Trip Story: The Road to St. Jean de Luz

Our plan for our third full day in France was to get up, eat breakfast, check out of our hotel, take a cab to the train station , pick up our rental car, and then wave good-bye to Bordeaux and drive to St.-Emilion for lunch. We also thought we might buy some of the wine for which St.-Emilion is famous and drink it that evening in our hotel room in St. Jean de Luz, where I'd splurged and paid an extra 10 euro/day for a private ocean view balcony.

Things did not go precisely as planned.

We over slept terribly, waking up well after breakfast was done- and in fact after our check out time. We hurried to get ready and pack up while our wonderful and forgiving hosts called a taxi for us. We got to the train station and had to wait quite a while for our turn at the rental counter. We finally got the keys to our car and lugged our bags up a flight of stairs to the rental car level in the parking garage, got in our car, backed out... and the warning light indicating a flat tire came on. So we went back into the rental car office, got keys to a new car, and then finally we were on our way. By this time it was after noon, but we figured we could get to St.-Emilion before 1 p.m., and keep to our original plan.

And then we missed the turn off the ring road. This was primarily my fault- I had not yet gotten my bearings as the navigator- but also a little bit Mr. Snarky's fault, because he forgets that I do not have his eerily good, almost photographic memory for maps. We had not eaten, and were annoyed from how long it took to get a car, and so we of course started sniping at each other. Mr. Snarky took the next exit. I thought he was planning to turn around and get back on course for St.-Emilion, but he was in fact planning to find some place to eat. He found a pub like place in a little suburb of Bordeaux that did not look appealing to me at all. More sniping ensued.

Finally, we acknowledged the scale of our mistake, and decided to give up on St.-Emilion. We would head south instead, and find some place reasonable to get off the motorway and see scenery on the drive to St. Jean de Luz. First, though, we needed food. We pulled into a gas station at what was essentially a rest area on the motorway and decided to resign ourselves to a so-so sandwich just so that I'd stop being so grumpy. (My tendency towards hangriness is well-known, and Mr. Snarky has been with me long enough to know that nothing was going to fix this situation except food.)

A way marker in Moustey

Our sandwiches were far from so-so. They were delicious, and I'm fairly certain that was not just the hunger talking. The bread was essentially perfect, the ham was full of flavor, and the cheese was amazing. We were a little in awe of the sandwiches, to be honest. Neither of our native countries offer gas station food that good. (Although the Kiwi classic of a pie and a slice is pretty awesome, the pies on offer at most gas stations are... disappointing.)

Once we were fed, we plotted a new course. We decided to get off the motorway near Belin-Béliet, and drive through a little bit of the Parc Naturel Régional des Landes de Gascogne. The scenery was pretty enough, but not overwhelmingly beautiful. I suspect that truly enjoying this park would require getting out of the car and hiking a bit, which we didn't really feel we had the time (or the gear) to do. Also, it was sprinkling off and on, and the forecast we'd seen implied it might do more than that, so we weren't inclined to stray to far from our car. We did stop for a snack in a little town called Moustey, which was interesting primarily because we saw two other couples there, both apparently following the Way of St. James, an ancient pilgrimage route that is still in use and fairly popular. The sea shell is a sign of the route, and one of the other couples had sea shells tied on the front of their bicycles.

After Moustey, we drove back to the motorway and stayed on it until we were in Le Pays Basque. We stopped to see the sights in Bidart, which has a beautiful coastal view, and many of the white buildings with red beams that we soon came to recognize as characteristic of the region.

The view south from our clifftop vantage point in Bidart.

We enjoyed the chance to stretch our legs a bit, but wanted to get to our hotel before it got dark and/or it started to really rain, so we drove on... and realized we actually had no idea how to get to our hotel. Luckily for us, St. Jean de Luz helpfully provides road signs to all of the hotels in the old part of town. This is essential, because even with directions, I think we would have gotten lost in the maze of narrow, one-way streets.

We safely arrived at our hotel and found that it really was right on the coastal walk and we really did have a private ocean view balcony... and that it was far too cold and windy to sit on that balcony. So we had some wine in our room looking out past our balcony to the water, and started making plans for our stay.

Weekend Reading: The I Don't Know What Edition

Fist of all, I'm really enjoying the comments on yesterday's post... keep them coming. I promise to come answer some of them soon.

