My article on Lyme disease, which ran in the North Bay Bohemian, was reprinted in Metro Silicon Valley. I guess the article is getting quite a bit of positive feedback from Lyme disease sufferers. It’s always nice to know people like your work.

In other news, Kyle and I are going to Seattle for the next five days to visit his Dad. From there, we are going up to Victoria BC, which I have always wanted to see. Canada, ho!

Last weekend, Kyle and I went to Monterey to celebrate our anniversary. We stayed at the Way Station Inn on the north end of town. Although the hotel is by Monterey’s tiny airport, it is very quiet and surrounded by a veil of pine trees. Our room felt like a private bungalow. It’s a good place to stay if you want a hotel that is less touristy and more affordable.

During the rest of the day, we walked around downtown and Cannery Row, looked for otters and seals in the ocean, tasted wine in a wine shop, ate an excellent dinner at Passionfish Restaurant in nearby Pacific Grove, and went to the beach to watch the sun set.

Pictures:

I was disappointed the sunset wasn’t more spectacular. However, while we were there, we noticed a couple wandering near the surf. Suddenly, the man got on his knees and took the woman’s hand. She must have said yes, because they hugged and hugged afterwards.

In keeping with the wedding theme, my article on wedding tourism was published in the June issue of North Bay Biz Magazine. As anyone who has been through one knows, weddings are big business. This article looks at the financial impact of weddings in Sonoma, Napa, and Marin counties.

Four years! You are the best thing to ever happen to me.

(Joy and Kyle in Napa, two days before their wedding)

I have a new article in this week’s North Bay Bohemian. Did you know that Lyme disease has tripled in the last year in California? Read all about it.

I am planning to write a post about the Book Group Expo that I went to with Marcia last week, but work keeps getting in the way. In the meantime, read Marcia’s take on the Expo.

And while you’re at it, consider donating a book to the libraries in Harrison County that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Biloxi Library, for example, had 3 feet of water and lost 39,000 titles. Gulfport Library lost its children’s, adult fiction, and audio-visual collections.

Plus, you get to pick which book you want to buy from the library’s Amazon wishlist, which is pretty awesome.

My husband Kyle Rankin’s fourth book Ubuntu Hacks is out. He co-wrote it with several other people, including his boss Bill Childers.

Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux. According to Wikipedia, a rough translation of the African word Ubuntu means “humanity towards others,” or “I am because we are.” The Ubuntu distribtution wants to bring “the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.” I’m just glad it’s not Windows XP.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Update: Ubuntu Hacks got 9 out of 10 points on Slashdot!

Update: Ubuntu Hacks is now the number 1 top seller for Computer and Internet books on Amazon!

For the second time this week, I’m stuck on my laptop because my main computer is refusing to boot. So that means that not only am I stuck on a much slower machine, I’m stuck using Windows XP instead of Linux.

Windows is making me insane! It has brought up “Automatics Updates” 10 times so far this morning asking if I would like to reboot my computer. In fact, it just did it again! Why yes, Windows, let me stop everything I’m doing so you can randomly do a bunch of updates. Sure, shut down all my programs. I wasn’t doing anything. In fact, why don’t I just step away from the computer and you can use it to bring up ads and restart every few minutes?

Windows also refuses to play a surprising number of Mp3s and other files that work fine on Linux. I am not 4 years old, so I don’t want little cartoon dogs and paperclips flashing every time I use a program. Somehow AOL got installed, which is making everything worse, since it repeatedly brings up an AOL window asking if it should be my default browser. I’m pretty convinced there is a ton of spyware on here now because it is taking 500 years to load, and because, duh, AOL, but Search and Destroy and AdAware say otherwise.

Yes, I know I can spend two hours looking through all my programs to figure out how to turn all this off, uninstall AOL, etc. But–oh look the Automatic Update came up again!–I just want my computer to work. I want programs to open when I say and I don’t want to be constantly interrupted by stupid updates. I want me to be the boss of the machine, not the other way around. Why anyone would use Windows XP when there are other options out there is a mystery to me.

