I got home this morning from Austin. I had four hours of sleep last night, and had to leave for the airport at 5 AM. I'll have a lot to say later, but for the moment, I'm going to echo what I said on clubkingsnake.com:
If the film Body of War is opening anywhere near you, go see it. Just go.
More on that, on music, on coffee, on Austin, on SXSW, and on geek everything.... later. After I repair the synapses of my brain with sleep.
I have two things I haven't had since I got to Austin: thirty free minutes and a stable internet connection.
Apparently all the Twittering and blogging and streaming video and bandwidth-hogging internet junky behavior has not only the Austin Convention Center's amped-up SXSW wireless overloaded, but all the local hotels, cafes, and T-mobile hot spots. Half the time I can't get online at all, not even with the hotel's ethernet connection, and the rest of the time I can't stay online for more than ten seconds before the connection drops.
Now, you're saying, well, Christie, hey, take this as an opportunity to stop and smell the roses! But number one, I'm an addict, number two, I'm working, so I kind of need to get online and blog at Pet Connection and club.kingsnake and PetHobbyist (you know, the people paying me to be here?), and three, I had to file my SFGate.com column yesterday and not only did I need to submit it via email, I needed to do a little research on the web and apparently to get on the web, one needs an internet connection.
This year, SXSW has taken a stand on making the conference "greener," and included tips on how to reduce the environmental impact of the conference and festival. And then they gave us three bulging bags full of useless crap, nearly all of which is filling and overflowing the trash cans of the hotel, convention center, and streets of Austin. I'm sure some of it ended up in recycling bins, but what a waste.
In addition to our panel on pet blogging, which I'll write about over on Pet Connection, I attended a panel on gossip sites. Since I write for AfterElton.com/AfterEllen.com and have been known once or twice to indulge in a bit of celebrity gossip over there, I thought I might learn something. The panelists included a guy from TMZ, the founder of Twitter, and a New York Times reporter, as well as a blogger from Valleywag.com, a site that covers Silicon Valley gossip for the six people outside of the tech industry who give a damn about it.
There was a woman in the audience who booed the Valleywag panelist, and pouted and flounced around about how persecuted she was, and tossed her hair and acted victimized. So of course, she gets invited to sit with the panelists and proceeded to dominate the panel by whining about how gossip sites have no right to cover the private lives of nobodies like her.... but she, my dears, works for Star Magazine (yeah, the tabloid gossip rag) covering Britney and Paris and their ilk. Why is that different from someone blogging that they saw her (who I've never heard of) having dinner with some tech star (who I've never heard of)?
Her rationale? Because Britney et al have staffs of handlers and publicists to deal with all that attention, and "ordinary people" like her and whoever it is she was dating don't.
I didn't come to the panel to see her. I have no idea who she is, she was acting victimized and like an attention seeker, two behaviors I loathe, and then she objected to someone who characterized what she did as "crashing the panel." But that's exactly what she did. I was bored and aggravated, and probably should have left, but I really couldn't believe the moderator would allow her to stay up there the whole time and dominate the panel the way she did.
It's also funny being here as a "pet blogger," which in case you're wondering gets you zero respect among the uber-cool SXSW crowd, even though virtually all of them have pets and will happily talk to you about them for hours in the hallways. It's very amusing. Especially when a story I blogged on Pet Connection got picked up in USA Today this morning:
The outbreak of contamination in pet foods that killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of cats and dogs last year in the USA wasn't the first such incident, veterinary pathologists have determined.An outbreak in 2004 that also involved pet foods contaminated with industrial chemicals sickened more than 6,000 dogs and a smaller number of cats across Asia.
Kidney failure in the animals was linked to Pedigree dog foods and Whiskas cat foods manufactured in Thailand by Mars Inc. Thousands of pets died, according to Asian media reports at the time.
The Asian outbreak was little-known in the USA until it was reported last week by the blog Pet Connection. In the American public's view, the U.S. outbreak several years later appeared to be the first of its kind.
[....]
The Georgia paper was published last fall in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation but largely went unnoticed until it was picked up by the blog.
Story by Elizabeth Weise and Julie Schmit here.
In other news: The true highlight of my journalistic career, at least after interviewing Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor, was my coverage of Project Runway over on AfterElton.com. Yes, it's true, I got to interview winner Christian Siriano (who was happy, funny, and adorable) and runner-up Rami Kashou, who was charming, thoughtful, and much warmer than he seemed onscreen. I also gossiped about both of them in the interviews. Mea culpa.
Today I'll be liveblogging (if, that is, I can get online) Moby's keynote address at SXSW over on club.kingsnake.com. Tomorrow is music doc day: I start with Daniel Lanois' new film at noon, then the Joy Division documentary at 1:30, followed by "Lou Reed's Berlin" at 4 PM. I'll be catching The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello's political/folk persona), and then being torn between seeing REM at Stubb's or Martha Wainwright at Club deVille.
Thursday morning, I'll liveblog Lou Reed's keynote address, also on club.kingsnake.com, before seeing Billy Bragg on the day stage at the convention center, and then heading over to the premiere of the film "Body of War." Bragg, Morello, and other artists from the film's soundtrack will be doing a showcase at 7 PM, and Clint and I will be covering that for club.kingsnake.com, too.
If REM won the tossup on Wednesday night, I'll try to catch Martha Wainwright Thursday at 11 PM, but since I'm leaving Friday morning at 7, I suspect I'll be packing and sleeping instead.
Despite how exciting that all sounds, I think I'm a little old to keep up this pace. What can I say?
And oh yeah, I miss having an internet connection and I miss my dogs.
Honeys I'm home.
