Frolic And Detour

So how are you?

I know. I’ve been away for one million zillion years, as often happens, and some of you actually went to other people’s blogs or TWoP to find out if I was all right after the 35W bridge collapse, which was very sweet and very generous of you, considering that I’d deserve it if you’d forgotten all about me.

The thing is, by the time the bridge collapse happened, I didn’t actually live in Minnesota anymore. Well…I don’t know if that’s right. I was sort of without an address at that particular moment, because I was in transit from Minnesota to my new home in Brooklyn, where I am sitting as I write this.

I am not a lawyer anymore. I have not been a lawyer since the end of March. As most of you know, NBC Universal/Bravo/The Sheinhardt Wig Company bought TWoP this spring, and one of the delightful consequences of some of the shifting around that ensued is that I landed a job as an full-time writer/editor there, at which point I left the legal profession so quickly that there was a me-shaped hole in the wall of my office when I was gone. As it turns out, being an editor at TWoP is now a job located in New York, so along with Tara and Dave and Joe, I began packing up my gear to relocate to my actual Favorite Place On Earth.

Joe and I quickly decided that sharing a place, at least for a while, was our ticket to affordable New York living, so we met up in Brooklyn in mid-July to look for an apartment. Here are the top five things I learned about New York apartment-hunting:

1. I am incredibly resentful of how much brokers get for, in many cases, standing there while you hand them a check.

2. Getting an apartment in New York when you don’t have a bank account there and are thus not equipped to obtain a bank check quickly and easily is enormously difficult. Like, ENORMOUSLY difficult. Like, you almost can’t do it.

3. If you are used to typical apartment layouts in non-crowded cities, you will get the tee-hees occasionally looking at the tortured floor plans that have been employed to, in some cases, make medium-sized one-bedrooms into small two-bedrooms.

4. Rent with short people. Renting with tall people requires you to turn down perfectly good apartments just because the sloped ceilings only allow tall people to walk a foot into the bedrooms before they hit their heads. Whatever, Joe.

5. You know what you don’t want to do? Lose your wallet.

Oh, yes. Yes, yes. After a long day of looking and chasing bank checks and assorted crapola, I went out for drinks with Joe and the Couch Baron, and when I got back to the hotel, I somehow managed to…lose my wallet, either in the taxi or getting out of the taxi. So I had to cancel my credit cards and my ATM/check card, meaning I was in New York with no cash, no ATM card, no credit cards…oh, and no driver’s license. You know what’s not so easy? Renting an apartment without ID. Fortunately, I had one of the few genius ideas I had on the entire trip, which was that NBC HR had a copy of my driver’s license that they’d taken during my initial employment stuff (I worked for them from home beginning in early April), and they were able to provide that, and that let us get the rental done. The place is cute, small, located at the edge of an awesome neighborhood, and equipped with a deck, which is a pretty damn nice feature for a New York apartment.

And then I got back to Minnesota, and the crush of work to do before the move was on. I sold my car, which was surprisingly jarring. That’s been my car for ten years, almost. I’ve taken it to Missouri and New York and Madison (and Madison and Madison and Madison) and through the Starbucks drive-through about four million times. When they drove of with my car, I kept thinking…my car! They took my car! Of course, I had their wad of cash, which eased the pain a little, but…they took my car.

Of course, the other big task was getting rid of as much stuff as possible, because you know what isn’t a good idea in a small, shared two-bedroom apartment? Bringing all your old crap that you just can’t figure out how to get rid of. I got rid of a ton of stuff on Freecycle — gave my outdated TV to a lady who wanted it for her daughter, gave my dinette set to a local writer/editor, gave my table lamps away, gave my old desktop computer away, gave my old bed away. (There will be a new bed.) Gave the books I didn’t really, really want to the used bookstore (which takes everything and recycles/donates what it can’t resell, God bless them). Had a ton of old electronics taken off my hands by the local recycler. In fact, I paid $40 for that privilege, which was a good abject lesson in not accumulating crap I don’t know for sure I’m going to enjoy and use.

