Nutgraf

Spouse is a great guy. Among other features, he is the best roommate I’ve ever had. Love him and all that. But now that I’m spending more time managing the homestead, there’s a habit of his that’s making me just a little bit crazypants in my headholes.

When he uses a dish, he takes it to the sink, fills it with water and leaves it there full to the brim. Tea cup, salad plate, ice cream bowl, stew pot, roasting pan, baby bottle… whatever. He says he does this “so they can soak.” Which is patent bullshit and obfuscation. That glass had water in it, Spouse. How do you soak water off of a glass?

So, I’ve asked him nicely several times to please not leave me a sink full of dishes full of water.

And I come home to this.

I mean, seriously. It would be one thing to place a dish in the sink, wait for a few to accumulate, then do a big rinse and put them all in the dishwasher. No big. But if you’re going to fill them carefully and line them up? This is the maximum amount of effort one can expend while still not actually doing the dishes. This makes no sense to me.

To use the sink at all, I have to move these offerings, and always get my hands covered with dirty dishwater, so I have to wash my hands, so I may as well just fill the dishwasher… hey, wait a minute.

But I’m not sure Spouse even knows he’s doing it now. I think that I’ve now put a bug in his ear about “dishes full of water,” and subconsciously he’s trying to oblige. It’s all so tidy. That lineup on the right? Four baby bottles full of water, and four baby bottle caps also full of water. WTF?

How do I make it stop?

When I was in college, there was much discussion of the Dish Fairy. “What do you think? There’s some dish fairy that comes and cleans up after you?” Signs posted in the kitchens my friends shared with a cadre of house- and roommates were sometimes signed by this elusive dish fairy, and begged, cajoled or threatened the reader with bodily harm if they left dirty dishes in the sink.

I don’t think he’d respond well to notes from the dish fairy, so I’m going to try something I read about a couple of years ago. While researching a book about a school for animal trainers, this author learned a lot about positive reinforcement techniques. She tried them on her husband to get him to pick up his dirty socks, to great success. Her article in the New York Times was enormously popular (I remember it making quite a splash when it came out), and was the cause of much conversation around the office.

• Read “What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage”

Wish me luck.

While pulling some weeds in the neglected part of my yard (read: any part of it), I saw this perfectly good machete lying on the ground yesterday. At least I assume it is perfectly good. I have not tested its goodness, and I don’t have on tap a machete evaluation schema. But this machete appears to be in working order, and was just hanging out innocently enough near the fence at the very back. Out in the open. Under a tree. Minding its own business.

Spouse disavows knowledge of this machete, saying “All of my machetes are accounted for.”

Sigh.

Ignoring that for the moment, I don’t know where it came from or what it was up to before I found it. I’d ask my neighbors, but… that would involve speaking to my neighbors and this is something I avoid as a matter of policy.

And that’s really all I have to say about it.

Er… have a great week.

I read some terrible news yesterday about the family of someone I know and admire. While mom was already in the middle of a battle with cancer (and you know how I feel about cancer), one of their children fell suddenly and extraordinarily ill.

That part’s not my story to tell, so I’ll stop there. I invite them to link to it in the comments here, though they’ve certainly got bigger fish to fry.

As a new parent, blah, blah, blah

Let’s not even humor me with that line. It’s just horrible when bad things happen, but extra insultingly, gut-wrenchingly, tear-makingly shattering when it happens to a child. I can’t even imagine what they’re going through, and they’ve been much on my mind.

An impotent, but hopefully poignant gesture

I want to do something for them. But there isn’t even a disease named yet I can throw money at to assuage myself. They’re extraordinarily well covered colleague, family and friend-wise, and I’m kind of beyond peripheral to this story in most ways anyway, and don’t want to intrude on them during this horrible time. I promised that I’d put a penny in every fountain I passed. What they don’t know is that my neighborhood has a lot of fountains.

This morning, after sending my own daughter off to daycare with extra kisses, I took a spin through the neighborhood and chucked a penny into every fountain I could think of.

Here they are. 16 fountains. 16 pennies. Thousands of good wishes being sent in your direction, folks.

I invite anyone to add fountains and locations.

The Internets can be fickle. Social media is so in that it’s now a big yawn. The shark has been jumped, Twitter has been twa… er… tweeted, and nothing against all of you foursquare fans, but I know nothing about foursquare and still cannot stand it. I’m not even interested in where I am most of the time.

My pocketbook is smarter than me

But as we all stare ever more raptly into the tiny screens we carry around, I’ve been thinking about how isolating it all really is. We don’t talk to people on the metro (though honestly, that’s kind of a blessing), we don’t ask for directions, we can get book recommendations at the tap of a finger, find out how much that house cost, compare prices around the world with the flick of a thumb, and tighten our tether to e-mail and work all in the name of convenience. What I haven’t seen, though, is a really good implementation that combines social media, the Internets and the big, bad, real world.

The other week I was invited to try out the goSmithsonian Trek scavenger hunt across the Smithsonian Institution museums and – to be honest – I thought “Ugh. Trying to navigate the real world with new technology. How annoying is this going to be?” I was wrong. It was actually pretty fun, even going it alone.

• Read more about the Trek on the Around the Mall blog

Basically, you download the SCVNGR app to your iPhone or Droid (because you are a nerd) and it takes you on kind of a guided tour of several of the museums. You are invited to answer a series of questions or “challenges,” featuring trivia from the exhibits, and earn points for correct answers. It’s kind of addictive, and I found myself plowing through school groups and dashing up stairways to find the answers.