By the way, Leona has pictures of last Friday night’s Karaoke. I’m the one with the mouth that opens really wide.

1. An evil scientist puts you in a time machine, sending you to your least favorite place during your least favorite time in history. His kindly assistant adjusts the settings to give you control over your race, gender, marital status and profession. Where, when, what and who are you?

Although there are many periods of history that don’t interest me, I’m pretty sure cavemen had it the worst in terms of overall dirtiness and daily boredom. So I would probably be sent back to caveman times in, say, northern Europe. What a mean scientist. Language hasn’t been invented. Cavemen are hairy. I’m cold because fire has not yet caught on the way it will five years from now. This sucks.

Given all this, I don’t want to be human. I want to be a Woolly Mammoth. First of all, I’m warm. Secondly, I have adorable babies. Third, when I die by being frozen in ice, 30,000 years later, scientists will take my DNA, combine it with the DNA of an African Elephant, and make a clone-hybrid out of me, thus making me kind of immortal. That rocks.

2. In the year 2000-whatever, your adult children put together a photo album — or its super-futuristic counterpart — chronicling their favorite moments with you during their childhood. Describe some of these moments.

“Wow our Mom was cool. Remember when she won the Pulitzer for her fifth novel? We were very proud of her. Oh and remember when we all graduated from nice colleges and became doctors? That was awesome. Here’s a picture of Mom and Dad standing on the Great Wall of China during our trip there. We saw sooo many monkeys on that trip. Man, we sure had lots of happy Christmases involving good food and love. Oh here’s Mom and Dad on their 50th anniversary. Mom looks only 35 there. Our genes are amazing.”

3. You can choose to be any character in literature for three days. Which character do you choose and why? What part of his or her life do you choose to start your three days?

This is the hardest question you asked. I realized I would not want to be any of the characters in the books I most admire. Who would want to be Mrs. Dalloway or Sethe? So I’m at a loss. Of course, I could pick a tragedy and be, say, Romeo and have him behave more rationally about his secret marriage, but that would make the play boring. Or I could pick something mushy like Scarlett O’Hara and make her introspective enough to realize her love for Rhett Butler, but living in the Old South would scare me. It seems like it would be fun to be Don Quixote until you realize how embarrassing it must be to be him sometimes. So I will pick Moby-Dick. As Moby-Dick, I would swim away so that boring book would never be written.

4. You are a hard-boiled news dame from the 1930s. You have the choice between breaking the story of a lifetime, thus cementing your status as coolest news dame ever, or moving to Morocco with the man of your dreams, effectively giving up any chance to become a serious newspaper gal. What is the story you could break, and which choice do you make?

Hands down, I would cover the story. Whatever, man, if you can’t wait for me to cover my story, I don’t think we would work. I would be like Martha Gellhorn, who married Hemingway and then refused to be a housewife, instead going off to World War II and becoming one of the most important war correspondents of the time.

So what story would I cover? I suppose, logically, the biggest story of that decade would be the rise of Hitler, so I should say something like breaking Hitler annexing Austria. However, you know what would be really awesome? An exclusive interview with Bonnie and Clyde. First, they would take me–blindfolded of course–to their hide-out. They would let me sit in the latest stolen car and Clyde would show me his guns, which would make me nervous but it would be okay. As the evening progressed, they would open up about their poverty-stricken childhoods and descent into crime. The next day, every paper would print my account of their tale of desperation and love. Who needs Morocco?

5. You wake up tomorrow and discover that suddenly everyone in the United States speaks only Chinese. You still speak only English. What do you do?

Once I figured out what was going on, I would move to England where people speak English.

The End.

INTERVIEW GUIDELINES:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

I was interviewed by:
Marcia

Sylvia Plath on needing other people (aside from Ted Hughes) to read her work:

I need an outsider: feel like a recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can’t understand a word he’s saying.

I know exactly what she means.