Average Jane

Author: Average Jane

  • Average Jane in San Jose

    Before and after BlogHer, Cagey and I spent some time in the area doing other fun stuff.

    We flew into San Jose separately on Friday afternoon and met up at the airport.  It was past our lunchtime, so as soon as we procured a rental car, we headed into town and stopped at the first place that caught our eye:  Flames.  To our Midwestern eyes, it looked like the quintessential California-style restaurant.  The food was quite tasty, too.  I wish I’d been hungry enough for one of their beautiful desserts.

    We puzzled over our maps to figure out the location of our next destination, the Winchester Mystery House.  It was practically next door.  Heh.

    We got tickets for both the house and behind-the-scenes tours and spent the next couple of hours walking through the house and grounds.  I took lots of pictures.  If you don’t know the story behind the house, it’s here.

    As we made our leisurely way through the second part of the tour, we realized we were going to be late to the Friday night BlogHer dinner, which both of us thought started at 7.  Still, we wanted to get our hotel room first, so we checked into the Westin next door to the TechMart, freshened up a little, and headed to Alviso to catch the tail-end of the dinner.  Well, it turned out the dinner was really at 6, so when we got there at 8:15, it was all over but the cleanup.  We went down the block to Maria Elena’s and had dinner there by ourselves.

    Tomorrow:  How to kill time in San Jose on a Sunday morning.

  • Average Jane’s Wonderful Weekend

    I know, I know.  What kind of blogger goes to a blogging conference and then doesn’t post about it until almost two days later?  The answer:  a jet-lagged blogger who didn’t get home until after midnight last night, then overslept and was almost late to work.

    What can I say about BlogHer?  It exceeded all my expectations.  I finally met Yvonne, Toby, Amy, Elisa, Jory and Susannah – all of whose blogs I read daily.  I bought a "Writing well is the best revenge" shirt from Mrs. Kennedy, which distracted me from introducing myself to finslippy, darn it.  I met lots of other bloggers, too – they’re all in the BlogHer blogroll to the left and I’ll try to link to more specific people I met within a later post.

    I attended mainly business-oriented sessions:  Advanced Tools, Blogging for Business and $$ and Sense.  I also treated myself to the How to Get Naked session and went to the early breakout session on Identity Blogging (which is the kind of blogging I do, but I didn’t know a good term for it until now).  Every session was great, but I wish I’d been able to catch some of the other ones that were held at the same time, particularly the Audio- and Videoblogging session. 

    I meant to participate more actively in various sessions, but I didn’t end up saying anything until I got to $$ and Sense and spoke a little about a character blog I wrote for a client last year.  I made up for it during breaks, lunch and the cocktail reception afterwards, though.

    I’m SO glad I went and I can’t wait to read through the blogroll further now that I have faces to go with more of the names.  Tomorrow I’ll discuss my BlogHer experience a little bit more and also talk about some of the other things I did in San Jose this weekend.  (If I’m really on the ball I’ll get my photos uploaded to Flickr, too.) 

    Thanks again to everyone who helped make my weekend so much fun, particularly Cagey, who was a much better traveling companion than she thinks she was.

  • Get to Know Average Jane!

    I have a lot of stuff to do this morning before I leave for BlogHer, so I’m going to be a little lame and lean on a meme.  Feel free to carry it through to your own blog today if you’re feeling equally uninspired!

    All About Jane

    1. What time did you get up this morning? 6:30

    2.  What was the last movie you saw?  The Fantastic Four

    3. What is your favorite TV show?  For the summer, it’d be a tie between "Veronica Mars" and "30 Days"

    4. What do you usually have for breakfast? A Luna bar and a cup of green tea with jasmine

    5. What is your middle name? Alissa

    6. Favorite cuisine?  I have a soft spot for barbecue.

    8. What is your favorite chip flavor?  I like a plain, restaurant-style tortilla chip.

    9. What is your favorite CD at the moment?  I don’t have one right now.  My most recent favorite was the Scissor Sisters CD, which I played incessantly until I got a little tired of it.