I've already said my piece on Las Vegas as experienced by someone there on business rather than pleasure, which is that it sucks. Gambling in your face everywhere you turn, pre-fab indoor "streets," "village squares" and "neighborhoods" with an international orgy of restaurants -- some of them admittedly quite good, hello Rumjungle, but still -- you get to them without going outdoors, and the windows look out only on what is essentially a high-ceilinged, slot-machine-littered mall.
Or, if you're really lucky, you get a restaurant with a view of the resort's landscaping and swimming pools.
Day One was a bust because my flight was delayed and I got in too late to attend the scientific sessions that afternoon. I also had a murderous headache, and even with both Tylenol and aspirin, tossed and turned all night long. I woke up feeling worse than when I went to bed.
The hotel was an unalloyed pleasure though. It was the Marriot Courtyard South, part of a Marriott-owned cluster of non-gaming hotels (plus one Holiday Inn Express). I guess a lot of conventions use these hotels for their attendees like me who don't want to sleep in a casino, in both the English and Italian senses of the word, LOL.
I had a great impression of Marriotts in the past, from when Raven had her leg amputated. This didn't rise to those levels because I hadn't sunk to those levels, either. But the staff was uniformly helpful and friendly, from the front desk folks to the waitress who gave me my morning coffee to the guy who drove me to the airport. The room was beautiful and quiet, the bathtub was big, the hotel had computers and printers in the lobby as well as free broadband in the rooms and free wifi in the public areas of the hotel. And, you know -- no slot machines or big animated signs telling me to go see Mamma Mia.
The conference was fantastic, of course -- well organized, full of interesting information, and most of the best minds in veterinary medicine under one roof. I got to catch up with old friends, saw some people I'd only "met" online or over the phone, heard some fascinating scientific presentations, talked in the halls with a lot of vets, and realized Pet Connection's profile has exploded in the last year, since virtually everyone I spoke to knew who we were (a first for me, and apparently going on down at Global Pet Expo, where Gina was, as well).
I did a few interviews I'm very excited about, saw some advances in veterinary medicine that excited me a lot for their potential for improving quality of life in our pets, and was struck, not for the first time but possibly the most profoundly, with the commercialized nature of science in this country.
The drug companies were omnipresent -- banners and ads everywhere you turned, their logos on every single piece of swag and the bags in which it came, on our lanyards, on the programs. The rooms where the presentations were held were branded with their sponsors' logos, and virtually everyone who spoke had financial ties to industry, even though few of them disclosed those ties.
I'll save more thoughts on that for Pet Connection.
So, guess who was the first person to call me when I got home? My editor from AfterElton.com. He always dangles little bits of political content in the entertainment coverage, knowing I'm like a poor innocent fish about to get caught on his hook. If you're reading this, Michael, I love ya man. But don't think I don't know you're playing me.
I left today a little light so I could catch up and rest and take the dogs for a long, long walk, then I have to buckle down as I have one deadline on Friday and another on Monday. Remember this when you start thinking you'd like to be a writer when you retire.
I hate Las Vegas. I seriously hate it.
I go to a lot of conferences and conventions, and while I'm not really thrilled that most of them could be anywhere -- I mean, a convention center is a convention center, a convention hotel is a convention hotel, from north to south or sea to shining sea -- there is something a bit relaxing about the predictability of most conference sites.
Except for Las Vegas.
There is not one moment in Las Vegas that you can forget you are in Las Vegas.
Now, if one is in New York City or Philadelphia or San Francisco, that's a good thing. To be reminded that one is in a world-class city full of interesting cultural and historical landmarks, beautiful architecture or natural settings, music, art, film, shopping... whatever... is a good thing. And yet, when I'm at conferences and in convention hotels in those places, rarely, if ever, does that happen. I may as well be in some small, anonymous airport oasis in the neon.
No, only in Las Vegas do the slot machines in the lady's rooms of restaurants ensure that not for one moment can you forget you're in the tackiest convention town on the planet.
I don't drink. I don't gamble. I don't enjoy being around people who are doing those things. I don't like Las Vegas, as no doubt you've deduced, being smart folks with above-average reading and comprehension skills.
I do like veterinarians and veterinary medicine, so hopefully the fact that I'm going to Las Vegas for a veterinary conference will balance out the fact that I hate... wait, it's coming.... Las Vegas.
Sigh. That is all.
I just got back from my long weekend in the Xenaverse. I'll have a wrap up over on AfterEllen.com tomorrow with some new photos... KT is still on her way back, so I don't have the last batch yet.
And then I'll do a somewhat different round-up here, most likely with even more, other, photos.
All in all I had a wonderful time, but any delusions I had that this was a vacation? Like I said, delusions. I worked every minute I was there. I went down there tired, and came home exhausted. All I want to do is sleep, and guess what?
Chat Month on PetHobbyist starts Friday night, with a guest chat with Nathan Winograd, author of "Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America." (Check it out here.)
So not so much with the sleep.
I also had the chance while I was down there to go out with Teresa Ortega from In Sequence. We dashed through the downpour to a little coffee place and talked about Xena, the early years of the fandom and what it's become today, our theories on why the fandom is growing instead of shrinking, and a few million other things, before she made the very long trek out to Burbank to drop me off at my hotel -- in the aforementioned downpour. Thanks, Teresa, and it was a blast! And be sure to check out her post about LOLXena.
In other news, my mom picked me up at the airport and spent the entire ride home ecstatically recapping Ted Kennedy's speech endorsing Barak Obama. I know John Edwards still has her heart, but she's supporting Obama in a big way, and spends most of her free time online, CNN in the background. I think she's spending more time reading dKos than I do.
She's 72, folks. Gotta love my mom.
