my field's biggest academic conference in San Francisco

So: the reason I wasn't able to write a blog post three Fridays ago is because I was in San Francisco for a conference. I had a poster accepted and therefore needed to be there to present it. My supervisor's grant would have paid for my trip, but I applied for and won two travel awards: one was a matching grant between my department and Graduate Studies at the U, the other was a travel award that only applied to international students. As I am not yet a citizen, I qualified and won!

My flight was for 6:30am on Friday the 13th. I arrived at the airport at 5:45am which, it turns out, was too late. I had not accounted for the 300 people in the TSA lineup. They rescheduled me for another flight, four hours later that would take me to Seattle first and then SFO. So I settled in to a day of airports and airplanes and trying to catch wifi and charging stations. It wasn't so bad, really, but travelling is tiring. When I finally did get to my hotel around 6:00, I met up with my friends from the department, my roommate for our five days at the hotel, P, and my office comrade, B. We dropped our luggage and found dinner before retiring for the night.

Saturday was a day of pre-symposia tutorials. The first one was one on getting evaluation education into biomedical informatics programs. I was finally able to meet some characters I have only connected with online or whose papers I have read. Yes there is such a thing as academic fandom. It was great to put names to faces. I had also started tweeting the sessions I attended from my research twitter handle (not @yarnsalad). The afternoon session I went to wasn't very interesting but I did at the coffee break connect with a friend and former student of our department who moved away a couple of months ago, so it was good to catch up with him. I knew this conference would be one big happy reunion. Then I snuck off with some friends from SLC whom I had not seen in a while and went to a pub for a pint. That evening, I went with those same friends and one new friend to a fancy restaurant and discovered how awesome Uber is.

Sunday morning began with getting to the hotel gym at 6:15am, and I should have gone earlier to get a full workout in. I had to rush because I had a breakfast date arranged via Twitter more than a month ago with two Twitter friends - one I hadn't met yet (great sidebar story: Kim and I found each other on Twitter because of knitting, then we discovered we work in the same field and that we were both going to this conference! Also we both have personal as well as professional Twitter accounts.) and one who graduated with a PhD from my program at UVic the year I began my first Master's. Nice breakfast, too.

That morning's tutorial was about how to be a good leader within the organization and how to get into positions of leadership. I made some good connections there and met some more people who are famous in our industry. That day I found David's Deli and had an excellent kosher lunch.

It was after lunch on Sunday that the symposium officially began. Before the opening keynote speaker, the president and CEO of the organization welcomed everyone. He mentioned the Twitter stats for the day and a half of tutorials, and in the top 4 tweeters, he named me second! After that and for the rest of the conference, everyone from my department commented on my Twitter fame.

Sunday evening was busy, socially. There was the welcome reception where all the vendors and schools had booths in the exhibition room; ie, the place where all the free stuff is. I am happy to report that I now have 15 new pens, three water bottles, a couple of bags and some other fun trinkets. Later there was the reception for new members and new attendees. I'm on the membership committee for the organization so I went to interact with the new people. Rob, our organization's membership coordinator, brought some of us up to the front and gave us all a lovely introduction as "people we should talk to". It was Rob who I hold responsible for getting me back into the field at all, so I am happy to give back. I met some nice people, had too many extremely excellent desserts, and waited in anticipation to see if maybe I would win the raffle prizes of the bluetooth wireless headphones or the Apple watch! But alas, no, the headphones went to an alum from our department (so that's nice) and the Apple watch went to my friend and office mate mentioned above, B. After that reception, my hotel roommate P and I went up to the 46th floor for the Women in Informatics Networking Event. It was kind of an awkward space though so we ended up mostly just talking to each other. We haven't spent much time together outside of our one class prior to the conference, so it was really fun getting to know her, actually.

On Monday, P and I met for breakfast the group of people who had agreed to be mentors for the 10 high school scholars for this conference as well as the students themselves. I met the student I had been paired with, but for reasons, we didn't actually get to see each other much that day. I did get to meet his dad later though and got a photo of him with his poster. Nice kid, I was glad to hear he is planning to do a computer science degree (and then I recommended doing our Master's at UUtah). I live tweeted some interesting sessions. I spent some time with Barb in our booth in the exhibition room, talking to people about our program. Went back to David's Deli for lunch, this time a salad to go, which was also excellent. My committee chair gave a presentation about why our department is so awesome and other than the four people from our department who attended (and were also live tweeting), I think there were maybe three other people, so that was a bummer. We need to figure out a way to show people how great it is to live in Utah.

The last session of the day was the presentations of the high school scholars. Five of them had papers, the other five (including my buddy) had posters. It was a very well attended session, standing room only. One of the organizers introduced the program and the names of all the graduate student mentors went up on the big screen - three students from our department, Utah was well-represented!

The thing about these conferences is that you are not done when the sessions finish at 5pm. I still had two other events to attend. The first was the membership committee - we usually meet by Citrix for an hour every month, but this time we finally got to meet in person. It was really cool to put faces to names. I had to leave that meeting early though, because our department chair had arranged a dinner for our department people and alumni at a nearby restaurant. It was a fun evening and I was glad for an early night - after all this busy time I needed some down time.

Tuesday morning I got up at 5:30 to get to the gym earlier (since I had another 7:00 breakfast date). When I got to the gym at 5:45, every one of the 20 exercise machines were full and there were three people waiting. Eventually I got onto a spin bike and put in a 45-minute workout. The 7:00 breakfast was to meet with all the people who had been working on the Year in Review - 18 of us had spent the last six months reviewing 1400 articles to see what was relevant and what kinds of themes have emerged in our field since the last Symposium. That was awesome. It was great to meet those people just before the session where our leader, Patti, presented them to an overstuffed room with at least 1,000 people. Again my name on the big screen. She did an amazing job of condensing all that information into a synopsis.