    10. What kind of car do you drive?  Honda Insight

    11. Favorite sandwich?  Corned beef, sauerkraut, horseradish and swiss on marbled rye.

    12. What characteristic do you despise?  Feigned helplessness

    13. Favorite item of clothes?  My "Inappropriate" t-shirt


    14. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go?      I’d like to go somewhere to see the remains of ancient civilizations:  Mexico, Greece, Egypt, etc.

    15. What color is your bathroom?  It is so unspeakable, we shall not linger on this question.

    16. Favorite brand of clothing?  Are you kidding?   
    I’m lucky to dress myself at all.  Well, I do like American Apparel t-shirts and Lee One True Fit jeans.

    17. Where would you retire to?  I’m not holding my breath that I’ll ever be able to retire.

    19. Favorite sport to watch?  I’m not a big sports fan, but I can appreciate the occasional football game.

    20. Goal you have for yourself?  Keep going…

    21. When is your birthday?  July 7th

    22. When is your anniversary?  December 9th

    23. Are you a morning person or a night person?  These days I’m a morning person. 


    24. What is your shoe size?      9

    25. Pets?  Four geriatric cats

    26. Any new and exciting news you would like to share?   Not so much.  Ask me again after this weekend!

    27. What did you want to be when you were little?   A vet or an archaeologist.

    28. What are you today?  A copywriter (with cats, who subscribes to Archaeology magazine).

    29. What is your favorite candy?   Truffes from Andre’s.  My sister bought me a box of them for my birthday and I’m savoring each one.

    30. What is your favorite flower?  I like really fragrant peonies.

  • Average Jane Needs Some Exercise

    I knew that July would be a bad diet and exercise month for me.  Now it’s becoming clear that my excessive caloric intake and insufficiently active lifestyle are catching up with me.  Here are a few of the signs:

    • The armholes of the sleeveless dress I wore yesterday felt as though they were going to saw my arms off by the end of the day.  I don’t think the dress is at fault here.
    • I wore a pair of capri pants last week that I distinctly remember having to safety-pin at one time because the waist was too loose.  Now they’re uncomfortably snug and the pockets stick out funny.
    • I keep telling myself that wearing a belt will help disguise my pudginess above the waist of my pants, but my mirror-editing abilities aren’t powerful enough to allow me to believe it.

    It doesn’t help that I spent last week working with almost 200 extremely fit people.  "Look, here’s the out-of-shape girl, gasping for breath after her trip up the stairs with your class paperwork!"  Not cool.

    I don’t think I can afford to go back to the expensive yoga classes anytime soon, but my plan is to hit our perfectly good treadmill several days a week, and get in some push-ups, sit-ups, and other exercises that are easy to do at home.  Exercise opportunities are everywhere – I just need to START DOING IT.  After BlogHer, of course…

  • Average Jane’s Cult Classic Faves

    About a month ago, a friend of mine sent around an e-mail asking people to list their favorite cult classic movies.  I added my two cents after a lot of responses had already come back, and I deliberately avoided choosing ones that other people had mentioned.  Here was my list:

    Yesterday I found out why he was asking – he’s put together a discussion forum on this very topic:  CultMovieForum.com.  There’s not a lot of activity yet, but feel free to sign up and rhapsodize about your favorite non-mainstream classics.  I have a feeling that the "Movies that should be on here, but aren’t" discussion might get the most play for a while!

  • Average Jane Reads Harry Potter

    I finally finished "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" on Sunday and passed it along to my sister.  All I can say is that it’s going to make a very scary movie.  I can hardly wait for the last book!

    After I sniffled through the last part of the book, I decided I needed to re-read "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."  As I read through "Half-Blood Prince," it was obvious that I’d forgotten a lot of details from the previous two books.  That’s not too surprising considering that I’m sure I gulped them down as soon as they arrived and then put them on the shelf until now.

    I find it odd that the articles about each new Harry Potter book or movie always center on kids’ reactions and usually mention adults’ love of the stories as an afterthought. 

    On the weekend of July 16th when the latest book came out, one of my friends sent her one-year-old and her husband to her parents’ house for the weekend so she could read in peace.  Another agreed to a quick get-together early in the day, but only because his partner was home to receive the book when it was delivered.  My dad picked up a copy for my stepmother at a grocery store at 3:00 a.m. on the 16th and by the time I talked to her on Sunday, she was already starting her second reading.  Even my husband, who never reads anything but technical manuals and the occasional magazine, will make time to listen to Harry Potter books on tape (these days, as podcasts).

