Carbon day

Some people got an e-mail from me about this book yesterday. But I thought I should probably mention it here, too, with apologies for the blatant solicitation:

This guy I know wrote a book. When I met him, Eric was writing for Time magazine, and he can put a sentence together. He's also engaging, and writing about a subject that matters to everyone. It seems that is not sufficient to become a very successful author. He needs everyone in the world to buy his book on Amazon, today. And by "today," I mean literally, "today," not, "in these modern times." I do not mean "everyone in the world," literally, although, it couldn't hurt.

Do what you like with this information: Buy the book, pass this on, ignore it entirely. But can you really go wrong with a book that has this editorial review up on Amazon?

"Carbon, the citizen king of elements, governs who we are and what life is—but the king is going mad! Citizens, revolt against the despots, or all may be lost!"—James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Here's this e-mail from Eric's wife.

Dear friends,

As many of you know, for the past few years my husband Eric Roston has dedicated an enormous amount of time investigating the role carbon plays in our lives. The result of his efforts, The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat, was released last week. It is a readable, thoroughly researched book that challenges the fundamental assumptions we make about critical issues facing our society.

The way the book industry is right now, having a big day on Amazon.com can determine the trajectory of a book's success. This is all a preamble to say that MONDAY, JUNE 30, is going to be Eric's "Amazon Day." When brick-and-mortar bookstores see a new book on the Amazon bestseller lists, they take that as a signal to order more books. So, if you were thinking of buying the book or just want to help out, it would be great if you could order The Carbon Age on Amazon on Monday, June 30!! You can click on this link, or this (shrunken) Web address: http://tinyurl.com/3nshxl

Thank you for your attention and support!!

Below are some links that will tell you more about The Carbon Age.

Your pal,
Karen

http://www.ericroston.com
http://www.walkerbooks.com/books/catalog.php?key=720

Oh, also, I should say, congratulations, Eric! Good luck today!

It's just a theory...

...but do you think it's possible that some people who work in offices where people are generally expected to work ridiculously long hours have babies just because it seems like the people who have babies get to go home at a reasonable time?

Because if you think that might work for you, let me tell you, it is almost certainly not worth it. There are other ways.

Just checking in

A friend and apparently former reader told me the other day that he tuned out sometime during the "interminable moving story."

To which I say: Try living it, pal.

And also: I'll try to wrap it up.

But seriously, folks, thanks to those of you who are still reading through my recent spate of very sporadic posting, including long, drawn-out stuff. I should be back on track soon.

The update from the country is that it's very hot and humid, there is a strawberry festival in a nearby town tomorrow, I may do some canning on Sunday, and also, all of a sudden, the candidates are back. In June! Unheard of!

When do you think we will be done with this town-name-as-symbolism thing? Doesn't this Unityfest feel very Hope, Arkansas?

A webinar I went to said we should have a picture with every blog post. I am not sure that's true, but in case it is, here is a picture. This particular one is of a Babylonian tablet listing pythagorean triples. Expect more of these, and you can thank Karl Bates of Duke Research. Or you can just tell me if you like pictures in the comments. Of if you'd prefer actually relevant pictures, which would be more work for me. There, something to talk about.

Late last night, while we were all in bed...

If there is one thing about Peter Brady that is better than me, it is his ability to do this without freaking out his friends to the point where they feel compelled to become EMTs.
It is not his Humphrey Bogart impression. Mine is certainly superior.

(Mike, I do know that this is Christopher Plummer and not Peter Brady. But there are other things about CP that are better than me, including his ability to get foxy much younger women to like him without being entertaining or interesting or funny. Hey, wait. What?)

(Everyone, I do also know that it's really Christopher Knight. Whoops. Christopher Knight was Peter Brady. Eve Plumb was Jan Brady. Christopher Plummer was Captain von Trapp. Christopher Knight is also who I am discussing in parentheses above.)

About RSS

It appears that practically everyone I know (including me in the not-too-distant-past), is afraid they might be the last person on earth to understand RSS.
In my case, it did not help that I knew that the RS in RSS stands for "Really Simple."
Now, there are a few readers who do get it already. This post is not for you. You may go back to feeling smug. I am very impressed by you.
Everyone else, you are not alone. I have had this conversation with many people lately. And also, I was asked to blog about it for work, back in the slightly-less-distant-past, when I knew what RSS was but could not possibly have explained it well.
Luckily, I found this video. Watch it if you want to be the person who gets RSS and does not feel left out any more, or if you are genuinely interested in finding an easier way to read blogs and news sites you find yourself checking all the time. It's brought to us by the good folks at Common Craft, and I am very grateful to them for it. Oh, and it's entertaining, too.


One more note: I use Google Reader. If you decide to use it, too, and are my friend in real life, let me know and we can be friends there, too.

A moving story, Part 5

(Part 1 here.)
(Part 2 here.)
(Part 3 here.)
(Part 4 here.)

Oh, and I think I forgot to mention, on his way out, The Guy told me he wasn't sure when they'd be able to deliver my stuff, but the Saturday morning we'd originally talked about was most likely not going to work for him.
We'd figure it out, he said.
Thanks, The Guy.

