Next week, most U of M employees are getting furloughed. For those of us who had the pay decrease, we’re “strongly encouraged” to take vacation during that time.

I’m going to follow their advice, mostly because Megan is being furloughed anyway and it will be nice to not actively think about work for a week.

I hereby designate next week to be furloughcation week.

What are you going to do with this free time? Something productive? Pshaw. You need a break.

Here’s your first recommendation of what to do:

Watch Cougar Town

I am dead serious. This is the best fluffy sitcom you’ve ever refused to watch because of its stupid and offensive name.

As the producers learned relatively quickly, the whole “older woman on the prowl” theme was dumb and unwatchable, and the whole “dysfunctional friend-family” is far more entertaining than being repeatedly scandalized/titillated by a woman in her 40s having sex (EEK!).

In my countdown list, I will give you three reasons to watch this show – and give you one to watch on Hulu right now to get a taste. Even though it’s in the middle of Season 2, I think it communicates the show’s sense of humor. And then you can judge me.

3. Laurie
Honestly, she is my number one favorite thing about the show. I love her. I want her to be real so she can be my friend. I have a fondness for badass, crass, fun ladies, and her “sexy, townie ho” self is sheer perfection. The actress (Busy Phillips) does such a great job of conveying the sensitivity underneath her big personality and…yeah…can she please be real and hang out with me?

2. The relationship between the main character and her ex
One thing I really like about this is that Courtney Cox’s character and her ex-husband, with whom she has an 18-year-old son, have a complex, adult relationship. I feel like we don’t see a lot of that depicted – where people share a difficult history and still have to continue a relationship. That’s pretty much any healthy divorced couple with a kid in existence.

1. The characters and their relationships
I mean, isn’t this why anyone would want to watch a sitcom? You’re not watching for the action, the intrigue, or the mystery. You’re watching because you like the people you see enough to laugh at their jokes and want to see them play out their days.

Anyway, that is Part 1 of what to do on your furloughcation. I may recommend more dumb TV shows (or even not dumb, but most TV shows are pretty dumb), and will more likely recommend brain relaxing things. If you want to go be all intellectual, go read journals for me and write an IRB submission.

Megan and I were coming home from an evening at Spyhouse (me desperately writing a paper for a conference, a sad excuse for a paper; Megan reading) and caught the end of The Story on our glorious Minnesota Public Radio. This is what it was about:

Jessica Zichichi and her husband Sal have held onto good jobs – their problem is the housing market.

Jess and Sal were living in a small house in Cape Cod that they loved. Then Sal took a job in South Carolina. It was 2006 and they figured they could easily sell the house. In the meantime, they’d live on their 33-foot boat.

Then the bottom fell out of the housing market. Jess and Sal were stuck living on the boat while they rented their house to a nightmare tenant and tried to rustle up enough funds to build a one-room barn to live in. And then Jess got pregnant. She talks with Dick about some of the good that’s come from her family’s ordeal.

With all the awfulness of our own buying(?) a short sale ordeal overwhelming most aspects of our lives at the moment, hearing Jess’s story was like a moment of light. I think this may have been a rerun because I vaguely remember the story, and I remember originally thinking “oh how terrible!!” – but this time it just delighted us. We laughed and gave each other big smiles every time Jess’s story intersected with ours. Just knowing someone else was going through things as ridiculous as ours – and more so, at least we’re not living on a boat, right? – made our transient life a little less lonely and tragic.

It’s not perspective really, more of a relief at shared troubles. I guess that’s perspective in a way.

All I know is that MPR brings me so much joy so frequently. And I love listening to it with Megan.

***

By the way, I haven’t even talked about how we got married. But it was so fantastic. I’ve started a few posts about it, but things have been so nuts with the house stuff that I haven’t even had the level of concentration necessary to finish writing the posts and do the wedding justice.

I am currently aglow and in awe of what we accomplished yesterday. MinneWebCon wound up being a conference beyond the dreams of those of us who started gathering last fall and geeking out over our shared desire to have a conference that addressed the needs of those of us who are craftsmen (ty to Eric Meyer for that usage) of the Web. (And craftswomen. Craftspeople. Craftsgeeks.)

I had a great time in the sessions I attended and am craving the podcasts of the social networking and microformats sessions that I missed. This first conference reaffirmed my belief that the University is full of smart, talented, dedicated people who are leading in their various areas–and that people from outside the U would want to hear us and others talk about these things. It means that the things we’re interested in are the things others are interested in.

Honestly, the number of non-U people in attendance was humbling and mind-boggling to me (I believe it was 1/3).

Also, I had a great time presenting–but I dig getting up in front of people and doing my thing. It’s fun for me.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for coming–thanks to those I met in person and those who were twittering (tweeting? I’m new to that. I’ve caved. I was trying to avoid it.) with all the #minnewebcon stuff.

Hopefully next year will be better–considering none of us had put on a conference before, I think we did damn well. Or, rather, we were fucking awesome. But I’m not prone to hyperbole or anything…