My kids spent this week with my parents. They come home tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to seeing them, but I have to admit... I got a lot more done without them here.

Before you call "hypocrite!" on me and my claim that kids don't have to keep you from doing great things on the work front, I want to emphasize: (1) the number of hours worked does not have a directly linear relationship to the amount of work done. I've been getting a decent amount done even with my lower hours. (2) I took the extra time created by not having to help anyone else get ready in the morning, read bedtime stories, or do any of the other child care tasks I usually do and consciously decided to put that into work (and some chores about the house) because a recent review of my time logs showed me I'd been slacking a bit and I knew I wanted to increase my hours spent on work.

(If you're curious, I've been averaging about 30-35 hours/week of work, and I want to move that up to 35-40 hours/week, which I know from past time logging is my optimal work week in terms of getting sh** done over the long term.)

I keep time logs now because I charge some of my time out to clients, so I figure I might as well log all my work time. I'm not logging home time right now, although I've done that in the past. I've also logged just my work time at various points in the past, and I know that I can work more when the kids are around, I just haven't been doing so.

Frankly, I was really, really burnt out last year, and I needed some time to recover. I've had that time, and now it is time to kick it back up a notch or two. Having the kids gone for a week was a good chance to do that. I intend to keep my work at this higher level once they're back, both in terms of hours and in terms of actually making good use of those hours.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a weekend reading post. Shouldn't there be some links? I've got some for you, but they are extremely random this week, hence my complete failure to come up with a reasonable title for this post.

First up: big news! Annorlunda Books' second book is now ready for pre-order at Amazon. If you're one of the people who prefers other ebook outlets, I'm working to get pre-order pages elsewhere, too. I hope to have links for you by next week.

Meet one of my favorite local politicians.

When was the first time you became aware of your race? If you're white, your answer is probably actually about when you first became aware of other peoples' race. This was a really eye-opening and thought-provoking post for me to read.

This reflection on losing 100 pounds is really good.

I shared this piece about women's speech patterns in an earlier post this week, but I'm sharing it again because it is really good and you should be sure to read. Ann Friedman's piece on this topic is worth your time, too.

And if you're really intrigued by speech patterns and how they impact how people are perceived, I just finished reading Deborah Tannen's Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Workand it is really good. I'll also admit to finding it a bit depressing that a book that came out in 1994 was still so completely relevant.

Zeynep Tufekci's post about why the computer glitch that hit the NYSE this week should scare you is really good. I may finally get around to writing a post about over-automation. If I do, it will be over at my real name blog.

More data about how to end homelessness.

Did you see that Ellen Pao has stepped down as Reddit CEO? I am sad about that, but hope she moves on to a happier place for her.

On a somewhat related note: ending abuse in an online community turns out not to be impossible.

Danilo Campos has some sobering thoughts about the lack of inclusiveness in the tech world.

The fun at the end:

Key and Peele's feminist pirate song is awesome.

This video of a girl and her dad having a beatbox duel made me smile.

So did this:

This guy was boating in Alaska when a pod of humpback whales pop up to feed. He makes the exact noise that I would. https://t.co/Df5vVSO5qv

— SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) July 9, 2015

Paying for the Things I Enjoy

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I pay for the things I like online- i.e., how I pay for the content I consume. I'm thinking about it for the obvious reason that my decision to start up a micropress makes me very interested in what convinces people to pay for content. After all, one of the things I'm competing with is the free stories people can read online.

But I've had the interest in content and who pays for it (and how) for quite awhile. I've written about this at Tungsten Hippo. The internet is set up so that the people who make it worthwhile, namely the people that produce the information that it provides, are the last to get paid. You certainly pay for the hardware you use to access the internet. You probably also pay for the bandwidth, unless you're at a university or using a public library where someone else pays for it for you. You are much less likely to pay actual money to the individual sites whose content you access, even though without those sites, you probably wouldn't care whether or not you had bandwidth, and may not even be so fussed about having certain types of hardware.