The dogs missed me. Jeff at PetHobbyist apparently missed me. I wish I thought that Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor were gonna miss me, but probably they're even gladder it's over than I am.
And now, back to work!
I can't quite believe I haven't blogged here since Dec. 21. I've blogged at the places I get paid to, which just goes to show I'm a mercenary bitch, just like you always suspected.
Seriously, my mom has been sick, I had company before the holidays, and lots of family stuff. And I'm trying, not entirely successfully, to enjoy a short period of no deadlines. I have nothing due until Jan 2, and that's just a Project Runway recap, and then nothing until Jan 7, when my SFGate.com column is due. This may be the longest period I've gone without a deadline in a year. I literally don't know what to do with myself, or at least, once I stop having to take my mom to the doctor, I presume I'll have problems with that.
I'm not good at relaxing. When did I turn into a Type A personality? (Friends from my youth are laughing now... "turn into???")
In other news, Kyrie looks very pretty in front of my Christmas tree, but resents being treated as a decorative object, under the jump.
I just got home from my trip to Washington. I spent the first few days visiting my friend Terri in the Hood Canal area, getting to know her Silken Windhounds Teddy and Phoenix, and falling in love all over again with her deerhounds Tor and Lilibet, who I knew since, well... before they were born, actually.
Tor is the world's biggest lover, a 100 pound lap dog.
Terri's place is absolutely gorgeous, a fairy tale woodland setting full of mists and sparkling with FROST because it was freezing. Terri and I don't have the same internal thermostat setting, so my desire for the house to be somewhat warmer than the outdoors conflicted with her desire to sleep on a block of ice, and I spent most of my visit with my teeth chattering.
She also took me bird watching, a first for me. Which leads me to the following comment: I'm very concerned about all the birds who seem to think they are fish. I have heard the song, and it says "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly." In Washington, apparently many birds think they are fish.
Seriously, we saw a bald eagle, and although I pretended not to care, I actually thought it was pretty cool.
Also we saw a seal and Terri didn't know what it was. So she should probably check out the "mammal" section of her wildlife books once or twice. ;)
The Seattle portion of my trip was very different, and not just because the hotel had central heat and I could control the room's thermostat. It was also because, of course, Seattle is the spiritual home of Nordstrom, and I spent several hours wandering its aisles and meeting my new best friend, the guy at the Chanel makeup counter. More on that later in a post-vacation edition of "Stuff I Like."
I also had lunch with my editor from AfterElton.com, Michael Jensen, and his partner, Brent Hartinger. I already knew I adored Michael but meeting him just made it even more so, and Brent and I bonded over the Xena love. When he started analyzing the impact of the Season Three "rift" arc on their relationship, I bounced up and down in my seat and did my best fangirl squee.
Kyrie is completely punishing me for abandoning her (let's forget the twice-daily dogwalker, the two friends who stayed at the house for no other reason than to feed and love them, and my mom, who like the best grandmothers, spoils them rotten when I'm gone), but Rebel is following me from room to room.
It's good to be home.
So, the lovely autumnal Pacific Northwest is lovely and autumnal, almost East-coast feeling, but it's cold. Freezing. I'm like wearing my coat indoors.
Today my friend Terri made me go took me birding with her in the wetlands on the Hood Canal. It reminded me of a trip she and I took several years ago to Vermont, when the Scottish Deerhound National Specialty was held at the Basin Harbor Club on Lake Champlaign (I probably spelled that wrong) in Vergennes. It looked a lot like this area, which also has a lot of lakes, but with one big and important difference.
All over Vermont I noticed a horrifying shortage of good coffee places. Here, not only does there seem to be a Starbucks on every corner -- I'm not a Starbucks fan but it's better than the gas station and convenience store coffee we had in Vermont -- but an independent coffeehouse or espresso stand, too. It's bliss.
We saw a bald eagle last night, Blue Herons today, and many kinds of duck that got her very excited. I'm happy to see her happy and long walks in beautiful places are always good, but I don' t think I'll get the birding bug anytime soon.
Tomorrow I go to Seattle, where I'm hoping the hotel is warmer than every house and business I've been in since I got here. Coffee must have some kind of anti-freeze effect on the blood. Yet another reason they should have more of it in Vermont.
I had a humongous life-eating deadline yesterday, and now that it's behind me, and I'm back to a full work and dogwalking schedule after my long bout with whooping cough, this morning for the first time since I got sick I picked up my weights and worked out.
Oh dear readers! FIFTY PERCENT LESS WEIGHT than I could lift before I got sick!
I want to curl up into a little ball and cry like a baby.
Instead, on Monday I'm going to go to the gym I finally decided to join since moving here 11 months ago and leaving my beloved Sebastopol gym behind. I'm not wild about it, but it's nearby and has good parking, so I'll actually go, unlike all the gyms I like a lot better but are far away and in areas where parking sucks, so, well.... you do the math.
It also has a pool, and since being immersed in water is one my favorite things ever, I hope it's not too full of either chlorine or kiddy urine for me to enjoy after I work out.
Now, back to my pathetic little ten pound hand weights.
*sobs again*
I'm tentatively announcing I will live again.
My cough seems to have turned into the typical lingering post-bronchitis type of thing, with only the very rare mild whoop. I haven't gasped, choked, gagged, clutched my throat and staggered around in terror that I'd suffocate for a few days now. And my energy levels, while far from normal, are at least sufficient to walk the dogs, do the dishes, put a little bit of laundry through, and use my brain enough to write if not well then at least well enough to get by.
Plus I had someone come in and build shelves for my shoes in one of my closets so I can open the door and look at them any time I want to. Such as the red suede Franco Sarto Mary Jane pump on a red patent wedge that I hope to actually feel well enough to go somewhere I can wear someday soon.