I hired movers, but I still knew I was going to wind up driving myself out here, because I didn’t want to wait for the movers with nothing to my name except what I could check and take on a plane. So I resigned myself to driving, which: ugh. Fortunately, my mom decided to road-trip out here with me so she could keep me company on the drive and see where I was going to be living. I think it’s easier for her to have a picture in her head that isn’t Generic New York, because even though she really likes New York, her head would build something not nearly as charming as my actual neighborhood if left to its own devices.

We were in our hotel room on the second night of the trip — in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania — when I looked at Metafilter and saw a post that said, “The 35W bridge over the Mississippi river in Minneapolis has collapsed.” And I said, “Oh my God, Mom.” I read the item to her, and we kind of both sat there for a minute and then turned on CNN. “By the U,” I added. And, I thought to myself, too close (not really close at all, but too close anyway) to M. Giant and Trash’s neighborhood. After we called my dad — who would have no reason to be on that bridge at all, but…still), I wrote to Trash immediately, and told her to drop me a note when she had a chance. She got back to me almost immediately. I wrote to my wonderful old pal Snowmobile Boy, with whom I had managed to squeeze in a visit before I left. He got back to me, too. His wife took that bridge twice a day, but she wasn’t there at the time. It’s hard to explain how weird it is to see a usually-ignored city on CNN all day. “That’s 35W,” I kept thinking to myself. I didn’t personally use that bridge much, but it’s not far from my doctor’s office, and I certainly took 35W to within a couple of miles of it every time I came to Minneapolis. It’s just crazy. It’s not like it’s some obscure location…it’s a commuting bridge. It’s where everyone drives to get to work or whatever. It was…crazy.

The next day, it was time to drive into the city. I think Mom and I had both built this up in our minds to the point where we both just dreaded the actual, physical drive into town. Although Yahoo! Maps and Mapquest were sending us via the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a friend of my mom’s who lives in Brooklyn recommended, based on my actual location, that we stay on Canal Street after the Holland Tunnel and then take the Manhattan Bridge. The most interesting incident of the morning was that for the very first time, when we were maybe an hour from the city, my mom — who had been SO good for about 1150 miles of me driving on interstates — made a couple of comments about the speed and precise positioning of the car, at which point I said, “YOU want to drive?” Once. That only happened once, on the entire trip. We did very well, all things considered.

Okay, so…Canal Street was pretty much bazoo. You have to keep in mind that we were in an SUV, which is not the car I normally drive, so it felt kind of clumsy anyway, and now I was trying to squash it between delivery trucks and taxis, and whatever you’ve heard about driving in Manhattan, it’s…true. But then we got over the bridge, and it was…less terrifying, although EVERYTHING was one-way going the opposite direction from what we wanted, and yes, those two streets intersect, but you can’t actually turn from this street onto that street, and WOW, that guy almost hit me, and so forth. I was really happy that the car had Minnesota plates, because sometimes I’m happy to announce my unfamiliarity with my surroundings in the hope that I will be pitied.

I really, really like the apartment, even though I won’t have furniture for another couple of days. We have an Aerobed and an air mattress, and we’re getting by all right. There’s no A/C here (yet?), so of course, we arrived during an oppressive heat wave. Surprisingly, our ability to get air to circulate, along with an impressive collection of electric fans, have kept us pretty comfortable. At CVS, we found the fold-up canvas chairs — like the ones my sister takes with her to watch my nephews play baseball — and one of them even has a footrest, like a recliner. They’re very comfortable. And the cable guy came to do the cable and the internet, right on time (and, of course, even before that, there was wireless available, because…that’s kind of how it goes).

Of course, in order to get the cable hooked up, I had to buy the TVs. My old one had seen better days (which is why I gave it away before I left), and Joe wanted a new one for his bedroom and already had the one we’d be using once he gets here in late August, so I was in charge of buying two TVs, which would eventually be in the two bedrooms. This meant taking the SUV (which we were keeping for a few days until Mom left to fly home) to Best Buy. I could tell you about our harrowing trip to Best Buy, but I will just say this much: if the ramp onto the freeway is hosed, it is possible to get a long, long way in Brooklyn on surface streets if you have a good navigator, but it will take ten years off your life. We got the TVs, though, so…yay.

