I was talking the other day with some friends on the HubSpot UX team about how much we try to find new ways to listen to our users and then act on what we hear, and it got me thinking about how many more of our senses we rely on in our pursuit of good UX design at HubSpot.
It’s one of my favorite complaints to say that the village I grew up in on Cape Cod was utterly bereft of kids of my age. And it’s true, more or less. For most of my youth, there were maybe two or three kids who lived within a mile or so of my house who were roughly my age. Of course we all understand that the degree of forgiveness for what counts as “my age” when you’re young is very, very small. You’d have to be no more than one or two grades above or below me to qualify. Hey, I don’t make the rules.
I'll be speaking at INBOUND about how to refine your content strategy and strengthen your brand voice, based on what I learned in my glamorous past life as a romance novel editor. True story.
Folks on my team were sharing and discussing this recent article on Harvard Business Review this morning, which I thought was an excellent exploration of a topic near to my heart. My only real quibble is with the title, which instead of Run Meetings That Are Fair To Introverts, Women, and Remote Workers, should really be something more like "Run Meetings That Are Fair To Your Whole Team." Because when any voice is silenced, we all suffer.
Just the other day I was lamenting with a friend -- on his podcast, no less -- that the personal blog has all but disappeared. That there's just not so much slow, rambling storytelling online, at least not in that old bloggy way. I actually miss reading your long, aimless posts about how you felt when you woke up today. Or about what you had for lunch yesterday. Or about that thing you almost said to that boy when you were twelve, and how the thought of that day has haunted you ever since.
Speaking at INBOUND is pretty much the highlight of my year. It's probably pretty exciting for my neighbors as well, since in the weeks leading up to the conference I'll spend hours walking up and down our short little street by the river on Cape Cod, waving my arms and rehearsing my lines over and over and over again.
So if you're one of my neighbors and you'd like to see what all the fuss was about, or if you missed INBOUND this year, or just want to relive the glory of me standing in front of a room of 1000 people talking about writing like a human, not sounding like a jerk, and making the voice of your brand sound the way you want it to sound — then handing out chocolate chip cookies at the end — have I got the video for you.
It was an honor and a delight to appear on the Problogger podcast with Darren Rowse this week. Give it a listen for the top ten things you can start doing today to make your writing sound more human, honest, and kind.
Everyone these days wants their microcopy to bring the funny. To infuse some lighthearted joy into an otherwise tedious chore, spark a smile in the midst of the workaday world. It's what I love most about my job, as a matter of fact, bringing the funny to the software. But how to be funny without coming off flat? What if you strike the wrong tone? Fail to carry the joke off?
You guys, it's actually really pretty simple. What it all boils down to is You've got to be kind.
This was my first week back at work after a month-long paid sabbatical that my company has just started offering folks who have been with them for over five years. I started at HubSpot back in January 2010, so I was one of the first people to become eligible for such a glorious thing.
And glorious it certainly was.
Lately it occurs to me that I've been doing a heck of a lot of griping to myself that I didn't have enough running blogs to read -- not enough people are writing about running, dammit! -- and yet have been doing exactly zero writing about running myself.
Shortly after I graduated college, I had a meltdown. Nothing serious, just your usual sort of freakout. I responded to this event the way New Englanders have for generations: I sold what I owned and bought a one-way plane ticket to San Francisco.
From the latest edition of the Mount Holyoke College alumnae magazine, where I chatted a bit about how to establish a daily writing habit.
It’s been said that writing is easy; you just sit down at your typewriter and bleed. Sounds pretty untidy, fairly painful, and frankly more than a little unsanitary to me. But writing—whether you’re working on a novel or polishing an email to your boss—is an increasingly important skill in today’s hyperconnected world. We all need to write and write well.
A reader emailed me the other day, asking me if I'm still running or not. He'd just seen my talk from last summer's Inbound conference (the somewhat misleadingly titled How to be a Writing God), and I realized that now might be as good a time as any to give y'all an update on all of that. You know, one year later and whatnot.
I'm guest-blogging today over at You Can't Fake Sweat about what it's like to be a new-ish runner two years down the road, and what I miss about being a brand new runner like I was back then. Check it out.
When you use some delightful piece of software, is it yours, or does it belong to the company that built it? Okay. Obviously, in a strictly legal sense, software is intellectual property that "belongs" to its makers. But don't we talk about "my Google doc" and "my Excel spreadsheet" and "my Facebook wall?"
Sure we do. So it's a bit jarring when the interface reflects a totally different point of view.
One of the first things I find myself doing when I'm asked to edit someone else's work -- whether it's microcopy or blog posts or just about anything else -- is to add in a bunch of contractions.