Because I know you're all sitting there going OMG how is Christie, here is an update on my ongoing battle with whooping cough.
What seems to have happened is that I am now coughing much more frequently, but it's a weaker cough. I still "whoop," and it still hurts my head and makes me feel momentarily exhausted, but it doesn't knock me to the ground moaning and wanting to die.
And hey, I wrote something!
I'm thinking I might write something else soon!
*crawls off to take nap after becoming exhausted from blogging*
I'm emerging warily from my cave and thinking maybe, just maybe, I felt semi-not incredibly terrible today. It's not impossible that by Monday I might be able to have a half-normal schedule.
And I'm almost done with my pet column. And I'm actually thinking I'll blog at Pet Connection tomorrow, I have something to say. Now if I can only find the energy to get a little bit of a rant going.
In other news, apparently the world went to hell in a handbasket while I was huddling in bed coughing.
"Are you dead?"
It was a phone message from a worried friend. I wasn't sure she was kidding.
I'm not dead. I was actually better, then I had what I hope was one last full-on bout of paroxysmal coughing, which gave me the worst headache of my life; I couldn't even move my eyelids without intense pain, and two Aleve and four extra-strength Tylenol did nothing for it at all. My mom asked if there was anything she could do to help me, but when I told her, she refused to shoot me.
I mean, why ask if you're not going to help?
So I'm still here and now that the headache's mostly gone, I'm glad to be alive.
Ummmm, can someone please finish my SFGate.com column which is due Friday? Thanks.
Oh, and thanks to Alison Brendel DVM for the nice photo of a toy bordetella pertussis germ.
*crawls back to bed*
I felt better yesterday, then I had another one of those gasping-for-air, thought-I'd-die, almost-passed-out whooping episodes last night, and felt dizzy, shakey, and drowsy for hours afterward. Then I had another one, although it was much milder, and then I slept until past 1 PM, and now it's 5:30 and I'm sleepy and yawning constantly and shaking.
WTF IS WRONG WITH ME? I left a message for my doctor yesterday but she never called back, and while I realize I can call the advice nurse and/or go to urgent care, I just want someone to tell me what's wrong with me.
/whine
[UPDATE: I found a sound file of an adult with whooping cough on the web. It sounds just like me. Maybe you can see why it's so freaking scary.]
I don't know if some of my filters were disabled after the Big Power Failure yesterday or if it's just random, but I got hit by a lot of spam in my comments section last night. I'm going to turn on comment moderation for the rest of the day -- I'll turn it off tomorrow. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I normally shun memes, but I got tagged by someone I find kind of interesting and smart and provocative, so I decided WTF and I'll do it.
PBurns, aka "terrierman," has a great blog in which he says many wise things about working dogs and occasionally says thing with which I disagree. Ah, well, no one is perfect.
I'm supposed to list eight random facts about myself. I suck at things like this, because there is very little that I haven't revealed quite profligately already. I can't possibly find eight things hitherto unknown, so we'll have to settle for eight things never before assembled all in one place.
1. I had cats before I had dogs.
2. Before Xena, it was Christine Cagney.
3. I'm a fourth generation native San Franciscan.
4. I've been feeding a raw homemade diet to my dogs and cats for 21 years, 6 months, and have never had one of them suffer from a food-borne illness or any form of nutritional deficiency or excess disease, which apparently means I'm smarter than most veterinarians, who seem to think that requires a commercial laboratory, finely calibrated measuring equipment, and a degree in nutrition.
5. I have lost 187 pounds in the last 4 years, 2 months.
6. There are few things on earth I hate more than getting new machines, equipment, and electronics; I fear and loathe getting a new computer, a new car, a new DVD player. When I get new electronics, I have to have people come over and set them up for me.
7. I have turned down three offers to write books about canine diet and nutrition because I honestly feel I have nothing more to say on that subject.
8. I was at Candlestick Park for the World Series when the 1989 San Francisco earthquake hit. I denied for at least 45 minutes that the game would be cancelled.
Sorry for being absent. I took the weekend off to get my Pride on, and had deadlines Thursday, Friday, and today that ate my life otherwise. I promise to do better the rest of the week, in order to earn this:
I love Gina, I do. I would walk through fire for her. I would crawl over broken glass. I'd throw my body in front of a speeding bullet for her.
Apparently I'd do just about anything for her except return her beautiful wonderful tiny little laptop to her.
I have had it since January, and other than sending it home for one brief visit, it hasn't left my hot little hands, despite her repeated reminders that she needed it back. I had it all packed up to go when she had to cancel her out of town plans due to a looming book deadline, so I immediately saved it from a fate worse than Sacramento death and clutched it to my loving bosom once again.
Tonight my strategy finally paid off and she said I can keep it forever and ever! Oh, oh, Gina's tiny laptop and I will be so happy together for all eternity! We are like Wesley and Buttercup! Xena and Gabrielle! Oh tiny laptop how I love thee!
Thank you, Gina!
In other news, my desktop got very very sick and was in the hospital this weekend. It's home now, recuperating. I have lost at least one month's worth of email, probably for all time. Sob.
This is the first morning in two months that I haven't gone to the PetConnection blog before I even had my morning coffee.
I'd say this is a sign that the pet food recall story might finally be winding down, but I think it's more just that I'm burning out. So consider this just a stupid meaningless venting of excess insanity that will allow me to continue functioning for one more day.
Continue reading "Irrational thoughts from a delusional place" »
Okay, all you techie types who come out of the woodwork when I blog about technology... tell me. Do any of these things exist?
