Caveat Lector

Yesterday on the walk to work I saw a pair of loons beak-to-beak in the bay.

This is unusual. Loons don’t generally appreciate the company of other loons. Something about stripes versus checks, I think.

But there they were—and then they started an odd sort of water-dance, with much ducking of heads and tiny little dives (not at all the typical loon dive, which lasts over a minute and ends quite some distance from where it started) that invariably brought them back up beak-to-beak with each other.

Oh.

Is a baby loon called anything more special than “chick”? I think it’d be awfully neat to see one.

I said my say, rather obliquely, on what happened to Kathy Sierra, and I’d planned to leave it there, because this sort of thing raises my blood pressure. (If it had happened to a friend, instead of someone whose blog I occasionally look in on, I’d be leading the perps to my personal private guillotine right about now, because I overreact that way. As it is, I don’t have any kind of status to pull stunts, so I’m trying not to.)

Over at Meredith’s, a couple-three men are saying how much the episode sickens them, and how helpless they feel to do anything about it. This post is for them, and folks like them. I don’t actually think there’s nothing they can do. I do think that what they can do is non-obvious, difficult, slow, laborious, frustrating, and courage-sapping, though.

My sense of what can be done to stop specifically misogynistic bullying depends on what I hinted at in my earlier post: it’s a broken-windows problem. (Yes, I know the sociologists debunked the broken-windows hypothesis long ago. I still find it a convenient analogy.) I don’t think the hateful language or the rape ’shop jobs or the threats could go nearly as far as they have (and still do) were it not for a widespread and unchallenged culture on the internet that insults, demeans, and irrelevantly sexualizes women millions of times on millions of websites every single day.

It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in geekland. There’s a strong (but by no means 1.0) positive correlation between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland. (It’s not just the computer geeks, either, which is why I use the vague term “geekland.” Gaming of various sorts, comics, science-fiction fandom—same story. Also, my remarks may extend to homophobia, which is likewise endemic in geekland, but I welcome refutation from people closer to that problem than I am.)

It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that” (hit, equating sex to aggression, that, reducing a human being to a thing), the “I bet she’s hot,” the “I bet she’s a fat whore,” the “I did your mom” one-offs. Everything about a woman, any woman, reduces to sex and sexual attractiveness. Even compliments are invariably phrased in terms of sexual attractiveness; geekland doesn’t know how else to compliment a woman.

All this is deeply ingrained in geekland culture, so deeply that if your connections to geekland are strong enough, it is inescapable… so inescapable that perhaps you’re already accustomed to it. Me, I have never gotten accustomed to it—call me sheltered, but I honestly didn’t ever run into people who thought and talked that way until I joined geekland, sometime after graduate school—and so I get angry about it and people hate and fear my anger, and try to delegitimize it.

It’s out of this earth that attacks like the one against Kathy Sierra grow. I firmly believe this. If you don’t, then click away; there’s not much point in reading further.

I can’t do anything about these particular broken windows. I’ve proven that the hard way—by trying repeatedly and failing repeatedly—and believe me, I hate my helplessness. My sense is that geekland culture only listens to women when they behave like honorary guys, which means silently accepting the prevailing misogyny (because after all, the guys do). Long ago, I tried to fix a broken window in my corner of the blogosphere. I failed, failed abjectly, and I came within an inch of leaving blogging because of it; if you want the gory details, hop all the way back to the beginning of my “Grunchy stuff” category. More recently, I tried to fix a broken window in the code4lib IRC channel. I failed, failed abjectly, though I hear others have picked up tools and are perhaps making progress with them.

I’m dubious that women can fix these windows on their own, in fact. It’d be nice, but geekland culture has got a cozy little cycle going: demean women, then accuse them of overreacting (I’m being kind here; the accusations are generally much nastier than that) if they protest it, then demean the protesters, who are after all women, until they are driven off. Then demean women some more; who will be left to protest? And who will be left to protest should merely demeaning women escalate to threatening them? Threatening them sexually? Threatening their lives?