You know what I mean. If the author wrote "you have," I'll change it to "you've." "Will not" becomes "won't."
We've been talking a lot at HubSpot lately about the importance of storytelling in our work. Last week, Laura Fitton published this delightful megapost of talks from last year's INBOUND conference that either focused on storytelling as a virtue or used great storytelling just to get a point across.
But how can storytelling help you write better microcopy?
John Zeratsky shared his five rules for writing great interface copy recently on Fast Company Design, and I was so happy to nod my vigorous agreement with almost everything he said. Because: Preach. But I just have to argue with one little thing.
Just one little thing! In every other way that post smelled like chocolate chip cookies, fresh and hot from the oven.
So a couple of years ago, I was working on a major deadline. I had a massive writing project that I needed to complete, and things at work and at home were just too frantic for me to clear up enough head space to get it done.
To top it all off, I had to travel the weekend before my project was due.
So I'm a big fan of coddled eggs. I eat them for breakfast all winter long, which means that I occasionally rhapsodize -- at length and out loud -- about how truly spectacular a thing coddled eggs are, which means that my friends can often be found walking around looking deeply confused when they're with me.
I get sentences and phrases stuck in my head the way some people do with songs. Either way, I think it's fair to call it an earworm.
And just like that 80's power ballad that won't leave you alone, sticky words and phrases can only be exorcised one way.
It happened sooner than I was expecting. The seedheads and weeds were overtaking the garden faster than the late summer wildflowers could climb up and over them to crowd them on out. And the days were rapidly cooling. And getting shorter.
It's fall. I don't care what the calendar says. And things are dying.
I was sixteen years old when my great aunt's house fell in love with me. Well, technically, fell on me. But I knew what it meant.
The timing was apt. Not because I was at some peculiarly ripe age for handsome old houses to start noticing me. I mean. Is there ever a wrong time for a house to choose you, and mark you as its own?
This is probably not a hypothetical question.
Here is what I remember.
I've been realizing more and more that when people ask me how I'm doing -- just in the course of everyday idle chitchat -- I have less and less of any real dramatic interest to report. I mean, at the risk of calling down every jinxy jinx in the universe upon mine unlucky head, let's be honest. Things are going pretty great around here.
My neighbor has a birch tree in her front yard, and it makes no sense at all.
Been doing an awful lot of gardening lately, followed by an awful lot of twilight wanders through the cool evening air. It's been a banner year for fireflies, and the sight of them flashing and darting amid the undergrowth never fails to make me clap my hands with delight.
Patience has never really been one of my virtues. I hate waiting. And I especially hate waiting for a gradual thing to come to pass.
It is hard to want to stay indoors and write when outside in my yard it is looking like this...
I've gone and written another one of my madcap historical essays over on Wonders & Marvels, this time ostensibly on the early American natural scientist Thomas Say and his trip down the Ohio River on the famous "Boatload of Knowledge" to found a utopian settlement with the best scientists of his generation.
Apparently, Say is most well-remembered these days for having a particularly handsome portrait in the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
And while I'm certainly the last person to dispute anyone's right to come at history with an eye toward its more aesthetically pleasing representatives, I'd actually suggest that Thomas Say's story has a fair bit more to recommend it than just a fine pair of eyes.
While Thomas Say's latter-day designation as a 19th century hottie may be what catches the eye, the man's actual career is fascinating enough in its own right. Already a successful and highly respected natural scientist by the age of 25, Say was a founding member of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He formed lasting friendships with many of the most respected and prolific scientists of the day, each of whom it seems can lay claim to being the "Father of American" this or that. Auspicious company, indeed.
And it was in some of this auspicious company that Say travelled to Indiana in 1826 on the delightfully named "Boatload of Knowledge," a gang of top scientists headed for the utopian community of New Harmony that was then in its heyday of attracting the best minds of the young republic.
The heyday didn't last long, as is so often the way with utopian societies. But Thomas met his future wife, Lucy Sistare, on the Boatload of Knowledge. Lucy was herself a gifted illustrator of the natural sciences, and would in fact go on to be the first woman elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences. Her own thoughts on her husband's relative attractiveness have not been recorded, though perhaps they can be reliably inferred.
The Boatload of Knowledge was actually a fascinating episode in history. I think it has all of the makings of a swashbuckling tale of adventure and romance. These wayfaring scientists were trapped in ice, threatened by attack, locked in endless nights of heated debate, and, in at least one instance, scared out of their daylights by the violence of a midwestern thunderstorm. In between adventures, they played whist.
Also, I've included a picture of Paul Tillich, jumping. Trust me, there's a connection.
Read A Boatload of Knowledge on Wonders & Marvels.