Tuesday was my big day partly because of that, but also because it was my day for my poster presentation (there were about 400 posters, split into two days). I had bought myself a suit back in August to wear for that day, that moment. I attended my poster from 5:00-6:30pm. At the end of it, one of the organization's staff members came up to me with the photographer and asked to take my photo. I was so touched! They appreciated all the tweeting I had done and my level of commitment to the organization. So lots of arranging of hair and ears, turn this way, lean in, he took a few dozen snaps. A week later, she sent me these:

She said "you never know where this photo will turn up". Of course I sent her an email back, squeeing, which made her day. :-)

Back to the Symposium. After my poster presentation was done, I went to my room and changed into the dress I wore to another fancy restaurant for dinner. I also got in a half-hour phone conversation with Dan - in the few days I was there I hadn't had much time to chat with him other than to say things were going great (me) and the kitty misses me (him). Dinner was great and fun, I really enjoyed my dinner company. When I got back to the hotel I found my office mate B and we ended up chatting with one of the organization's leaders for half an hour about movies, of all things. So great to make that human connection.

Wednesday was the last day. We had no breakfast plans so were happy when they had muffins out for the morning coffee break. (My room mate P and I are both students and experienced free food scavengers). The closing keynote was just after lunch and once again they mentioned the conference's Twitter stats. They showed a slide with the top 10: I was number 5, a post-doc from our department was number 7, and our department (me) was number 10. Go Utah!  The closing keynote was great and I think he gave us all some good ideas for how to move forward.

I was sitting next to B for the closing, and afterward when people were leaving, we stood up and turned around to find one of our department's alumni with two people on his team from South Carolina - I had not met any of them before but we all became fast friends and decided to have lunch together. We found a great little Pakistani restaurant (one of the women we were with is Pakistani) and I swear it was the best meal I had in San Francisco. Sooooo good. (why didn't I take a picture of my chicken tikka masala?) Then we walked over the hill to Ghirardelli Square because of course, it's San Francisco. Burned off all the lunch calories doing that walk! Had a fabulous time with our three new friends and we hope to turn that into a more formal collaboration in the future.

B and I retrieved our luggage from the hotel and went to meet a Twitter friend whom I've been Twitter friends with since I first signed up back in 2009! We've been through a lot together and we finally met in person! It was so awesome to meet Heather and I hope next time I can spend more time with her in her city. B and I took BART to the airport, went to our departure gates, and he went off to another conference on the east coast while I went home, to sleep, to catch up on a week of being away.

I will be finishing my degree, my second Master's degree, in April 2016. While they are still encouraging me to do a PhD, (and made a very persuasive pitch), I think I am going to stay the course. Part of my effort at this conference was to see what kind of work is out there (I was invited to go to Seattle, Nashville, and Portland). I really love Salt Lake though, I have no plans to leave it any time soon. More on the job front as I find out what's happening...

A gun scare resulting in a shooting lesson

I was at my community garden last Thursday night, minding my own business, watering the plants, when all of a sudden I heard screeching tires, vehicles crashing into each other, then a bunch of officers yelling expletives at men to get out of the car, face down, get out of the f****** car, get your f****** hands up, not a hundred yards away from me in the parking lot across the street. There were a lot of black police vehicles and officers in camo - not the uniform. I didn't know what I was witnessing. Police? FBI? Military? Who were these bad guys?

More to the point, as I was watching this I thought "ho hum, this is just like the things you see on TV".

But wait.

1. I don't watch TV.
2. The one TV show I watch is Game of Thrones and there are no guns.
3. I'm not in Canada anymore, and if I were still in Canada, this takedown would have been a shocking event.

Like seriously, if one of those firearms had been discharged, I could have been in harm's way and shot by a stray bullet. For real.

Dan and I have talked about learning how to shoot - mostly for protection against things like rattlesnakes (a real threat here) and crazy people. But I also wanted to be able to handle a gun and not be afraid of it if I ever needed to disarm it.

I have a Twitter friend @NotAssa who, it turns out, is a gun enthusiast, and when I asked him if he would teach me, he eagerly agreed to do so. Now just so you know that I haven't completely lost my mind in going off to the hills of Utah with a complete stranger to shoot guns... I had met him in person a few times before and one of those times was for breakfast with a bunch of new Twitter friends where Dan was present, and Dan figured this guy was okay for me to spend an afternoon alone with guns. (Spoiler: he's not a psycho killer).

It was an entire day of serendipity. We agreed to meet a parking lot but didn't check beforehand what the other would be driving. We coincidentally pulled up next to each other at the same time. What timing! We all got out, said our hellos, Dan dropped me off and I went up the mountain with Asa.

We had not spent much time together prior to this, and he's one of those super-serious yet thoughtful guys who is reserved yet well spoken. To be honest it was a bit awkward, but I'm used to drawing people out of their shells (if you will forgive the pun). When I'm nervous I talk a lot and ask lots of questions, it seemed go go okay.

On the way up we heard pop POP pop and we thought it was just the balloons Asa had blown up beforehand to use as targets. We gained a lot of elevation in 20 minutes and maybe the air pressure changed so much that the balloons were popping? When we arrived at the site, no, it wasn't the balloons. It was the right muffler.

What you are seeing above here is the exhaust pipe having become detached from the muffler by heat degradation. We had no TIG welder nor wire with us, so we decided to just do our shooting lesson and deal with the muffler later.

The first thing we did was attach the targets (balloons) to the bushes with clothes pins. There was really a lot of litter in this site, clearly a popular spot for target practice. There were cans, broken bottles, broken clay pigeons, spent shells, milk jugs, and even vinyl records (what heathen would use Haydn as target practice!) We agreed that after we were done shooting we would pick up some of this trash.

I started with the .40 Smith & Wesson pistol. After firing a few rounds and missing all the balloons, I declared the gun broken because it was not hitting the targets. I must admit I was getting discouraged. I finished a magazine and declared I was done with that one, let's move on to the rifle.