I will try to be back soon with more awesome details, but for now, I am in love with the little cafe around the corner, and I think Mom and I are going to a movie today just to relax ourselves a bit. It’s all kind of harrowing right now, with lots of worries and inability to find things and so forth.

OH! And a very weird thing happened. I think some excerpt from the book ran somewhere recently, and all of a sudden, I looked at the Amazon page and it was…#67. In ALL BOOKS. I kid you not. Normally, it’s like #100,000. I am not really kept in the loop anymore about anything involving that book (it’s a…long story, for which you can get a flavor by visiting “the book’s” MySpace page), but I am glad that, like, five people bought it in one day or something. Very strange. Very, very strange.

Anyway, I am here, and things are very different, and now I have jumped, and I have to see how it goes from here. More later.

I’ve just finished another session housesitting for my parents, which always brings up one interesting mystery.

My parents’ dog has three fears in life. The first is thunderstorms. Very understandable. There’s lightning, there’s a lot of loud noise, and because of the timing of summer storms in Minnesota, it’s usually dark outside. He doesn’t like the banging, and he doesn’t like going outside and getting wet, so he does tend to hide under the table. The second is fireworks. The neighbors have been setting off fireworks on and around the Fourth of July since he was a pup, and he has always hated it. He’s become more neurotic as he ages, and every year, it sends him into more severe fits of shaking. And, of course, hiding. He used to be afraid of the basement, to the point where you couldn’t drag his 80-pound body down there during a tornado warning if he didn’t want to go, but he spontaneously cured himself of that one day, for reasons still unknown to us. He sometimes hangs out down there when no one is home.

His third one is the weird one. The dog is absolutely freaking terrified of Grey’s Anatomy.

That show comes on, and the dog absolutely flips. He prefers to go outside and lie on the deck while it’s on, but that doesn’t always work when it’s ten below outside. Barring that, he will go through a routine where he alternates between hiding under tables, finding someone who is sitting in such a way that his or her face is accessible and breathing hot dog breath at him or her until he or she pays attention, and walking around whining. He hates that show. There are no other shows that do this to him, but he does it with incredible regularity.

We have hypothesized that between the doctors’ pagers and the machines used in hospital rooms, there’s just too much beeping for him to take. Other than that, the only thing I can think of is that he agrees with me about Ellen Pompeo.

I think what happens is that I always feel obligated to provide full updates once I let too much time go by, and then it’s officially overwhelming, because I can’t update you on four months of stuff at once. Suffice it to say there’s no big news since October as far as my own life. I have kept writing, kept working, kept seeing my family and my friends, and kept going to the damn gym. It’s been a contemplative time. My grandfather died just after New Year’s, a friend died in early February, and I continue to try to keep in mind that time is always short. And my Music Stylist won Chicken Bowl this year. Probably fair and square. I think the people at his new workplace (he has relocated) just aren’t made of stern enough stuff.

Probably, the most unexpected news is that I went to Hawaii in late January. Expat Mike, whom you know from his all-too-brief blogging period, is one of those people who enters sweepstakes. And usually, he’ll be the first to tell you that all he wins is crap. But he entered the Monster Energy Pipeline Pro Something Something Sweepstakes, and he won a six-day trip to Hawaii to watch their surfing competition. And, because we don’t get to see each other that often and I have the kind of job where I can sometimes finagle a few days off without a lot of notice, he invited me, and I went. This was the first time I’ve ever been in Hawaii, and I have to say, this is the way to do it. Direct flight from Minneapolis, meaning I didn’t have to put my feet in L.A., which is just how I like it. An ocean-view room on the top floor of the Hilton Hawaiian Village. An adorable silver-gray Mustang convertible, which we drove all over the North Shore and to one museum that was kind of a bust and to one restaurant with ridiculously good food. The room was so high (35th floor) that the birds are basically down, from where you are. When the birds feel ambitious, they hop onto the balcony, and then, if you have the sliding doors open (which you often do), they come walking into the room and make themselves at home. I took several pictures and some video of birds walking around our room. One of them got very confused by the mirrored closet doors and, I think, was moments away from falling in love with himself permanently.