My monthly column is up at the history blog Wonders and Marvels. This time I'm nattering on in my usual way about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her thickheaded husband Louis. Excerpt below.
Last Friday, I took the day off from work and squired an out-of-town friend across town so that I could show her one of my absolutely favorite places in the whole world.
It is a place that requires suitable preparations, like a temple for which you must ritually cleanse, and so we approached it with all of the solemnity the occasion demanded.
We ate grilled cheese sandwiches, drank strong coffee, and shouted for an hour over the din of a noisy cafe until our throats were sore.
Then we washed our hands, checked our coats, and stalked silently up a long, glass corridor into the preserved, inexplicable, crazyass house of a bona fide 19th century whacko.
I speak, of course, of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The Gardner is just one of those places that I've always known my way around, always loved. She's like that mean old neighbor in the house on the hill. You whisper stories as you walk by in the day, run past her darkened windows at night, and call her ma'am when you see her in the store with your parents. It's a living, breathing house of hauntings. Everything in that place sighs with the melancholy of an old society dame whose friends have all already passed away, who can't stop telling stories of the old days, the old crowd, the things they once knew and got up to, when they were young and in charge.
It's awesome, in other words. Just... awesome.
I've never understood why people say that the Gardner Museum is just a stale remnant from a bygone age, like it's some sort of faded antimacassar on the back of a horsehair chair. To me, it is a never ending source of delight, a jumbled old mess of a place that offers, if nothing else, a steady stream of fresh insults to the established way of doing things.
She's like the Don Rickles of art museums. Only much less concerned about what you think.
Seriously, what's not to love about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum?
Let's start with Isabella herself. Fearless leader of society, insanely wealthy widow, shameless plunderer of Europe's artistic treasures. I mean, that's what insanely wealthy Americans did in the 19th century. They spent absurd amounts of time in Italy, competed with each other over first editions and Titians, and then brought them all back home to flaunt them.
Isabella, of course, took it all a step further. Perhaps that's what I so enjoy about her. I do have a weakness for taking a thing too far. Had you noticed?
She built this crazy house out on the edge of a swampy backwater of Boston, way out near where the Red Sox were busily making a name for themselves in their new ballpark down the road. She wanted it to look like one of the Italian villas she loved so much when she was abroad. And it might have done so, too, if she'd been able to keep her sticky little fingers out of the builders' business when they were constructing it.
Instead, she was every contractor's worst nightmare. An amateur with deep pockets, who needed to micromanage every least detail. She once stayed up all night pulling out the ceramic floor tiles her Italian laborers had spent the whole day painstakingly setting in place. Yanked them all out, because she didn't think they had quite captured the look she was going for. Got up on a ladder herself and mixed paints until the interior walls were just the right shade of salmon pink, just like she remembered from her own rented villa in Venice.
And of course her artistic vision for the rest of the place -- clobbering together little vignettes of her bits and pieces of artwork and architecture, assemblages that still cause art historians to yank out entire tufts of hair just looking at their woeful mismatchings and unapologetic odd bedfellows -- was famously quirky, to say the least.
But woe betide anyone who tried to impose their will on her domain while she was still alive. And of course she gets her way in death, too, as the terms of her will state that not a single hair can be moved within the confines of her crazy old treasure chest of a house. Everything has to remain exactly in the place where she left it, or the trustees have to sell off the contents and donate the proceeds to Harvard. (Whether or not the strikingly modern new addition violates or honors her will is a matter for some debate, but I'll leave that alone for now. Enough ink has already been spilled, and all that.)
Basically, Isabella didn't give a rat's ass what anyone else thought. She knew how she wanted things to be, and that's how she did them. She was in charge, right or wrong.
So no, there are no labels in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. No placards to tell you artist and title, what materials were used, or any of that stuffy old art historian nonsense. The lighting is atrocious. The curation is questionable. Acknowledged and breathtaking masterpieces of Western art hang shamelessly next to pasty watercolors by charismatic young artists whom she probably just had a sort of older lady crush on, and who sponged off her shamelessly in her later years.
But she was also good friends with some of the legitimately most incredible artists of her day. And she gave unforgettable, intimate concerts in her house out there on the fens, taking great pains to give her favorite struggling musicians a place to play -- and the undeniable power of her patronage.
She adored anything associated with the name Isabella. She wore white as a widow. She was a huge baseball fan.
I just love her. Although I seriously doubt that she would have had the time of day for me. And the modern incarnation of her hospitality is just as spiky and uncomfortable as she was -- the museum guards bark at you if you so much as think about taking a picture or texting a friend, the sunlight blinds you in some corners and is utterly absent in others, and you need a seeing eye dog to help you get through some of the twisty, dark corridors that connect the improbable series of galleries.
