Syndicate and Hague

We moved our books out of storage today.  The living room is now overrun by piles and piles of novels and poetry and political theory.  It’s the first time I’ve felt semi-calm in four months.  It’s the first time I’ve seen any of my books in four months.  Hell, it’s the first time I’ve seen 95% of my things in four months.

I love my books.  It is not unusual for Megan and I to be having a conversation which I interrupt by running off to get a book that either contains information helpful for the conversation, some tangential but related information, or just to share something I have on the shelves that our conversation made me think of.  Being without them…well…it’s not so interesting to say “let’s remember this moment, because I have a book in storage that is perfect for this.”

It was so exciting to unpack those today - and though this whole saga is not quite over yet - I can see the light (aka: the closing) at the end of the tunnel and the books are back and that is beautiful.  My greedy eyes have missed the poetry I regularly take off the shelves and read and I’m so happy to return to that part of life.

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.

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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.

This picture was taken on Day Four of living together.

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…