Pointedly

'Snuggle Mountain,' an app mentioned in this week's Digital Savant column

My energy level is up in a major, scary way, one of those “LOOK OUT, WORLD!” feelings that the world, it turns out, has largely seen before.

For a few weeks I wasn’t going to the gym as often and I was eating… not great, and my energy level was just total shit. I was getting sleepy at 10 p.m. even when I’d had a decent night’s sleep and just was getting no writing done in at night, never mind actual house stuff or getting organized.

Maybe it’s that it got hot again for a weird week, but now that the cool weather is coming back I feel like I’ve got my second (cool) wind. It’s nice. Stuff’s getting done. Waste paper is landing in basketball-hoop-style trash can novelty toys. The blood feels like it’s moving again.

It’s a good thing because this morning was the first time I’ve done an NPR thing since March. I was invited to go on the show On Point with Tom Ashbrook to talk about the Amazon Kindle Fire and the tablet wars in general. (TABLET WARS! THEY’LL SLATE YOU… THIS CHRISTMAS.) You can listen to the one-hour segment (there were other guests as well) on their web site or just download the MP3 here. I think it went well. I did a ton of cramming and reading over the weekend in preparation, but went in with minimal notes and, in a big departure from when I used to do All Tech Considered, I was able to keep my laptop open and have an Internet connection. Something about having Twitter running in the background and access to information if I need it just calms me. Feeling hermetically sealed often makes me talk faster and feel less confident. Either way, it was nice to be back on the air.

A few other new things: today we ran a Digital Savant column about an upcoming digital storytelling symposium for children’s book authors and illustrators. There’ll be a lot of talk about ebooks and children’s apps and I’m all over that.

Last week, I wrote a blog post that ended up running in the paper about the future of vending machines. It was pretty snacky.

That’s about it right now. I’m looking at a few more weeks of knocking out some stories and columns before I take another vacation in early November, right after Halloween. We’re trying to potty train Lilly at night (no more Pull-Ups!), but that’s challenging. Carolina has learned how to fight back when her sister takes items away from her and that’s… loud. Our fall looks like zoo visits and Wurstfest and putting away the plastic swimming pool and, for once, I’m OK with that. I had a great summer and I don’t feel bitter that it’s gone like I usually do, especially with the awfulness of the temperatures and the drought this year.

Work is work; a few more staff members are leaving or shifting into other roles and I have a hard time remembering when things were “normal” or if that was ever really a state of being there.

One thing I saw today really affected me. I went to Goodwill Computer Works to interview someone for a story. As I was wandering around, I saw this hanging up near the front:

The air went out of my lungs and I just stared, mouth agape. I wrote the story in 1997. I’d just been hired a few months before and it was one of the first big, ambitious stories I wrote. It’s still one of my favorites, a piece about the Apple Lisa back when it looked as if Apple might not even exist in a few more years. A rush of emotions filled me, but I just turned away, smiling. The man I was interviewing walked into the room and it was time to get to work.