Spiky and hostile, generous and unpredictable, passionate and powerful. Crazy old Isabella.
Love her. So much.
So if you've read my About page, or if you know me at all in real life, you know that I have an actual, honest-to-goodness day job.
One of the benefits of living in a house that has been lived in by several generations of your family is that there are ghosts lurking around just about every corner.
I am the opposite of a packrat. I am a thrower out of things. This tendency has only been amplified now that I live in a tiny house by the sea.
Did I mention that I write a monthly column over at the Very Impressive History Blog Wonders and Marvels?
I was up in Boston for a little shindig at my old school the other day, and I neglected to notice until it was too late that this particular little shindig would be finishing up right in the middle of rush hour. On a Friday afternoon.
At the beginning of October, my friend Susan Scott invited me to join her on one of her frequent trips to Colonial Williamsburg. Always game for an unscheduled frolic through the past, I naturally agreed.
We ended our vacation by spending one long, glorious day and most of an enchanted evening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Curling up with some friends I met today in Tarrytown.
I'm off tomorrow for a long, uninterrupted week of meandering aimlessly around the Hudson River Valley on my annual Autumnal vacation.
When I was a kid, I used to play some epic games in the bathtub. You did too, don't try to deny it.
All those silly little storytelling games you made up while the water slowly cooled?
One game I remember playing in particular was the one in which I was a daredevil spy for the British Crown, and my codename was Lady Ada.
I thought at the time that I had totally made this name up, that this combination of letters and sounds simply hadn't existed until I had come along to devise it and claim it as my own.
Also, I thought it kicked all kinds of ass.
Imagine my surprise and amazement when, later in life, I discovered the awesomeness that is Ada Lovelace! While my high opinion of my own creative powers may have taken a blow, I consoled myself with the fact that my namesake was so undeniably kickass as to render the point moot.
Yeah, I was forever rendering points "moot" when I was a kid. I bet I was pretty freaking annoying, when it comes right down to it.
So Ada Lovelace, as you surely already know, was Lord Byron's only legitimate child. Born of his extremely misguided union with the unfortunate Anne Milbanke, a very serious-minded young woman who had high hopes of reforming the mad, bad, seriously dangerous Lord Byron.
Oh, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
"Reform" Byron. Honestly. That one never gets old. Excuse me while I wipe the tears of hilarity from mine eyes.
So anyway, the two mismatched turtle doves stayed together long enough to produce a child, who was born just before Anne decided Byron was well past redemption and that she was better off prosecuting him -- in excruciating detail -- for all of his admittedly beastly behavior.
Look, I know Byron was a jerk on an absolutely monumental scale. But honestly, Anne, could you not see that one coming? Just one teensy little bit?
No, I guess one never really does. Alas.
So Ada turned out to be a right sharp little nut, despite the unalloyed nuttiness of her forbears. In fact, her story is so phenomenal that I honestly think it can only best be told in a dramatic black and white webcomic format, by the altogether delightful 2D Goggles, AKA Sydney Padua.
Seriously. Click on the picture to read the comic. You will not be sorry.
So yesterday I was chatting with an MBA student at my old school about what kinds of books we like to read.
I grew up on the wrong side of town. Now, I realize that many of you sincerely doubt that there is such a thing as a "wrong side of town" on Cape Cod, but I can assure you that there is.
I made a little video for a colleague of mine who is getting married this weekend, and I'm not gonna lie. It makes me giggle. So much so that I figured, what the hell, I'll share it here, too.
I just watched The Last Station, a gorgeous movie about the last days of Tolstoy. Predictably, it has torn the heart right out of me.
The winds of Irene continue to blow hard this afternoon, and the forecast is for several more hours of tropical storm force winds to come. We've had remarkably little rain from this storm, since the track Irene followed brought the eye of the storm much further westward than had been originally expected. In fact, if you went by what the radar looked like, you'd think this storm was a non-event on Cape Cod.
When I was a kid, I loved exactly three TV shows. M*A*S*H, The Carol Burnett Show, and The Muppets.
Seriously, is everything that comes to my house with British postage on it awesome?
When I was a senior in high school, my adored English teacher took me to the Bread Loaf Young Writers' Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. I don't even really remember entering anything, or applying in any formal way. I suppose I must have, but I honestly don't remember that part at all.
This week at the Farm Stand, Jess was kind enough to bestow on me one dozen fresh eggs, which quite honestly made me quake with desire.
