xoxo

The first time you hear it, you’re never sure. Is that what I think it is? I am, of course awake, listening to the winter wind and rain pound the side of the house, wishing I could sleep. My mind, wanders aimlessly as I wait.

chirp

Yes. Yes it is. The smoke alarm. The one in the hallway. That ridiculous relic of 1970′s-era technology. Why do we still need smoke alarms?

I remember my childhood best friend, a spunky redhead named Sharon Sue, solemnly showing me a a collapsible ladder she kept under the bed of her second-floor room. Its box had a picture of a blond woman in her quilted bathrobe, clutching a toddler and climbing down the ladder from a window with flames shooting out of it, a fireman with sideburns waiting for her on the ground below.

The danger of fire somehow seemed real then in a way it doesn’t now. Especially in soggy Portland where everyone in my house (except occasionally the dog) sleeps on the ground floor within inches of a window.

chirp

Nice. Not quite loud enough to wake my sleeping husband but just enough to keep me from drifting off, back to sleep.

I know. One is supposed to replace the batteries of these ridiculous smoke alarms every year. But it seems wasteful to change out a battery before it’s done and, frankly, I’m lazy.

It’s only a matter of time before smoke alarms will seem quaint. Soon we’ll all live in smart houses with brilliant appliances and high-speed everything. The house won’t need a fire alarm because it will know better than to actually catch on fire.

chirp

I mean, I downloaded the new Firefox today and found the whole process rather cumbersome even though the download was snappy and the install painless. I mean shouldn’t my laptop just know there’s a new version of my browser and do all that on it’s own?

Then I start thinking about shrink-wrapped boxes of software on the shelves of stores like CompUSA. Yes, smoke detectors are going the way of shrink wrap. Yes, the way, as they say, of the poor, flightless Dodo.

chirp!

Is it getting more insistent. And annoying.

I picture getting up, dragging a chair over to the floor beneath my bane and reaching up to wrench it off the ceiling, opening the back door and tossing it outside. Yes, I suppose I could just replace the battery, but the chances of me figuring out how to take out the old one, let alone locating the proper replacement battery somewhere in the house are about equal with the odds of me, oh I don’t know, becoming a celebrated opera singer.

But I have to do something. So I wake up Mike. He gets up, pees, and stands listening in the middle of the room. For at least a minute.

The chirping, it seems, has stopped on its own.

The fabulous JCloe tagged me for this 7 things thingie and I hemmed and hawed briefly about whether or not I want to play the game. I mean, really, haven’t we all grown out of the chain letter phase? But I didn’t want to let the diva of classic rock down.

So, here it goes. First, the obligatory listing of the rules, which are:

1. Link to your original tagger and list these rules in your post. (check)
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below below)
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged. (see Twitter)

Okay then. Now the hard part. My 7 things.

1. I am an aspiring geek. Here is a short list of the geekeries to which I most aspire: cheese geekery, social media geekery, WordPress geekery (stop laughing, I am just beginning this one), wine geekery and smart-grid technology geekery.

2. I hate The Gypsy Kings, chewing gum and lima beans. I know, hate is a strong word, but it applies in these cases. Except maybe The Gypsy Kings because I am sure they are nice people.

3. I grew up in Alaska but spent the better part of my formative years in denial of that fact (think mini skirts and tanning beds and teeny tiny little shoes with no socks – it was the ’80s!). I hate cold weather and I don’t know Sarah Palin.

4. I have written about open source software in one capacity or another since 1998. Yet I have never owned a machine, on purpose anyway, that runs open source. (This is not a fact of which I am proud.)

5. I like to bust out whenever possible. “Busting out” in my definition includes everything from packing up and moving to a new city (complicated currently by the fact that I’m not-so-secretly in love with Portland) to dressing the busting-out part for no particular reason.

6. I love going to movies by myself, going to bed with wet hair, and drinking pink wine in the summer, red wine in the winter and white wine all year round.

