Happy Birthday to me

Today I turned 31.

I liked being 30. It was a good year that included becoming a yoga teacher, starting a company, watching that company fail, being unemployed for a while (it was very in at the time), taking an amazing vacation in Maui, getting a job while simultaneously not getting many other jobs, learning to make beer at home, climbing a mountain I've wanted to climb for many years, building and planting a garden on my roof, watching most of that garden die but still managing to harvest a few spectacular tomatoes, and most recently agreeing with Eric that we should keep this thing going for a good long time to come.

Today was a great way to launch the next year of adventure. I spent time with friends in DC this morning, then took the train to Philly where my aunts Barbara and Penney scooped me up to go spend a wonderful evening with my grandmother sitting on her screened-in back porch watching the darkness on the grass and gabbing.

Happy Birthday to me. Life is grand.

Back East

I'm stomping my old grounds today and yesterday. I've been wandering around my old neighborhood in between conference calls and meeting friends for meals at times my body hasn't quite adjusted to yet - though I haven't actually walked past my old apartment. My biggest observation so far is that it is hot here. And there's now a Lululemon right across the street from my old yoga joint, as well as a new gelato place which has Rhubarb gelato, a first for me.

It has been a year since I've been back to DC and the last time I was here was when I was packing up my old apartment and hiring illegals to carry everything down four flights of stairs for me. Ahh, the good old days.

It has been very reassuring to visit with friends here and discover that I haven't made myself totally irrelevant by not coming back for a year.

Did I mention it's really hot here?

So cultured

I am kind of fascinated by this brilliant and horrifying and possibly wonderful idea.

I particularly liked this line: "But the public doesn't always blindly buy what companies believe they should."

Not always, but with good marketing they can get pretty close.

Undoing it

I went to an Unconference yesterday. An Unconference is not a non-conference, and it's not an anti-conference. It is sort of like a combination of a conference with a Quaker Meeting.

The biggest difference from a regular conference is the format: there's no structure, no sessions planned, no speakers, nothing conferency like that until everyone shows up that morning and creates it.

The only thing that exists ahead of time is the topic. In this case it was "Green Innovation for Business."

We and about 150 people all showed up at 9am with no idea how we would be spending the day. The process then went like this: everyone there did a 15 second self-introduction, we talked for about 10 min in small groups about things that would be interesting to have a session on, and then whoever felt so inclined wrote out a session topic on a piece of paper and put it up on the wall in one of the ~40 session slots (there was time for four one-hour sessions across 10 rooms)

This, now, was the agenda for the day. The person who put up the topic was the session moderator.

We each looked at the wall, picked out which sessions we wanted to go to, and off we went. If people showed up for a session, then it would happen. If no one showed up, then it wouldn't. If you got bored halfway through you were encouraged to leave. Vote with your feet - make it relevant to yourself.

If the conversation came to a natural end before the end of the allotted hour, then people would head off and either join other sessions or just hang out until the next round of sessions started. If a session needed more time, it could continue indefinitely until the group was satisfied.

There were plenty of other collaborative tools to support the event as well. In each session someone would volunteer to take notes and upload them to the unconference wiki, which becomes a central collaboration and discussion space following the conference. People also volunteered in each session to take notes on flip charts and then put them up on a large wall that by the end of the day was full of interesting ideas, with clear themes starting to emerge.

It was a great day and I left feeling very un-satisfied.

Meet the neighbors

This is our neighbor across the way. We call him Naked Man for obvious reasons.



Be assured, this little peep show on a Saturday morning was not a one time event. He struts around his apartment and balcony pretty much all the time completely buck naked.*

We point him out to guests when they come over.

"Oh look, Naked Man's out," Eric will point out casually. The guest will usually laugh, then look, then gasp, then look again, then ask if we have binoculars handy.

We do.

I do have to wonder aloud why he has an enormous sign in his apartment which says "Bon Appetit." Perhaps someday I'll have the opportunity to ask him.


*In high school I was on the yearbook staff and we had to do a special scan through the names for all of the group photos to make sure no one was being a comedian and putting fake or ridiculous names down. Sure enough, my senior year, "Buck Naiked" was one of the more active students at OPRF and appeared in I think seven different groups including Stage Crew and Band.

Crunch time

On my way to yoga yesterday I rode my bike past a most improbable and horrifying accident.

I could see the flashing lights for blocks, and all traffic was stopped in both directions. I continued down Market Street towards the accident because it was the only way to get to the yoga studio, and because I am apparently the sort of person who bikes towards the flashing lights instead of away from them.

And there I saw it: an SUV sandwiched between two street cars, accordion style. I paused, considered taking a picture with my cell phone, decided that was ridiculous, and continued on to my yoga class, which was excellent.

Here's what the local authorities had to say about it. I like how they refer to them as "historic trolleys." Good to know that no one was killed.

Afternoon Announcements

When I was in 8th grade, I was selected to be the student who read the day's announcements over the PA system at the end of each day of junior high. I have no idea why I was selected for this dubious privilege but I embraced it with gusto.

The way I opened it, every day for the entire 8th grade year, was by saying "Afternoon Announcements" with an upward lilt at the end of 'announcements' so that it sounded either like a question or like I was British royalty. After that, everything was read normally. I can't tell you why this made sense to me but at the time it did. And it became my signature, and my legacy.

To this day, people I went to junior high with will mimic it back to me and then, once again, wonder aloud about why it sounded like a question when it was clearly a statement. That's when I sock them in the gut and run away.

Today's Announcement, of the morning variety, is that Eric asked me to marry him and I said yes.