Being good at gratitude

Gratitude is one of the few spiritual/happiness practices that comes naturally to me, plus I love food and cooking, so naturally Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It feels appropriate for Thanksgiving to arrive now, because I’ve been in an almost constant state of gratitude lately. Recently I tweeted: I may be the luckiest girl in […]

Because cheese.

Since my Because Reasons post, I’ve been collecting examples. I’m sure a search would turn up more, but I’m enjoying collecting them in their native habitats. “well, okay, maybe not the dairy free part, because cheese” This was a sentence fragment from an online messageboard. “I had catastrophic coverage, but no maternity coverage (private insurance […]

What if your design rider is wrong?

Tonight at the 20s Bikeway SAC meeting, the PBOT Project Manager was giving the group some perspective and background. One thing he mentioned was the concept of the ‘design rider’. Surveys in Portland have shows that the population roughly breaks down into four categories: people who will ride anywhere, anytime (~1%); people who are enthusiastic […]

Because reasons.

I suddenly noticed recently that there’s an interesting construction developing right under my nose. In fact, I’ve used it, without thinking “This sounds like a new syntactical development.” (Like you do.) “I can’t because reasons.” “I want this because reasons.” This is actually two developments in one. The first one is “because of reasons”, from […]

How I am, and am not, a hipster

(For the purposes of this discussion, a hipster is someone who likes things and considers them good until/unless they become popular and/or mainstream, at which point they become ashamed of liking them or declare them “sold out”, “over”, etc.) I don’t think I’m a hipster most of the time. (No one does, right?) I tend […]

Breakfast sets the tone for the day

Recently, for about nine months, I think, I’ve been eating the same breakfast most days: 1/3 cup hot multigrain cereal with 1 large stalk (or 2 small stalks) finely chopped kale, topped with a fried egg over easy and sprinkled with pepper and nutritional yeast, accompanied by Harney & Sons Formosa Oolong tea. The cereal […]

The kinds of conversations on the Internet that recur and recur and never end

How people arrange their financial accounts with their significant other. What kind of car people drive and why they like it or hate it. What personality type people are in some system, and whether that system rocks/sucks/is scientifically valid/is total bullshit. [Added 9/22] What kind of houseware people own, or wish they owned, or have […]

So you got the cURL error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol

Yeah, a lot of people do, apparently. However, if you’re a client (not the server administrator) and you’re pretty much positive that the server isn’t configured incorrectly, you don’t have a proxy server on your side, it’s not supposed to be plain HTTP….you might still be confused after you read all that stuff. I was […]

I hate everything about this menu.

Multnomah County Library (which I do love, sincerely) redesigned their website recently. The redesign was much-needed and a lot of things have improved, but this menu, I absolutely hate. They managed to pack so many wrong things into one little menu! The title is unecessarily long, strangely cased, and punctuated. The title has a drop […]