Only The Curious

About two months ago I was gesturing not-all-too-wildly during my first-ever conversation with the spectacular Ms. Alexis Gentry, when my hand grazed the top of the fabulous REI travel mug that I have had for 10 years and will rave about forever except for its one fatal flaw: it’s top-heavy, and therefore very easy to knock over. A little too easy.

As a result of my enthusiastic gesture (if you saw how well Alexis and I get along, you’d understand. You know THOSE people in your life – the ones where pretty much any time you get together you’re going to have a completely random but hilarious and awesome 3-hour long conversation with? She’s one of those in my life.) anyway, as a result of that gesture and the knocking over of my mug, my MacGook drank about a teaspoon of ginger tea. (If only I’d screwed on the completely leak-proof lid!) Maybe it was more than a teaspoon, more a gulp than a sip, but either way I immediately grabbed paper towels and turned it facedown onto them, thinking I’d gotten the liquid before it could even have gotten past the keys.

I promptly shut the computer down, drove to the store, and got a 5-lb bag of rice to stick it in. I’ve seen the rice trick work on multiple iPhones that have gone through the wash/been dropped in the toilet/doused in coffee (not mine. Not yet, anyway.) and they came back to life with varying degrees of success.

Three days later, my computer would still not turn on.

I took it to the Apple store, and they said it would be a minimum of $320 to fix it but more likely $750, but possibly it could cost that much and I’d have to replace it anyway. I could buy a new laptop (albeit not a mac) for $750, and the thing was 5 years old and begging to be replaced anyway.

That being said, I didn’t have even the $320. So I took it to Denver Mac Repair. I will tell you that the guys at Denver Mac Repair are ridiculously knowledgeable, nice, and helpful. They did their “water damage repair” service, but it still wouldn’t turn on. My MacBook was dead. After removing the hard drive and putting it in a case, they offered to buy my machine for parts, which brought the cost of the whole experience down to roughly $72. They also told me that I made three major mistakes:

1) turning it off (apparently this may have been the action that shorted things out in the first place.)

2) not removing the battery

3) not taking it to them immediately

If you ever feed your computer tea or any other liquid, just take it to them. Stat.

So I no longer have a Mac. For the past two and a half months I’ve been using my boyfriend’s Acer. At first, I had no idea how to cope with using a PC and office 2007. But I’ve gotten used to it. I love having the 10-key pad, and the 15″ screen makes a bigger difference than I expected. Except for the mousepad. It has all sorts of gestures that I don’t understand, which randomly pop my tabs out into windows, move my cursor to the middle of the next paragraph, and do other random irritating, time-sucking things that I have to go back and fix. I’m still a Mac person.

Kind of like Karl’s granddad, apparently. His dad told me to Google Lars’ grave. You wouldn’t think it would be a funny thing to do. But it is, and even funnier, this random article about the grave compares Karl’s granddad and his granddad’s best frenemy and their gravestones to the Mac vs. PC ads.

Also? If anyone is selling a 15″ Macbook Pro or an iMac for cheap, I ::might:: be in the market. Like, a lot.

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I haven’t posted in over two months. (Sometimes I wonder if I post more about not posting than about any other topic on this blog. Let’s remedy that. Post, Nicole!) This has largely been because I’ve been working a lot, which is good. But I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t been working enough to actually justify not blogging. I’ve been using it as a plausible sounding excuse to procrastinate.

What made me decide to post today was reading Matt Chevy’s post from last week inspired by having the flu. It kind of slapped me across the face to realize that he blogs even when he’s been sick, and finds inspiration from just about anything. He posts every week, and it’s always interesting. Here I’ve been doing tons of great work and cool, inspiring things, and then sitting around convincing myself that I have nothing to post about.

So thank you, Matt, for getting sick and letting your flu kick my ass, too. (Also sorry to hear you were unwell, and I hope you’re feeling a million times better.)

Here’s what I’ve been up to and some of the things I could or should have been blogging about for the past two months:

- I went back to Wisconsin for Christmas, rather unexpectedly. I had decided as a measure of austerity to not buy the plane ticket home, but my folks decided that they really wanted me there. There were lots of family and relationship things that came up around not being in Colorado with Karl over the holidays, letting my folks buy me a plane ticket but insisting that I don’t have to pay it back in guilt trips or expectations of what I do with my time while I’m home, only getting to see friends briefly, and the lesson I learned about gifts: it feels way better to be generous within your means than to give so much that you regret it.

- The New Year. I thought about doing a resolutions post. But I decided not to make any resolutions, because my 30 before 30 list is more than enough to do to keep myself busy doing good, productive, and healthy things. I guess you could say I resolved to stay resolved? Karl and I did, however, decide to start the year off with a cleanse. We ate only fruits, veggies, and whole grains for two weeks, and had no alcohol for the first three. I could have written about that experience and the discoveries I made about myself, my health, and my habits. Probably one on self-discipline, too, and how being disciplined with one thing can help you be disciplined in everything.

- The Mile High Young Professionals, of which I am on the board of directors and act as the director of social media and newsletter editor, launched our first two events. I have a lot of thoughts on what it means to be a “young professional” and things related to that I could write about. Though I feel like people like my personal posts more than my professionally-oriented ones.

