the world is your acorn

I have to say, Nashville is not very pedestrian friendly. I try to walk as much as possible, since part of the reason that we are paying so much damn rent is so that I can. Well, I’m not going to stop doing it, but it’s not really the most enjoyable part of my day. Most intersections don’t even have crosswalks, and no driver around here ever seems to have heard of the “pedestrians have right of way” rule. In fact, no driver around here ever seems to even notice pedestrians.

The other day I was in the middle of crossing the road - the light was in my favor, and no car was in sight in any direction - when some guy comes speeding up to the intersection and starts his turn. In fact he was halfway through his turn before noticing me about 6 inches from his bumper. Lucky for me, he stopped in time. I stared at him, shocked, since I was clearly in the middle of where there should have been a crosswalk when he started his turn. He stared back at me, apparently shocked at my presence on a road obviously meant only for automobiles.

Via Boing Boing, a woman in Romania stole a cell phone the other day, and hid it where the sun don’t shine. Police had to call it and listen for the ring in order to find it. The article is worth a read, for sure.

Police extract stolen mobile from woman’s posterior [The Register]

I want to tell you about this service that I read about on Oh Gizmo!. Supposedly there is a phone number that you can call (it has a Denmark country code) when you’re in public somewhere but you want people to think you’re important, or have friends. On the other end of this number is an automated voice that guides you through some things to say that make it sound like you’re having a conversation. I know that we are all quite secure and don’t need such a pathetic service, but you know there are those times when you wouldn’t mind a helping hand.

I tried to check out the website, but of course it’s in Dutch or something. Let me know if you make anything of it.
“You’re kidding me!?” Phone Service

Since lifehacker.com linked to me yesterday, I thought I’d share a couple of useful posts from them today:

Airplane seating: SeatGuru.com is a great reference for choosing your seats when you book your flight. They have floorplans of most planes that the major airlines fly, and as you mouse over the graphics you get popup details about seats. Apparently some seats are narrower, some recline more or less, and some even have shorter armrests!

Texting from email: tech-recipes gives directions for sending text messages to your buddies’ cell phones from your email. This would have been useful for me this summer when I was trapped in reception-less dungeon libraries and I wanted to arrange meet-ups after work.

Prepare for Airtravel with SeatGuru.com [lifehacker.com]
Send SMS from E-Mail [lifehacker.com]

I found this on Cool Hunting: this website called What Should I Read Next?, lets you enter books that you like, and you get suggestions from other folks’ lists. I guess it’s kind of like amazon’s recommended items list, but you can pick a particular set of books from your list from which to get a recommendation, rather than just getting recommended willy nilly.

From lifehacker, LibraryThing is a site that lets you catalog your books. Some features include a comment field, a reviews field, tagging, and some social networking aspects. It’s pretty cool so far, and it’s still in beta, so I can’t wait to see what new features they come up with.

Update:
From Nashville is Talking: It’s Banned Books Week! The American Library Association sponsors this week each year to celebrate the freedom to read (and write). There’s lots of great resources on their site, including a banned books week kit that you can order, lots of information, and lists of the most challenged books/authors.

This morning has not gone quite as planned:
At 6:50 all 5 smoke detectors in the apartment went off, for no apparent reason. If the house is burnt the the ground by the end of the day, I guess then we’ll know why. For now, it seems to be just one more thing that doesn’t work right in our new lives. I got out of bed, looking in every room for signs of smoke, burning, or some sort of oxygen deficiency. I then bumped into The Little Red Haired Girl coming out of the bathroom, fresh from her shower, looking bewildered and cranky. Half an hour later, after talking to the landlord (who had us play with power switches but didn’t really help), I got up on a stool and yanked each and every one of those fuckers out of the ceiling.

At one point I had to go outside to turn off the main power, and made eye contact with a neighbor walking up his driveway. Against the backdrop of my obnoxious off-beat shrieking smoke detectors, he smiled, waved, and kept walking. Which makes me think that smoke detectors are much like car alarms; they go off so frequently for no good reason, that, were there a real emergency, no one would pay the slightest bit of attention. Comforting, really.

