Yesterday:

  • CFS 6th graders got their XOs, and I saw kids using Sugar on their laptops in classrooms for the first time since I started volunteering at OLPC over 2 years ago. It was great to finally be there.
  • Engineer 2.0 conference @ Olin. Ended up in a long discussion with Woodie Flowers on training materials and open-source learning practices. Need help explaining to him why OSS is awesome - he was surprised I liked it, I was surprised he didn't, need to figure out where that perspective comes from. (I think we've seen different aspects of OSS.)
  • Elsa taught me about sonata form by dissecting the Waldstein (as I asked many stupid questions, as usual) and holy cow people write books analyzing music I did not know this before. LIBRARY. TOMORROW. How could I ever have thought I'd learned all I was going to intellectually learn about music when I was 14? (Sure, I could practice more and play different pieces on the piano, but I knew how to sightread and play notes together fast at the approximate right volume. What more was there to it?*)

*SO MUCH MORE. It's great - like living on a little island and then sailing off and bumping into a continent... and then having people tell you there were other continents out there too. Music! World! Expanding! Exponentially! AHAHAHAHA!

Despite this, I totally failboated at piano lessons today (when you can barely make a bass line cling to the chord progressions of songs you know, you're really out of it), and Kevin was a real champ and cheered me up. MUST PRACTICE SO MUCH THIS WEEK ZOMG. And then Lissa bailed me out and kicked ass at cooking dinner tonight and we made a gluten-free, citrus-free, vegan meal with things nobody in the house disliked. Total win. It's great to have teachers and friends who simultaneously help you up and kick your ass out of self-pity when you're wallowing in suckitude. I want to be able to do that better.

My laptop is going to be at pika for a week. Yes, I'm behind on email again. This is teaching me a remarkable amount about efficient/effective communication and not being phone phobic, though. Ironically, I broke my phone charger today, so that's item #1 on the agenda tomorrow morning (in sequence: yoga, library, get charger, get mini fakebook, do taxes, go for sanda training, and eat & play piano to fill the remainder of tomorrow's noncomputer time).

Anyway, here is the autoresponse.

Hiya. I'm trying an experiment to fend off the RSI that seems to be impending - I'm leaving my laptop with some friends (not at my apartment) for a week so as to prevent me from using it incessantly while I'm learning to rewire my posture.

As such, I'll be checking email once a day (after dinner) from 4/3 - 4/10 (both Fridays). So if you really need to reach me right this moment, send a text message to +1.847.970.8484. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for understanding.

--Mel (and Mel's hands)