The surfing itself was a little disappointing. We were there for the first few days that the competition was on, and aside from about a half-day of competition where the waves were barely good enough to work with, they wound up doing most of it after we left. (That’s how they do it - they have a window, and they pick the best days available.) But we got to see some, at least, and we got to enjoy the wonderful hospitality house, complete with free drinks and the most amazing view of the ocean I’ve ever seen. The house isn’t very big, but it’s probably worth about eleventeen jillion dollars because of the view alone.

Obviously, for me, the highlight was the weather. I got off the plane, and inside the airport, I said to Mike, “The inside of the airport smells like fresh flowers.” Remember, I haven’t seen a live, vibrant, green plant since about October, unless you count evergreens. Being there, where everything is explosively, aggressively green? Unbelievable. I discovered a previously unknown love of fresh raw tuna, had my first taste of Monster energy drink ever, and got seriously melancholy at Pearl Harbor. All in all, a great trip. And was it nice to be in 80-degree weather for a few days, right before we went into the annoying cold snap we’re experiencing now? Oh yes. It was.

Oh, and: owing to issues with poker and medical spam, I’m moderating comments, so don’t be surprised when it takes a few minutes for your comment to go up.

You will remember how Dave The Personal Trainer approached me over the summer while I was on the elliptical trainer, and you will remember that I didn’t do anything about it at the time. This message is being brought to you by my sore… everything, the result of the fact that finally, I got around to getting it going.

I am not working with Dave TPT, which is probably just as well, because Dave TPT would be distracting. I would conk my head with weights while staring. So it’s just as well that Dave TPT was not there when I showed up at the desk one day. Instead, at the desk, was… well, TPT. Different TPT. TPT was not sure whether he wanted to train me at first, because as we talked about what I was looking for from the experience, he quickly became concerned about a deep philosophical divide between us: I professed not to care that much as between the Browns and the Bengals. He immediately announced that he would not be training me, but would find me someone good. I asked him why he cared, and he said he was from Cincinnati. After I explained that I had relatives in Cincinnati, and after I was able to explain to him within a reasonable degree of certainty where in Cincinnati they lived, he agreed that perhaps it would work after all.

That was before my glorious vacation of early October, during which I visited my beautiful sister, increasingly awesome nephews, lovely pal Ames, and inimitable Music Stylist — now accompanied by his charming family, which finally got out from under the horrible strife of living in Wisconsin. Yuck. At any rate, TPT and I agreed that rather than skip a week and a half when I was just starting out, I’d just start after I got back. I got back on Sunday the 15th, and because the world tends to conspire to make me procrastinate even when I’m not trying, I immediately became deathly ill with a chest full of crackle paint and sinuses full of wet sand. This did not seem like a good way to start either, not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t make even a Bengals fan sick on purpose (just kidding!), so I had to cancel, and we reset for this past Sunday as opening day.

Here’s the thing about me and stuff like this: the most important thing is getting past the part where I feel like a complete wad. Seriously, you get me out there with my hair in a ponytail and my clumsiness blazing (although, in fairness, I was rocking my special-edition Glarkware shirt that says “Is This Because I’m A Recapper?” on the back), and I am in goddamn gym class all over again, and I can’t climb the rope, and you would think that maybe some of this would have left me, but none of it has. So the first thing I have to do is get used to the fact that if we’re going to do weight machines and whatnot, I’m going to hang out in the half of the gym with the Guys Who Go “RUH!” You know, those guys. They wear muscle shirts, and they wear little leather gloves, and with every move, they go, “RUH!” At least they’re thinking it. My half of the gym is the half where the people walking on treadmills and watching TV and playing their iPods hang out. That’s the mellow half. The half where it’s just distracted sweating. Hanging out with the GWGR is totally different. RUH! There aren’t as many of me over there as there are over by the treadmills. I instantly feel more… presumptuous. I trail TPT around very carefully, partly because I’ll get lost otherwise, but partly to lend myself legitimacy. “He’s making me do this,” I try to say to the GWGR via mental telepathy.