I've got a bright and sunny breakfast recipe for you that I'm going to spell out to you in excruciating detail in just a moment. It's just perfect for Sunday morning, which for me is the day after I pick up my fresh produce at Jess's Farm Stand and so everything is still bursting eagerly out of the refrigerator, yearning -- yearning I say -- to be eaten.
Folks, it's summertime on Cape Cod. And I'm going to be honest here: I much prefer fall. And winter. And yeah, okay, spring.
Ripped from the actual biography of a highly prominent 19th century American figure. Yes, one you have definitely heard of.
Well knock me down. Looks like I'm not the only one with a little fetish for a good looking man in a cravat.
I've spent a fair bit of time lately on this here blog showing you around the places I hang out, like my front yard, my favorite new cafe, and my favorite place to go for lonely walks along the shore.
It's become a tradition with me since I started working from home to end my day in the warmer months with a walk around the yard. Poking my nose into flowers' blooms. Checking on shoots who show signs of faltering. Cheering on buds whose time has not yet come.
I am a night owl. Everyone knows this about me. My preferred hours of top activity are somewhere between 10 pm and 5 am, which sort of explains my well documented need to sleep until noon on a regular basis.
I spend an awful lot of time in coffee shops. I work mostly from home, telecommuting to my job, which is based in Cambridge. And, as you know, I write romance novels in my spare time.
The women in my family have always been pretty hardcore bookworms. From my great grandmother on down, every single one of the females of the line has been known for staying up until all hours of the night, devouring books like they were goddamn candy.
The second half of our recent trip to the UK was spent in Bath. You may recall that we fell very much in love with Bath on our last, brief visit.
A long time ago (in internet years), when I was first discovering that there were other people online like me, who loved and wrote about period drama and the deeply satisfying 19th century literature much of it is based on, I stumbled across a site called The Egalitarian Bookworm, written by Sarah Seltzer, also known as @fellowette.
One of the things that influences me so strongly when I actually leave the house to watch a movie in the theater is the experience of being at the theatre itself. And I don't just mean the chatting, popcorn chewing, unclean masses with whom you are forced to share oxygen, either.
So here I am, just back from watching the new Jane Eyre.
Let's pause a moment to remember Beau Brummell, who died on this day in 1840.
On the second day of our trip, we walked all over London. As you may recall, the day began with an early-morning jaunt across the entire length of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park and back, and let me assure you, we were only just getting warmed up.
Welcome back! When we last saw our heroines, they were flat-out knackered and collapsed once more in their beds in the Regency Hotel in South Kensington, their bellies full of delicious Indian food.
Oh me oh my, but I seem to have returned at last from OMGLondon and OMGBath. Turns out, a week is a whole lot longer than four days when it comes to travel. At least, for me it is.
Just wanted to poke my head up for a moment to say hello and confirm that yes, I have returned safely from OMGLondon and OMGBath, and it was glorious. Hopefully, you maintained sporadic contact by following my occasional updates on Twitter and Facebook, but if not, then never fear, for the full review will be arriving shortly.
Well, my lovelies, we leave for London in just three short days, and let me tell you, we are all a-quiver with anticipation. We leave on the red eye Wednesday night, and arrive in Heathrow far too early on Thursday morning. After a few action-packed days in London, we move west and take up temporary residence in Bath.
I'm delighted to be a contributing writer to Erin Blakemore's Heroine Love month. My post is up. Leave a comment (on Erin's site, not mine) to enter to win a glorious Jane Eyre prize pack.
The final episode of the first season of Downton Abbey aired in the United States last night. Naturally, I was tuned in to the Twitter party of viewers on the East Coast, even though I had already watched the whole series on the DVD and knew all about the heartbreak that was to come.
It's a rare and special day today, as I've got the house to myself for most of the afternoon and evening. That means vast, uninterrupted acres of solitude and silence, which, let's be honest, are two of the most wonderful words in the English language.
March is fast approaching, you know, and while I am more than usually excited about March because I'll be heading back to London for OMGLondon2, this March I have something equally -- if not more -- exciting to talk about.
March is fast approaching, you know, and while I am more than usually excited about March because I'll be heading back to London for OMGLondon2, this March I have something equally -- if not more -- exciting to talk about.
Back in October, I went on a trip to Stowe, in Vermont. I bought some yarn from a very nice lady in a wee little yarn shop. She had spun and dyed the yarn herself, which is just the way I like it. I made some loooooong cabled mitts out of this yarn for Melissa. Then I gave them to her.
I am still writing a book, you know. In case you were wondering, I actually haven't given up yet. I write every day, without fail. Anne LaMott told me to treat it like a debt of honor, and that's what I do. Anne also said to commit to finishing a thing that you start. So I am.
