We moved office at the end of May and it was a total CF:

• No one thought to get emergency no parking permits from the city so to get space for the trucks to unload three of us had to go downtown with our cars and circle the block until spaces opened up (Uh, gas is over $4.10/gallon here and you’re only going to pay me for “mileage” at 48.5 cents/mile?);
• the moving company only sent half the crew and trucks they should have so the rest of our move had to get pushed until Saturday and on Saturday one of the driver’s got pulled over, with an empty truck thankfully, and had the truck impounded because he had no registration so the move that should have taken four hours took 10;
• we didn’t get keys to the new office until we’d been there a week and we still don’t have after hours access.

The good news is that the new office is fabulous: my space gets morning sunlight and I have windows that open which have been a fantastic boon during the mid-70s, low humidity weather we’ve been having for the past week.

The new office is Downtown, in fact we’re right in the heart of DC. I walk out of my building, cross the park and cross one more street and I have the opportunity to moon the White House if I so choose. Not that I’d choose to in this climate; I hear the Nutraloaf at DC Jail isn’t especially appealing. Downtown is interesting, full of people and things to see and places to eat and bookstores to walk to, all things I’ve been deprived of the past couple of years while I’ve been working Uptown near the Metro Stop That Time Forgot (but hey, we had a grocery store where we could go and get…groceries).

As a consequence of the move, I’ve had to develop a new routine; going to a new subway stop for work will do that to you, but going to a new place has gotten me to thinking about habits and how we form them and why we do some of the things we do. Such as:

Why do we wash our hands in hot water? Experimentation since this thought randomly occurred has proven to me that washing dishes in hot or warm water makes sense; the higher temperature water helps to loosen food particles that may be stuck to dishes. Now, this same experimentation has also proven that scrubbing harder using cold water will loosen food particles so it makes sense: in dishwashing, hot or warm water is a labor saving device. But the same doesn’t hold true for washing your hands.

In cold climes, it’s true, warm water just feels better in the winter. But with anti-bacterial everything, including hand sanitizer that doesn’t even require water (hint: most of them are something like 60% alcohol), other than the comfort factor during the winter, what’s the point of using hot or warm water to wash your hands? If you’ve got cheese or something else stuck to them you’ve probably got bigger issues than water temperature but how many things do we do out of habit without thinking about them?

I’m not saying all habits are bad, more that in order to be present in your life isn’t why you’re doing something just as important as the effect you get from doing it?

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is fashion. With more people to look at as I trek to and from the office there are a lot more fashion choices to consider, both good and bad, and I’ve discovered two things:

1) sartorially it’s 1983: I saw a guy the other day in a lime-green Izod polo shirt, collar turned up ‘natch, salmon-pink pleated-front khaki shorts, and boat shoes. He looked like he’d memorized The Preppy Handbook. Given that not one single good thing ever came out of 1983, this is not a good sign considering that…

2) hip-huggers have invaded “business dress” for women: yes, once confined to casual wear women are now squeezing themselves into these god-awful pieces of clothing and going to work. Given that anyone with actual hips looks like a sea cow in a pair of these, why would you choose to wear them all day at your job? Perhaps because the fashion industry conspires against any woman who wants to eat more than a valium and a Diet Coke every day? But having looked at a lot of asses in the past two weeks, again on the trek to and from the office, I think the easiest way to kill this fashion trend that never should have been reborn is to make every woman look at her ass in a pair of these. The business casual version of these pants, typically with a wide waistband about 2 inches above faux pockets with flaps, make even a woman with buttocks best suited for this style look like she’s wearing an adult diaper. And I know incontinence is really what I’d like to advertise in a professional or social scenario.

Yes, I know this is all pretty random, but I’m avoiding writing my essay on Presidential politics. Mostly it’s because I still can’t approach the issue with any measure of calm. The rest, well, is it possible to go to the polls in November and vote “present?” After all, if it’s good enough for the Democratic presumptive nominee it should be good enough for the average voter.

This year’s summer solstice will occur at 23:59 GMT (that’s 19:59 EDT to you). Some data on the daylight at my location from Weather Underground. Happy Summer!

You have no idea how much you really sweat until you have a case of poison ivy as an adult.

The rash that happens from contact with poison ivy, poison oak, or poison sumac (altogether now…Don’t need nothing/but a good time/and it don’t get better than this) is a contact dermatitis reaction caused by an oil called urushiol which is found in all parts of the plant. Basically, it’s the thing that makes you itch. But in this day and age of climate control – hello personal HVAC unit in the new office – and Benedryl spray it’s fairly easy to keep the itching under control…until you go outside.

