Starbuck on the Pequod

Just a note to say that the incoming dude kicks and flips and rolls around an awful lot these days. Critterma pretty regularly goes, “WOW!” I look over and see strange roving lumps, coursing across her belly.

Morning edition had a piece today on the theoretical (and seemingly unverifiable) lifespan and size potential of lobsters. The story included an awesome song called “Leroy the Lobster” (refrain: “Eat, molt, repeat.”), and the critter seemed to be rocking. Who wouldn’t?

But you know what? He seems to rock regardless of stimulus. This one’s gonna be mobile.

I go back and forth on this, but I’m not sure which of the following inspires a more profound love/hate reaction for me:

1. National History Day, a more-than-a-day-long event that brings bazillions of high school students to campus to compete in some sort of history contest.

2. The perpetual cycle of sports camps whose participants overrun the student union during the hot months.

Both are ultimately good things, as they serve a community larger than the University (which exists to serve more than itself, after all), and as someone who spent a number of high school weeks on college campuses for various camps and conferences and whatnots, I am in principle happy about the hordes.

But sometimes they overwhelm us with their noise and their general lost-ness and their noise and their crazy lines at the union’s lame fast food court and their noise. Oh my, they can be loud.

I’ve had a gmail account for a while, now, but just really started using it about a month ago. Same thing with the Facebook page. Also subscribed to two Yahoo groups (neighborhood and running club), and there’s a knowing comfort in having all those structures (Google docs, gmail archives and tags and conversations, Facebook’s fill-in-the-blank template, the files/calendar/message thread scheme of Yahoo). Makes me feel carelessly robotic. Where’s my paranoia about losing agency when it comes to how these markers of myself are shaped? True to form, though, I cannot answer the Facebook questions without asking about the questions themselves. Yes, that hardly changes…

Got an ambitiously-defined conference presentation tomorrow morning. Back to that, now

(dave e) seems moribund. I’ll hang on to the posts as a record and continue to lose a few hours every once in a while reading its older posts, but I’m ready to treat blogging differently now. Need a new place, and I reserved this WordPress name back in October with entirely different ideas about what it might become. For good or ill, that gimmick/project has been deleted.

Here’s the news.

Natalie and I are expecting our first later this summer. The critter’s upcoming arrival has us both feeling ways that adjectives don’t quite capture. More here. The next few months have been dutifully planned, and so a study will become a nursery, a reasonably energy-efficient washer and (there’s no such thing as a) reasonably energy-efficient dryer will be the foundations for a cleaned up and re-imagined laundry room, and childbirth classes are on the docket.

We’re Mac people, now. What took us so long? Generally, a better experience.

Work goes well these days. A happy balance of predictability and blank slate seems to be the order of business, and a few recent projects have done what they ought to.

After a five-month rest, another marathon training season began in April. It looked as if the never-diagnosed knee injury was behind me, but light hints of discomfort are back. Because I signed up to coach in my running club again this year, the possibility of this injury’s reprise is more than a nuisance. Because I’m a terrible swimmer, can’t really afford a ride-for-exercise bike, and am not really the gym sort, the possibility of this injury’s reprise has me gripped in the worst way.