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I always have a difficult time with Valentine’s Day.  To say that I’m undemonstrative with my affections is a vast understatement, as I’m sure my husband would agree.  Still, I like to try to think of little ways to show that there’s a soft center beneath my hard candy shell.  Here are a couple of online ways I’ve found to do so:

• Via J-Walk, I discovered the Acme Heart-Maker.  It allows you to create a JPEG photo image of a candy conversation heart personalized with your brief message.  I sent one to my husband that said "I [heart symbol] [his name]" and he was touched enough to write a very loving e-mail in response.  Custom digital candy:  the perfect Valentine’s Day treat for your diabetic loved one.

• MateMinder is a free service (donations accepted) for couples billed as "Your way to nag without nagging."  You and your S.O. sign up together and each create a list of nice things you’d like the other person to do for you.  The site sends each of you an e-mail periodically (you decide how often you’d like to receive the reminders) that includes one randomly chosen favor from the other person’s list and the suggestion that you perform it before the next reminder arrives.  The hard part is finding time to sit down together and get started, but I like the randomness and element of surprise.

I hope you all have an enjoyable V-Day no matter what your romantic circumstances may be.  Remember, the leftover candy goes on sale tomorrow!

I don’t have much in the way of office toys these days, but I do have one that I enjoy a great deal.  It’s a classic, red plastic eggshell filled with pink Silly Putty.

For someone with a lot of nervous energy, Silly Putty is like chewing gum for your hands.  You can pull it, stretch and break it, or fold it over and snap off blunt little chunks.  You can roll it into a ball and bounce it or roll it into a rope and coil it into a cartoony snail.  It’s great for sculpting into all sorts of shapes, although it’s just soft enough that it’ll always smooth out and sink back down into a featureless lump eventually.

Several jobs ago, I remember giving a co-worker another office toy in a plastic egg:  Angel Snot.  It was softer and slimier than Silly Putty, but oddly cool to the touch, pearly white and fun to pour from hand to hand.  We all played with it until the novelty wore off and its owner put it back in its clear plastic egg and let it sit for a month or so.  That’s when things got disgusting.

Apparently the high water content of Angel Snot encouraged the growth of microorganisms from our hands once the substance was sealed inside its little container for a long time.  The next time we looked at the egg, the goop inside had turned a virulent chartreuse color.  We were afraid to open the egg lest we unleash a plague within the office, so we disposed of the Angel Snot, egg and all, as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, Silly Putty reveals no such tendencies toward hand-cootie husbandry.  I learned by going to Silly Putty U that it comes in other colors besides bubblegum pink.  There’s a glow-in-the-dark variety, one that changes colors with the heat of your hands, and several metallic hues.  Perhaps I should collect them all!

I don’t ordinarily do this, but I’m taking the day off from work tomorrow.  I’d agreed to attend a luncheon that threatened to take up a good portion of the afternoon, so it seemed reasonable to just take the whole day and run some weekday errands that I’ve been putting off.

So far tomorrow’s schedule looks like this:

1. Get an oil change
2. Find a Great Clips and get my bangs trimmed so people will stop mistaking me for the dead girl in the well from "The Ring."
3. Pick up the lady who invited me to the luncheon
4. Luncheon
5. Drop off my luncheon companion
6. Take my business and personal tax paperwork and leave it at my accountant’s office

I could also stand to work in an eye doctor’s appointment, because my eye is still bothering me.  Maybe that can wait until Saturday.

So that’s my big day tomorrow.  Woohoo!  The best part is that I can get up about an hour later than usual.  We’ll see if that actually happens…

Yesterday I learned a valuable lesson about carpooling in bad weather:  don’t do it.

I had a meeting scheduled yesterday afternoon some 60 blocks from my office.  It was snowing, yet the other attendee and I decided to ride together in my car.  We got to the other office without a hitch and accomplished a moderate amount of work over about an hour of meeting time. 

Then it was time to head back to our office.  My car had more than an inch of snow built up on it and it was clear that other drivers were starting to have difficulties maneuvering through the increasingly snow-covered streets.  Still, we had no choice but to head back so my associate could retrieve his car.

At first, I found some good side routes and managed to avoid a lot of traffic.  The Honda Insight was impressive as it chugged up snowy hills with a minimum of sliding.  Unfortunately, we eventually met up with many thousands of other motorists headed in our same general direction.

We were within about 15 blocks of the office when forward movement ground to a halt.  Many of the cars around us would begin to fishtail and slide every time they attempted to inch forward.  We tried to kill time by talking about work projects and listening to and mocking weather reports on the radio, but the whole adventure ceased to be any fun at all somewhere around the one-hour mark.

We finally made it back to our building a little less than two hours late for our next meeting.  Sigh.

Today I’ll be heading out into the snow again, but at least it isn’t actively snowing anymore.  One thing I do know:  if I have to leave the office by car, I’m going alone!