No, a Kathy Sierra debacle won’t happen in every community whose norms allow sex jokes. But I will venture to say that every community with those norms has driven women out of it, mostly but not always silently. Argue with me about that. I dare you. I’ve been that woman too often.

But the cycle can be broken. It just has to be broken by men. And, I believe, it needs to be broken as early as possible in the cycle, while the norms of a particular community are still forming. Once they’ve crystallized such that pr0n jokes and “I’d hit that” are acceptable, the battle is lost. That community is inevitably going to drive away some woman sometime, and probably a lot of them. Moreover, I have yet to see such a community reform itself.

So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, “Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.” You say, “Hey, could we not use that phrase? I don’t like it.” You say to the main perpetrators, in IRC whispers or private email or whatever, “Hey, would you mind toning down the jokes? That kind of talk really bothers me.”

The key here is to express that the demeaning of women bothers you, you personally. Don’t appeal to nebulous higher causes; geekland scoffs at that stuff. Don’t even say the words “sexist” or “sexism,” much less “feminism,” and avoid “woman” and “women” whenever you can. If you say “that kind of talk,” trust me, they’ll know what you mean; whereas if you invoke the loaded words, they’ll shut down like a portcullis before an invading army.

And don’t say that you want the talk to stop because you want a comfortable environment for women, or even for a specific woman (your significant other, your sister, your daughter, your boss, your employee). Geekland doesn’t care. You can’t even say that you want more women to join the community. Some geeks will openly say “Why?” (Or, less openly, they will say that women aren’t there because they don’t want to be—without answering the question begged—or aren’t smart enough or good enough or “tough enough” to be. The last-mentioned, of course, is code for “honorary guy.”) The rest will simply assume that you want women for sex, because that’s all that women are for in geekland.

In fact, don’t get drawn into discussing why sexist talk irks you; doing so has probably been my major mistake. Geekland is very, very good at attacking feminist arguments, and dismissing and besieging the arguers. If they ask you why you’re bothered, just ask “Shouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it bother you? Uh, isn’t it wrong?” and like that—let them defend. (They will, don’t mistake me. But at least they have to.)

I reiterate: You must say that “that kind of talk” bothers you personally, and you must not get drawn into fruitless arguments about why you are bothered. That’s the only thing that breaks the cycle.

Sounds easy. Isn’t. It’s no good to do this in safe spaces, like the comment section of a female (much less feminist) blogger. You have to do it in spaces where you will not feel welcome or possibly even safe in saying it. And you will have to repeat yourself until you are blue in the face, this happens so often. Welcome to my world.

You will be told you’re overreacting. You will be told nobody means any harm. You will be ordered to lay off. You will be asked why you care, why you don’t have anything more important to worry about, why you’re ruining the great social environment. You will be shunned. You will be hassled. You may even be told to get the hell out. You will be called a feminazi, very possibly to your face. You will be told you’re pussywhipped, because in geekland, women are properly subordinate to men and nobody better damn well forget it. You will even be called a pussy or a cunt, because in geekland, nothing is worse than being compared to a woman, and her genitalia specifically.

Not easy. Not easy at all. It will take astonishing amounts of courage and persistence, in fact. But aside from getting in early and setting norms up front, nothing else works that I’ve ever seen. Think you’ve got the guts? Step up and prove it. Sing with the chorus.

And for those of you who already do—thank you. Thank you, Walt and Roy and Brad and Kevin, just to name four. Thank you very much.

This is my contribution to Stop Cyberbullying Day. I don’t do tags on CavLec (no philosophical objection, just haven’t bothered), but this post can be appropriately tagged on del.icio.us or elsewhere.

Last week, which was my first week at my new job, I got pulled into a brief impromptu meeting. “There’s a one-day symposium on research computing in a couple of weeks.”

“Yes, I heard.” Cliff Lynch is coming. You think I wouldn’t hear? I heard.

“We want to do a poster session for [the repository]. Will you be around?”

“Er, no, actually, sorry. I’ll be at the Texas Library Association conference.” And then I said the kind of thing I often say. “But if you need a poster, I guess I can whomp something up, as long as somebody else can babysit it at the symposium.”

