TABROOM
Turned a corner over the break; some elements of the new framework fell into place mentally, and I’ve hit the glorious threshold of SEEING a THING. Doing invisible work is seriously tough; you can’t feel like you’ve changed the world, even if it’s just the world inside a small browser window.
I’ve also learned that Tabroom has been requiring people to write ballot comments for entries marked no-show, which is obviously dumb, but the type of thing that doesn’t get reported often. Folks tend to report what they use, and my interface to the user base is more often tabbers than judges. It doesn’t always strike tab staff to report issues that they are helping others around, instead of the ones they are confronting themselves.
I’ll be at ASU this weekend; as I’ve said, it’s not a hard sell getting me to Arizona in January. Emory awaits me after that. A quieter January otherwise, punctuated by a short trip to park lands and hiking to try to compensate for the late fall, which I’ve spent as a slug. And hopefully more SEEING the THINGS as above.
NOT TABROOM
I went to Montréal over the holidays; it was more holiday-ish than I prefer to spend my birthday that everyone else celebrates, but it worked. The food was glorious, the city is lovely, I got away with speaking French far more often than my sense of my own fluency should allow, and in Montréal is totally fine with you shoving in an English word when the French one fails you. And the pouding chomeur at Au Pied de Cochon made the whole trip worthwhile on its own, though the venue belied the name of “Poor-Man’s Pudding”. It’s very similar to a dish my own mémère would make for a special treat. So that was nice.
The temperatures hovered around 10F, but there was no wind, and some lovely snow.
I am beginning to think about the summer trip. Unlike the last few years, I do not have a short list of I’ve-always-wanted-tos to choose from, so I’m rather at loose ends. But I’ll come up with something. I bailed on thinking too about the winter and will instead go to my favorite haunt. Perhaps I should do the same; I go full nomad typically for the summer and range across a lot of territory. Perhaps the play this year is to stick a pin someplace and drink the stillness.