7. My son is going to be famous. My husband and I are banking on it. But he has all the traits: huge head, outgoing personality, a knack for charming large groups of people…

Tah-dah!

And here are my 7 tags:

1) Tyler Ashcraft of Spending Days (and, yes, I’ll fix the link on my blogroll) because he beat me to this blogging thing and I’m sure his New Year’s resolution is to update more often.

2) The inimitable Don G. Park who was also helped nudge me in the blog direction and who is sure to have an interesting seven.

3) Jay Parkhill of Startup Toolbox, a talented lawyer, my Twitter tutor and dear friend who is really bikey and belongs in Portland.

4) And of course Cory Frye of The Daily Wrazz, truly the most creative writer I know and the coolest cat in Albany, Ore.

5) Kathleen Mazzocco of kmazz, whose global savvy, PR smarts and approach to life in general I really admire. Plus she takes awesome food porn photos in France and then shares.

6) The lovely and talented Media Chick of I Heart Media because I’m a huge fan and she’s joining the Beer & Blog franchise and ’09 is going to be a BIG year for her, I can just tell.

7) And, finally, reaching randomly into my list of Twitter friends who blog, all of whom would generate interesting lists that I would surely enjoy reading, I tag Mara Collins, Oleoptene,who I had the pleasure of meeting at a recent BackFencePDX and whose writing I enjoy.

Endings are the most difficult part of every story. It’s much easier to wrap up a story with an “And that’s my story,” or “Tah-dah,” or even “The End” than it is to think of a true ending.

But it’s reflective of life isn’t it? The endings are never so clear cut. The calendar may say January 1 but the load of laundry I put in the drier last year will stay there until I take it out and fold it, I still need to lose 15 pounds, my desktop is still a mess and I’m still a mom, wife, friend, employee of the same cast of characters. Where’s the ending?

Relationships do end. But they seldom have a well-defined ending. Any breakup I’ve ever been a party to has happened in fits and starts. Despite the declarative statements there is often breakup sex and more often tearful phone calls. The shorter the entanglement the easier the clean break. But the longer the plot line of the relationship the harder it is to write a suitable kicker.

As a newspaper reporter, the easiest way I found to close a story was to give someone the last word. I’d dig through my notebook and find a suitably pithy, summing-up quote and I’d use it as the final words of the story. It was a crutch that I resolved one year to abandon, so I pushed deadlines to the limit trying to write my own suitable closing lines, which were so often, well, bad. When I had copy editors calling me at home at night to suggest changing my endings to close with a quote instead, I abandoned my quest.

Who knows, maybe it’s just me who finds endings tricky, arduous and elusive. After all in my first year as a flack, the loss of my first account brought me to breakup-worthy tears (the been-jilted kind).

For example, right now I’m struggling with how to end this post. This post that few will read and fewer will remember. Because it seems to me I had a point to make when I started here or at least thought I’d find my way to one by the time I got here.

Tah-dah?

My sister just sent this link to me: Andrew Sullivan calls it no less than a war for the future of human civilization and I have to say I don’t think he’s exaggerating.

This morning my company laid off one-third of its staff. We’re small. This hurts. The people in charge say it’s unavoidable and I’m pretty sure I believe them.

And now I hear that Obama’s grandmother just died.

I am anxious and a little sad and I think it’s likely I’m going to remain that way for another day or so.

It was decided that we’d start with a hike in Forest Park. It was a pretty morning and given the growing dread that descends on every Portlander on sunny fall days (you know what they say about paybacks, the deluge is sure to come) we intended to make proverbial hay.

I distinctly remember thinking as I corralled my sweet, sweet boy and got him dressed that it was early for Portland, at least my part of town. We’re consistently amazed by the droves of sleep-eyed hipsters lined up for weekend breakfast at places like Cup & Saucer and Jam on Hawthorne when we’ve been up for hours. It’s life with a toddler, not like a conscious choice. And yet I still get a charge of feeling, well, wholesome.