    All I can think is:  what will we all do after the last book and movie come out?

  • Average Jane vs. the Heat

    Words can barely express how tired I am of dealing with 100-degree heat every day.  My clean laundry is dwindling alarmingly because I have to change my clothes between day and evening activities.  No matter how I style my hair in the morning, it turns all wavy and frizzy within seconds.

    My little car does its best trying to provide air conditioning when it’s moving, but it gives up when it’s stopped.  Thus, every stoplight seems interminable.

    I’ve been watering my impatiens every morning, but they’re still turning into little wizened, blossom-free stubs.  My yard is so dry that even the weeds are shriveled (except for the crabgrass – that stuff is bulletproof).

    I haven’t lain in my hammock, played a game of frisbee or gone for a walk in weeks. 

    One ray of hope:  the long-term forecast for Santa Clara, California, where I’ll be attending BlogHer this weekend, says they’ll have a high of 85 degrees on Friday.  I just hope it’s true.  The last time I was in the San Francisco area, they had their biggest heat wave in living memory and we were miserably hot the whole time.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

  • Average Jane Checks In

    As the weeklong seminar progresses, here are some random facts, figures and lessons learned so far:

    • Number of cans of Red Bull it takes to cancel out two pints of beer:  1
    • Shocking cost to fill up a Jeep Grand Cherokee with gasoline:  $45
    • Number of miles Jeep can go on $45:  approximately 280
    • Number of miles my Honda Insight can go on $45:  approximately 1,000
    • Number of days of 100-degree Fahrenheit weather I managed to handle driving around in a Jeep with no air conditioning:  2.5
    • Number of pages of the latest Harry Potter book I have read since it arrived on Saturday:  408
    • Number of really bad curse words spoken by me this morning before I had my first cup of coffee: 15+
    • Number of those words directed at cats:  10+
    • Number of times I have fallen asleep briefly in the middle of the day this week:  1

    Just three more days of the seminar to go (counting today).  After that, I’ll be back to my regular life and perhaps I’ll even have some things of general interest to talk about.  I’m sure you’re all waiting with bated breath…

  • Average Jane Shuffles Paperwork

    Recordkeeping is by far the most difficult thing about coordinating a training seminar.  First, everyone must register for the seminar.  All of that goes out the window as soon as people start showing up because, inevitably, a good 5% or so of the attendees never sent in an application (and then another 2-3% who did register never show up, so it almost evens out).

    After that, we need a good set of completed paperwork for everyone who is there.  And we need everyone to sign in each day when they get to class.  Already we’re looking at three separate lists that never match up.  Still, I enter everyone into the computer, make educated guesses as to who’s actually in class, and print a certificate for each person figuring that the instructors can throw away any certificates they don’t need.

    For the first two days of the seminar, everyone is in the same big class.  For the next four days, there are as many as seven different classes on any given day, spread out over four separate locations.  You can imagine how much I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

    The good news is that we’re having a pizza and beer party tonight after class.  I may be tired and frantic, but at least there are a few perks!

  • Average Jane Hits the Ground Running

    This is the busiest week of my year.  I’m helping my dad coordinate his annual six-day training seminar (180+ attendees spread out over four locations), I’m keeping an eye on three separate projects at work even though I’m technically "on vacation," and I would love to read the new Harry Potter book, but I’ve only gotten through about 200 pages so far.

    I need our Jeep for transporting seminar attendees, but it’s been garaged for several months due its gas-guzzling ways.  As of yesterday morning it was packed with drums, had a low battery and a flat tire, smelled funky from being closed up, and had a burned-out headlight.  Yesterday afternoon my husband emptied out the drums and charged the battery (oh, and he licensed it last week because we’d let the tag lapse).  I discovered the flat tire at about 11:00 p.m. last night and filled it with our air compressor while I sprayed Lysol all over the carpet.  Today after the opening ceremonies for the seminar, I had the headlight replaced, had the oil changed and cleaned the insides of the windows.  All that’s left is to vacuum out the aged french fry crumbs and I’ll be good to go.

    It’s going to be a long, tiring week.  Wish me luck!