This was seized upon with glad cries… but there was a joker in the pack. “We’d love to help you, but we’re going to be gone all next week.”

Ah. Had I mentioned that I’ve never done a poster before? I hadn’t? Oh, dear. “I’ll do you up something, then,” I said, willingly but not without doubt. “It won’t be perfect or anything, but it’ll be something.”

And something, it would appear, will be enough.

They gave me a tri-fold poster that had been made for some other thing two years previously, and told me to go to town. Fortunately, it turned out that some of the electronic files for this poster were still in existence, which gave me a base to build from. The rest, I learned from a quick Google.

(Short version? Create a ginormous slide in PowerPoint. Seriously. Now you know.)

It’s coming along. The big center panel is done, and after some messing about and wrong turns I at least know what I want on the two side panels now, and will turn my hand to creating it tomorrow.

I have no idea whether it’s any good, not being an aficionado of conference-style posters. I’d like it to be good, because then it will be useful in a great many more contexts. I have endeavored to keep the library jargon at an absolute minimum, I did my best to sell the repository in terms that faculty and librarians alike will find attractive, I’ve made it bright and shiny and colorful without (I hope) veering into tastelessness, and I remembered to put the repository’s URL somewhere prominent.

Let’s not discuss how long it was before I remembered that last.

And then I came home, went right back out again to help with the grocery shopping, came home a second time, ate dinner, and plowed headlong into the TXLA presentation, about which I can at least say that the title slide is a stunner. It looks good. Thank you, Flickr, Creative Commons, Gimp, and Keynote.

I’ve never actually been to a state library association conference. Going to TXLA next month will be my first. It looks as though WAAL rather than the larger WLA will be my native state conference, but I won’t make it this year for the obvious reason that I’ll just be coming back from TXLA.

Of course I haven’t helped organize a state library association conference either. It could happen, but it hasn’t.

Despite my inexperience in these matters, I have repeatedly run into a common and rather unfortunate paradox: library associations treat imported speakers like imported caviare, but they treat in-state or in-organization speakers like dirt. Not good wholesome rich-in-organics farm dirt, either—contaminated worn-out landfill dirt, more like.

As I mentioned before, I’m getting a lovely deal from TXLA. Native Texan and fellow Five Weeks organizer Michelle, however, is getting the shaft. Or she would be, if she weren’t smart enough to tell ’em where to stick it.

Let me make the math super-explicit here. I am on tap for a 45 to 50-minute talk plus ten or fifteen minutes of q-and-a. In return, I am being flown to San Antonio, housed and fed for three days, comped registration fees, and paid a $400 honorarium. (I didn’t sign any NDAs about the honorarium that I’m aware.) Michelle has been preparing a full-day preconference tutorial, six or seven hours of material. She is getting no reimbursement, no honorarium, and not so much as a conference-fee rebate.

The idea lurking behind this lunacy was expressed to me by Meredith in IM a few weeks ago. “I don’t mind presenting for free at a conference I’d be going to anyway,” she said. So state-conference and org-conference planners high-handedly assume that every librarian in the state or the org is going to their conference. Why should they comp these people, much less pay them? They’d be coming even if they weren’t presenting (even if they’re not members!), and after all, conferences cost money. The outsiders won’t tell the insiders anything about the inequitable compensation, and librarians are used to martyring themselves for their organizations anyway, so where’s the problem?

Look, y’all, the Internet just outed you. Rachel and Walt and Meredith and Michelle and Jenny and Michael and I (and others), we’re on this thing like bloodhounds, and we aren’t letting it go. I don’t care what the current conference financial model is, it must change, or conferences are going to just plain run out of talent. Would I have taken the TXLA gig if I’d known Michelle was getting screwed? No. Hell no. Will I take an insider gig for free if I learn that outsiders are getting caviare? I will not.

In fact, after this mess I’m a-gonna start asking about conferences’ general reimbursement structure before I agree to speak. I’m kinda cranky about TXLA placing me at embarrassing sixes and sevens with a colleague I value. (And no, this wasn’t Necia Wolff’s fault and shouldn’t be laid at her doorstep; I didn’t know what to ask, and so I didn’t.)