Ah, but you pay in ads or information, right? What happens to the money from those? If you look at the sites you access, chances are the distribution of money follows the same weird inversion. The people who host the site certainly get paid. The people who wrote the code that runs the site probably get paid, although a lot of sites do run off of open source tools. The people who provide the content- i.e., the writers? That's less certain. There are a lot of opportunities to write for free out there. If you don't believe me on that, I can forward you some of the pitches I get, telling me I should write a "guest post" for some site, and how they'll pay me with a link back to this site. And then, of course, there are the big sites like Huffington Post, where you can submit for the slim chance of being published and paid nothing except "exposure."

I do not know the solution to this, but in last week's Weekend Reading post I said the following, about addictive systems: "the systems we build are the results of our decisions, whether conscious or not, and we always have the option to try to make better decisions."

So, I'm going to try to make some different decisions. I have decided to think about my favorite things online and figure out how to pay the people who make them.

A lot of my favorite sites are personal blogs that don't run ads. In those cases, there is not really anyway to send them any money, unless I track them down and write them a check. (Bloggers I read- consider this a standing invitation to hit me up for a lunch next time you're in San Diego!)

But there are a lot of other things I love that I can pay for. Here's my list so far:

I love the History of the English Language podcast, and I've gotten Pumpkin hooked on it, too. So I donated via the donation button on the website, and I plan to buy the History of the Alphabet audiobook as soon as I figure out the best way to do that for how I'm going to listen to it.

I used Coffee Break French to brush up my French before our recent vacation, and I'm using Coffee Break Spanish now to try to ensure that Pumpkin and Petunia can't have entire conversations that I will not understand. Both are produced by Radio Lingua. My intention is to become a subscriber to Coffee Break Spanish, but that costs more than I can justify spending right now, so I bought the One Minute Spanish for Latin America series instead.

I already buy a lot of books for my Kindle for Amazon- I have to keep the flow of short ebooks going to supply Tungsten Hippo, I have book club books to get, there are random other things I want to read (I'll be buying Between the World and Me,Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest book, for instance).

I'm just getting started on this little project. I want to go slow, so that I can pay attention to what makes me decide to pay, and how much I'm willing to pay for different things. So far, the things I've decided to pay for are things I've really loved, but had been enjoying for free. I don't think that is the usual behavior for people, and it probably isn't even the norm for me. But who knows? Maybe I should set up a "donate" button on Tungsten Hippo.

What about you? What things that you get from the internet do you pay for? What makes you decide to buy?

A Parable from a Parking Lot

Last week, Pumpkin moved back to our usual YMCA camp, after spending the first two weeks of summer break doing a gymnastics camp at a different local Y. She says she prefers our usual YMCA for camp, and I do, too, mostly because traffic is so much less of an issue when we are at that camp. Pumpkin doesn't care so much about the traffic, but says she gets more playground time at her usual camp, and the "spirit activities" aren't as annoying.

There is one thing that is more annoying at our usual camp, though: the exit from the parking lot. To leave the parking lot, you make a right turn onto a fairly busy road. Meanwhile, there is a line of cars waiting to either turn left into the parking lot or make a U turn and go into the next parking lot (which is reserved for people going to the Y to workout, not do camp drop off or pick up). Sometimes, the people waiting to make a U turn get impatient, because at peak drop off or pick up time, there is a fairly steady stream of cars trying to get out of our parking lot, preventing them from making a U turn even when there is a break in oncoming traffic. And sometimes, when they get impatient, they do questionable things, like make their U turn while someone else is turning left, thereby almost hitting the car coming out of the parking lot.

Last Monday morning, I came very close to having an accident with a man in a blue BMW

The car looked a lot like this. (Image credit)

convertible. Luckily for both of us, I saw what he was doing in time and slammed on my brakes. Luckily for me, this did not get me rear-ended by the next person trying to get out of the parking lot before the traffic light down the street changed and we all lost our window of opportunity.

I'll admit that I said some not very nice things about the man in the blue BMW as I drove away.

From the glare he gave me as he turned, I suspect he said some not very nice things about the people dropping off their kids at camp and making it hard for him to get his morning workout. I suspect he hates the camp season. I had the right of way and I didn't even honk my horn at him. Why else would he be glaring?

Once the adrenaline was all out of my system, I realized that we were both blaming the wrong thing (each other) and letting the real problem (inadequate infrastructure for the traffic in and out of that parking lot at peak times) off the hook.