I only have two things to say right now, and this is what they are:
Melissa and I were delighted to be featured in The Barnstable Enterprise last week, essentially spotlighting our intense interest in the works of the Bronte sisters. Which we all know perfectly well is just a polite way of saying "our undying obsession with Jane Eyre."
We all know how much I love to get mail from England. I mean, maybe not as much as Melissa enjoys getting mail from England. But seriously, that's a pretty tough act to follow.
Well, I survived my return to San Francisco. It was lovely weather (for me; I am a freak and like it when it is) all rainy and windy and chilly. All the adorable San Franciscans were all bundled up in their scarves and hats and boots and coats against the 55 degree weather, and I spent a lot of time wandering around the streets near the convention center, poking my head into shops and cafes whenever I wasn't, you know, at the actual conference.
I'll be boarding a plane in a few hours to San Francisco. My company is sending me to a week-long conference that regularly draws over 20,000 attendees. I'll be very busy, and it's tremendously exciting of course, but it does feel a bit strange to be going to a conference and not be presenting anything -- usually I'm involved in some form of public speaking or teaching, so I'm feeling a little at loose ends about it all.
I've become slightly obsessed with Amelia Long, AKA Lady Farnborough, in the course of writing this here little Regency romance novel of mine.
Here's the deal: a bunch of incredibly talented (and nice) modern quilters have joined forces to fight worldwide hunger, so please consider spending ten bucks (or more) to help out this excellent cause, or just to earn the chance to own one of the incredibly fine modern quilts that have been donated.
I'm participating in NaNoWriMo this month, as you can see by the nifty little wordcount widget over to the right. Keep an eye on that puppy if you're interested in watching my progress -- I hope to post some more details about the book and the experience as the month goes on, but right now I am flat-out knackered from a long day at work, followed by writing 1800 words of prose that will, god willing, one day be part of a real, live book.
Melissa and I are quite evidently still pining away for #OMGLondon (also known as ActualEngland™). So when I heard that a local inn was going to be serving a special seating of a proper tea this weekend, I jumped on it and booked us a table.
The Candleberry Inn is a lovely little B&B on historic Route 6A in Brewster, just one town over from my hometown of Dennis. I had been to one of their teas before -- they only do them a few times a year, on special holidays when they can be reasonably sure of enough warm bodies to make it worth their while -- so I knew that these were people who did the thing right.
I've been eyeing the Threads of Feeling exhibit at the Foundling Museum in London ever since I heard about it a month ago, and have, in fact, been seriously considering timing my next trip to London specifically to coincide with its run.
It never fails. As soon as I start writing lots and lots at work, my personal writing drops off like a thing that drops off really fast.
We're battening down the hatches here on Cape Cod for tomorrow's scheduled appearance of Hurricane Earl (or, as my more geeky friends are calling it, "URL"). It's got quite a few of us concerned, especially those happy few residents of Nantucket, where the eye of the storm is projected to pass over.
I've always been a bit of an academic at heart, and so I always feel like September is really the beginning of the new year, not January. How bizarre is it to think of January as the beginning of anything? But Autumn, now, that's a clear, obvious, vivid transition period. The old passes away. The new begins.
So it's nearing the end of the summer here on Cape Cod, and I appear to have been swamped with work and family and such things. I'm changing roles at my day job, moving into a different and significantly larger sphere of responsibility, so that's been taking up a lot of my time. Especially since it is still a 2.5 hour commute each way, and the new role means I have to be in the office a little bit more, and work from home a little bit less.
Today was a special day for me -- an anniversary of sorts -- so I went out after work and celebrated with friends. After that little gathering was over, I drove out to Chatham to watch a free concert by my good friends in Tripping Lily.
Last Friday night was one of the best Friday nights a girl could have.
My Dad took me out for lunch today to celebrate my birthday. It's far too hot around these parts these days, but we braved the heat and the summer traffic and drove out to The Corner Store in Chatham to get some lunch to go. If you're ever in the neighborhood, I highly recommend you stop by The Corner Store and get yourself a burrito. (Follow them on Twitter to get a heads up on the daily special.) Can't say enough about how nice they are in there, and how good the food is. Super double plus.
It's my one hundred and eleventieth birthday!
"The architectural monuments of England and Wales have been accessible to outsiders for centuries. And for centuries men and women have made special journeys to see them. Like us, they admired the image of Elizabeth I in the Long Gallery, or that portrait by Joshua Reynolds in the Drawing-Room. Like us, they raised their eyebrows at the owner's taste in furnishings, or applauded his scheme of landscape design. And like us, they often indulged in a rather vague nostalgia, or dreamed of what it must be like to live in such a place.
Seriously.