Obviously, at this point, BTG and I were too tired to do much. So we went to my grandmother's apartment for a quick nap and a shower, and then jumped right into the part of the plan you may remember from Part 1:

... go out to dinner with two of my close friends, BTG and I would crash at their house, and we'd hit the road bright and early Saturday morning.

Well, sort of.
We did go out to dinner with my friends (we'll call them D&D), and then out for drinks, because we needed them, badly. We did crash at their house. And then, bright and early Saturday morning, there was still all this crap to deal with.
Luckily, I have the best friends in the universe.
D&D and kay bailey and her husband sprang into action. One of the Ds helped with cleaning. All of them ran errands for me in the morning, taking stuff to Goodwill and returning the famous cable box. BTG helped me sort through boxes and boxes of stuff that I had essentially just been moving around for a decade or so because it was easier (well, more immediately easier) than sorting through it. She will, I feel sure, get into what was in some of those boxes in the comments, but suffice it to say that there were coupons for pizza places in my current hometown, which I last lived in more than eight years ago. And I threw out a lot. I got willing to get rid of a lot of stuff I had intended to keep, but there was Just. No. Way.
And this piece of the moving process is so much longer than I am making it seem here, but it is also boring, so you must understand me when I say we woke up at D&D's at about 7:30 Saturday morning, were at my apartment a little after 8 a.m., and started moving stuff into the parking lot around 9:30 at night.
Here is the best thing about BTG as a moving buddy: She is more patient than anyone I have ever met.
Here is the second best thing about BTG as a moving buddy: She is a brilliant master of fitting things into a car, puzzle-style.
Here is the worst thing about BTG as a moving buddy: She has chronic back problems.
Yes.
Chronic back problems.
It is very good that I let her have the bed and slept on the couch myself at D&D's.
So I took everything that was still in my apartment and put it in the parking lot, prioritizing as I went: "It is very important that this get to New England. It is not at all important that this get to New England. This is less important than this, but more important than that."
BTG and her bad back stood by patiently in the dark and then put almost everything I brought out into the car. Amazingly. Incredibly. Beautifully.
I finished cleaning my house.
And at midnight, sixteen hours after we'd meant to hit the road, when I had decided that I actually was totally willing to just throw my vacuum cleaner away if it meant we could get out of there one second sooner, we left my old apartment behind and started driving. We drove for two hours, to a less-than-spectacular motel in Maryland, and if I'd had any idea how close we were to Delaware, I would have kept driving.
We slept until about eight minutes before our checkout time, at which point I put my dirty clothes back on (because, remember, my clean clothes were all in the truck) and got out of there.
BTG's family was having dinner in Providence, R.I. We figured we could make it. What else did we have to do?
And make it we did, exhausted and (in my case) filthy. They were lovely. There was lots of hugging and sizing me up. I stood firm in the foyer, refusing drinks and nourishment and insisting I had to get to the town my parents live in before I was too tired to drive. As it happens, they know that town quite well, and were quick to talk about who we knew in common, including two people who'd recently died, including the local dentist who'd died in a very unfortunate tractor accident.
I did finally hit the road and made the rest of the trip on my own, without incident. D&D called me with a map in front of them, eager to chart my trip and see how near where I was going would be to where I'd been.
I stayed with my parents, shopped at the local discount stores for a mini-wardrobe, started my new job and closed on my house. Eventually, The Guy got around to telling me when the movers could deliver my stuff; it wasn't an ideal time, but it was convenient enough, especially since my mother was available to help me supervise. Life was glorious.
Until the movers came.

Summer, for real

More moving story this weekend, it seems like.
This week, I am looking after my parents' elderly dog.
I live in terror that this dog will pee in the house, which means I don't sleep much, because every time she turns over in the night, I jump up to let her out, regardless of what time it is or whether she wants to go out.
I don't know what I'm so worried about; she pees in the house anyway, usually between 5:30 and 7 a.m., and always on the easy-to-clean kitchen floor.

Anyway.

During some of my late-night adventures sitting on the deck while the dog stumbles, bewildered, around the yard, I have become aware that real summer is here. Saw my first fireflies the other night, and my first shooting star. (Yes, I made a wish. No, it hasn't come true yet.)
And those little "welcome to summer" moments have started coming faster and faster: Sunday, I turned on the air conditioner. I bought a zucchini this afternoon. And earlier tonight we had a perfect trio of firsts-of-the-season: first bats while I ate my first hobo stew from the new grill and watched the kids next door run around their yard in their pajamas with sparklers.

Accomplished

Here's just some of what I accomplished this weekend:

• Finally dealt with that blackberry bush
• Almost dealt with an errant oak tree
• Discovered that the air conditioner in my house does, in fact, work just fine
• Made roughly one million rings out of Shrinky Dinks
• Carved a rubber stamp
• Watched a lot of the second season of The Office
• Watched the whole first season of Dexter
• Went letterboxing
• Ate a lot of ice cream and one grinder

I know, I know, that's all very impressive. So impressive you might think I was Wonder Woman. But I am not, and part of how I know that is that Wonder Woman spent her weekend in D.C., discovering dead bodies in the Potomac.
What?
Yes.