Next up was a .22 rifle. I was to learn that the guns would get progressively heavier and have progressively stronger kickback. Dan warned me beforehand that I would have a bruise on the part of my shoulder where the long guns butt up against it, so I sort of knew what to expect. The .22 was WAY easier to shoot and hit the target. Turns out rifles are in general easier than pistols. (TV and the movies lie). It was very gratifying hitting the target but I found myself feeling bad for shredding the bushes and trees, hoped I didn't kill any small critters.

The next gun was a super fancy one. I never thought I would find myself holding a semi-automatic rifle but there it was. This is a .223 AR-15.

If I was a bit more muscled I would probably have felt more confident firing that one (I mean, it does look pretty badass) but it truly felt dangerous. Didn't spend much time with this one. I think that it scared me a bit made my aim weak too.

After that Asa handed me the 12 Gauge shotgun. More noise, more kick. Here I learned you can just point and shoot, rather than aim. Pop, Pop went the balloons. Okay, I was getting the hang of it.

The last one was a .300 Savage rifle. By this time my left forearm was getting very fatigued at the twisting action of holding weight that I'm not used to. If I was a golfer I would have had no problem, probably. Even now, two days later, my forearm is a bit sore from that motion. This gun had the most kick and sure enough, the next day I had a smallish bruise (looks more like a hickey!) on my shoulder.

So the shooting lesson lasted probably about an hour, then with the bags we had we picked up as much garbage as we could. We also looked around for some useful wire to perhaps string up the muffler with, since it was hanging by one end and would no doubt bounce a lot as we went down the gravel road. The only thing potentially useful was the wire holding this fence together but we had no tools to get it with.

View from where we are parked. We gave up, got in the car ready to leave, when a US Forestry Service truck pulled up behind us. Then they started to drive away. Turns out they had come to that spot to pick up garbage but, on seeing it had been done, were leaving. Asa jumped out and flagged them down, explained our predicament, but they had no wire. One of the agents suggested using the fencing wire (serendipity!) and he had wire cutters. What luck! So we traded him for the garbage we picked up.

The next step was to jack up the car and string up the muffler. The Forestry guys left and we got to impromptu car repair. Having lived with Dan for so long, I know a thing or two about cars.

I held the muffler in place while Asa attached and tightened the wire. That would at least get us down the mountain. 

Feeling triumphant and proud of ourselves for our amazing skills, we toodled somewhat noisily down the mountain back to meet Dan at the same parking lot. Along the way I regaled Asa with tales of when Dan and I had the van and the accident we had on our honeymoon camping trip and other such yarns. We had bonded by this point, having been in a potentially difficult situation if either one of us had different dispositions (I am a woman who is not afraid to get dirty, who sees minor setbacks like these as a part of the adventure). 

In all, it was a fun afternoon.  

bread, yarn, Twitter, and a job

Latest adventures include 

 I was sitting on the sofa one day minding my own business when HOLY MOTHER OF GOD WHAT IS THAT I saw a spider. A big, thumb-sized fuzzy menacing looking spider. There are poisonous spiders here and I don't know how to identify them yet, but Dan assured me this is a harmless orb weaver. Okay. Glass and cardboard aided this little fella's return to the outdoors.

 Last Saturday, Dan and I went to Goldsboro and Selma to look at antique shops. Strangely, I didn't take many photos but I did take a picture of this "one of a kind" sheep. The sign said "lamb" but we all know better.

 This is all of my yarn stash and a few finished objects that are up for reconsideration (frog, reknit, mend, etc.). It's not as much as I thought it would be but still more than I would have if it wasn't for the generosity of Ursa and Natalie last year!

 This is our bedroom. It's been cold, so the electric blanket is on my side of the bed (Dan, the furnace himself, doesn't need it).

 This is the Pate Fermentee that I started yesterday for the French Bread I will bake this afternoon. Yes, I am resuming with my bread baking adventures. I still need to buy some rye flour to get my new sourdough starter going, but in the mean time I'll work with yeasted breads. On that note, my goodness, I am having a hard time finding unbleached all purpose flour. I'm having a hard time finding all-purpose flour, period. There are fifteen kinds of biscuit flour and lots of self-rising flour (?) and none of them seem to be in quantities bigger than 10 pounds. I may have to order from a wholesaler. On this bread-baking topic, we now have gas connected to our range and I baked brownies yesterday - my first time baking in a gas oven. I forgot about the brownies (Dan and I were discussing paint colors for the sun room) but turns out in a gas oven, they are less likely to burn. So that was nice. We didn't have any baking powder so they didn't rise and the texture was weird, but they still taste like brownies.

Other random things: I have locked my Twitter account, so I apologize to those of you who aren't on Twitter but follow my feed. I have done this because there seems to be a lot of spam, a lot of hacked accounts, and worst, a lot of stalking happening to my Internet friends, so I am just taking precautions. I realize this limits my exposure in many ways but that might be a good thing, I don't know. In other news, any minute now I will hear if I got the job at a local furniture store I applied to. Dan and I randomly walked in on Friday and noticed the "office help wanted" sign. I figured I would inquire, as it's a local job and a good place to start. They are all very nice people, I filled out their brief application and went back for "a chat" with the lady in charge today. I expect I will get it, four days a week. That will get me working, learning some new things as I'm getting my bearings in Kinston, and it's not that far from home. To be honest, even though the really good jobs are in the towns 30 miles or more from us, I am reluctant to take a job that has me commuting - both for the fossil fuel use as well as the safety issue.

That's it for now, I hope everyone is well!

On the Hundred Mile Diet

Sometimes on Twitter you can run into a conversation between other people partway, and because it's public, it's possible to weigh in on the matter at hand. Someone I follow was having a conversation with someone about shopping at Wal-Mart, but I didn't see that, and the other person said something about how farming practices on Vancouver Island make the 100-mile diet unlikely (I can't remember her words exactly).