The first day was really not bad, with the exception of one thing, and for those of you who know what I’m talking about, you’ll instantly know what I’m talking about: GODDAMN BIG BALL. You know how those balance balls look kind of friendly and floaty, like you could cuddle up with one to listen to someone read you a story? Well, you can’t. Because they are made of evil. If you’ve ever seen the episode of The Office where Dwight is sitting on one and Jim stabs it with a pair of scissors? I now love that episode for an extra reason, which is that those things are not nice. TPT makes me sit down on it, then roll forward until my head and shoulders are on it and I’m flat like a plank out to my knees. Are you picturing this? Okay. Now, he wants me to lift up each leg in turn.

This sounds easy. It is not easy. It is designed to humiliate you, as he basically admitted. See, once you have nothing but your head and shoulders on the ball, moving your leg means moving your hips, which means falling off the ball. You wouldn’t think you could fall off a ball, but I assure you that you can. This is the soundtrack from me, doing this exercise: “Oops. Whoops. Oops. Oops. Whoops. Shit. Oh, sorry. Oops. Goddammit.” All I do is fall off. If falling off were the exercise, I would already be queen of it.

The rest of it? Not that bad. Acceptable, though very difficult. At the end, I wasn’t sore, exactly. I was just made of rubber. I went downstairs and discovered that changing for your shower is very hard when you can’t lift your arms over your head. I waited a couple of minutes.

That night, while I was over at M. Giant and Trash’s, Trash tried to convince me to drink, like, eight gallons of water before bed. “It will wash out all the… I don’t know… the thing? And the whatever? There’s a thing that makes you sore, and the water. Mm. Drink water! Shut up!” If you know Trash, you know that this is almost an exact transcription. I chose not to take her advice, because I think its only possible value is that it would have made me get out of bed five times overnight, which might have helped keep me from stiffening up, I admit.

And then, there was the being very sore. Not bad, not like I was injured. Just… sore. And as I explained to Tara, the only things that didn’t hurt were the things I care about not hurting: back, neck, knees. So I give TPT big props for that.

Today was round two. We started out with treadmill walking, which saves me a few minutes with the GWGR, but which also makes me… stand there while someone watches me walk on a treadmill, which is disconcerting. I feel like I should be entertaining him or something. I’d tell jokes, but… I don’t think so. We somehow got on the topic of him trying to help me keep from dropping weights on my head later, and we discussed what would happen if I did drop weights on my head and need to be taken to the hospital. We agreed that he would probably call me an ambulance, but he would definitely try to get himself another client for whatever remained of my hour.
The only bad development was that this was the day TPT learned that I will not be doing pull-ups. At least not at this time. I was a good trouper and I tried. But… no. Actually, more like “HA HA HA! No.”

For whatever reason, the machines were more crowded than they were on Sunday, even though it was Wednesday (crazy Minnesotans), so we did a bunch of other things, including walking lunges. What I “love” about walking lunges? It’s the closest you’re going to come to actually going up to every individual person at the gym, knocking on the side of his head, and saying, “Hi, would you like to stare at me?” Because “walking” means “walking.” Down the aisle. Of machines. I kept feeling like I should wave to everyone. I almost stepped on the head of a guy doing sit-ups. This was also the only thing during which I actually hurt myself. You may or may not know this, but you have this muscle halfway down the outside of your thigh that you use for getting out of the car. You aren’t even aware that you’re using it, but you are. You’ll only learn you have it if you ever harm it in any way, as I did, while doing walking lunges. Getting out of the car will immediately become substantially more challenging.
Also on today’s agenda: something that felt a lot like a field sobriety test. Stand on one foot, put the other foot forward… to the side… behind you. Do this for one minute. I told TPT that this would help if I were ever pulled over, which resulted in his telling me a very amusing story about proving to a friend that he wasn’t drunk by doing a row of back flips. This is why he’s a trainer, and I’m… a writer.

