fire, ice, fur

January 23rd, 2013

Here’s how cold it is.

Here’s my office window.

Here’s the fire.

Here’s the cat.

The power company sent out an email asking everyone to conserve electricity from 5pm till 8.

I just spent the entire day answering email. Usually I try to get at least some real work done every day but things have reached such a sad pass that I knew I couldn’t concentrate on anything creative until I answered some of these things. They’ve been piling up like a winter’s worth of snow, freezing and thawing and drifting as I answer some, lose track of some, read and re-read some, quailing at the prospect of concocting a sufficient response then closing them again unanswered and marking them “unread,” for the fourth time.

I have to be in a certain frame of mind to answer email, clear but not too clear (otherwise I’d read or write), energized but not too energized (otherwise I’d go out and ski). Maybe I just worry too much about being thorough, or articulate, or polite. I recently received a refreshingly concise email from someone, and at the bottom he had a tagline that read, “why are my emails so terse? emailcharter.org” These guidelines seem sort of helpful, especially the one about not sending contentless responses such as “great.”

But email is really just the tip of the iceberg. Keeping up with Twitter and Facebook can obviously take every moment of waking life if you let them. And you can’t ignore those things because more and more people use that stuff instead of email. Not to mention texting. Now I have to keep track of which friends communicate with phone, which with text, which with email, which via god knows what new social media engine. I know I sound like a cantankerous old lady, but I am a cantankerous old lady. My brain is still packed with the instruction manual for the electric typewriter I had in college, not to mention the manuals of dozens of appliances long gone to the landfill. I guess it helps that nothing comes with a manual any more, at least the incoming tide is stemmed. But I wish I could go in and delete some of that stuff from my hippocampus or wherever it’s lodged.

Well, I just had to get that off my chest I guess. By making a blog post, and telling you about it on Twitter. I’m sorry.

Here’s another rant while I’m at it. I just got a pair of nice warm gloves and promptly lost the right one. So I have one really great left glove that is of absolutely no use. I went online to see if there was any such thing as a glove bank, where people could send these items. I couldn’t find anything though, except someone’s lost glove art project. People who have only one arm should set up some kind of clearing house like that, don’t you think? I could also send them this awesome fleece mitten which I can’t bring myself to get rid of. Here it is closed.

And here it is with the fingers and thumb freed–the fleece flaps back and snaps to itself with strong little magnets. So you can text without taking your mittens altogether off.

Though I must confess that I just bought some of those gloves with magic fingertips that work on a touchscreen.

Holly is looking over my shoulder and remarking on the extraordinary length of this blog post. I should make more frequent, shorter ones. Well, that’s another thing! God forbid we should exceed anyone’s attention span by going on for more than two sentences.

Okay, I really am sorry. I know you’re busy. Move along, nothing to see here.