Explaining Facebook

Recently my mother-in-law and husband joined up on Facebook, adding themselves to the “everyone else I know” contingent. And in the last week or so, both have had questions or comments about it. So as a public service, I hereby offer this explanation of what the heck you do with Facebook.

1) What the heck does it mean when you post that you have “Mastery in Artichokes”?
Facebook offers a bunch of games like “Mafia Wars”, “Farmville” and “Fish World” — to name a few. These are cooperative games, so if I do something in my game, I can offer a “bonus” to all my friends on Facebook who also play. This creates an altruistic incentive for me to do things like announce my recent Artichoke victory. The other people who play the game can get points because of it.

Facebook games are funny things. They’re pretty simple to play. The way you “win” is by checking in on them regularly. They’re also highly interactive. For example, in Farmville you visit your friend’s farms (you can see what they’re doing with them) and help out in some way. You’d think this would be entirely the purview of time-wasting losers like me, but I’m continually surprised and amused by just who plays and how seriously.

You have three choices when your Facebook friends keep announcing they’ve found Lost Kittens. First, you could join the game. Why not? You don’t have work to do anyway. Second, if you choose not to join the game, the appropriate thing to do is politely ignore the posts and pretend you don’t notice that your friend just posted about finding a lost moose on a rollercoaster. Third, if you find them annoying (and who can blame you if you do), you can block all similar content by hovering over the offending post. A drop down will appear on the right and pick “Block Farmville” (or whatever is driving you nuts).

No more cats

2) Friend regret
So someone you vaguely remember from High School asked to be your friend. You thought she was nice enough 15 years ago. But once you friended her, you discovered that she keeps posting about Artichokes, church events, and linking to her boring blog. You don’t want to offend her by “un-friending” her, but you also really don’t care about the Advent Workshop (November 22nd after church! We’ll be making Advent Wreathes!). If you look at the image above, you can see that there is a “Hide (Name)” option. The person in question won’t know that you are “hiding” them, and you can still check on their wall if you want to talk to them about something or see what they’ve been up to.

3) Have you forgotten that I live across the country/will be taking care of our kids while you go this event?
Yesterday I sent out an invite to Prayer at the Close of Day tomorrow. My husband made a growly noise because since I will be there, he can’t be. My mom pointed out she lives 3000 miles away. But often times if you belong to a group (like our church group), invitations will go to all group members. I didn’t actually pick each and every person and send the invitation to them.

If you find Facebook is sending you too many emails (or not enough!) Facebook has very granular settings for controlling emails. Click on the “settings” link in the upper right hand corner when you are logged in. The third tab in controls notifications. Scroll through and make choices appropriate for how you want to be contacted:

More details than you ever wanted

Hopefully these will help you enjoy Facebook more. If you have any additional questions on how it works, please feel free to let me know!

‘Fessing Up

So, I have a confession to make. This is not my first blog. No, my first blog was started in 2003 on one of those other sites (waves her hand indistinctly). It wasn’t very formal. It wasn’t really the sort of writing you want people to find on Google. I never informed my parents or other family members about it. I did, however, make a ton of fantastic “online” friends and give way more updates about how hungry/tired/bored I was than was really required.

But gradually, I found I wanted to have a more public voice. As my writing increasingly turns to be about my children, I wanted to share with my larger family. And I’m getting smarter in my old age. I hope I’m smart enough to not write anything that would embarrass me now or later. So I went public and didn’t let on that it was “in media res”.

But… there were a few actual decent posts in the old blog. All my first pregnancy is documented there. The two miscarriages. Big thoughts. Perhaps one in twenty posts is something I’d like to hold on to.

So gradually I’m pulling in the best and most pertinent of my old writing here. If you go all the way back into my archives, you’ll see a number from 2003. I suspect that the stickiness of the writing — my desire to persist it — will increase as I began to find my voice.

I’m actually rather amazed at just how YOUNG and PERKY the posts from that first year really are!

So here you go. If you’re bored (and I can’t really imagine any other reason) feel free to go back and check out the archives as I fill in the years between 2003 and 2008.