After dealing with that I made myself coffee for the first time since moving here. It’s delicious, by the way, thank you. I also made myself half a bagel. Unfortunately, I put it in the $14 toaster oven from walmart and left the room. When I came back my breakfast was a healthy shade of black and half the size it had started. I tried to scrape, but all that did was create a little cloud of brown dust, while the bagel remained burnt and shriveled. I’m eating it anyway. It’s giving me tooth crotch, but what the hell.

Last night we had pizza for dinner. The frozen kind, in which I was pretty disappointed. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood for it. Plus the crust was too thick. Digiorno, for future reference. Too bad we have one more to eat, since I insist on buying everything in bulk from Sam’s Club.

Just about everytime I eat pizza I get all raw and cut up in that spot on the roof of my mouth between my front teeth. The Little Red Haired Girl and I call it “tooth crotch”. We call the area tooth crotch, but we also call the injury tooth crotch. I guess because there is no other reason to refer to that body part.

To try and avoid tooth crotch I often cut my pizza into little pieces before eating it, but then everyone around thinks I’m a total tool. Sometimes I’ll try folding the slice in two, so that the cheese is sandwiched together and can’t burn me, but then the crust chafes my tooth crotch and it’s essentially the same effect. In fact, I get tooth crotch from eating crusty breads too, especially sandwiches on crusty breads.

Is everyone this sensitive to tooth crotch? The Little Red Haired Girl never seems to complain about it. Of course, she’s not as big a complainer as I am. But is there something genetically wrong with my tooth crotch that it’s more prone to injury? I wonder if some day we will evolve so that a little plate of armor grows over that area, thus forever eliminating tooth crotch. Can you imagine the first baby who has that? Who would notice it? Would that kid just grow up thinking that everyone has it? Maybe his or her dentist would notice. I hope they wouldn’t try and remove it. That would be lame.

Last night we had some school friends over for some meat hot off our shiny new grill. Among those attending (and the last to leave) were a couple who I had met when I visited for prospective student weekend in February.

Everything Guy is in Math Ed like me, has had a very different experience and perspective, yet has many of the same questions as I do. I call him Everything Guy because he seems to know about/how to do Everything. Not in an annoying know-it-all kind of way, because he is generally pretty quiet. Not because he is shy, but because he only says relevant, interesting, and funny things. He must never have those cringing moments where he sits at home days afterward still wishing he hadn’t said whatever it is that made everyone in the room embarrassed for him. I’ve often wished that I could be like that; that girl in class who so rarely speaks that, when she finally does raise her hand, everyone knows that something really good must be coming. Instead I find that either I have to sit through class silently day after day, or blather on until I hit on something valuable. On really good days I am quiet for an hour and a half, then realize that I haven’t said anything and the professor might think that I haven’t done the reading, so I finally interject something inane and barely relevant, just to prove that I have been doing my homework. Needless to say, we like Everything Guy.

His wife, The Theater Professor, is equally cool, though for different reasons. She, of course, teaches theater. The first night I met her was the night during prospective student weekend where current doctoral students took us out for beers downtown. Deep into many cans of PBR, The Theater Professor and I got into a conversation about her teaching, and how she works with her students. We discovered that we have very similar (though not articulated or named) theories of learning, and were really excited to talk about it. I’ve wanted to be her friend ever since, and knowing that they were coming here made my own decision somewhat easier.

Be assured that you will be hearing more about Everything Guy and The Theater Professor in the future.

I’m home alone today. The Little Red-Haired Girl is at work! This morning she got up bright and early, had her morning routine just like the old days, and I dropped her off. It’s like taking your kid to the first day of kindergarten. I’ve just been puttering around all day, running errands, doing chores, not tackling any schoolwork, waiting to hear how her day went.

This first day of The Little Red-Haired Girl’s new job is really a sign of life becoming regular here. We will both have our respective schedules and routines. Soon life will become a rhythm; this will become home.

…well, not really. But last night, while watching Iron Chef on Tivo*, I technorati-ed myself, and discovered that Aunt B over at Tiny Cat Pants links to me! There’s no evidence that she reads this (so don’t worry, nando, you’re still my one and only superfan), but it’s still my first real incoming link! woohoo!

*The Ingredient was sea cucumber, and Chen Kenichi won