Photo by clevercupcakes / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A month from now I will probably be neck-deep in brown boxes and packing tape, sniffing a Sharpie marker to relax. I’ll be moving to North Carolina at the beginning of July, and while I’ve moved across town and moved 70 miles away for college, I’ve never moved out of state. Well, not on my own. My parents moved us out of state several times when I was a kid. My only part in those moves was the “game” my parents had us play afterwards where my brothers and I competed to see who could collect the most packing inventory stickers off the furniture. At the time I seriously thought this was a game, and not a clever way to get your kids to do slave labor gleefully.

My memories of former cross-city moves include several last-minute carloads of crap piled into the back seat that I ferried across town, all while saying, “I think we can get the rest in just one more trip!” Ha! Since I don’t see [...]

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• Continue reading "Babies sure do wear weird hats these days"

In one of those mix-ups that occasionally happens, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway mistook me for someone of importance. Before they could discover their error, I snatched up their offer for media credentials. (I love the word “credentials.” I have credentials! I’m credentialed!) That’s how I found myself wandering around the speedway last Saturday, drinking as much free Coke Zero as my bladder could hold.

First, I picked up my badge and pin from the administration office. I also grabbed a handy spotter’s guide, which is like a birdspotter’s guide, if birds had corporate logos. (Hey birds, smarten up and you can trade your nappy nests for super sweet birdhouses!) I also got a parking sticker that got me a prime space only a quarter of a mile away from the stands instead of miles away from the stands like everyone else.

I headed into the garage area, where I saw a guy in an Herbalife jumpsuit smoking a cigarette. Ha! Didn’t score a picture of that though. I did manage to hone in on a source [...]

• Continue reading "Indy 500 Qualifying Day: I evidently don’t need any qualifications"

One of my readers recently let me know she is having problems accessing the blog, but is still able to read entries via the RSS feed. When she visits the site, she gets this error:

Method Not Implemented

GET to /blog not supported.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I’ve tried to figure out what’s going on here, but it seems to be beyond my area of expertise. To further confuse matters, the reader is using the Firefox browser, which I myself use, but I’m not experiencing any problems. If you are running into the same problem, or if you think you might know what’s going on, email me at blog (at) pastaqueen {dot} com. Thanks!

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Have you ever been out at a restaurant with friends when you unexpectedly run into a coworker? Let’s make it even more awkward and say you run into your mom too. And let’s say the waiter is from a highly, specified Internet niche you belong to, like “people who knit Smurf clothes in the style of Revolutionary War heroes.” Suddenly, your head begins to explode as your try to draw a mental Venn diagram determining what shades of your personality you’ve shown to each group. Then you realize there is utterly no overlap between all the groups. You have absolutely no idea how to act. Should you be the amusing office serf? The dutiful daughter? Or should you start a conversation about the gender dynamics in Smurf society caused by Smurfette being the only female Smurf?

This is how I’ve felt lately about social media, be it my blog, Twitter or Facebook. I’ve got people from my work sphere, friend sphere, casual-acquaintance sphere, weight-loss sphere, headache sphere and lots of other spheres watching me in all [...]

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