Now this is someone who I once followed on Twitter, and who once presented a workshop I attended. On seeing that her values are not in line with my own, I stopped following her, but I can see (based on the Wal-Mart conversation when I went back to look at it) that she is someone who is fully in the fold of our modern consumerist society and doesn't really get the whole local food thing.

I tread carefully here, because while I'm on a soapbox, I also don't want to be too critical. My friend's part about Wal-Mart was that if you have to use it, it's a good thing that it's there, but we do have a choice. And despite that the ultra-low wages of Wal-Mart employees have been in the news lately, and that outrageous statistic that something like more than half their employees are on food stamps, I would argue that there is a portion of Wal-Mart customers whose attitude is of "I don't care about them, I have to feed my kids".

But the equation is not that simple. Everything we do is a choice. We weigh our choices as a consumer based on our values. What is important to you? There was another study arguing recently that organic food is not significantly more nutritious than conventionally grown food. To base ones choices on whether to buy organic on this single point alone, I think, misses the point entirely. Conventionally grown food uses all kinds of herbicides, pesticides, hormones and all manner of chemical to force food to grow in a sterile environment. I would bet money that if the farmers in the prairies stopped using chemical on their fields, the incidence of asthma in those provinces would be reduced by half. Another point: tons of fossil fuels are used so that we can have Peruvian asparagus in November, and tropical fruits year-round. I went to a grocery store in Cobble Hill earlier this year, passed a handful of cattle farms on the way to the grocery store and they had no local beef, only beef imported from Australia. How does this make any sense?

So I decided not to engage in conversation with this woman on Twitter. I didn't feel like I had the energy to have that conversation and I didn't think it was worth my time to educate her. People don't like being preached to. I don't even know what she meant by "farming practices" on Vancouver Island, but goodness, it sounded like she wanted bananas to grow on the Saannich Peninsula. I commented about the farming practices she referred to, saying that it's not just farming practices, but the kind of diet we have gotten used to. Her reply: "I agree. I prefer fresh out-of-season veggies to preserved local most of the time". GACK!! I was not supporting her in the argument! I dropped the conversation at that point.

I have, since late summer, been reading a number of books about growing food, food preservation, self-sufficiency, permaculture, self-reliance, and more or less being prepared for the decline of our current way of life. Between climate change, energy decline (as in the decline in the extraction of fossil fuel resources from the earth), and the current economic situation in the world (which I believe will never "recover" as the economists would have it), I think it is important, for me at least, to prepare for a life of not finding things at the grocery store, or not being able to afford what is offered there.

Our modern way of life is not sustainable. It's only in the last century that we have even been able to get out-of-season veggies in the grocery store whenever we want them. That is only made possible by cheap fossil fuels. The point I was trying to make to this woman is that the 100-mile diet is possible on Vancouver Island, we just have to change the way we eat, which includes putting food by and eating from the pantry. This doesn't mean we can or even should grow it all ourselves - but I do feel that building relationships in our communities where we can trade or barter our goods and services for things we can't produce ourselves will become an increasingly important aspect of our lives.

//end rant

(So much for not being critical. Just before I wrote this post, one of the bloggers I read posted this about the price of food in the store and being able to grow it yourself. Have a look!)

New hair

I've been reading this book* and it has me thinking a lot about stuff. I'm not going to go into it right now because I'm just full of previously unthought thoughts and processing them all is taking a bit of time. But Friday morning, I was writing in my Morning Pages, and my mind clamped on the idea of me cutting off all my hair.

I have long wanted to have the experience of feeling what a shaved head looks like, but my vanity always got in the way. What if I look awful? Would that hurt my chances of getting a job? (And back when I was still single) how will I attract a mate?

As you may know, the colour of my hair has been a moving target these past couple of years. I went from my flat mousy brown with strands of white to blonde in 2010/11, with the blonde getting increasingly lighter. I wouldn't do any touch-ups or roots, I would just apply the stuff in the box to my whole head and I was pretty close to platinum, I think. Every 5 - 8 weeks I would have to reapply, as my hair grows at about a half an inch a month. After all that abuse, it sure wasn't feeling healthy anymore. I wasn't too concerned, it's only hair, it will grow back. I know this.

Just before Christmas I decided to go red as an intermediary colour. I did blog about that. The first round of red (which was more of a burgundy) quickly faded out and my hair was turning the dreaded copper colour that just makes me look dead. Two weeks later I tried again with a box that said "Ultra Violet". They were great colours when they first settled in, but it too got to washing out.

I decided it was time. It was time to cut out the colour and go back to my natural. It's been almost four weeks now since I last coloured, so I have almost half an inch of my roots showing. Wow. There is a lot more white than there used to be. This being apart from my husband for eight months has aged me. Well, no big surprise.

As usual when I want to change my hair, I want to do it now, and I have long owned my own hair-cutting scissors. You may recall in June when I went from long hair to shoulder length, I Tweeted my way through the process. This time was no different. After chatting with Toni about the idea of me cutting my hair, I went for it. Put the garbage bin on the counter, leaned over, and just started hacking.

It took a couple of days for me to keep trimming and fixing. I'm just about where I want it. My original idea was to get out the clippers and get rid of all the red, but when I asked the Skipper to help me out he refused. "Nooooo, Stace, you can't! Wait until Dan leaves...". Harumph. Okay then, I'll sleep on the idea and see if I still feel the same way.

After some trimming and reshaping myself (I am mighty acrobatic with scissors and mirrors), I am pretty happy with it. It was really spiky and sticky-uppy- at first, but I soon discovered that if I put my running toque on while it's still wet, it will tame the hairs that are sticking up. It's cute now, says Toni, and I feel like I am channeling my inner pixie.

So I probably won't take the clippers to it now, I kind of like where it is right now. This was on the outset me confronting my vanity and it seemed really hard at first, but I felt utterly compelled to do it and so it had to be done. Not only that - where previously I would not have left the house without having my hair and makeup done, for some strange reason I feel less of a need to have make up on at all. There must be a sea change in me.