At the end, we attacked the thing on the side of my leg. The Getting Out Of The Car Muscle. Specifically, he taught me how to give it a massage (this had an official name starting with “self” and ending with “release,” which caused me to do my Beavis laugh, but only on the inside), which he told me would hurt like holy hell at first. Which — mission accomplished!

At any rate, I am still what I would describe as “fuck-all sore,” but mostly in a good way. Today wasn’t as much Arm Day as Sunday — it was more Leg Day, which is why instead of being unable to lift my arms over my head, I almost had my leg give out on the way down to the locker room. But other than the Getting Out Of The Car Muscle, it’s all going well. I am encouraged by the fact that TPT tells me what to do, but does not feel the need to be all “rah rah,” because I would have to punch him in the face if he did that. In fact, we have a growing sense of trust — a dude came strolling by while I was working out today, and he was clearly kind of watching and observing, and he slapped TPT on the back, and I was thinking, “QUIT STARING.” But it turned out that it was TPT’s boss. “So this would be the wrong time to scream for help,” I said. “No, that would be good. It would draw attention to us and make it clear that I’m a jovial trainer.”

So this week, my day job held a conference where they do a lot of presentations about the direction the department is taking, and what the strategic planning goals are… things like that. And it included breakout sessions in a variety of areas. During one of the time slots, I intended to go to a breakout session on handling on-the-job stress that I am told included a relaxation exercise that I probably would have found very enjoyable. Instead, however, I did what I often do and walked in the first door I came to, because I didn’t want to wander around like an idiot looking for the place I wanted to be. This breakout session turned out to be called “Workplace Attributes For The Future.”

Basically, it involved talking about the important qualities you bring to your job now, and how you will make use of those qualities in the future, as the nature of work changes and the department’s mission develops and so forth. We broke into small groups — as you inevitably do — and we were supposed to talk about how specific functions would change in the future. One of ours was “Problem Solving.” So as usual, no one is talking at first, and then a couple of people point out that they talk to co-workers to solve problems, and everyone is nodding, and this is when the same thing happens to me that always happens to me at a time like this, because I can’t help it.

I say: “Well, of course, problem-solving will be totally different, because we will have robots.”

Normal people think to themselves that they can’t think of anything intelligent, and they are therefore reduced to thinking about a future full of robots. It’s not a particularly innovative thought. It’s just that I inevitably actually say this kind of thing: “Well, robots.” Not only that, but of the five people in the group with me, four of them look at me like I’m a complete moron. The other guy — one guy — looks like he is smirking. And, of course, this guy is now the focus of the entire remainder of the session for me, because I am determined to drag him into my futuristic universe in which all of our jobs will be transformed, not by the evolution of online training or anything like, but by the advent of incredibly powerful, future-destroying robots. From this point forward, I do not say anything about robots to anyone else. Only to this guy. “Robots,” I mutter to him. “And space cars, and the fact that we will all be wearing uniforms.”

Yesterday, I sent a text to Jane Wiedlin’s Boyfriend complaining about the fact that I was stuck in the longest security line of all time at Dulles Airport. Which was true, but they opened several new lanes shortly thereafter, making it possible for me to make the plane. But at the time I first got in touch with him, I was distraught. “I am in the longest security line ever,” went the text.

JWB: I’m thinking I could make it longer if I send you exactly the right message at exactly the right time.

Me: You are adorable.

JWB: I’m serious. I know what it is.

Me: What, the message to send? I’m sure you do, troublemaker.

JWB: Is that a dare?

