I hope your wheel survived that claw. They don’t fit any of my power chair wheels, and the dirty looks I got from the front-of-the-bus regulars are forever etched in my hindbrain.

As you know I’m a chlorine junkie, and I discovered that deep water running-in-place, as well as jumping-jacks, xc skiing, and other arms & legs thrashing is much better aerobic exercise than actual swimming. (Except for competitive athletes.) An exercise physiologist at my pool wired me up with a heart monitor, and I averaged 130 in deep-water running and 100 in crawl and back-stroke.

If you’re not a sinker, then you don’t even have to wear a float belt (and that adds a little more work).

Oh! Kabuki Springs is so heavenly clean. I took a chance on a massage there — often too painful due to my fibro — and it was wonderful.

Lemonade will never be the same.

I am going to be audacious and ask you to host a Security Night where you can teach us how to use a VPN service (and how you chose yours and how to find what options there are out there/how you know you trust yours), how to use Tor (and when), how to be aware of your surroundings with firesheep, what wireshark and nmap are, how to encrypt our email and IM… but above all, WHY we need to care about this anyway. Maybe women-focused; maybe at Noisebridge.

Why I am asking for this: I’ve read Little Brother. I have set up PGP with thunderbird and OTR with adium/pidgin, and I encrypt my email and IM communications with only 1 person in my life. I have downloaded the Tor Mac client and the firefox extension and used it a few times, but stopped because I left tabs open about Tor for months without doing the research and understanding fully what it does (I mean, I understand that there are certain people that are exit points, and their IP addresses will show up for all the traffic of the people they’re in front of; and it’s all encrypted…) … BUT I have never used a VPN, firesheep, wireshark, or nmap. So I am a beginner and I want to learn more! And I KNOW that instructions are available online, but it’s hard to get people to do it all — it’s much more powerful to meet in person and get things started hands-on (and besides, we could do key-signing parties!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

We could just do a one-off, or we could use the Railsbridge model and call it Securebridge or something. Haha!

I sat next to someone at dinner on Saturday who told us about being on the front lines in Mexico and teaching people to use encrypted email so that the government couldn’t monitor their communications. If she could do it in Mexico, we can do it here. LET’S GOOOOOOO