Later that week, I watched a fight play out in my Twitter stream between two groups of women. One woman had tweeted something that another woman felt was demeaning towards women who do not have kids, and it kind of snowballed from there into a strange and yet familiar argument about whether mothers or women who do not have kids get more shit from society.

And it occurred to me that this was the exact same dynamic as what happened between me and the guy in the blue BMW.

I know this isn't a profound observation, or even a novel one. But dammit, I wish we could learn to stop yelling at each other and focus instead on the real problem of a society in which there is literally not a single way to be a woman without catching shit for it.

On a somewhat related note, I fully intend to keep using my natural speech mannerisms like "just" and "sorry," and this post from a linguist explains why. There is only so much tightrope balancing I can do.

But I also swear that I will not judge any woman who does manage to eliminate "just" and "sorry" and all those mannerisms. After all, how other women talk is not the real problem here.

Weekend Reading: The Long Weekend Edition

It is a long weekend for most people here in the US, as we head into the patriotic extravaganza that is our July 4th holiday. We'll be spending it a bit unusually- we're packing the kids off to my parents' house for a week, and won't even be with our kids for the holiday. Oh well, as Pumpkin likes to inform us, they're half Kiwi, anyway.

Perhaps we should make a huge deal out of Waitangi Day next year.

Anyway, I am not talking the entire day off, but I am planning to stop working early.  And so, your links list will be somewhat random this week. Here goes:

This is a really interesting essay about why we shouldn't build "addictive" apps. It is also a reminder that the systems we build are the results of our decisions, whether conscious or not, and we always have the option to try to make better decisions.

Don't assume everyone who disagrees with you is a jerk. I basically agree with the main point of this article, and do think that it is best to aim for a civil discussion and try to understand why the person on the other side thinks differently than you do, without demonizing that person. I struggle to reconcile this general belief/desire with the fact that sometimes the person on "the other side" is arguing that I'm not equal, and/or won't actually discuss the issues at all. So I guess I think I shouldn't assume the other person is a jerk, but that I have to be free to respond appropriately when the other person proves to be a jerk.

Speaking of jerks: I don't think I should have to learn how to cope with verbal abuse. I think that people who routinely resort to verbal abuse should not be tolerated in any workplace. They can change. I have seen it happen when it was made clear that their behavior would result in them losing a job. (Thanks to the reader who sent that article along! I'm not sure if you want to be named publicly or not...)

Somewhat related: it is on me to build my racial stamina. Sometimes, we need to have conversations that make us feel uncomfortable, and accept that the other party has every right to be angry.

Back to speaking of jerks: why do people care where other people pee?

Another reader submission: the study of women in color in STEM that was referenced heavily in What Works for Women at Work.

Back when I was reading up about labor and delivery, I remember reading that we didn't really know what triggers labor. We still don't know the full story, but we're learning more.

And speaking of labor... did you see the story about the California woman who got lost in the woods, gave birth, was attacked by bees, and started a wildfire?

This tweet about that link (from a local reporter) made me chuckle:

And here Scalia thinks we're not the real West. https://t.co/gtWAUoqhxh

— Sara Libby (@SaraLibby) June 30, 2015

How a woman is transformed into a cover model. The gif in this tweet is a bit mesmerizing, and also disturbing:

This is how an average woman is transformed into a cover model pic.twitter.com/p0N1C5nLQD

— How Things Work (@ThingsWork) July 2, 2015

And while we're doing tweets with embedded gifs:

El fútbol femenino vs hombres... pic.twitter.com/SAHOdfTZSj

— Leugim Figueroa (@leugimfigueroa) June 30, 2015

And finally, a couple of promotional links for things I'm working on:

I'm trying out an idea for short (and inexpensive!) seminars on focused topics. First up, how to run better meetings. The price is already low, so there is no discount for signing up early this time: just the knowledge that you're helping me stop worrying about whether I'll hit my revenue goals for the course!

I've got the page for the next release from Annorlunda Books up! Unspotted is the story of the elusive, endangered Cape Mountain Leopard, and the man who has made it his mission to save them. It will come out in August, and I'll have the preorder page up soon. In the meantime, I'm looking for some advance readers- sign up if you're interested.

Oops, almost forgot the closing laugh. XKCD has a great answer for those annoying "what's your greatest weakness?" types of interview questions.