Today is the birthday of one of my absolutely favorite people in the whole world. Can you guess who it is?
You know that old saying about advertising? The one that says we know that 50% of our billboards work, we just don't know which half?
Knowing "which half works" has become a kind of Holy Grail in advertising and marketing. Lots of folks who haven't yet made the leap into inbound marketing labor under the illusion that the type of marketing they are used to -- outbound marketing (also known as broadcast marketing, or shotgun marketing) -- is more measurable and traceable than marketing conducted via blogs and social media.
Not so.
Inbound marketing is actually quite a bit more trackable than outbound marketing, and it's largely due to something called Tracking Tokens.
Tracking Tokens are little bits of code -- just strings of letters and numbers -- that are placed at the tail end of any old URL, so that when that link is clicked, some piece of analytics software somewhere knows where it was clicked, and by whom. It tells you which billboard worked. Which campaign got you to take the next step, and click?
For a great example of the use of tracking tokens, check out what Major League Baseball is doing right now to assign the final two places on the roster of the All-Star Game next week. From now until Thursday at midnight ET, fans can vote for one final player to send to the American League team, and one to send to the National League team. It's a big honor to be selected for the All-Star Team, even if some of your more jaded and spoiled athletes don't treat like the honor it is. In fact, one of my main criteria for who should be selected -- all other stats being equal -- has always been how excited is this player to play in the All-Star Game?
Allow me a short digression? Well, I'm a big baseball fan. I'm a Yankee fan, in fact, a detail that I tend to keep under my hat most of the time, as I live in Red Sox country and I have more than once gotten a door -- literally! -- slammed in my face by folks round here when they see a Yankees T-Shirt on my chest. But my rants about sportsmanship and courtesy will wait for another day.
My point is that my favorite player these days is Nick Swisher, primarily for the unbounded enthusiasm he brings to the field every single day. When he started playing for the Yankees last year, my husband and I joked that he must be drinking about 25 Red Bulls every day before the game, because he was out there practically doing cartwheels in the outfield, he was so pumped up to be playing that game. In every post-game interview, he was practically wagging his tail with excitement. Love that guy.
So I was sad to see that he didn't make the first cut for the All-Star Team, because he is absolutely qualified, stats-wise. But he's not a huge name, you know. So Nick is one of the last few players who are contending for the last slot on each team. End of digression.
Earlier this week, whilst I was happily toiling away at work on one of the days that I actually join my awesome coworkers in the actual office, I chanced to look across the room and spy my adorable colleague Julie wearing the most pleasing frock:
The inimitable Lizzy House has announced the first Castle Peeps Summer Camp, featuring eight weeks' worth of fun activities and projects, guided by some pretty awesome "camp counselors."
And only one day after I posted those pictures of my daylillies in front of the shed? The ones that were just about ready to burst into song?
You'll never believe what came in the mail today.
At the end of each day that I work from home, I close my laptop (yes, it does happen at least once a day), blink a few times to adjust to the middle-distance of it all, and stride purposefully out of the house, usually for the first time all day. I'll often post a status update on Facebook or Twitter that it is Time To Take a Turn About the Room.
I've been doodling in whitework embroidery all week.
There was this one sculpture in the V&A Museum in London.
The other thing that has really stayed with me from the textiles room at the V&A Museum in London was all the drawn thread embroidery that they had in case after case after case.
When Melissa and I were at the Victoria & Albert Museum in #OMGLondon, we spent a ridiculous amount of time in the textiles study room. Rows upon rows upon rows of carefully filed and displayed lace, embroidery, whitework, woven fabrics, knitted, tatted, crocheted...
Stephanie's Written Word is hosting Everything Austen II, a six-month-long joyride through just about anything Jane Austen-related you can come up with.
I am reading Melvyn Bragg's insanely excellent book, The Adventure of English: The biography of a language these days, and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't already had the pleasure. It traces the evolution of English from "an obscure Germanic dialect" to the global and diverse organism that it is today, and it is, as they say, excessively diverting.
We got all kitted up, washed our faces, and brushed our I-mostly-work-from-home hair last night to attend the opening of the Melissa Averinos solo art exhibit at the Centerville Historical Museum. It was a glorious summer evening (too warm to wear my new shawl from the V&A, alas), a warm summer night on Cape Cod (who doesn't love that?), and tons and tons of people came out to see Melissa's more than 50 new pieces of stunning new work.
See, now THIS is why I really need to finish up all my works-in-progress. Because on days like today, I get deliveries of glorious and tantalizing new books like THIS:
Now that I'm fully rested from my trip to London, it's time to knuckle down and finish some of the numerous craft projects I have in progress.
