The Mandelbear's Musings

I'm not sure whether to lead with the back-story, or the song. I think the song. One of the songs. For some of the back-stories.

Today's song is Janis Ian's "Welcome to Acousticville" (Lyrics). It's on her album, Hunger. Go and listen. I'll wait.

Back-story - the song

I first heard "Welcome to Acousticville" the one time I heard Janis perform live, at a little Mexican restaurant called Don Quixote in Felton, CA. (You might want to look at my post, though it doesn't say very much.) "Welcome to Acousticville" was one of my two favorite songs from that concert; the other was "The Last Train" (lyrics. I've sung that one quite a few times, though not recently. Never had the guts to try "Welcome to Acousticville".

Janis Ian is a science fiction fan; I find it interesting but not surprising that my two favorite songs of hers are fantasy; neither would be out of place at a filksing.

Back-story - the title

This post grew out of comments by me and technoshaman on bairnsidhe's poem, "No Simple Highway". I've already posted a Songs for Saturday about "Ripple"; what brought this one on was the later discussion of my purple rose icon (which you can see on this post) in connection with psychopompery. (I know it isn't officially a word, but it's what psychopomps do, and I'm not the first one to use it.)

Back-story - the icon

The rose icon started out as a gif that somebody posted on Usenet; I took out the background and adjusted the color balance until it looked right. I created it in 1990, in honor of my daughter Amethyst Rose. I first used it as an icon on LJ in 2003; it appears to have been the second icon I uploaded, after the fractal that I still use as a default.

Since then, I've been using it as my standard icon not only for the Amethyst Rose posts, but for most posts and comments about grieving. Most people use a candle.

Both the job search and the house triage continue, if not apace, at least somewhat. I finally feel as though the search is gaining a little traction: I've gotten replies on several of the job applications I've put in, and have three phone interviews set up between now and Monday. And I've taken about nine feet of books out of the office and piled them in the living room to see whether anyone in the Wednesday crowd wants them.

I'll be up in Shoreline from tomorrow afternoon through Tuesday afternoon. Mostly looking at apartments.

My first shipment of tapeless moving boxes arrived. Those were the small book boxes; the medium and large ones haven't even shipped yet.

And I actually took walks both days. I cut yesterday's a little short because my left ankle was bothering me. Growf.

Quite a few good links. A rose made of galaxies is absolutely gorgeous. The best news is "The Bomb Buried In Obamacare Explodes Today-Hallelujah!" -- this is the rule that health insurance companies have to spend 80% of their budget on actual health care. What a concept! Health care after the move still scares the heck out of me.

It's been a long, strange trip. It still is. The journey started three and a half years ago on livejournal, with this post and this song.

It's been quite a while since I was posting regularly on this tag, since I was looking inside and trying to understand myself. Even longer since I really used the river as a metaphor for this journey, or posted about friendship or the care and feeding of geeks. I don't think I've ever gone back and read through the whole thing. I want to change that.

I'd like to make at least one River post every week. Realistically, that's not likely to happen, but it's what I want to aim at.

About two years ago I thought of collecting the best posts and turning them into a book, which would have been called A Year On the River. "Three and a Half Years..." doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow. (No fair mentioning Two Years Before the Mast.) But that's still a possible back-burner project, maybe with crowdfunding.

And less than a week ago, I won a custom icon from the amazing meeks. I love the way she captured the idea of reflecting, which I hadn't even thought about but was obviously there all along. I'm using it for the first time on this post, and hope that it indicates a turning-point both in my posting habits and in my journey of reflection and self-examination.

Come walk with me again? We're about to go around a bend.

Read the Wikipedia article.

Watch the video.

Look at xkcd 442, which is indeed awesome, and the comments on the LJ feed post, where the fun began.

Track the progress on xkcd_boomdeyada.

The Web is not merely stranger than we imagine...