I also don't know the future of my hair. I assume I will grow it out again, and even with the prospect of that awkward growing-out length, I will simply have to knit more things to wear on my head either to hide or control my crazy hair. And my crazy hair will have more whites, I am finally okay with that.

*The book I refer to is The Disappearance of the Universe

WordCamp Victoria 2012: a brief recap

I love conferences. I love going to these kinds of events where a whole bunch of interesting brains are in one space and having one big gigantic brainstorming love-in, with lots of different options of which session to go to. During and after each session I always feel like I want to press the "pause" button so I can run off and write in my journal about all the thinks [sic] I'm thinking. But there is no pause button alas, and I just simply have to take copious notes and hope that I remember to revisit every detail later in writing. Is that even possible?

Here is what happened: On Thursday, someone retweeted that there were extra tickets available for WordCamp Victoria if someone wanted to attend but couldn't afford it, just go to the website and contact the guy. This was a right place-right time situation, and I was on it. I contacted the guy, was registered and two days later I was there.

So were 300 other people. Holy cow, this was a thing! This un-conference (as it was billed) is for WordPress enthusiasts, but I figured there would be lots of content for people who are social media fans and bloggers in general. I knew that I might perhaps be lured to move my blogging activity to WordPress. You have been warned. There is an actual Social Media Camp in Victoria in June, but by then I'm sure I will be long gone to North Carolina with green card in hand.

I will do another post about the specific sessions I went to, because there really is just way too much content to put into one post (and you might not be interested in it anyway) but there were some general observations and themes throughout the day that I would like to share with you.

Who was there? Good question. I didn't actually interact with a lot of people in person, believe it or not. I spent most of the day being an audience member, and as so many people were live-Tweeting, it meant that those same people (I was one of them) were not interacting with other attendees. That did feel admittedly odd, since the whole point of an unconference is to interact with people. But that's the thing, right? It's about being online. I did get to meet a few people from Twitter (was starstruck by a poli sci prof from UVic, @janniaragon who is interesting and prolific, she later referred to me in a tweet as "statuesque"!) and made a bunch of new Twitter friends. It was kind of surreal. In one session, someone I follow on Twitter (@scribbler9) was tweeting about the same seminar I was in, so I tweeted "where are you sitting?" she said "second row, red water bottle", and I said "I'm in the third row, blue water bottle". Then later, a new Twitter friend/follower asked if it was me knitting with the pink yarn (I think I was the only person knitting there). It was like public stalking, but in a good way. In terms of demographics though, it seems everyone was proportionally represented, given the demographic of Victoria. I would say more than half the attendees were 45+, more than half were women, there were not many visible minorities. Lots of technogeeks (as evidenced by the sheer volume of iDevices) and WordPress superfans. There were writers, photographers, graphic designers, social media junkies, academics and laypeople. And all of them were Tweeting.

There were seven sessions, one per hour between 9am and 5pm, plus lunch. There were two keynotes and I missed the first one (I think I was confused about the schedule) but everyone was live tweeting the content so I felt like I was there. I'll talk later about the specific sessions.

What surprised me: people schedule their blog posts. Then they schedule the tweets announcing their blog posts. There is software to do this for you. Does this seem weird to you? It did to me. Some people tweet about their blog post three or four times to make sure everyone reads it. Then there was talk about linking from all the social media sites, Twitter and Facebook being the main two, but Google + being a leading contender and people are actually using LinkedIn. (For the record, I hate LinkedIn, never found it useful when I was on it and would go back with a great amount of resentment if I had to). There is a feature in WordPress that gives you suggestions on what to blog about. Um, what? Toni and I were talking about this the day before, about what an odd thing that was. Why blog at all if you can't think about what you want to write about? What I found hugely surprising is that no where in any of the presentations I saw was there any attention to language skills, to grammar, punctuation and spelling, or to the conventions of writing. Is that a given? Is it even an issue for people who blog that if you don't have the language skills that you might not retain a sophisticated readership? As a word nerd, I was rather shocked by this absence.

It also gave me cause to give some thought to why people blog, tweet, and otherwise engage in being an online presence and social media. There was a very clear message early in the day about being your own PR manager and creating your own personal brand, because everyone, it seems, has something to sell. Lots of people want lots of people to come to their blog so that they will attract advertisers so they can make money from blogging. This made me uncomfortable and I have to do some thinking about why I blog. At the moment I blog to keep people up to date with what kinds of adventures YarnSalad is having, and I hope that will always be interesting. While I think I have lots to say and I am delighted that I get more than a thousand hits to my blog every month, I do need to think about the future of my blog. A future employer or publisher could be reading my work here so this must be a consideration. I'm sure if you Google my name this comes up high, and it is true that potential employers and landlords are using Google to see what kind of person their applicant is. I am one of those people with a unique name (and not a Kevin Miller or something like that) and a solid internet presence, so I do have to be very mindful of the content I put on the Internet.

At any rate, by the end of the day my mind was full and exhausted, but I am so glad I went. I will start paying attention to more things like this in the future because I think unconferences like this will proliferate and, well, you know me, I like to be on the cutting edge (that was sarcasm). Something to consider though, is how to keep the balance of being a smarmy salesman engaged in shameless self-promotion and being a sincere human being behind the keyboard? Hopefully, dear reader, I will keep it real and that will mean you will continue to hang out with me.

How much stuff does a person need, anyway?

I am not a person who has a strong personal attachment to things. I don't know where that came from, but I have often credited it with my early pursuit of Buddhism. Not having an attachment to things comes in very handy when, say, getting ready to move house. Throughout my whole adult life I have moved house a lot. I could try to count, but I think I would lose count at about 20. The longest I have lived in one place was two and a half years, in East Sooke.