- I was asked to submit some of my writing for a book, Largely thanks to the writing I’ve done on this blog. The book is a collection of writings around the idea of “My Secrets for Success” directed at teenagers. I wrote four pieces. None of them were about secrets to success that I had when I was a teenager; I don’t think I had any back then. Or, rather, the ones I thought I had ended up hindering more than helping me. So the pieces were more reflections along the lines of “I wish that I knew what I know now…” It was a great exercise. Maybe I’ll share some of those essays here.

- I coordinated and executed my first event for Bliss Studios. It was the launch party for The Pozitivity Project, Mondo Guerra’s awareness, education, and support campaign for those who are HIV-Positive. The event benefited the Colorado AIDS Project. Not only was it awesome to get to coordinate my first event and meet Mondo, but I’m grateful that I got to work on something that was such a great cause.

- It seems super trivial in comparison, but I also won a chili cook-off. This was a surprisingly big ego-boost for me. It made me realize that because of my tendency to want harmony, I don’t compete much these days. It’s been a really long time since I won anything just based on my own merits and not those of a team or group of people. It was also really affirming of my cooking skills, which I have always taken pride in, but never really put to any kind of test.

- I’ve been skiing, a lot. Which doesn’t really sound like something to blog about, aside from posting pictures of mountainscapes, commenting on how lucky I am to live here, and a few sentences about epic powder days. But I’ve been pushing myself a lot, and realizing how good it feels to really be learning and growing my skills. It’s also lead to a lot of thought about the physical side of it – how to push yourself, how to know when to lay off, and how to deal with limitations. But there’s time left in the season for that.

- I’ve also been keeping up with the usual things – work, choir, the young adult activities at my church, working out – but also doing all of them more. I’ve made bigger commitments to everything in my life over the last 6 months. Despite the being busy a lot, it’s really good. I look at where I was a year ago and it’s kind of amazing to me how much more on top of things, how much more competent and confident, and how much just MORE I am.

So there’s a lot going on. Yes, I am busy. But I can always make time to write. And I will. And then I will be able to write more concise posts instead of epic catch-ups of 100+ words. Thanks for reading!

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The first Odd Tuesday Potluck

5 years ago, I started a social network. My network isn’t online though. It’s in-real-life, 3-D, grassroots social networking. It’s called the Odd Tuesday Potluck…

It all started in October of 2005, when I FINALLY moved back out of my parents’ house, where I’d been since graduating from college in 2004. I’d been struggling to grow my social life while living in the suburbs with my folks, and just knew that as soon as I was out living on my own again I’d be going out, meeting people, having them over for dinner parties. Life would be awesome!

Yeah, not so much. It turns out that having an apartment to invite people over to doesn’t really do a lot of good when you don’t have said people to invite over.

So I started thinking about how to make friends. How did I make friends in college? Well, I thought, I’d see people in class or around the dorms. We’d chat, joke about a funny lecture or the awful dorm food, maybe start to walk to class together. Eventually we’d gotten familiar enough through these regular running-into-one-another times that we’d decide to study together. Then maybe we’d hang out for fun, or someone would have a party and we’d all go. And magically, we were friends.

I realized that the key to all of it had been having a place where we regularly crossed paths, to get to know one another a bit before we started making plans more one-on-one, or on less neutral ground.

I decided to create an opportunity like this – a time and place where people could run into one another a few times over. Where they could talk. Get to know one another. Become friends in their own right, rather than just being mutual acquaintances of mine. We would all come together and build… wait for it… a social network. But, you know, like, a real life one.

But just hosting a regular event wasn’t enough. My same seven friends wouldn’t all want to come every time. The key was to tell everyone to bring a friend or three along. We’d all meet new people! Every week! It would grow! Exponentially, even! Ooh, maybe people would fall in love! Or get job connections. This would be awesome!

Hosting something weekly would be too often (and too hard for me to commit to,) but monthly would be too rare. I decided on a bi-weekly event. Then I realized I couldn’t just invite everyone over without a shared activity, and a potluck seemed like the perfect idea. It wouldn’t cost anything, and it would create an instant conversation topic: food. An easy introduction would simply be “so, what’d you bring?”

And thus, the Odd Tuesday Potlucks were born.

Since then approximately 200 people have attended. (Thank you all for making this wacky social experiment a wild success!) We’ve had guests from as far as Alaska, and attendance numbers varying from 3-60. (Usually it’s between about 7-10.) Once someone showed up at my apartment with spaghetti on an even Tuesday and had a very pleasant dinner with my roommate. I moved away from Madison a year ago, but Kimmy (who wins the award for most regular attendee – I think she’s missed a grand total of 3 and was one of my original seven) & Ian took up the reins, and continue to host potlucks there. I started them up in Denver last winter, so we now have Odd Tuesday Potlucks going in two cities. This week we toasted via Skype to celebrate the anniversary, between the two potlucks we had 32 people in attendance. I heard that a friend of a friend was running one in St. Louis for awhile, too. If you would like to start hosting an Odd Tuesday Potluck in your area, get in touch with me, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t. But the real key is just keeping it going. Cheers!

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