Board Games

A common scene in our household

My husband and I have always played a lot of games. In the gravy days, back when we had TIME, we mostly played games in group setting — with friends. But lately, board games have become one of our primary date activities. That’s what we do when we want to spend time together.

Board games (and I’m not talking Monopoly here, people) fall into various categories. There are epic ones, quick ones, medium ones. There are hand-builder games (Dominion), resource games (Agricola – I first played this while in labor with Thane), spatial reasoning games (Richochet Robots), screw-your-neighbor games (You’ll probably disagree with me, but screw-your-neighbor is usually a defining feature of our games of Catan), strategy games (Memoir ‘44) and party games (Werewolf).

There are games that play best with 6 or more people, and there are games perfectly balanced for 2. (Although it seems like most of MY favorite games are best with 3 – 4 players.)

Lately, Adam and I have been playing lots of Dominion, Roll Through the Ages and St. Petersburg. We’ve been playing so many games lately, that I’ve started to see and perceive patterns in what makes a game fun for us, and how we’re different in our makeup.

For example, Adam has a slight edge in Dominion, I dominate Roll Through the Ages, and he completely trounces me in St. Petersburg. Reliably. I have a slight edge in Memoir ‘44, but that one takes so long to set up we rarely play it. All four of those are games we both enjoy playing.

What’s the difference? Adam is a perfectionist – an optimizer. He will take as long as he needs to figure out the absolute optimum strategy and apply it. I’m more of a good-enough-er; an executive decision maker. I go with what seems like a pretty good idea, make my decisions quickly and change my strategy midstream if it seems appropriate.

Neither one of our personalities is better, not even for game playing. I enjoy games that overwhelm him, like Race for the Galaxy and Agricola. He doesn’t like these games because he can’t really map out all possible outcomes and plan accordingly — there are too many and the fellow players at the table get impatient. He hates Catan because his careful planning usually gets spiked by the moves of other players in a way that feel malicious.

It’s been fascinating to watch how RELIABLY he beats me in St. Petersburg, even though I’m really trying my best, haven’t made huge mistakes, and have a competent strategy. In that game, night before last, the difference between competent and not making mistakes vs. perfectly optimized was a mammoth 30 points.

We’ve played a lot (a LOT) of games together to notice the differences between our decision making styles. I’m glad we have, though, because the styles hold true whether it’s in a board game or in life. I would (for example) win many more games if the scoring included the speed with which decisions were made. It always takes him a lot longer to decide what he wants to do, because he’s weighing all his options carefully. The same holds true for, for example, buying a computer. He’ll investigate all the options. I’ll find one that seems pretty good. Sometimes the difference between the third one on Amazon that seems reasonably priced and has high ratings and his careful research is nil — I end up with the same computer he finds after weeks of investigation. Sometimes it’s terribly significant. I begin to wonder if he should be in charge of some of our more major financial decisions. Or if, alternately, choosing a mutual fund for our IRAs might paralyze him with choice.

What about you? What kind of decision making process do you use? Have you discovered truths about yourself by playing board games?

The training starts early

Insert thoughtful educated post here

Let’s see here. I’ve done the milestone “see how big they’re getting now!” post. I’ve done the “here’s what I’ve done with the house” lately post. I’ve done a Domestic Diva post. I haven’t had any adventures in the last two weeks, unless you consider getting lost in Boston adventurous. That means I’m due for a “Deep Thoughts” post. (Sorry to pull back the curtain.)

Just one problem.

Right. No deep thoughts.

I’ve been contemplating this issue all day, trying on topics to see which ones would work. I’ve listening to Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga lately on audiobook and just came to the stunning revelation that Sergyar was named for Prince Serg. But aside from a psuedo-English-major essay on how Miles Vorkosigan is a namer as defined in Madeleine L’Engle’s books, I don’t think I have a lot to contribute on the topic.

I have been programming in a new language at work, but I’m still at the confused stage, so I don’t think I have anything valuable to add. Plus, a readership nourished on cute kid stories probably doesn’t want to hear my rant about WHY we can’t just have one standard universal data typing scheme so I don’t have to remember if it’s a float or number or numeric or if it’s a varchar or char or character or string or text.