When we moved from East Sooke to Ucluelet, we did get rid of a lot of stuff but it seems like we took a lot too. We also seemed to acquire rather a lot while we were there. We had a big house to fill, after all. Dan has an amazing ability to scavenge and repair things, such as aluminum boats and theater seats.

When we knew we would be moving to North Carolina, we agreed that we would only take what would fit into the back of his truck (aka the floundertruck), a 1986 Nissan 720, and my truck, a 1999 Ford F150. We spent two weeks getting rid of as much stuff as we could, inviting friends and acquaintances to come by and pick through everything, take it all away, please. The theater seats went first, oddly enough. Sofas and tables and shelves were highly coveted.

Dan left on May 25th. I spent the next several weeks doing further culling, which included (eventually) three trips to the dump, a garage sale, and a trip to the thrift store. I drove away from Ucluelet on July 2. I spent a week on the south end of Vancouver Island and then headed for Alberta, to stay with my sister until immigration came through. We all know how that went. When it came time to leave, I did a further culling and reduced the volume of my stuff by half.

Returned to the Island on September 30th after being rejected at the border, then unloaded all the stuff from my truck into the basement of The Stately, the basement of Dan's mum & stepdad, where I was to reside for just over two months. I have now been in Cowichan Bay for a month, and just today I popped by The Stately to get some things out of storage.

I was looking for a few specific things. I found a new home for my beloved vacuum cleaner, so that's one awkward thing that I won't have to take with me. I will use up the rest of the bag of pine kitty litter. I found a couple of books and magazines that I can read here and then give away. Found a pair of old socks that I am not especially fond of and don't really plan to wear them ever again, wonder how they had made the cut of the first few cullings.

The news from yesterday, the whole 'five months' thing and the possibility of me going to North Carolina on a temporary visa to wait out my immigration has not surprisingly reframed how I am looking at my situation. If I am going to fly there and leave all my stuff (including my truck!) here in British Columbia, what will be the essentials that I take with me; what can I not live without for a few months while I am reestablishing myself in Kinston? Well, I don't know. It will depend on how much I am allowed, and how much extra luggage costs.

The most important thing of course will be the kitty. She hates traveling by plane and is terrified of being in a box/cage/kennel. I didn't want to have to do that to her, but in the bigger picture, it might be better to just get her there in 14-16 hours of travel rather than six or seven days in the truck. Yes she'll hate the trip, bit it will be over quickly.

And then what else? I have been thinking about this all day. Lately, as I have been interested in my Russian roots, I have been watching a lot of films and documentaries about Russia and Europe, many of which are set in the first half of the 20th century. There are so many tales of displacement and evacuation. If you were forced to leave your home forever, what are the important things? I realize that I am not in such a dramatic position, but really, what do you need on a daily basis and what can you live without?

The other night I asked the Skipper about photos of himself when he was younger. He had a massive stash of them and we were able to see what he looked like at all ages. That, and the beautiful photo album Dan's sister gave me for Christmas full of photos of Dan when he was younger, made me realize that there are probably very few photos in existence of me when I was younger. I know I don't have that many - I have moved too many times. The few that my mum had (she fled her crappy marriage with my dad on a day's notice, so didn't have much) may not have been saved from the mold-ridden basement suite she lived in back in the 90s. I doubt my sister would have many of me and well, I'm pretty much done communicating with my father. So probably I'll just have to draw photos of myself.

At any rate, back to the topic at hand, what would I take with me if I was boarding a plane for North Carolina? I'm not sure I would bring my entire yarn stash. Gasp! you say. Well no, I don't actually have that much yarn anymore. I would actually bring all my tools though - all my needles and hooks and notions. I don't own very much clothing anymore. I can't recall if I told you all those months ago - before I left Alberta in the fall, Dan had told me not to buy clothing because everything is cheaper in the States. So I didn't. I just had a small selection of summer clothing. With all the weight I had lost, most of my stuff didn't fit me anymore anyway. So, when I ended up coming back to Vancouver Island to spend the winter here, I had almost no winter clothing. I had one wool sweater and a couple of hoodies and some jeans. (Lots of hand knit wool socks though!) Dan's mum lent me a sweater dress and then decided I should just have it. Zola lent me a pile of sweaters (I still have one of them, and it will be returned to her). Toni had a big stack of clothes she no longer wore or no longer fit, so I have been getting a lot of mileage out of all these lent garments. Most of them will stay here in Canada though, so there will not be a lot of clothing coming with me either.

So then what? My computer, obviously. Dan has a Kindle now, so I don't really need to bring books. I will use the library anyway. Believe it or not, I will probably fill my luggage with small kitchen utensils. Again, we'll see what I'm allowed to bring.

Which leads me to something else - I don't own luggage. I have a 40 litre backpack and that's it. This raises another question then - would I be able to use Rubbermaid bins as my luggage or will I have to go and buy something? I am probably putting the cart before the horse here, because at the moment we aren't even allowed to apply for my temporary visa, so me actually boarding a plane is unimaginable. This is what happens to me when I have lots of time to myself to think, my mind gets me into trouble.

My last consideration in all this is while I'm waiting for immigration in North Carolina, what would I actually be doing? Believe me, I have no problem filling my hours. Between my computer (Twitter, blogging, podcasts & movies) and my knitting, I'm happy as a clam. I can go running (if I'm there by March, my friends-I-haven't-met-yet and I will be running an 8k race). I can be the Queen of My Kitchen! And, I suspect, we'll be doing a lot of entertaining. So that just means I'll need to make sure I also bring my running gear and my party dress.

So... dear reader, if you were in my situation, what would your essentials be, what could you not live without?

One of my most precious possessions: a one-cup pour-over coffee filter cone that I bought in Japan for 100 Yen. That thing goes everywhere with me.

I'm not ignoring my friends

I'm sitting here in the living room at backyard feast while our good friends from Stellar Coffee are here visiting. We are curled up on comfy furniture, knitting and beverages to hand, having had sushi and pound cake for dinner. It's been an awesome New Year's Eve party.


