First rain of 2009

Just to check in for the new year -- yesterday, a cold dry day, we visited friends a few blocks away, and they served us apricot tart made from fruit from their garden.

This morning it was raining gently. I went to Morning Prayer at St. Gregory's as usual, and there was a fellow visiting from out of town who had just been given Sara's book for Xmas, so he was excited to meet her.

I'm looking at this as a four-day weekend, and those are the best. Will try to get some writing-related work done... tomorrow.

Adventures in book publicity

Hey look, it's my friend Sara on the NPR home page, doing a "This I Believe" shot to promote her book Take This Bread. I interviewed Sara in 2006 when she was completing the book; this interview with the SF Gate.com website is much better. Among other places, you can see her work on salon.com. Her book caught the attention of the Episcopal church's presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who quoted it in a 2007 commencement address at an Episcopal seminary. Others who loved the book include Anne Lamott. Sara's previous book was about the relationship between Web 1.0-era entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the Al Gore campaign, but this piece she wrote in the New York Times in 1999 -- the same year she began going to church -- already reflects her questions about whose responsibility it is to make sure people are fed. (By the way, this Sara Miles is a completely different one than the one with the autistic kid who's gone on the Snow White ride at Disney World 2084 times, and whom I blogged about yesterday without mentioning the mother's name.)

technorati: Sara Miles

Happy Birthday, Chris Carraher

Happy birthday to my wonderful friend and collaborator Chris Carraher. Before I was a novelist, before she was a painter, we did performance art together in the 80s and early 90s. Behold:

That's a flier from 1986, if I'm not mistaken.

Life's too short to squint

It's amazing how having a highly paid tech job can enable you to clear out a few annoyances. The monitor they gave me was too small after I got used to working on a big one at my old job, so after struggling with it for a couple of weeks, I ordered a new, larger one from Dell, only $310. It arrived today and after I set it up I felt much more productive. Now all I have to do is explain to my co-workers that I haven't received special treatment from the manager. I got it because I have "eye problems." Yeah.

In the past I probably would have felt it was my duty to just work with the smaller monitor. But the heck with it, I'm not going to struggle if I don't have to.

For those of you outside the Bay Area: It was v. warm all over California today -- about 75 in the city. Meanwhile I got email from a friend of mine in a small city in northern Japan: too cold and snowy to work outside today.