I am still dreaming about the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Then what happened?
We went to see The Real Thing at The Old Vic twice while we were in London.
St. Martin-in-the-fields lies just to the side of Trafalgar Square. It's "in the fields" because when it was built, it lay in the broad fields between the cities of Westminster and London. Now, of course, it lies in the midst of Tourist Central. No matter. St. Martin-in-the-fields is a lovely church, and plays host to some of the greatest classical recordings and concerts around.
Melissa and I returned home yesterday from #OMGLondon, and I am itching to go back already. I had planned this trip as a quick hit -- just a few days, nothing elaborate -- and now I'm come back and I feel like I could have stayed there for at least another week. Maybe a month.
And what are you doing on this fine, fine holiday weekend?
On the last day of Quilt Market, I was sleepy and not a little overwhelmed. After Melissa's last booksigning, on Sunday, we had nothing but time to kill until Quilt Market was over and it was time to catch our flight back home to Cape Cod.
The lovely Melissa Averinos is responsible for setting us up in the most amazing bed & breakfast possible here in Minneapolis. It's just an unassuming three-story house in a leafy neighborhood in what is apparently known as Lowry Hill East. But once you step inside... well, a series of gasps is really the only appropriate response.
I'm at Quilt Market Spring 2010 here in Minneapolis, and I've only just this evening been able to gather enough breath (and wifi) to blog about it.
I graduated from grad school yesterday, and was officially granted all the rights and privileges, as they say, of the degree of the Master of Business Administration. It was a glorious day, all bright blue sky and golden sparkling water on the Boston waterfront.
So it appears that I will be attending Quilt Market 2010 in just Two Short Weeks! Melissa's book is launching officially at Quilt Market, she'll be signing books and giving talks and being generally amazing in every way.
BronteAlong has now officially moved on to a focus on Wuthering Heights, after weeks and weeks of wallowing recklessly in everything Jane Eyre. As promised, we won't be necessarily leaving Jane and Edward F. Rochester behind... just adding Cathy and Heathcliff to the mix.
Oh my stars and garters! April is halfway over, and what have I to show for it?
Don't look now (by which I mean LOOK OVER THERE!! NOW!!!) but Melissa and I are hosting a festive little giveaway for our subscribers over on Eggplantia, for this week only!
The New York Times ran a story a few days ago called The Next Big Thing in English, the premise being that, post-modernism having run its course (debatable, but we'll leave it), lit departments across the English-speaking world have been casting about for the next big trend that will magically jolt this course of study back into relevance and prestige, reinstating all the lost funding and cachet that lit departments have suffered since the heyday of the 1970s.
It's amazing to me how easily we convince ourselves that we are the only oddballs on the planet who like the oddball little things we do. For me, it's 19th century literature, history, architecture, manners, dress... but you knew that.
Tonight I spoke at an undergraduate management class at Simmons College. I got my MBA at the Simmons School of Management not that long ago, so I was excited to work with the latest crop of students from the other side of the desk, as it were.
Ladies and gentlemen! It gives me great pleasure to announce a New Thing That You Will Like! Melissa Averinos and I have officialy launched Eggplantia.com, a new online home for our many and wide-ranging joint projects.
Ever since we started in on this whole BronteAlong madness, I've been reminiscing about how I grew up loving Jane Eyre. When I was about 12 years old, I suddenly graduated from obsessively re-reading Little Women (and Little Men, and Jo's Boys, and Rose in Bloom -- I do nothing halfway) to obsessively re-reading Jane Eyre.
So in the 2006 version of Jane Eyre, there is a whole lot of use of the color red.
Today is the first day of spring, and a tremendously beautiful day it was on Cape Cod, too. Bright blue sky, plenty of sunshine, and temperatures in the 60s. I am not usually one to go crazy for the sunshine, being a bit more of a night owl and fog-lover than all that, but even I could see that today was something special.
So BronteAlong is only one week old, and already we've been picking up quite a bit of steam!
Now that we're moving on to All Things Bronte around here, I thought it only fitting and proper that I should close out the one remaining knitting project I have from the winter, post it here, and be free to move on to whatever obsessive cravat-making might necessarily follow from 32 consecutive viewings of Jane Eyre.
I've notched another refined accomplishment to my belt today -- one that has been on my list for some time. And you'll be the ones to benefit!
Now that Spring is officially on its way (the forecast is for 53 degrees today! I am all a-twitter and agog!!) I feel that I must finally post some of the fruits of my winter knitting frenzy.
So as you may know from reading my dear fiend Melissa's blog (which I am sure you do, with the fine taste and discernment that you have) that we are both wallowing around in a deep and exquisite Jane Eyre obsession.
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