I want something that will show what is on one TV on all the TVs in my house when I want it to. I want to be watching a DVD in the living room, be able to walk into my office to check my email, and have it playing at the same time on my office TV.
I want to be able to convert digital interviews to text. Does software exist that can do that? I don't expect it to be perfect, although "smart" software that can learn at least my voice would be nice.
I want an iPod that is also my phone and can surf the web. Not just an mp3 player, an actual iPod, or at least, an mp3 player that can play iTunes files. I know Apple doesn't have that at this time... are they planning on it?
I await your responses with breathless anticipation.
Pastels.
That is all.
So, every now and then I have to use a site that doesn't like Firefox, and forces me to use IE. Blech.
msn.com is the homepage on IE, and I so rarely use it, I've never bothered to change it. Today, when I launched IE, there was a blurb about how to get your child to behave on airplanes. And they ask the question, "Should parents get the boot from flights when kids misbehave?"
Ummmm, is it just me or does that sound a bit drastic?
Some kind of weird stomach thing kind of ate the last 36 hours, but I want to thank everyone who helped me figure out what was wrong with my header.
Well, actually, I never did figure it out. Or do anything about it. But apparently it fixed itself, because the last forty bazillion people who replied said it's white.
I myself basically am afraid of things that fix themselves, but you know, ummm, what choice do I have but to accept it?
Are you seeing this page, or the banner, with a black background??? Gina said she is, but I have it set to be white, and it IS white, for me.
What are you seeing out there?
"Giftable" is not a real word.
That is all.
My dear friend Ginger, who I can't link to because she's not a blogger (although her extremely cool daughter is), had a terrible house fire last night. The dogs, cats, and people are all safe, but they are out of their home for 2-3 months, and have lost many beloved personal items to fire, smoke, and water damage.
I'm not asking you to do anything, there's really nothing to do, but they love their old Victorian house, and they are the only Democrats in their small Kansas town, so please send them good thoughts.
Okay, I was browsing around the Internets looking for information on games and toys about horses, and I followed this link and found this toy, which isn't available anymore, I can't imagine why. Go read the product description and then tell me this isn't the weirdest thing you've ever read.
Someone posted in my comments section that I should forget about writing my novel and focus on humor. Gina almost daily begs me to stop writing about entertainment media and instead stick to pet writing. Other friends urge me to write more or less about music, about my personal life, about politics. Others just beg me to blog, about anything dammit, but BLOG MORE!
All these people seem to be overlooking one critical fact: I'm not in charge.
I don't know if muses really exist, or if everyone has them, or only writers, or what the deal is. I just know that there is a little gang of temeramental bitches who run my life and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. They tell me what to write. They decide if I'm going to write at all. They decide the tone and the mood of each piece. And they don't care, not the slightest bit, about my career, my bank balance, or my bedtime.
If my fictional muses are up, then I'm up, writing fiction. If my non-fictional muses want to play, we play. If my funny muses are tickling me, we laugh. If my academic science-wonk muses are feeling feisty, we get serious. I have journalism muses, bitch-slap-the stupid-people muses, political muses, cute pet story muses, and journal muses - they're writing this post and really are completely indifferent to the fact that I prefer not to get journal-y on my blog.
You think I'm kidding? I'm not. Some massively disciplined people may have gotten their muses beaten into submission, or maybe just figured out how to get their cooperation. Some people may not have as many different kinds of muses as I have, all clamoring for their time at the keyboard. Maybe I'm having a psychotic break and this has nothing to do with the creative process.
I've even found myself taken over by my muses. I mean, phsyically. One night I was lying in bed, and realized I'd been so wrapped up in something I was writing I'd forgotten to eat dinner. I got up to make some scrambled eggs, and the next thing I knew I had been at my computer for two hours, writing. And no, I don't take Ambien.
I suppose I should be grateful I have muses. I've never had writer's block (she says, knocking frantically on wood), although I've often had to do one kind of work when my muses were screaming at me to do another. I won't say writing I do under muse-protest actually sucks, but it's never my best.
No, the best I can manage is hoping the appropriate muses will come out when I need them, and that one day they'll learn to understand that the cryptic numerical figures on that spreadsheet indicate the need to reliably produce the type of writing for which I get paid.
Hint, hint, girls.
... at least about technical things, can you tell me: For the last couple of years I've been blissfully happy using a Logitech Trackman Trackball, with a cord.
You can open it up and clean out the contacts, enabling the "marble" trackball to spin freely.
I clean them, oh, once a week.
The trackball has finally stopped working well and I got a new one. The same basic model, but "updated," so that now you cannot open it up.
I'm assuming there's a good reason for this, as I see NONE of the new models of "trackball" style mouse-alternatives can be opened for cleaning. I just can't think of what it is. How am I supposed to clean it? Is there a secret? Because the way things are now, this thing is going to have a lifespan of one week, and I'm going to guess since I haven't heard a hue and cry across the Internets about this, I'm missing something.
What is it?
Lassie, get help, Christie's in the well.
There may be something to be said for "Just do it" as a motto after all.
I blogged earlier about hating to do interviews, or not hating actual interviews, just hating the lead-up, and particularly hating cold calls. I noticed when I was doing several interviews, with lots of cold calls and a few hot calls (aren't I extremely witty?), for my story on Gale Harold, though, that my anxiety level had lessened considerably.
And today when my editor asked me to do a last minute interview, I felt nothing, not even the least little fluttering in my stomach.
Is it possible I have, at last, grown up? And why is talking to television PR hacks less nerve-wracking than talking to veterinarians, dog trainers, or pet book authors?