Methinks there are dozens of ways to be reasonably fair about this. There are categories of conference speakers: keynoter versus featured speaker versus invited speaker versus accepted speaker. (No fair making the distinction if everybody in a given segment is in the same category, though; calling preconference-tutorial presenters “accepted speakers” and paying them less than regular-conference speakers just because standard operating procedure is that all preconferences are submitted for approval is mean.) Length of presentation is another issue to address; seven hours of material ought to be worth more than 45 minutes. And if you’re making a specific pool of money off a given set of events (like preconferences), it’s insane not to set aside some of that money for the presenters.

Should there be any difference between compensation for your insiders and outsiders? Maybe there should. For a state conference, your outsiders may well be travelling further. But, honestly? I’d rather discard the entire insider/outsider criterion. If some speaker’s getting in free, every speaker gets in free. If some speaker’s getting an honorarium for a presentation of a given length, every speaker gets paid. The accounting can’t get that much more complicated for most conferences, I shouldn’t think, because speakers are such a small percentage of attendees.

So you make the table or the spreadsheet and you twiddle it until you’ve got the compensation that works and seems fair given your resources. Then you make that information public. Transparency—what a concept. Okay, maybe you have to hide some honoraria, especially on the top end, because everybody knows those are negotiated. But aside from that, everybody ought to know what everybody’s getting, and for heaven’s sake, everybody ought to know that no speakers were financially harmed in the making of a given conference!

Call it keeping yourselves honest. If you publish your table and hear vivid outrage in return, it had better not be from your insiders. They don’t just come to your conference. They don’t just present at it. They are your conference. As for us outsiders, what are the odds that we’re going to pitch a fit because we’re not being treated better than insiders? That’s absurd.

I’m hearing an objection already. Won’t this system mean that the conference is flooded with craptastic talk proposals from insiders wanting to get comped? Sure, could be. What the hell is your program committee for, anyway? It’s their damn job to weed through that stuff, and to keep records of who phoned it in at a given conference so that the guilty parties don’t waste folks’ time in future. This is a self-limiting problem, honestly. There are easier ways to freeload!

What’s more, comping (or at least rebating) your insiders will bring excellent speakers out of the woodwork that you’d never have known to invite, in all likelihood cutting way down on the number of outsiders you have to (expensively) invite. It will add to the socioeconomic diversity of your conference in general and your speaker list in particular, as people come who couldn’t otherwise have afforded to. Folks like Michelle might even join your association if they’re decently treated at your conference. These are wins. Take them!

But the bottom line is, if you can’t run a conference without screwing over some of your talent, then you’ve got no business running a conference. Go be a librarian or something.

And since I really ought to put my money where my mouth is, I expand upon the off-the-cuff offer I made in Michelle’s comments: if she ends up teaching this thing and TXLA still can’t see its way clear to treating her decently, I’ll sign over my honorarium to her. She deserves it more than I do, and I’m getting plenty from TXLA already.

My question to library associations is this: Who’s going to be the first to step up and do the right thing, the transparent thing? I’ll celebrate you here. Heck, we’ll all celebrate you. Because the current system, he is broken.

So I’m doing a presentation called “What’s Driving Open Access?” next month. And because I will happily take a metaphor, run it into the ground, resurrect it, run it back into the ground, then hop up and down on its exanimate corpse just to make the point, I went to Flickr’s Creative Commons search looking for pictures of buses.

Oh. My. Gosh.

I found some awesome stuff. I found more metaphors than even I can shake the proverbial stick at. I found the “rubber meets road” picture. I did. I swear I did. And my open-access pals will appreciate this: I found pictures of honest-to-goodness green buses. I don’t even have to mess with the Gimp.

I’m still looking for the perfect “fell off the back of the bus” picture. (My open-access pals can guess what that one’s for, I’m sure.) If anybody’s got it, or knows who does, let me know. BY license only, please; I’m getting an honorarium for this talk, and I often mod photos.

