I can’t be sure without going through old email I’d rather not read again, but I think today is the one year anniversary of Mike and I deciding to separate, which of course lead directly to where we both are today.

It’s always sad when a relationship falls apart, but I think we are both way better off now than we were a year ago, and for years before that. So I ignore the sad parts and focus on the good stuff, of which there is a lot. Friends, fun, and the freedom to do almost anything. Who could argue with that??

I know it’s an 80s cliché, but it’s also true -the future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades…

Not from dating in general, mind you, just from online dating. I just canceled my memberships and deleted my profiles from Yahoo! Personals, Match, and Fitness Singles. And good riddance to all of them.

The guys were unappealing, for the most part, and not very interested in me either. The few dates I’ve had have either been excruciatingly painful or have resulted in friendship, which is a good thing but I have plenty of friends already. So, I’m done with it. I’ll just have to make more of an effort to meet someone in real life, which is really how it should be anyway.

Anyone who has been reading my tweets (who says software engineers don’t have a sense of humor? :) knows that I’ve kept up making them, though not as frequently as when I first started this experiment. I have trouble remembering to post, so things happen and I only think to tweet about them after the moment has passed. But I’m keeping at it and I think it does make me pay attention to life around me just a little bit differently.

No-one has said anything one way or the other about whether they’ve enjoyed reading them, but I haven’t lost any followers so it must not be too bad. I find it interesting that fully half of my followers are people I don’t know… where are they finding me? Why do they find what I have to say interesting? I’d love to know, but it’s one of those questions that one Does Not Ask.

When I mentioned my bravery at Deschutes Brewery the other night, I neglected to mention something else – I also ordered a fish entree for probably the first time in my entire life. Mac and cheese with salmon in it instead of chicken. More people just fell off their chairs. :)

It was reasonably good the first time around, but I just nuked the leftovers for lunch and the fishy flavor is a lot stronger now. Pretty much yuck but I’m eating it anyway, which is something in itself. I’m not picky about a ton of things, but I’m not usually very flexible about the things I am picky about. I’m trying to change that.

I’m reasonably handy with tools; as an only child, my father pressed me into service on home maintenance and car repair projects that I would have been kept away from had there been a boy around to help him. But I was always the helper, the surgical assistant; he never had any desire to actually teach me how to do any of it for myself. Not ladylike and all that (Dad was Spanish and Very Old World).

Since then I’ve spent most of my adult life living with men who were far handier than I am, and so I’ve stayed in that helper role. Until now, that is. I’m now the only one in this house with opposable thumbs, and so it’s up to me to get things done if I want them done at all.

Enter the simple acrylic shelf.

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I don’t follow a whole lot of people on Twitter, and even fewer follow me. But some of the folks I follow have really interesting, insightful things to say, even when they’re just commenting on what they do all day long. I feel absolutely intimidated trying to speak in the same space as @rands, @gruber and @jdickerson (and many more). So generally I don’t have much to say.

I’m going to try an experiment and try tweeting as much as possible next week. There’s nothing special about next week; nothing going on that’s out of the ordinary. It just feels like this is an experiment whose time has come.

At the end of the week I’ll decide if I got anything out of the experience. Did it help me focus my thoughts, or force me to be more productive so I’d have more to tweet about? Did I lose all my followers en masse? I do plan to warn them, along with a link to this post by way of explanation (hi! :). Even better, did anyone say they liked what I had to say? Depending on how it goes, I might try to keep it up, or I might go back to saying nothing. Watch this space for further developments!

If anyone wants to play along, you can go to the Twitter website, sign up for a free account, and then go to my page to see what I’ve said recently. You can click the Follow button on that page to add me to your Following list, and after that my tweets will show up on your home page when you log in to twitter.com. My username is @janineanne. If you’re on a Mac and want to follow tweets in real time, I highly recommend Twitterrific (also available for iPhone).

Ok, geek-out time is over! :)

Last Thursday I had dinner at the new Deschutes Brewery in the Pearl, after my singing class. There was a wait for a table so I went to the bar. It was pretty full too, so after a pass through I walked up to a guy sitting alone and asked if I could share his table.

Those of you who have known me for a while probably all just fell off of your chairs. :) This is something I would not have been able to bring myself to do just a year ago, but I did it with almost no hesitation.

Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself anymore. And that’s a good thing.

I’m back from the conference and mini San Francisco vacation. Time there is always too short…

I realized something about myself while I was at the conference that I thought was worth sharing.

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