I’m thrilled to have been invited to participate in the 100bloggers project.  This post will serve as my contribution to the book and as a slightly early one-year Average Jane anniversary summary.

The Blog and I

I’ve always had a thing for the humorous essay. I may have been the only nine-year-old in the
world who wanted to grow up to be Erma Bombeck.

Sure, I enjoy fiction and informative non-fiction, but
there’s something about quirky true-life tales the length of a newspaper column
that really grabs me. Whether written by
Mark Twain or Dave Barry, a good comedic essay is a delightful treat.

I once thought I might someday become a newspaper columnist,
but my career path veered away from journalism shortly after college and hasn’t
made it back (so far).

Still, I’m a spontaneous written communicator. When I raised a tank of Sea-Monkeys on my
desk several years ago, I kept my friends informed of the little crustaceans’
progress via weekly e-mails. By the time
I finally flushed the last Sea-Monkey corpses down the toilet my "subscription
list" had increased by several dozen people, some of whom I didn’t even know.

I’d had it in the back of my mind for quite some time to
start a blog called "Average Jane."  I
knew I wanted to post every weekday and that the post titles would be written
in the third person. The one thing I didn’t
know was how to handle the technical aspects, and that delayed the launch by a
couple of years.

Fortunately, I ended up maintaining a Typepad blog at work
and it didn’t take me long to figure out how to start one of my own. The hardest part was creating a design. I already had the doodle of myself drawn by a
co-worker back in the early ’90s when I was skinnier and had a big perm. I reversed the image in Photoshop and, after
experimenting with adding pastel colors, eventually went with black and white.

I began by posting the Sea-Monkey Journals (which still
bring in a lot of Google traffic) and took off from there. I’ve posted almost every weekday since,
except when I’ve been really sick, out of town, or so frazzled by work that I
have nothing to say.

Average Jane is a decidedly personal blog, but I’ve taken
care not to over-share. I don’t specify
where I live, give my name or the names of my friends, or discuss my work. If you agree with the quote (by either Eleanor Roosevelt or Admiral Hyman Rickover, depending upon which source you consult), "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds
discuss events, small minds discuss people," then you’ll find that I fall
neatly into the "average" category for most of my posts. What a coincidence!

I’ve never made a
list of the blog content rules I set for myself, but I base them largely on the
way I’d behave socially. Everything you
read on Average Jane really happened, pretty much as described. Naturally, since I’m the writer I make myself
sound nicer and more even-tempered than I really am. Anyone who knows me can confirm that Average
Jane reflects my personality pretty accurately, though.

I’m not perfect about
following my own rules. For example I
break my "Jean Teasdale Rule" (no talking about cats) fairly often simply
because I have four cats and sometimes they’re the most interesting thing I
have to talk about. When you’ve
committed yourself to daily posting, there are times when you have to take any subject
matter you can get.

Writing is only the
beginning of the blogging experience. What makes blogging truly a new medium and more than just a journal or
column is the interaction that comes from the readers.

Prompting comments from readers is a science in and of
itself – one that I can’t say I’ve mastered yet. Sometimes I’ll write an entry that seems to
beg for comments, only to be greeted with the blog equivalent of crickets
chirping on a quiet evening: zero
comments. Other posts will garner a huge
number of comments and bring out lurkers whose names I’ve never seen
before.
I’ve "met" interesting people from all over the world via
the comments they’ve left and the kind words and links they’ve put on their own
blogs. I’ve also discovered that more
friends, co-workers and friends of friends read Average Jane than I would
have expected. I’m always surprised and
pleased to have a new reader, no matter how he or she learned about my blog.

I use my "Other Blogs I Like" list as a source of daily
entertainment. I also keep a long list
of business blogs bookmarked for regular perusal. Many of them are on the 100bloggers list, so
I feel especially honored that my non-business blog will be included.

Considering that blogging and blog reading are such rich and
entertaining experiences, I don’t imagine that the phenomenon will peak anytime
soon. I have lots of friends who don’t
read my blogs and don’t really understand what a blog is, but I have quite a
few other friends who have begun their own blogs in the past year.

For the foreseeable future, I expect to continue Average
Jane and another blog I have that’s focused on the amenities of the city where
I live. I’ll also keep plugging blogs as
a business communication and marketing tool for my clients. I’d eventually like to jump into the business
blogs arena with my two cents, but I need to give it a little more thought
first. In the meantime, I’ll keep commenting
on other business blogs.

Average Jane has been a wonderful exercise to help me find
my voice as a writer and I have every reason to expect that it will lead me to
opportunities that I would never have found before blogs came about.  The blogosphere thrives on ideas,
personalities, interactions and shared experiences. Who wouldn’t want more of that?

I had to wear my glasses all day on Sunday because Scott Baio gave me pinkeye.  Not really, of course, but ever since the first episode of "South Park" wherein Cartman was abducted by aliens and Scott Baio gave him pinkeye, everyone in my family has blamed their subsequent cases of conjunctivitis on Scott Baio. 