And for those of you who are breathlessly waiting for the tiniest morsel of news about my private life, OMG, I'm moving on the 27th! Unless something completely unforseen happens, me and the dogs will be in our new San Francisco home, literally one house away from Sigmund Stern Grove, in 15 days. I'm anxious, happy, filled with worry, excited, and other contradictory and adrenalinized adjectives.
This self-indulgent blog post was brought to you by Gina Spadafori, who sniffed disapprovingly at me for not blogging daily and suggested that linking to articles I've written elsewhere is not REALLY blogging.
That there should be a period placed at the end of a sentence.
That is all.
Signed,
A frustrated editor who wonders what this world is coming to when people submit work without even checking to make sure their sentences have periods at the ends of them and oh I don't know, RUNNING SPELL CHECK?
"You need to blog EVERY DAY."
This is the type of thing I heard from serious blogging types at BlogHer, and that my friends say to me on the phone and in email, imploring me for, I guess, something to read.
I write for a living. I know that's no excuse. Gina manages to blog her fingers off, and she not only writes for a living, she writes more than I do. And lots of authors and columnists and reporters blog daily. I'm clearly lesser stuff.
So my profound thought for the day: I hate deadlines. I hate their relative lack of malleability. I hate the painful aching feeling they give me in my gut. I really hate missing them, and try not to, but sometimes, well, I just do.
Given that I hate interviews and deadlines, do you find yourself wondering: WHY exactly did she become a journalist?
And on that happy bloggy note, I leave you to go write an article about old dogs, that perhaps I'll post here and bring light to the life of all those people who keep asking me sadly, "Are you ever going to blog about dogs again?"
I really hate interviewing people. Or, I don't hate interviewing them exactly. Once I'm actually doing the interview, I'm fine. But I hate working myself up to the interview, setting up the interview, preparing for the interview, and the thing I hate the very, very worst of all, is trying to get a comment from someone by making a cold call.
Now, none of this would matter if I weren't, you know, a journalist. It's like you're Greg Louganis and you like Olympic diving but you don't like to swim.
Today I interviewed two amazing women, Ellen Ratner of Fox News (seriously) and Cholene Espinoza, who wrote a really great book about Hurricane Katrina. They were wonderful, the interview was easy and enjoyable, and it was set up in response to a contact from their publicist, so this was certainly not a "cold call." And yet.... I was a wreck all morning.
Now my editor at AfterElton.com wants me to get a comment on a story I'm doing on Gale Harold (oh, calm down ooogy!) and of course, I'm sitting here going, oh please no god not that. NOT A COLD CALL.
And what's hysterically funny is I get just just as nervous calling a vet at a veterinary college for a comment on sunscreen for dogs as calling a TV network.
Perhaps I should look into a new career in Olympic diving. I love to swim.
Gina posted on her blog a week ago that blogging would be "light to non-existent" while she finished her book, then posted like, fifty billion times that week.
And probably now I'll be saying, OMG, I so have to finish all this stuff at work and I won't be blogging much, and then I'll come here every fifteen minutes and post. Because I'm addicted.
And the next person who tells me to take it to LiveJournal is so banned.
It's the weekend and I'm trying to stay away from my computer. Or I was. Now I'm here. I'm weak. Or work is so compelling, fascinating, challenging, that it draws me in, moth to flame etc.; insert other cliches of compulsion that appeal to you more.
I'm so in love with the new Gabriel & Dresden album, Organized Nature, and specifically the synthed-up cover of that old chestnut by Kansas (a band I loathe), "Dust in the Wind." It's really scary how much I'm loving this song. Because I'm sure it has no redeeming artistic merit at all and it's too slow to even dance to, and it's DANCE MUSIC. And it was by Kansas. And I'm so ashamed because I have the frigging thing on auto-replay and I've listened to it like fifty times in a row now.
Gina is never going to speak to me again.
Oh, and that John Scalzi guy Gina emailed me about? He's too funny. Check out his rules for the comment section on his blog. Especially this:
(P)eople who want to score points off of me with their astounding wit and withering comments should be aware of the following salient point:
I don't care what you think of me.
I cannot emphasize this point enough. I honestly, truly and sincerely could not give a runny crap in a bucket about your opinion of who I am, how I live my life, what you think of my opinions, etc. That being the case, trying to flame me is really a waste of your time. At best, I'll grade you on your performance, since I enjoy a good flame (be aware that I have high standards in this area). At worse I'll simply ignore you.
The fact is -- and no offense -- you're just words on a screen to me. Therefore, your opinion of me is nothing I'll spend a lot of time worrying about. I've learned over time that nothing enrages a flamer more than a casual disregard of his opinion about one's self, so there's also the added attraction for me of watching such people fume when I take them rather less seriously than they take themselves. So, if you really want to amuse me this way, by all means go right ahead.
I don't really have problems with this type of thing here, but over on PetHobbyist? I'd so like to implement a policy along these lines. Tragically, there is a whole department over there dedicated to nothing more than preventing me from telling the users what I really think of them. Can you imagine having as part of your job description, "Keeping Christie from killing people who want to know how to tell when their dog is having her period?"
Did I mention I've listened to "Dust in the Wind" 50 times in a row?
I love Mark Morford. That is all.
Really, I don't mean to fill this up with idiotic nonsense, but it's late and I have to ask:
Why does my printer call itself "the device" instead of the printer when it's out of paper? Clearly it knows it's a printer because it's not like any other form of hardware is going to HAVE paper. Why does it call itself a "device"?
Goodnight.
You get David Gahan's pallid flesh and a rant about dance music, Big Gay Picture gets Rosie O'Donnell's hairdo, gay marriage, the Sopranos, and Xena.
It's not fair. It's not right. I'll try to do better. And if you want the antidote for David Gahan at Coachella, check out Madonna's arms. Guh.