So when I say I'm not ignoring my friends, I mean my friends in the room. I'll rejoin them shortly. But you know me, I'm a bit of an Internet junkie so I just had to come see what you are all doing. Go see Amanda - she has completed her goal of knitting/sewing/crocheting a scarf/cowl/neck thing for every single day of 2011. Stop by and congratulate her for getting there! And while you're out visiting my friends, go tell Ellie you're glad she's finally joined Twitter.

Right, not to partying like it's 1999 (but I admit I'm having way more fun tonight).

an enriching experience

I just had a really good experience tonight and wanted to share it with you.

I have mentioned here before how much I love Twitter and the Thursday night #knitchat that has been running every week for more than a year now. #knitchat began with Natalie from the Cloudy with a Chance of Fiber podcast, and her co-host Rachel (who recently gave birth to a son) is often an active participant.

During this year of being a part of the #knitchat community, I have made some pretty great Twitter friends, I feel like if/when I actually meet these people in person that it will be just like old times, like no time had past, as if we've been friends forever.

Natalie is a self-proclaimed tech geek (you did say that once, right?). She works in tech, so is always in the know about cutting edge technologies, especially when it comes to social media. A few days ago when I suggested that we have a "weaving in ends" party (note for non-knitters: when you are finished knitting a project, there are always tails of yarn that need to be woven into the fabric) for all our Christmas gifts. Natalie made it happen. She opened up a discussion thread in Ravelry, gave us the link with information on how to set it up, and announced to Twitter when it would be.

It was my first time with using Google Hangout, and I think you have to be logged into Google+ for it to work. I haven't been using Google+ very much (though I signed up for it a few months ago on Natalie's advice) but Google Hangout is a very powerful tool. It's like Skyping with nine of your best friends. Or up to nine - I guess there is a limit of 10 people, but tonight there were only three of us.

Natalie beckoned me on Twitter to come a bit earlier, to make sure it worked. After some fussing with my computer, I was able to hear Natalie and she could hear me! We talked about our knitting (and I confessed I had no ends to weave in because I was compelled to wrap all my Christmas gifts today, hence the ends were done already). I am very familiar with Natalie's voice because I listen to her podcast - but none of my Internet friends had heard the voice of yarnsalad until tonight. :-) 

It was great. I blog, Tweet, and post on Ravelry and Facebook, but of course what you read here is the cleaned up version. I have to be politic about what I write so as not to offend anyone or air any dirty laundry. With Google Hangout I was able to have a fairly intimate conversation with someone I have long considered my friend, but with whom I had never had a discussion with until tonight.

Maia joined us after about half an hour, and there was some interesting conversation about yarn shops (in Portland, Northern California, and Victoria), some TV shows I will have to see when Dan and I get Netflix (he doesn't know we're doing this yet, but we are). We talked about the #knitchat KAL (knit-a-long). By the way - if you want to participate and haven't voted, you should TOTALLY go vote for Nathan's Scale Mitts. They would be a quick easy knit to do, in a worsted or aran yarn. Another pattern is leading the polls right now, but it has a dumb name and even though it's pretty, I feel a special allegiance to Nathan, who has long been a participant on #knitchat and is also a dear friend I've never met.

Sam got to participate in this hangout too. She was sleeping, but I got her up, held her in front of my webcam, then put her back on the bed. She wasn't really interested.

the whole point of having a blog

In my case, one of the reasons I keep a blog is to keep you, my readers, informed of what is going on. Sometimes that turns out to be interesting random stuff, like picking rosehips from the side of Kennedy lake and turning them into a sauce for the duck to be roasted. Sometimes it's about the things we make. But lately, as my life has taken many turns and tumbles, it is really to keep you posted on what I'm up to and how I'm doing.

A long time ago there was a tradition of once-a-year form letters that people wrote & tucked into their Christmas cards. Then came the big blanket emails that some of us sent out to everyone, not wanting to repeat themselves or to save themselves the labour of writing out the same story 50 times over. For me, at this moment in my life, I bypass all that rigamarole and keep a blog. The Adventures of YarnSalad.  Some people check it regularly and each time I make a new post, I tweet it and post a link on Facebook.

I was very surprised then to hear that someone who follows me on Twitter and is also a Facebook friend only realized yesterday that I was back in town. I've been back for a month. With all the ways I go to great lengths to keep in touch with people, communication can still fail and I have to accept there is nothing I can do about that.

words that make no sense

I'm confused.

I really like the whole world of social media. Except by "social media" I really only mean Twitter and blogging.

I was on LinkedIn for a while but it really seemed like a big old popularity contest and I reaped no benefit from it, so I left. I hate Facebook and every day find more reasons to find it loathsome. I had it on my screen earlier today, walked away for a bit, then an audio ad - a commercial - started blaring out of my speakers and I had no idea what the heck was going on. I find that kind of assault SO offensive that I make every effort not to go to Facebook. And yet I have friends who only seem to interact with their Internet peeps that way.

What I will say for Facebook and LinkedIn, is that they are real words with real names and meanings.

But as social media programmers try to find the next new big thing, and as bending and reshaping words seems to be in vogue, even though the new words might not hold any meaning (yet), it seems that social media sites are popping up with new and confusing names.

Pinterest

Flattr

Plurk

Klout

Tumblr

Flickr

I listen to a lot of podcasts and engage with many people via social media and many of them use some of these other sites. Last night there was something really interesting happening with the Oakland police violence, and it was being documented on Tumblr, but I could not access it from the newly downloaded Tumblr app on my iPhone. Today somebody posted something on Plurk and, not wanting to be out of the loop, I signed up for a Plurk account.