It reminds me of my grandparents’ favorite pop culture reference, "…ever since Don Ameche invented the telephone."  Everyone of my grandparents’ generation knew that Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell in a popular 1939 movie.  My generation only knows of Don Ameche from the movie "Cocoon."  Anyone much younger than I am has probably never heard of him.

I can imagine myself in the nursing home with one red eye, jokingly cursing Scott Baio for giving me pinkeye as the young nurses shake their heads uncomprehendingly and make a note to increase my meds to quell the hallucinations.

As I was driving home from a shopping trip yesterday evening, I passed a streetlight just as it blinked out.  It resurrected a weird little back-of-my-mind thought that always crops up when that happens:  "The spies are signaling my approach."

It’s funny how the human mind tries to find meaning in everything that happens, no matter how implausible the resulting explanation might be.  It’s the same kind of thinking that leads people to talk – only half-jokingly – about gremlins stealing their car keys and hiding them or their cat batting at the ghost in the corner.

I remember the first time I took an airplane trip by myself, when I was about nine.  I was so worried about doing something scary and dangerous to the plane that I was afraid to press the button that made the seat recline.  Even a child understands that a plane manufacturer wouldn’t really put a button on a passenger seat that makes the cabin suddenly depressurize, but when you’re in a new situation, it seems best to just play things safe.

So what quirky little notions do you have that you don’t share lest your nearest and dearest question your sanity?  I’m willing to bet everyone has at least one or two.

If there’s one thing I can say about my husband, it’s that he’s generous to a fault.  He’s also incapable of waiting until the day of a special event to present a gift he’s purchased.  Thus, I received my Valentine’s Day gift when I got home from work yesterday.

It was a good ‘un, though:  an iPod Shuffle.  He’d even charged it and loaded in several hours’ worth of songs.  I love it!

First of all, it’s just as tiny as it looks in the photos – about the size of a pack of gum.  There’s a cap at one end that covers the USB interface, and you can take it off to hook the device to a similar cap attached to a lanyard that you wear around your neck.

It comes with okay headphones, but I’ll probably mainly use my Shure earbuds that I bought to use as monitors for band practice.  The only drawback of the Shures is that they block all outside sound, so I’ll have to keep an eye out for people standing in front of me and moving their lips while I’m rockin’ out.

The latest generation of cool, inexpensive Apple products is making me seriously consider going back to Mac for my home computing.  Considering that I used to manage to do desktop publishing on my old Mac SE-30 with a 25MB hard drive, I think the new Mac Mini ought to be more than adequate for my mainly web-based work with the occasional QuarkXpress project on the side.

We’re already a combined PC-and-Mac household.  I’m using an iBook with a wireless network connection in my living room right now.  Maybe if I get a tax refund this year instead of owing money the way I ordinarily do, I can look into reMac-ing myself.

Here’s my more immediate dilemma:  what should I get my husband for Valentine’s Day in response to his thoughtful and generous gift?  I’ll take all the ideas I can get.

In the 30-ahem years I’ve been alive, I’ve learned a number of things through experience.  As a public service, I’m going to share a few of them with you today:

• There’s no such thing as a sale price for a pair of glasses.  Whether the offer states buy one, get one free, free frame with the purchase of lenses, all pairs half price,  etc., a pair of glasses is going to cost $200-$300.  There’s no getting around it.
• My mother was right when she made me take typing class in high school.  I can still type 88 wpm, even though it’s not the sort of thing I put on my resume these days.  It sure speeds up blogging, e-mailing and IMing, though.  And I RULE at Typer Shark.
• High thread-count sheets are worth the extra money.  It took me decades to find out firsthand what everyone had been going on about all that time, but once I experienced sheets that didn’t exfoliate me in my sleep, I was hooked.  You don’t have to be like Jessica Simpson and spend $2,500 on sheets.  Target has 400 thread count sets for less than $80, if you catch them on sale.
• Salon shampoos and conditioners are NOT worth the extra money.  After literally pouring hundreds of dollars down the drain over the years in the form of expensive salon hair products, I’ve finally wised up.  I wash my hair with the shampoo that our water softener company gave us when we had our water softener installed and I condition with Infusium-23 from the drugstore.  Guess what?  It makes absolutely no difference at all – and I have about three gallons of surplus shampoo in the basement when the bottle runs low.
• Washing your face every night makes your skin look a lot better.  I know, I know.  Seventeen magazine should have taught me that when I was twelve.  Somehow it failed to sink in until convenient, pre-moistened, cucumber-scented exfoliating cloths appeared on the market.  I’m not saying I’ve started getting carded at the liquor store, but it certainly makes my skin look fresher.

Now it’s your turn.  What have you learned from experience?  Was it something you’d heard before but didn’t believe until you found out for yourself?  Was it something new that will change all our lives?  Let’s hear it!