Flickr and Creative Commons are the greatest boon to the weary presenter ever.

So I wandered onto my favorite IRC channel one day. It was a Thursday. How’s it going, I asked.

About usual for Thursday, said another regular on the channel. Snorting cocaine off a dead hooker’s leg.

It wasn’t what Kathy Sierra is going through. It wasn’t personal, heaven knows. It wasn’t pointed at me. It wasn’t even intended to be offensive.

But I never went back to that channel after that.

There’s a continuum. All of this stuff is on it. It’s damned hard to tell where stuff falls sometimes.

Please try to stay off it. Please. And I will too.

Meet Buffle. Buffle is a new 13-inch MacBook. Buffle is white, and is named after the buffle-head ducks on Monona Bay which are also (mostly) white.

Buffle is cute. Buffle Just Works, unlike the horrid PC with Windows XP I’m having to use at work (and yes I am going to lobby for a Mac just as hard as ever I can, but this is a big uni and it’s fixated on Microsloth and I have to make a case for myself; in the meantime, Cygwin makes the PC suck slightly less).

Buffle is ours; I will travel with it and use it as my personal machine, and David will take it to the library to work on his dissertation with.

Buffle is downloading all the backed-up stuff from before the move. This will take Buffle a while (not Buffle’s fault; it’s a powerful lot of stuff). I’m very pleased to have Buffle, and I expect we’ll be good friends for a long time.

It was crazy warm today, so David and I strolled down to the bay, binoculars in hand. The ice is long gone.

In evidence were the usual mallards and muskrats and geese, as well as coots, loons (so pretty!), and a group of buffle-head ducks.

I’m thinking about doing a CSA half-share this summer; there’s a well-reputed farm that delivers a few blocks from the house. It will be a Cooking Adventure if I do it, because I am not very good at whomping things up from whatever’s to hand, but I daresay I can adjust… and I’d never try half the neat stuff if I had to make up my mind to buy it at the farmer’s market.

We’ll see. Haven’t entirely decided yet.

When I was 16, I took my very first paid job, first busboy and then stockroom attendant at K&W Cafeteria in Cameron Village in Raleigh. Some days people would be absent and the cafeteria line understaffed; I was now and then sent out to lend a hand.

One such day, I dropped a spoonful of mashed potatoes while the line was at its longest. I hastily and sketchily cleaned up the worst of it, then went on serving so as not to hold up the line. A minute or two later, the oldest and most irascible of the regular servers returned, took one look, and shrilly demanded, “Who made this mess?!”

Uh-oh. Was I ever in for it. This woman could do ten-minute tirades that flayed flesh from bone. “Um, I did,” I said meekly, “and I’m sorry. Here, let me finish cleaning it up—it just got busy all of a sudden.”

She looked at me for a moment, baffled at my confession. “Naw, now you give me that,” she said gruffly, taking away the damp cloth I’d just picked up. “I’ll take care of it, hon. You just get along back to the back room.”

Better than half my lifetime ago, and I still haven’t forgotten that.

Early in CavLec’s existence, I became acquainted with another feminist tech blogger. Without fully acquainting myself with the history of her blog, I started backing her up on CavLec, and we became friends. We aren’t any longer. I eventually found out that the on-blog battles she was fighting got meaner and less contained off-blog. I also found out that active participation in both on-blog and off-blog struggles was more or less the price of her friendship; non-participation, or the least hint to her that perhaps angry confrontation was not always the best course of action, brought immediate accusations (mostly off-blog, but occasionally on-) of betrayal of friendship and conduct unbecoming a feminist.

Now, as we all know, I am something of a chameleon; I take on the characteristics of the people I hang out with, for better or for worse. I’m also an arrant coward; confrontation scares me and hurts me and if extended, threatens to drag me into depression. I lost stomach for her fights pretty quickly, and I didn’t have the guts to take her on (nor did I think it would make any difference if I did). The whole thing ended badly. I’d heard she was ill and in trouble, and was making arrangements to go visit and see what I could do when an angry, accusatory email landed in my inbox.