So I’m feeling wholesome as I charge out to the car with the dog and an armful of coats for the coat-shunning toddler. I pop open the back hatch and the dog, excited to be included in the outing hops up. I notice his grimy wool blanket is missing. “Where’s the dog blanket?” I call to Mike who is herding the boy out the door and fumbling with keys. It’s one of those questions you lob at your partner that you don’t expect an answer to.

I step to the backseat door and fling it open, noticing the shadow of pile of crap I don’t remember being there yesterday and that’s when I see him. First the soles of his black loafers. Then his eyes springing wide above the top edge of Seeger’s blanket.

My heart pounds as I shout, involuntarily: “Who are you!”

The young man in the back seat clearly has no idea. He springs out of fetal position and bolts past me out of the car, shedding the blanket. He stumbles and mumbles. He’s nicely dressed — slacks, a button down shirt — has an English accent and reeks of alcohol. “I need my backpack,” he gasps. “I had a backpack.”

Mike, who is tall and thick and somewhat threatening, especially in the morning when his hair stands on end, is bounding off the porch and lunging at the perpetrator who is already down the driveway and tripping up the sidewalk patting his pockets. Mike follows him uttering threats and securing assurances that our young guest hasn’t stolen anything from the car. Tall and skinny, the Brit starts to sound as if he’s fighting tears. “I was drinking,” he whines over his shoulder to Mike, as if it needs clarification.

It all took maybe a minute and then we were back to bundling into the family car and continuing with the day. Mike and I look at each other and laugh. “Can you believe that just happened?”

We used the top of Thurman St. as our put-in for the park. It was a abuzz with earnest runners: droves of them all ropey muscles and flushed cheeks. I had been expecting we’d beat the crowds as we do when we show up early to those breakfast places. Instead I felt like an alien, clothed without microfibers, plodding slowly along with sniffing dog and dawdling 2-year-old.

Mainly, I blame two things for this, although there are probably many more I could blame.

I don’t blame NaNoWriMo. I am too time-strapped and chicken to attempt to write a novel in 30 day’s time. I don’t blame the ever present stack of books beside my bed that I devour at varying speeds. I don’t blame the ritual of nightly stories with my 2-year-old son who is just becoming acquainted with his imagination. I don’t blame the fact that my days are spent tugging on the threads of business to find my clients’ stories and then trying to find the best audience to tell them to.

No, I blame my iPod and BackFencePDX.

A few months back I got one of the new iPods. Not the clippy one, the supersized postage stamp one. It was so much lighter and sleeker than the clunky old one that has become our home stereo. I became a podcast fiend. Suddenly every walk with the dog was the opportunity to listen. I started with the eat-your-veggie podcasts about technology and sustainability. Then I evolved to the voyeuristic pleasure of listening to interviews with local tech celebrities on StrangeLoveLive. But while I still enjoy learning-by-podcast, nothing transports me like a good story. I listen to This American Life while I toil up the hills to Mt. Tabor, I listen to The Moth while I shuffle to Stumptown for my morning coffee. I listen to writers talking about each other (in a good way) on the New Yorker Fiction podcast while I follow the dog around the neighborhood after dark. I can’t get enough.

Which brings me to my other scapegoat: BackFencePDX. The idea of standing up in front of people and telling them a story is terrifying and exhilarating. The experience of sitting in a crowd of rapt listeners and hanging on the words of someone I’ve never met and yet feel a random kinship with is transporting. It’s really just fun but it feels like something more. My brain works away, chewing on each story arc, reflecting on the pacing and intonation, noting the comic timing. My memory cycles back to something that happened last week, last year, when I was 20: What would my story be?

I want to get better at stories. I want to join the conversation. I want to have a voice that’s just mine. And yes, I’m impressed and inspired by Portland’s enormous blogging community — that includes you, Tyler — and ready to stop making excuses and join its ranks.

Let me say up front: I will make mistakes. I will go for long periods of time without updating. I will reveal the depth of my ignorance on any number of topics. But I will do my best to tell a good story or two. And I’d love it if you listened.