I have played several new board games lately. I enjoyed Pillars of the Earth even though I lost badly. I think Roll Through the Ages is one of the best-designed two-player games I’ve played possibly ever and am sad that my six consecutive victories makes it unlikely I’ll be able to con my husband into it again soon. I liked St. Petersburg, but need to play it again to completely master the intricacies.

I just discovered to my shock and dismay that the Red Sox traded Justin Masterson while I was on Mt. Rainier and unable to use my psychic powers to protect him.

Let’s not even get in to politics, eh?

So here you have it. I have managed to write a 350 word post about how I have nothing to write about. I’ll attempt to salvage my bloggy-honor by promising that next week will be a meaningful post. And maybe I’ll do something interesting in the next 24 hours that I can tell you about tomorrow.

Back from vacation

It’s always hard to get back on that digital horse when you come back from vacation. Usually I make regular posts about very minute things that happen in my life. And then I made rice in the rice-cooker; can you believe it?!?! But when you’re on vacation you spend like days and days doing actually interesting things and not blogging about them at all. Heck, not even checking your email or facebook or blogroll for DAYS AT A TIME. (Swoons)

And then you come back with all these things to talk about. And 2000 emails in your personal inbox (950 of which claim that you need more excitement in your nights while offering a solution to said problem). And another 2000 in your work inbox. And several hundred nearly-identical pictures of Mt. Rainier on your camera. And a pile of dirty laundry. And everything on your unwritten “to do” list that you thought “I’ll do do that after vacation; it’s too early now”.*

So if you’re lucky you end up doing one big spill-over post that ends up reading like your bad 9th grade journal: We went on a four-day backpacking trip on the West Side of Mt. Rainier. It was awesome. The weather was great. The bugs were terrible. It was generally fantastic. After that, there were hijinks involving an expired passport, but we made it to Victoria anyway.

So instead, let me give you a picture of Mt. Rainier and the (probably vain) hope that I’ll write smaller bits about what I did.

Aurora Lake at sunset

Aurora Lake in the morning

*I would like to apologize for this paragraph. I think that so far every single sentence breaks at least one rule of grammar. I am obviously unafraid of sentence fragments, and of starting my sentences with “and”. It’s not because I don’t know better; it’s because I’m a bad person.

Wishing I were updating

This hardly ever happens to me. I usually have a little cache of things I want to say or to talk about. But today I keep thinking about it and … nothing. So I thought I’d open the floor. What would you like me to talk about? Is there a part of my life you’d like me to expound upon? Are you totally sick of “cute things my kids have done recently” or is that a well that never runs dry? Comment and let me know!

My truant pen

In many ways it’s ironic that I’m such a happy denizen of the internet. I have this great and passionate love affair with paper and pen. For example, the other day my husband and I went on a date to Borders. (What? You’ve probably done the same thing.) While there, I purchased a gift for my 16 year old self. It’s a black leather journal embossed with a Celtic knot. 16-year-old-me went nuts over it, and promptly began writing poetry about how very alone I am, interspersed with overwrought descriptions of rain. (What can I say? I was raised in the Northwest!) You think that I started writing when blogs were invented? Hardly. I just switched from paper journals to blogs.

In some ways I prefer blogs. Paper journals never talked back.

In other ways, I miss the beauty and tactile fulfillment of paper and pen. There is an intense satisfaction to page after page of imprinted Bic writing in my even, if unlovely hand. The feel of a journal, with secrets, in your hand, lends your words a feeling of weight. You build, literally, upon the pages of the past.

I remember I always had problems when writing my journals with audience. I always wrote TO people. With a journal, I just never knew who those people were, although I pondered. My unthought-of children? My future self? My biographers? Now I know. I write to YOU.

There is a pen at the top of this blog. This is not a coincidence. It is an expression of my fancy and fantasy. I will likely now never write anything of great consequence with a pen. It is far too slow compared to the flying dance my fingers do over the keyboard. But I dream of ink, of creamy blank paper, and of the filling of space with words of import.