And I said no, no, I can’t do this, I probably should be able to, but I can’t, it’s only going to mess me up worse without helping her… and there things sit to this day, not patched up.

Not long afterward, I got into a role-playing game played by web bulletin board, a game with a fascinating setting and a GM with a deft turn of phrase and an excellent talent for surprising his players. Things were going swimmingly (ugh, wrong word, but never mind) until a typical CavLec rant about an ill-behaved child in a restaurant offended him. He posted a return rant on his own blog, casting specific, detailed, and caustic aspersions on my personal character. I withdrew from the game. The other players understood.

I got an email shortly thereafter from someone who told me that this was a pattern of behavior with this particular individual. She predicted that he would shortly destroy his website and pop up in another guise, with another site name and URL, and that he would never admit to his previous history except with paranoid assertions that various people were out to get him. She was right on all counts, and the pattern has persisted to this day; he’s even using pseudonyms now, and “out to get him” has escalated to “cyberstalking” and nebulous unsubstantiated threats to his family.

Not long ago, I connected the dots between him and his latest pseudonymous venture in public, because the cycle had recycled and he’d abused some more people, and I thought those people (and the people who followed, since more will follow; this cycle has gone on for years and at least four iterations that I know of, and appears unbreakable) should know who he was. Even less long ago, I got a complaint in email about it from his wife, wanting to know why I hadn’t let it drop, trying to make me feel bad about what I had done, again adducing threats to the family (which in all honesty, I don’t believe a word of). I didn’t answer. But I thought about it for several days, because really, what was I up to? Due warning, or cheap revenge?

I’m not above the latter. I know myself better than that. When I feel wronged (or worse, when someone I care about has been wronged), I get self-righteously mean and petty. Some of the time, I manage to throw a rope around it before much harm is done; I actually lost my temper good and hard with Meredith during Five Weeks and the Akismet problem, but I don’t know that she realized it, because I knew my inner reactions were ridiculous and therefore kept my outer reactions in check. But sometimes the rope misses its hold.

At my best, I’m not a bad egg. I know that. But I’m also well aware that I’m not always at my best. Meredith has reason to say nice things about me in connection with Five Weeks. The crew at Open Access Research has entirely legitimate reason to hold a different opinion, because I’ve been slacking badly with them—forgetting to return emails, not doing some design work I signed up for, and generally putting them on the back burner. Ugh. Bad me. And not the only ball I’ve dropped lately, either.

(Don’t panic, Jen. I’m working on the book. I really am! And don’t you panic either, Necia. Some things I’ve still got under control here.)

The point of all this being, the divide between what I am and a net.kook or a snake in the grass or a welcher or a messy pile of grinding rust-toothed grudges is sometimes shockingly narrow. Ask code4lib if you don’t believe me. Or consider my reputation in the biblioblogosphere, which surprises me unpleasantly on a regular basis—scared of me? People are scared of me? For heaven’s sake. But then again, “sometimes… just plain cranky and wrong” is a fair assessment, perhaps even a generous one.

(Though I do think two other things are happening: one, people remember my rants more than my other blogging, because rants are colorful and galvanizing; and two, I’m a woman not blogging like a lady, and that’s still a salient thing in today’s world.)

I don’t run myself down because I’m overly modest. I do it because I’d be a very monster of pride if I let myself. (And also, I think, because I don’t care to become jaded.) I don’t downplay my accomplishments because I’m humble. I do it partly because I’m uncomfortably aware that my accomplishments aren’t the whole story… and partly because if I rest on my laurels, which is sometimes tempting, I’ll start breaking more promises, letting more people down, and passing up chances to learn out of the arrogant and erroneous belief I’ve nothing left to learn. I don’t apologize publicly for my screwups because I’m a supremely reasonable human being. I do it because I’m quite the opposite—and I learned when I was sixteen that sincere apologies deflect a lot of ugly consequences, and I’ve learned since then that not apologizing when an apology is due creates even uglier consequences than the original sin.