It's always fun to look at what search terms people are using to find my blog.
Mainstream political terms used to be big big big, but have dropped off a lot, both because I blog less about mainstream politics and because it's that awkward time in the election cycle when less is going on. But of course, my frequent digs at that asshole in the white house get big returns; my number one search term is ITMFA (Impeach the Motherfucker Already). Remind me to blog about that more, I love saying it.
As I discovered ever since I started blogging more about music and entertainment media, lots of folks are out there searching for "P!nk," "Dear Mr. President," "Queer as Folk," "Gale Harold," "Xena," "Brian and Justin," "Dixie Chicks," "Not Ready to Make Nice, "iPod," and the various titles of songs in my iPod Friday challenges. Those terms are currently bringing around one quarter of the traffic from search engines, maybe a bit more (not one quarter of the traffic to my blog itself - just of hits that come from search engine results. Most traffic to my blog doesn't have a referrer, which I think means it's coming from bookmarks and email links).
I tend to think those "entertainment" people aren't likely to become regular readers of my blog, although I know at least two that are commenting, so I could be wrong (bound to happen someday). After all, it's not like I don't actually love me some Xena and of course, no need to even ask how I feel about my iPod, I named a whole blog category after it. Those searching on 
"Gale Harold" won't be so happy, as all I ever do is comment on how the man cannot dance. But yes, yes, teh hawtness, I know, I know. Calm down. I even updated this post with a picture of your guy to make you happy. (Is it only straight women who could think a man who can't dance could possibly be hot? And speaking of the ability to dance, it's amazing to me that NO ONE has ever found my blog searching on hip hop belly dancing.)
The names of my media gods are searched for a lot... Jon Stewart (genuflect when you say that name), Lara Logan, Helen Thomas. Lately I've noticed some searches for Mark Morford bringing traffic here; I hope this means he's becoming better known cuz he's my hero.
"Pit bull" brings a lot of hits here, and many searches that include "pit bull" in them. From the context I'd say nearly all these are responsible pit bull owners ... I'm not getting many "dogs fighting" type searches. That makes me happy, because I'm a big fan of the bull breeds and anything I can do to help the PR nightmare they are trapped in, I'm glad to do.
Osteosarcoma and amputation and three legged dogs ... I lost my dog Raven to this horrible cancer last summer, and her section of my blog gets a lot of traffic from people searching for information on it. Her story ended unhappily, but I hope that the people searching have better outcomes than we did. I also get a number of hits to an article about her death, called "How Long Do Dogs Live?", from people searching for that phrase. While my article is not about the lifespan of the dog, but a tribute to Raven, I hope that they find something they might not have been looking for.
Dog terms in general are big... veterinarian, raw diet, training issues, "are dogs omnivores or carnivores?", "deerhounds." Also, a fair amount of hits from "puppy shots," "dog vaccinations," "rabies shots;" although I rarely write about those subjects here (much more so on my website, where "puppy shots" and "vaccinations" take turns being my number one search term), it seems a lot of people find my blog with those terms too.
And of course, my all time favorite searches, the ones on "Dogged Blog" and/or "Christie Keith." Since there's no money in this, I'll have to settle for fame.
So, if you have a blog or website and track your referrers, how do people find you on the search engines?
Now and then I like to use my powers for good. Not often.
Cafe Press rocks. I bought a tshirt from one of their merchants and the catchy anti-Bush slogan on it was off-center. I emailed them, they emailed me back the next day telling me a replacement was on its way and to just keep the defective one. It was even a personal, well-written, and slightly witty letter.
Didn't anyone tell them you can't run a business that way?
"Don't you dare blog until you finish that article," warned Gina's voice darkly on my answering machine.
Yeah, the same Gina who sent me the very email I blogged about this morning. So helpful. So caring. So totally TOO LATE!
So it's the weekend, when I let myself get a bit journaly. (Travis hates me to insult journals, but I'm just mean that way.) And so now you get to hear about the desperately difficult life of a writer. See, I know all you non-writers think writing is really easy. One of my former bosses, who shall remain nameless, sincerely believed that anyone could write, and had absolutely no respect for writing or editing as a profession - until one day, after I no longer worked for him, when he contacted me about possibly helping to fix the incomprehensible utterings of a non-writer he was paying to do some writing for him. I suggested sweetly that I'd get to it as soon as I was done doing a cardiac ultrasound on someone's dog. OK, I didn't. But I wanted to.
See, writing is actually hard. Of course, it's not hard all the time. Sometimes it's hard NOT to write, and sometimes the words just flow out and all fit together beeeyoooteefully, and you re-read it the next day and think, shit, did I actually write this? Damn, I'm good.
But the problem with writing for a living is that you often have to write when that doesn't happen. You have these things, I can barely type it..... DEADLINES. How is THAT for an intimidating word? And I had one this week. It was on Wednesday. And what I was writing was just not frigging working, so I sent it to Gina for help. I've never sent Gina anything before, but she's the writer I most respect in the world, so naturally I thought, given that she's in the middle of a frenzied burst of last minute writing on a book deadline, that she'd be really happy to take time out of her busy schedule and save my ass for me. Which she did, by informing me that my article sucked, and that she knew I knew that or I'd have never sent it to her in the first place. Which is so true, but nonetheless, doesn't in and of itself fix the article or extend the deadline.
So I called the publisher to see if I could get a small deadline extension, exploiting counting on the fact that we have a close personal good working relationship to blind her to the total inappropriateness of my asking her for an extension make it possible for her to work this out for me.