It seems like some of these sites are trying to take over the domains where Twitter, Facebook and blogs have taken a deep-rooted hold long ago. It's just too many. I know that not everyone will come join me on Twitter (though I wish they would), but thankfully programmers have allowed some applications to be used in conjunction with their own. Case in point, my five most recent tweets show up here. I am glad of that! And just today I did a thing on Facebook where my tweets can show up there too. It will save me from ever having to log into Facebook again. That would be awesome.

ghost readers

Are you one of those people who reads blogs but doesn't comment? If I'm getting 500 hits a month on my blog, that's an average of 16 readers a day, not including me reading my own posts. Almost nobody comments.

Someone else whose blog I read (or was it on Twitter?) mentioned this. I'm sure we all have our reasons for not commenting on a post. Maybe we like the anonymity. Maybe we have nothing to say. Maybe we don't know how to comment, or find that whole entering-the-gobbledygook-word a bit of a mystery.

See this is one of the reasons I got these gadgets on the sidebar. That way I can see I have had readers recently from Winnipeg, Western Australia, Germany, and Rhode Island. Where are you friends-I-haven't-met coming from? How did you come to my blog? I would *really* love it if you told me how you found me. No really. I would. And if you have a blog, chances are, I'll start reading you back. I'm a pretty good commenter!

drive-by friending

If you are a knitter and listen to knitting podcasts, you may have encountered the term "drive-by friending". This refers to people who hear or read someone's Ravelry name, and then add them to their friends list. The friendee recieves a message "yarnsalad has added you as a friend" and sometimes you have no idea why.

 I first heard this term while listening to Susan Dolph's podcast, Knitajourney. Louise J Hunt mentioned it in a recent episode and said that I was the first person to drive-by friend her. Really?

Last June, I went through the entire Ravelry group for the Electric Sheep podcast and friended every single person. At the time, it was something like 600 people. Total drive-by friending, and simply because (and this is what I told people when they asked) they listened to the Electric Sheep podcast and therefore must be a nice person. A few dozen people asked, a few hundred friended me back, no questions asked.

Ravelry is unlike Facebook in that there is no steady stream of status updates. If someone is in your friends, it simply means you have ready access to their notebook. This includes projects, queue, library, groups, and hooks/needles. You can see what they are knitting/crocheting, see what books or magazines they have, see what groups they are in. It's a great way to learn about the kinds of things that are out there that we may never have heard of before.

So drive-by friending on Ravelry isn't as invasive as Facebook is. When I joined Facebook the first time around, people I hadn't heard from since high school friended me, ostensibly, to stalk me. I found that creepy. I don't really spend much time on Facebook now, since I find I have all my social media needs met here, on Twitter, and through Ravelry.

This is all to say if you are reading this, are on Ravelry and haven't yet friended me, you are welcome to! My handle is yarnsalad pretty much everywhere I go.

The week that kicked my butt

Hi friends,

Another brief update for you. The hard drive on my beloved HP laptop was failing, then I hammered the nail on the coffin when I tripped over the cord and it came crashing to the floor last week, shattering the tablet touch screen. Dan salvaged what he could, was able to recover most of my data, but because I use my computer so much we had to find me a new computer to use fast.

Yesterday we drove out to Courtenay to get Camilla, the little white Samsung netbook I am writing on now. I don' know why I have named her Camilla, I'm not in the habit of naming my electronic toys, but there you are. Some guy listed it on Craigslist for $120 and the thing is not even six months old. We were happy to take a trip out of town to get it! The keyboard will take some getting used to. The shift key and apostrophe are in different places, so I'm backspacing a lot to get this text out.

We popped over to Comox, since I'll be picking my sister & niece up from the airport there in April. Lovely little town, so many deer!

Somewhere during the day I started feeling sick, which is not at all surprising since Dan has been sick for much of the last week. I haven't been sick since June, was rather smug that I had sucessfully avoided being sick twice while my dear husband suffered. That's what I get for kissing him before the contagious period ends.

This means I had to call in sick today, and will be staying home tomorrow too. It's always a bit nerve-wracking calling in sick when you are new to a job. But I work in a hospital, and really, you don't want the person who cleans the instruments and handles the supplies and drugs to go into work sick, do you?

 I'm writing to you from my bed and I think I'll soon be going back to sleep. Cold medicine is taking hold, you see, and I need to chase sleep. But there you are, the reason I have been, as they say, dead on the air. (Though not if you follow me on Twitter, since I have the Twitter app for my phone). Also, if you are friends with me on Facebook, I got flamed last week and am having a Time Out from Facebook. I find I get much more respect and positive communication with Twitter. You know what they say: Facebook is for friends who are more like strangers and Twitter is for strangers who are more like friends.

the point of social media

Today I will tell you about Twitter.

I'm on Twitter all the time, way more than I am on Facebook. It's been great for me as a way of keeping in touch with people I've met, meeting new people, and participating in online dialogue about any number of interesting topics.

Without going into too much detail, the company we moved here for (but my husband didn't end up with)  recently joined Twitter and, in my opinion, don't seem to get the point of it. Or realize that not only are they on the Internet, but when someone goes to Google the name of their company, these stupid Tweets will show up on the list.

Now if you have a business and are on Twitter and are using Twitter to promote said business, you want to be professional, relevant, interesting, and interested. But if you are Tweeting about how this whole 'work' thing is interfering with your surfing, how working on the weekend sucks (um hello, welcome to being a business owner), only talking about music and things entirely unrelated to your business, then your potential clients will lose interest fast. They may start to think "wow, these people are wholly uninterested in what the rest of the industry is doing". That's the impression I get. The ironic part of this story is that they were recently featured in a local newspaper article about business who are 'using social media'.

Um, Tweeting three times a month about asinine topics is not using social media, it's just embarrassing you and your company. 

Newspaper article about knitting

I was interviewed for and featured in an article about knitting in the area. Check it out!

Knit your art out

The interview was conducted by email, though I follow Stefania on Twitter. She mostly used the text I provided verbatim.

#yay