Dodging tourists and photographing elephant butts

One of the things you’re encouraged to do in each museum is snap a photo to share. Here’s mine from Natural History. I’m also not entirely proud of the way I behaved in the Wright Brothers exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum, where I tried to move quickly through lolly gagging families to efficiently complete one challenge before moving on to the next.

I think the Trek has great applications. As a DC native, I’ve long seen school groups going on pen-and-paper scavenger hunts in the museums. This takes it digital and really makes it work with the technology that’s already in your pocket. I could totally picture going on this Trek with a bunch of kids (assuming a bunch of kids each have iPhones or Droids or whatever) and setting them loose to conduct the challenge. Or maybe as a group activity. DC is riddled with bright-eyed young things who love organized fun. And curmudgeons (such as myself) can also learn a thing or two. Even those (also such as myself) who used to work at Smithsonian Enterprises.

To fulfill the challenges, I actually looked around the Smithsonian Castle for the first time in years, saw the crypt where are kept the remains of James Smithson, the man who donated the bags of gold (literally) to found an “Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge” in a country he never visited during his life. This is just one of the amazing things to know about this amazing place.

Focus on experience, not interface.

As I said, I was pretty reluctant to try this thing out. I’m no luddite, but am congenitally cranky. It would be the easiest thing in the world to make the interface either too complicated or the activity dangerously dull. They’ve managed to make a really simple-to-use tool to guide users through what is at heart a much more complex activity. And keep the focus on the content, and the experience rather than on navigating the freaking phone. Strong work, guys.

But don’t take my word for it – feel free to download the free SCVNGR app yourself and head to the national mall. And don’t forget to drink plenty of water, it’s appalling out.

Plans for the future

I just spoke to the charming Beth Py-Lieberman, the editor of goSmithsonian who managed this whole shebang. She said that they’d love to take it further after this one-month trial is up. Maybe monthly treks, since the exhibits (particularly in the art museums) change so frequently.

“One of the takeaway lessons for me,” said Beth, “is that some of the visitors are going to have to be challenged more. We’re going to have to make them work hard for the answers, and get them into the back corners of the Smithsonian where the great stuff is.” I somehow failed to mention that I just couldn’t get one of the answers from the Hall of Oceans, so I may be in big trouble if they smart it up too much.

But it takes a lot of work to put one of these together. The one that’s live now? Beth says they started development during the DeathSnow and launched it during the heat wave, and that is something of a time commitment. It went through a lot of rounds of edits, a couple because the exhibits changed and threw the trek out of whack with reality, and one round Beth called “riddle-fying,” which is where they made lots of the questions rhyming and/or funny, which is pretty cute. No one asked me, but this all seems rather perfectly in line with the Institution’s stated goal of taking the whole of the Smithsonian digital, a project that is so exciting and of such appalling scope I can’t even get my brain around it. Maybe my pocketbook can.

• Check out the Smithsonian Commons prototype

Disclosure: I used to be an employee of  Smithsonian Enterprises. I have not been paid, compensated, bribed, cajoled or threatened to try this trek or write this post.

Read more about the goSmithsonian Trek from these fine bloggers:

Going places and completing challenges with the goSmithsonian Trek mobile app

Winning an iPad from the Smithsonian!

You all totally rock! Thanks to you, I’ve just sent a not insignificant $32.76 to the American Cancer Society to support cancer research! When I started this project a few months ago I had no idea that it would have such longevity. I am enormously touched by the fact that these donations keep coming in.

A little reminder of why I’m doing this: Because cancer was a total asshole to my rockstar Grandma.

Grandma really wanted to meet my daughter, and fought balls-out to stick around long enough. In fact, she fought this stupid disease for years – taking every indignity, every side effect, every inconvenience, and every ounce of pain with determination and a great attitude. She was in chemotherapy for about three years, if you can imagine that. Since the effects are often cumulative, she had at one point or another every side effect on the books, including some that her nurses hadn’t heard of. How’d she do it for so long? She had great doctors. But also her love for life and her will were indomitable. Well, nearly. She didn’t quite make it to meet her great-granddaughter, and that is only one of the things that totally blows about what she went through.

And it’s hardly unique. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been touched by this assaholic disease. I have a friend who said that – for her – the final and incontrovertible proof that God doesn’t exist is the fact that the profession “pediatric oncologist” does. It’s hyperbolic, sure, but I think we all know how she feels.

And now, without further ado – here is this month’s paperwork:

See? Here’s the Amazon.com payment to me from your purchases through the links on this site.

And here – as promised – is my receipt from the American Cancer Society.

How you can tell Cancer that it’s an Asshole:

1. Click through to Amazon from any Amazon link on this site. I have a few links to Amazon products and stuff on this site, including the book club selection on the left side. And This Amazon Link Here.
2. Buy anything, and your transaction will be flagged as coming from here.
3. At no charge to you, Amazon sends a small percentage of your total purchase to me.
4. I donate EVERY CENT of that sweet Amazon cash to the American Cancer Society, and post my receipts here. If anyone wants additional proof, just drop me a note (thea [at] nutgraf dot net) and we’ll figure out how I can satisfy your curiosity.

So, see? You just buy the stuff you’re going to buy online anyway, the ACS gets a little money and cancer gets the finger. It’s like making a donation for free – what’s not to like?