So, the new deadline was this morning, and I did send something in. And really, it's not bad. It's well-written, well-reasoned, and the right number of words. Many publishers and editors would be very grateful to get it, I'm sure. But it wasn't really ME, and so I have a slight bad taste in my mouth. Not to mention having spent way, way too many hours working on it this week, to the detriment of other, more lucrative things I really should have been writing. Or even blogging (which as I tell people wondering what's the point of blogging, has gotten me both work and sex, and it doesn't get any better than that, does it? Well, maybe if it got me shoes).
Now, one of my current employers, the darling and somewhat insane JeffB, has great respect for writing as a profession. He humbly sends me all his press releases and other public utterances for proofreading, because he knows that, while he does have a way with words and a lot to say, He. Can't. Spell. Or punctuate. I mean, not to save his life and the lives of all his family. It's bad. Then again, you know, my dad is a genius, I mean that quite literally, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley. And he once asked me how to spell "babies." Some people's brains just don't work right. I try not to judge them, and not just because whenever I criticize someone else's ability to spell or punctuate, it's almost guaranteed that post will be riddled with typos.
Do you dare me to post this without spell checking it first?
Sunday I'm spending with the world's cutest baby, who doesn't care at all about spelling or deadlines. Or work, sex, or even shoes. He just likes to bounce around on my lap and laugh joyfully as he grabs big fistfuls of my hair (usually with at least one earring) and pull. Hard. And he's teething, so biting down on my fingers is another important hobby for him. His loving mom and dad asked me to bring back their coffee maker that they lent me last Christmas, so I'm guessing sleep deprivation is becoming something of an issue at their house. Being an aunt is nice, you get to play with the darling boy then go home before he keeps you up all night.
Oh, and I'm sort of wondering, maybe I'd better take another crack at that article before I go tomorrow. At some point I'm sure to actually make it better instead of worse, right? Right?
Maybe I'll stick with bouncing babies and criticizing people who can't spell.
I didn't expect to do well on this time wasting bloggy quiz thing, but I did. Via the fabulously named blog Nice Shoes, Wanna Fock?:
***You Passed 8th Grade Math***
Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!
I'm evil, but I can count. Wowza.
Not everyone can answer with mathematical certainty the question, "How evil are you?"
Thanks to a link from Travis posting on LiveJournal, I have been scientifically determined to be 22 percent evil:
***You Are 22% Evil***
A bit of evil lurks in your heart, but you hide it well.
In some ways, you are the most dangerous kind of evil.
Now, what ticks me off here is that TRAVIS is 20 percent evil - not a whole heck of a lot less evil than I am, right? But HIM it tells, "You are good. So good, that you make evil people squirm."
Then again, maybe I'm proving their point by, you know, squirming?
I'm guessing "Have you ever corrupted a minor?" was the one that got me in trouble. Don't ask.
How Evil Are You?
Well, I don't know if it says more about good customer relations or the power of blogs, but I heard from someone at Ipswitch who'd seen my post about how they wouldn't let me redownload their FTP software. They apologized and offered me a link to download an upgraded version of the program I originally purchased.
So here are some roses for Ipswitch ... and I'm glad, because I did love that software. In fact, the niceness of their apology makes me glad that I praised it even while complaning about the company's policy on downloading, as well as embarrassed that I called them bloodsuckers.
OK, I can't really get into specifics because they've asked me not to, presumably to keep the spam-monsters from figuring out the counterspell, but I want to say that the folks at TypePad have been wonderful at helping me get out of spam hell.
You may have noticed I had no comments showing for a while, and that's because I've been the victim of some serious automated spam bombings in my comments section. Every time I had more than five or ten unpublished comments, or however many I have it set to show, my published comments would vanish.
Everyone at TypePad was professional, helpful, courteous, and definitely willing to think creatively to not just fix the damage but prevent it from happening again. Thanks!!
And I now return you to the regularly scheduled program of pissing, moaning, and ranting on Dogged Blog.
I have some advice: Just get rid of your computer. Do it now.
I realize that if you take my advice it's going to seriously cut down on my blog readership, but I'm willing to make that supreme sacrifice to free you from the risk of going through what I've gone through over the last six days.
It was bad enough that my hand-me-down laptop was designed by a Lilliputian, and that I had no notice or warning that my computer would crash and so didn't save any work-related links, documents, emails, passwords, nothing. But that wasn't all.
When I got my computer back, all my data was intact. Not so my programs. They were all gone... everything. My Norton Anti-virus, my firewall, my FTP program, and dozens of other little bits and pieces of software I've downloaded, customized, and yes, purchased, over the last few years. All gone.
Did my computer guy think to warn me of this? No, he assumed I understood what "reinstalling the operating system" would entail. WRONG.
He saved all my data, all my emails, my address book, all my photos. But I pick up over two dozen work-related email accounts, had hundreds of email rules, had a dozen sites programmed into my now-vanished FTP program.... ok, now I'm whining.
Speaking of FTP, let me tell you about the bloodsuckers at Ipswitch, makers of the very fine program WS_FTP. Would they let me re-download the software? They would not. Not even with my receipt, which I had. And when my computer guy, who had wisely copied my entire old hard drive before he reinstalled my OS, found the original download when I purchased the program in the first place, tried to install it again, it wouldn't let us. No, they have it coded so that you can only install it once, even on the same computer. Very nice, guys.
Only had I purchased their service agreement, which costs as much as the program does, would I have been allowed to reinstall this software. No other company treated me this way. All the rest provided me with a new link to download the software, most with no more documentation than verifying my email address.
Yeah, yeah, I know.... whining again. Maybe my week without blogging isn't looking so objectionable to you now?
[UPDATE:] A couple of days after I posted this, I heard from someone at Ipswitch who had seen this post. She apologized and sent me a link to redownload the software. More here.
