was looking for. I was hoping for some Alice Starmore, Mastering Regular Expressions, and a book on photographic lighting that I'd read over a friend's shoulder a few years ago. No luck, but I did get No Idle Hands, Jerseys, Guernseys, and Arans, a book on the history of photography, a book called Natural Light Photography by Ansel Adams, a book on animal portrait photography (containing some unbelievably cheesy shots by the author, like a hunting dog in a reindeer costume next to a stuffed pheasant in a santa hat and a "dominating" pose.)

I also got a textbook on insect physiology; I opened it to a page on menotaxis, which has to do with the way an animal orients itself based on cues in its surroundings. An insect on a turntable may keep moving so that it is always facing the same stationary object; many insects, if you put them on a striped surface, will walk between the stripes. I wonder if you could get a bug to walk a maze.

Back when Chris and I went to Iceland, it was really hard to find any books on the icelandic language. This time I found the icelandic section in the foreign languages area. It was on the end of a shelf. Somebody had helpfully put the section label on the edge of that shelf, with an arrow pointing to the one and only book in the section. It was a traveler's phrasebook from 1966.

A few hours later, I went to my volunteer orientation at the SPCA. (While we're on the topic of uniquely Ithaca institutions, I should mention that this is the only "open door" no-kill shelter in the country, and it doesn't turn any dogs away). I didn't know that people were allowed to just walk in to the shelter and pet the animals, but they can. (If a dog needs some peace and quiet, they'll lock its door). Also, volunteers can come in anytime to walk and socialize the dogs, which combined with a small minimum commitment is a great way to accomodate people's schedules.

After the orientation I stuck around a bit and met some very sweet dogs, including a pit bull type that loved to sit and lay down for treats (I started teaching her "stay") and a friendly happy coonhound that I took for a walk.