18 May 2004

The list, the list, the list. Uff da, the list. The sun is out this morning, which means I have no excuse not to do yardwork, especially as it's supposed to rain the rest of the week. Timprov has agreed to mow the lawn, once we borrow C.J.'s mower again -- we need to buy one, but I don't want to go without Mark, since he'll be using this thing comparatively often. So we'll go this weekend and ask to borrow Ceej's mower as a stopgap measure so that the grass does not reach baling proportions.

This is only the very beginning, the tip of the iceberg, of the list of Stuff. Ohhhhh, the Stuff. People, people, you cannot begin to appreciate the magnitude of Stuff we're talking about here. Oh, you probably can, because half of you probably have a similarly long list. But we're still in New Homeowners Mode, I guess, where we have to go buy a filing cabinet before I can even get going on the paper filling chore.

Today I will be running hither, thither, and yon, and then three to five more yons. The U library system, unlike the Stanford library system, will let me in without a card/borrowing privileges, although I can buy borrowing privileges if I decide it would make sense for me. That's one of my primary yons.

Yon!

I have rhubarb! Hoo boy, do I have rhubarb. C.J. went to his folks' this weekend, and apparently they harvested just an insane amount of rhubarb. So I have rhubarb tart with meringue topping, rhubarb sauce, and two big Ziploc bags of chopped rhubarb to do with as I will. I probably will want to make a cobbler and some of Grandma's rhubarb custard with it eventually, but in the meantime Ceej and I will dig into the rhubarb tart and hope there's some left that's still good when Mark gets home.

I have figured out something: I am no longer afraid of meeting people in person whom I've known extensively through letters, e-mail, or journals. I don't mean to say I'm incautious -- I'm not going to go haring off to secluded country roads to meet up with people I've exchanged two e-mails with. But a lot of the people I know not-in-person now are SF people, and there's kind of a whole fandom vouching system: if Karina was secretly a 50-year-old man with three felony convictions, I think Thomas and Philip would have noticed, and probably would have told me. Various people know other people and have known them not to be axe murderers, in some cases for longer than I've been alive. So there's that. But mostly what I mean is that when I've written a ton of letters or e-mails with someone, I don't delude myself that I know everything about them, but I also figure I have a fairly good sense of how well we'll get along. I'm no longer worried that Karina and I will meet in person and not like each other. I'm no longer worried that I'll show up at WorldCon and look at Bear (Hannah, Julie, Mer, Marymary, Philip, The Other Mark, Columbine...) and think, "Why on earth am I talking to this person? He/she is so boring," or that they'll think that about talking to me.

I don't trust the entirety of the internet, of course. But I've started to trust my own instincts with written communication a little more again, after an initial extreme caution. I blame Lizard. Lizzie and I corresponded for over a decade before meeting, and I was pretty nervous: what if we hated each other in person? What if we never wrote another letter and that wonderful connection in my mailbox just disappeared because we ruined it in person? Well, that didn't happen. Of course it didn't happen. Because who wants to write a decade worth of letters about things they don't genuinely find interesting? Even if there had been exaggerations or stories told slightly differently for comic/dramatic purposes, that happens in person, and it still tells you what the other person thinks is funny/interesting/cool.

This is part of Mrissa's Relax About WorldCon campaign. It will be fiiiiiiiine. In fact, it will be fun. Good time had by all etc.

I helped stake the clematis, and now I'm on to the long list of errands. When I get home, I'll work on the long list of writing projects and yard projects. When it gets dark, we will switch over to writing projects and house projects. And tomorrow there will be breakfast with Jon and then more listy goodness. Well, we hope it's goodness. Listiness, anyway.