Look, I can’t rely on beauty or charm; I haven’t got either. I can’t rely on a faultless history; mine is full of pitfalls and wrong turns. Brilliance? Nuh-uh. I’m smart enough, but plenty are smarter. Talent? Nothing earthshaking, and nothing especially focused. Agreeableness? Not natively, as the blogosphere is well aware, though I do okay when I work at it. So what’s left?

Relentless self-awareness and self-questioning, that’s what, along with a willingness to accept and (when I’m really ticking over properly) confront my own weaknesses and errors. It’s not the most enjoyable tool in the toolbox, I assure you, but it’s done better by me than any other.

On Monday, I closed the green-painted lockless door of the four-unit I live in behind me, and turned toward the shore of Monona Bay. A black dog with a white front, fenced into his yard, tossed a faded red-and-blue twist of rope outside the fence and regarded me with a practiced sad-eyed pout. I threw the toy over the fence, and the dog leapt after it joyously.

Monona Bay was frozen pretty much solid on Monday, bare of wildlife save for a couple pair of ducks and geese. The walk up to Brittingham Park was still far from devoid of interest: the quirky yard with a faux sea serpent in the flower border and a gorgeous copper-greeny butterfly bench against a tree, hardy joggers and bikers and one or two walkers like me, trees budding leaves, even the ice patterned oddly by refrozen puddles.

At Brittingham Park, I cut over to Park Street; there’s a marginally shorter way through the “Triangle” apartment complexes, but it involves crossing major streets without benefit of stoplights, so I prefer the safer (if noisier) route. Campus is creeping down Park Street, it seems; buildings I don’t remember at all start shortly after crossing Regent. They aren’t grotesque excrescences, at least, though they don’t demonstrate any particular harmony with the rest of campus. Madison seems to have learned something since the 1960s, which produced horrible Van Hise, Van Vleck, and the triply-horrible Humanities building.

Students and faculty heading for classes and offices join me at Dayton Street or thereabouts, right where my bad knee starts bugging me. I can’t quite explain what it is about their dress that feels familiar and comforting to me, but something does. It isn’t that they dress the way I do, because nobody does that, not in Fairfax and not in Madison either.

On the way home that day, the dog who asked me to toss his toy to him thumps his tail disconsolately, watching a child bouncing a basketball in the driveway just outside his fence.

Tuesday is warm; the bay is puddled as I walk home, and a few spots have opened up near shore. There are a fair few For Sale signs out; I note the addresses, to look up prices online later. I find out that there’s a bizarre spread on lakefront property, from $425K all the way up to nearly $600K. One differentiator appears to be actual deeded shoreline rights, but some of it is doubtless “wishing prices” from the housing bubble. All the houses currently for sale are far too big for my taste. The shore drive does have smaller ones, but no one’s selling any.

Wednesday is wet, although the rain doesn’t really start until I cross Johnson Street—that last quarter-mile where my knee starts to hurt, again. I have my umbrella, so no harm done. On the way home, quite a bit more of the bay is open water, and I see—

“’Skrat!” I announce to David on walking in the door.

“You saw ’skrat?” he asks.

“Three ’skrat!” I answer proudly. “Sitting on the edge of the ice.”

Thursday morning opens up even more water, and before I reach Brittingham Park I count nine muskrats at once. There may be more, even, but now and then they slip into or out of the water, so it’s hard to get an authoritative count. At the park, a flotilla of small, stubby waterfowl has gathered near shore. I assume they’re coots, though I can’t see whether their beaks are the right color because the light is just wrong; my hunch is confirmed on the way home that evening.

Friday, the ice has lost all anchors against the shoreline, drifting lazily toward my side of shore and piling up in hand-sized chunks. The coots have gone to the other side of the remaining ice, but the muskrats are very much still in evidence, paddling for pondweed or whatever it is they do.

I quite like my walk to work. The bad knee isn’t seriously bothersome; I’m inclined to let it work out its own ill-temper over time. And five hours a week of moderate exercise is probably just what the doctor ordered; I got lazy in Fairfax, there being few places worth walking in. I could take the bus to work. But I don’t think I will, now that I’ve established a different habit.