Monthly Archives: March 2007

Regulars

It was a quarter of nine when each of us got done with our days, so we decided to go out for dinner. We walked up to the next block and went into Freestone’s. It was as empty as we’ve ever seen it: three or four couples finishing their dinners at the tables, and one man sitting at the bar reading. We sat down and ordered dinner. It came, we ate, and I saw one couple finish their dinner and leave. The bartender quickly realized that Carol and I were going to talk with each other, not with her, so she put dirty glasses in the dishwasher.

About then the regulars started to trickle in to the bar. First four women — all in their mid-twenties, all pretty, all with black hair — sat down at the bar. They all knew the bartender, and greeted her by name. A very quiet man came in, sat down next to us and a few seats away from the women; the bartender said, “Wild Turkey?”, he nodded, and sat in silence watching the basketball game on TV, sipping his whiskey. A young man with a beard came in; he knew the four women, and spent a few minutes standing next to each of them and talking. The man who was reading put down his book — he knew the four women, and the young man with the beard, and the other young man who walked in just about then. They all chatted happily back and forth.

We paid our check, and at last the bartender could ignore us; she went down to the other end of the bar and exchanged pleasantries with all the regulars. The very quiet man looked up, and the bartender immediately came over. “What’s that?” she said, “Oh, you’re changing the order on me tonight.” She poured him a beer, and he turned his attention back to the basketball game, not moving except for a twitch once in his temple, and his thumb running over the fingers in his other hand. Another quiet man sat behind us, carefully studying the sports pages of the Boston Globe. At the other end of the bar, the man who had been reading exchanged a desultory high-five with one of the women. Another man walked in to join the talkative group, and if I had tried I suppose I could have heard all their conversations. But I wasn’t really paying attention to them, I was just listening to Carol.

When we left, the young man with the beard and two of the women were standing outside Freestone’s smoking cigarettes and chatting in the icy wind.

I was at work most of the day, only getting outside during lunch hour. I didn’t even manage my usual walk. When I finally left the office at 6:30, I walked out to my car to find big snowflakes dotting its roof. At first, I thought someone had thrown something on my car. I couldn’t believe it was snow — the sun was out at lunch time, how could it have snowed? — and I had to touch one of the flakes, to have one of the huge flakes melt under my fingertip and feel the wetness of it, before I believed that it had snowed. I wanted to have seen the snow flurry, big wet flakes drifting lazily down from dark clouds, but I had been inside. I don’t think I’m meant to be inside most of the day. Our ancestors evolved outdoors, and evolution has not designed us to spend all day inside, staring at computer screens, talking on phones, attending meetings. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel any need to be outdoors all the time — I worked as a carpenter for five years, and I worked out in the yard at a lumber yard for a year and a half, and there are many days when it is much better to be indoors. But there has to be a middle ground, some way to get more than one short hour a day outdoors.

Shut down

Pursuant to the previous post, I note with interest that a group has declared 24 March 2007 to be “Shutdown Day“:

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate! Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

Not a bad idea. It reminds me of the concept of a “media fast” advocated by Thomas Cooper, professor of media at Emerson College. Cooper described the purpose and results of a media fast in an article titled “You Are What You Watch,” available on the Emerson College Web site in a PDF file (the article appears on the second-to-last page): link.

Since March 24 is a Saturday, a day when I’m not in the office, I’ll be able to participate. No blog entry that day.

Computers suck up time

Last night, Carol said that suddenly her laptop shut down, and then told her to restart. My gut clenched — that’s exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago when the logic board died on my laptop. Sure enough, she couldn’t restart her laptop. Today, she drove it up to the Apple store in Cambridge, where I’m sure they’ll tell her to send it in for major repairs.

Of course this had to happen just when she is nearing the deadline for her book. Fortunately, she had been backing up her files pretty regularly. Unfortunately, she lost a day or so of work because she hadn’t backed up at all yesterday. Her bad experience reminded me to back up my own computer — it had been over a week since I last backed up.

Then today, my sister Abby called to talk about her blog. She’s been experiencing a flood of comment spam, and wanted help in controlling it. I thought it would take us ten or twelve minutes. We chatted on the phone while I installed various spam controls. Then I saw that WordPress had come out with a major security upgrade yesterday, so I started to install that. Upgrading proved to be a time-consuming process, mostly because I did not read all the directions ahead of time, which meant I had to repeat several steps. While I waited for files to upload I got to chat with Abby, so the whole process was actually kind of fun. Finally, after an hour and a quarter, we were done.

Now I have to go and upgrade the four other blogs I administer — this one, and three others. And I had better go and back up my desktop computer at work.

Even though they’re supposed to be time-savers, computers sure seem to suck up a lot of my time.

Spring watch

Yesterday, the last day of February, I walked over to Fort Phoenix state beach. It’s a 45 minute walk, and once I got there I didn’t walk out on the hurricane barrier to look at the harbor, and I completely ignored the beach itself. I walked all the way to the far end of the park where the Red-winged Blackbirds like to congregate. Suddenly I heard one, the familiar “konk-a-reeee!” By the time I got to the boundary of the park, I could hear dozens of them. I couldn’t see them, and I didn’t want to walk through the yards of the private houses where I knew they were roosting. But it was good enough for now just to hear them, a sure sign of spring.

How did I miss this?

Pamela Wood Browne, the administrator at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach, California, has a blog she calls “Finding my UU Soul.” I found some pretty good posts on church administration, one of my passions — such as this post about using automated phone answering systems in a church office: link. She’s also got a pretty cool office chair: link.

And of all the Unitarian Universalist blogs I have checked on Technorati, she has the second highest “authority” ranking, with over 200 blogs linking to her in the past 180 days. (In first place is a home schooling blog written by a Unitarian Universalist, with some 567 links from other blogs in the past 180 days, but you won’t find much mention of Unitarian Universalism on it.)

As Philocrites continues to cut back on his publication schedule — with a resulting dip in his Technorati rating — I’ve been waiting to see who will take his place as the most authoritative Unitarian Universalist blog. How appropriate that a church administrator would move upwards into the top blogging spot….