It has been brutal in DC the last couple of days: On Monday it was 83.8degF/28.8degC at 8am and while the official high was 98.4degF/36.9degC the heat index made it feel like 102degF, especially on the paved streets of downtown Washington. Now imagine that with 77% humidity and you’ll understand why I felt a certain shiver of…not schadenfraude for I take no delight in their discomfort…but vindication as I in my shorts and aloha shirt passed people who were wearing full-on office drag. Yes, you may make more money than I do, you may have more IT support than I do, you may have nicer office furniture than I do (and you probably didn’t have to go to Reston, VA in a rented truck to pick it up) but it is days like this past Monday when I am certain about why I continue to work in non-profit.

Tuesday was little better…official high of 99.9degf/37.7degC but today was gorgeous…a perfect summer day in DC. About 85 degrees and not too humid. So after three days of anti-poison ivy wash, at only $40 for a 1oz tube, and three days of being doped up on Claritin and coated with Benedryl spray I thought I’d take a walk around the neighborhood near my new office.

And it was quite pleasant, warm enough in the sun to appreciate that it was summer and similarly cool in the shade. Not hot, mind you, but appropriately warm. Not once did I break an actual sweat, but sweat I did based on how much I itched after a brief walk around the block.

So the next time you think you aren’t sweating because you aren’t completely pitted out or because you don’t have that tell-tale rivulet running some place intimate think again. Unless there’s something seriously wrong, your pores are busy putting out salt and other toxins by the gallon.

If you’re at all variant in American society in a way that doesn’t scream serial killer, whether your variation is sexual (as in “Hi, everyone, I’m queer!”) or it’s the fact that you really, really, really thought that Voyager was the best installment of the Star Trek TV franchise, coming out of the closet can be both a joy and a relief. When that coming out is something you choose to do it happens because you’ve finally reached a point where your own comfort with who you are is more important to you than society’s often arbitrary and exclusionary mores. Getting outed, though, is painful no matter what. It’s especially painful when it happens because a technological system fails to work in the way it’s been advertised to work.

Much has been made of Google and its potential to abuse the massive amount of data it is collecting both in aggregate and about you personally when you’re logged into your iGoogle account. Google has been accused recently of participating in Chinese government sponsored censorship and of failing to comply with California’s online privacy laws by making their privacy policy difficult to find. And while some of the critiques of Google may present slightly paranoid, it says something about the power of the data they collect that over two years ago the U.S. Justice department issued subpoenas to all of the major search engines as part of their attempt to enforce a controversial anti-pornography law.

Though the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Gmail FAQs is a comprehensive, well thought out list of reasons why you shouldn’t use Gmail it doesn’t mention Gmail’s one major flaw: it can expose your identity without your knowledge.

See, Gmail has this great feature that allows you to retrieve e-mail from other accounts into your Gmail box. Handy for people like me who have multiple e-mail accounts separated by function – one e-mail account for social networking, one for neighborhood political activities, one that fronts my blog identity – but who don’t want to have to log in and log out of several accounts multiple times per day. Ostensibly with your Gmail account you can set different identities in your umbrella account, the one that you’re using to pull from all your other e-mail, so that when you send e-mail to your boss telling him you’re sick it doesn’t come from cupcakelover56 it comes from Jill Jones. What Gmail doesn’t tell you with these identities is that each e-mail that’s sent carries your umbrella address with it.

When the Compose window looks like this:

it implies that your e-mail will be received as being from you with no association to any other e-mail address. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Check it out: This message was sent from my umbrella account (that’s my blog-fronting address) but was sent using my “professional” identity.

That blur at the top is my actual name. The blur at the bottom is another of my e-mail addresses. But that thing in the clear, that’s the address of the umbrella Gmail account I used to send the message.

I found this out this out the hard way: by finding my blog-identity e-mail address associated with my real name in documents that are part of the public record relating to the siting of a charter school in my neighborhood.

So whether you’re trying to separate your Facebook identity from your identity as a level 70 Tauren Druid, beware of Google’s hidden privacy flaw. Otherwise, your boss might be getting e-mail from BromopneaDruid without you ever knowing it.

I took 22 subscription cards out of three magazines this week…you know, those things that fall out while you’re reading in bed and inconveniently on to the floor where you can’t quite reach them but you just know that if you leave them there you’ll step on them when you get up at 3am to go pee, do that Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford thing, crack your head open and either die of it or end up having to go to the emergency room in whatever your S.O. could find in the closet before the ambulance arrives (’cause everyone loves a 3am trip to the ER).

Everyone talks about reducing junk mail but what about reducing the impact of publications you want to get? How many pounds of paper would we save each year if every magazine published in the U.S. cut their subscription blow-ins and sew-ins by even a third?

I don’t have the answers to this but I think I may have found my next project. Nothing like hard data to make a point.