A moving story, Part 4

(Part 1 here.)
(Part 2 here.)
(Part 3 here.)

So yes, as I alluded to before, I had plenty of time for worrying about my stuff and also my mover and also how bad a person I was, because it took a very long time to load the truck. Hours and hours, in fact. And BTG did an excellent job of keeping me calm. Two particularly strange things about my movers:

• Periodically, The Guy and Preggo would just disappear. For a long time. Without saying anything. I assume they were taking well-deserved breaks, but it was odd how they would just vanish. Particularly since I had errands to run, but did not feel I could leave, since I never knew when they were leaving or returning.
  
• Neither of them used the bathroom in my apartment once. This was probably taken care of on those breaks. But where did they go?

I did one thing almost absolutely right about this move. I packed a couple of weeks' worth of clothes, including work clothes, into one of my old camp trunk, and then I put everything I wanted to take in the car with me (cleaning supplies, for example, and toiletries, and the cable box I still needed to return) into the bathroom, out of the way of the movers. Brilliant, right?
Except.
Except I neglected to put that trunk into the bathroom, and so instead put it very close to the front door. Where it was probably one of the first seven things the movers put on the truck. Which I discovered only much later, while the movers were taking one of their mystery breaks.
BTG and I ran outside to see if we could still see it, but we could not, and this hour-and-a-half move was already on about its fourth hour and the truck was about a third full. There was no way I was having them unload the truck at this point.
So we went into the house, where my exhausted self freaked out a little more, and BTG sprang into action, grabbing any articles of clothing she could find still in the apartment to assemble a work wardrobe for me for my first week on the new job. That wardrobe consisted of a black velvet dress and a blue t-shirt.
Hm.
It got me laughing, which got me relaxed enough to call Kay Bailey and ask if I could borrow back some of the clothes I'd handed down to her about two weeks before. She let me. And then there was a lot more standing around, and a lot more waiting, and a little more freaking out.
And then.
And then it was about 5:30, and the apartment was close enough to empty that I felt like we actually might have only another hour and a half.
And then.
And then The Guy came back in to tell me that he was running out of room on the truck. I was mad, and I was tired, but I was calm.
"Take the furniture," I said. "I'll figure out what to do about the boxes."
"I'm not going to be able to get all the furniture," he said.
I stayed as calm as I could and pointed out the high-priority items. I was ready to disassemble and get rid of my bookshelves from Target, even though I loved them, because they'd be easily replaced. I could find a place in the car for my standing lamp, probably.
And then he asserted that he didn't have room on the truck for my bed. You might think I'd be the kind of girl who'd have a big fancy bed, and you'd be right, except that I broke it a few years ago. So the bed that would not fit on the truck? Was what we call in my family a "Boston frame," and what they call an "Adjustable Metal Bed Frame," anywhere else. Yeah, the kind that folds up into a stick.
With a beautiful "not my problem" shrug that I could not master if you were asking me to be concerned about what would happen to clippings of President Taft's hair, Preggo and The Guy got in the truck and left, around 6 or 6:30 Friday night. My apartment was not clean, I had not slept, the cable box was not returned, and I had easily five times the amount of stuff I could fit into my Oldsmobile, still in the apartment.

There will be at least six parts to this story. I predict seven.

Bruised

I know, it's been way too long on the moving story, and I will get back to it at some point this weekend, I promise.
But meanwhile, tell me if I'm being oversensitive.

None of my neighbors has ever spoken to me. I have met a few around campus, but they are people who live generally in the neighborhood, not people who live next door or across the street. I have yet to meet any of the people who live next door or across the street, in fact. Granted, I could have stopped by their houses when I moved in with plates of cookies, but I didn't. And neither did any of them.
Somehow, my lawn got monstrously long. Out of control. I kept not dealing with me because I believe in my soul that I should cut it myself, but hadn't gotten around to buying or borrowing a lawnmower. And I don't know any of my neighbors, so I also don't have anyone to ask, "Hey, who does your lawn?" which would be my natural inclination. It has been eating away at me, but, you know, other stuff happens and the lawn gets untidy. To be fair, very untidy.
Yesterday, a guy with a pickup truck and a lawnmower stopped by to ask if he could mow my lawn, as he's making a compost pile and needs my clippings. I was happy to have him do just that, and he did a magnificent job. And as he was doing this magnificent job, one of my neighbors thanked him.
So, unfriendly neighbors cross the line to smarmy and rude? Or neighbors who have not had time in seven months to say hello trying to be friendly?
As much as I am trying to buy in to the latter, my gut is going with the former, and that is awkward when you consider that I'm in this house, surrounded by these neighbors, potentially for decades.
Because this is my horoscope today:

It's way too easy for your ego to feel bruised by the smallest things today and you ought to take greater care to avoid situations in which others may be insensitive enough to make you feel bad.

Granted, in Virginia I did not know many of my neighbors (though I did know my ex's neighbors), and people in our complex were sometimes nosy or rude.
But didn't I move to Mayberry to escape that?