Me: I would never dare you on anything I do not actually want to see you do. I know how you are with “I did it just to say I did it.” I am through security, though

[Here, a lull occurs while I actually fly home.]

Me: Home!

JWB: “Did you remember to pack the bomb?”

Me: You had hours to think of it, though.

JWB: But that was what I actually had at the time.

Me: You say that NOW.

JWB: I could have said it then. and then where would you be? In jail, that’s where.

Me: You would visit me.

JWB: I would sell you out cheap.

Me: You would send me a cake with a nail file in it.

JWB: I would send [a scary person] to visit you.

Me: You would weep uncontrollably at my absence.

JWB: I would tell you to get your ass on Gmail [chat] and stop texting me.

Me: I would be waiting at the airport for my ride home, and I would tell you patience is a virtue, and to wait.

You can imagne how much more free time I would have if I started typing things like “b4″ and “l8r.”

Oh, thank you, Defamer, for this.

So this has been a very busy summer.

There was the book, of course. Oh, the book. Oh, the stories I could tell. Oh, the things my friends have heard 400 times. Oh, the book. But that’s not taking up too much time anymore, so I can’t really use that as an excuse for the dearth of posting.

I also took on the recapping of Big Brother, which… seriously, I know it’s only on three times a week, but it feels like that show is on constantly. Of course, it is on constantly, if you like to sit in front of your computer and watch the live feeds, which appeals to me slightly less than an amateur appendectomy, but for the people who like it, they really like it. I wound up not really liking anyone, except for Will, whom I only liked because he deflated all the other self-important maroons.

As I wrote about here, I had a delightful visit to Amy and the MS in July, just after spending a week with my sister and her awesome kids. If you’ve hung out here for a while, you’ve known Little A since he was tiny; can you believe he’s almost eight? EIGHT. Little B? He’s five. I am a hundred years old. We went to the Wisconsin Dells and hung out at a water park, which was sort of goofy, in that it’s the most unsettling kind of tourist epicenter, and I’m not used to padding around barefoot in public. I fell on a set of wet stairs and banged the heck out of my tailbone, but it didn’t stop me from enjoying the sight of Little A throwing himself into the water about 400 times in a row. I even kicked a little girl’s butt for him when she was hogging the rope course. Let Little A have a turn, you scamp!

I’ve also spent a lot of time housesitting for my parents this summer, which means a lot of bonding with their enormous dog. The best thing about him? His temperament. The worst thing about him? His crippling fear of thunderstorms, which often requires (I am totally not kidding) that you give him a tranquilizer if there’s thunder, unless you don’t mind not getting any sleep because an 80-pound dog is determined to jump up onto your bed and crawl on you until you wake up.

Just recently, of course, was the launch of the new site, along with the shift of this one from Movable Type to WordPress. I can’t really explain why the WordPress interface is so much easier for me; it just is. For one thing, every time you upgrade or fuss with MT, they make you touch code, which I’m sure is great for some people, but it’s not great for me. I prefer not to touch code. WordPress also has a very well developed library of plugins that allow for all kinds of functionality, and those are easy to install, too.

Baffling question of the summer: Can someone tell me why the Bravo site is so unbelievably bad, both in design and execution? They’re doing so many things so well these days, and they have some great ideas for content — Tim Gunn’s podcast is a weekly must for me — but I can’t abide having to navigate that site. It hurts my eyeballs, and it crashes constantly. You’re owned by NBC, you know? Invest in a server.

With any luck, I’ll have a couple of enjoyable things to announce shortly, including a couple of returns to the radio. I’m trying to return to regular posting now that my schedule has gotten a little more normal and the other site is up and running, so don’t go anywhere.

As you can see, we’re set up over here, but things still look wonky in places. I’m thrilled to have been able to keep the banner that Joelle designed for me so long ago, even though she’s way too busy and famous now to have overseen the move to WordPress. Stay tuned — things are going to be better soon.

We at F&D are taking some time over the Labor Day weekend to move from Movable Type to WordPress. Please pardon the dust during the move. We hope to be up and running as soon as possible.