Category: WWdN in Exile

I woke this morning to the sound of rain falling outside my window, and discovered that both of my dogs had jumped up onto my bed overnight and were snuggled into me to keep warm.

When I lifted my head from my pillow, I saw that both cats were also on the bed, tucked into tiny little "I really want to stay warm" lumps of fur.

My dog Riley, near my feet thumped her tail heavily against the bed.

"Yes, I'm awake," I said. The thumping became serious wagging.

Seamus, our other dog, stretched out his body to maximum extension and grunted, happily, before rolling onto his back and pushing his head into my ribs. One of the cats began to purr.

I stretched, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and scratched Seamus' chin. I was pretty sure he smiled at me.

The day wasn't five minutes old, and I already felt peaceful and loved.

Anne appeared in the doorway, a mug of coffee in one hand. "Good morning," she said.

"It sure is," I replied.

Some of you may know that I love Reddit (and now, I guess, you all know that. And while we're in this parenthetical, is it weird that I say "you" when writing to a few million people, many of whom I'm never going to actually meet? Is it weird to be so familiar? I think saying "dear readers" or "my readers" would be even more strange. I hate the term "my ____" because it implies ownership, and that's just … really, really not how I roll. Wow, this is a neurotic and rambling parenthetical, isn't it? I guess I'll end it now and go back to the post at hand. Let's never speak of this again.)

Recently on BoingBoing, Cory said this of Reddit, which sums up why it is the online community where I spend pretty much all of my online community time (yeah, that's a line item in the time budget):

…it's just as possible to build a society on social norms of mutual aid, compassion and whimsy as it is to build one on juvenile, meanspirited trolling and cynicism.

It's not too hard to find people who are being dicks, just like anywhere else in the world, but Reddit self-corrects better than any other online communityI've ever been part of. I have some theories on this, but I think it's because the core of Reddit users are all people who left other sites because they wanted to spend their online community time at a place where people weren't dicks, and protecting that (leading by example, usually) is important to us.

So, there. Now you know why I love Reddit so much (and here's me at Reddit, if you care about that sort of thing.)

All of this is preamble to the real purpose of this post: to point out an auction I'm doing with the Reddit admins to raise money and awareness for Fly With Dignity (or EFF, if Fly With Dignity doesn't need it).

Quoth raldi:

Back in 2009, when reddit's first iPhone app launched, kn0thing made a commercial featuring the underused marketing line, "More fun than LARPing with Wil Wheaton!"

Shortly thereafter, we had the motto laser-etched onto the back of a top-of-the-line 16GB iPod Touch and asked Wil to sign it (he's a avid redditor, of course.) We figured we could pick a charity and auction it off. I mean, who wouldn't want a piece of technology signed by this guy?

As the kids say, read the whole thing (because it's funny, and contains pictures and video that 4 out of 5 Bothans found quite amusing, and saves me the hassle of copying the whole thing.)

In addition to a spiffy and nearly-obsolete iPod Touch that is actually signed by me OMG, I'm adding a signed copy of the super swanky leather-bound and slip-cased Subterranean Press edition of The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I'm also including the audio versions of Just A Geek and Happiest Days of our Lives (it is an iPod, after all) and all existing episodes of Radio Free Burrito and Memories of the Futurecast.

Here is the auction.

Everything about this is just beautiful. I highly recommend watching it full screen, but for the lazy or whatever, here's an embed:

(via Geekosystem)

It's quiet outside my office window, like the heat and humidity is sort of absorbing and muffling most of the sounds that usually come through during a typical Saturday morning. All I really hear is birds singing, the occasional drone of a distant train, and the low rumble of thunder out over the mountains somewhere … it's magical. Both dogs and both cats are asleep in my office, Nolan is sleeping in, and Anne is out at the gym. At this peaceful and solitary moment, it feels like I can take a few minutes to look back on the last week.

I'm home between episodes of Eureka, and rather than spend the week taking walks with my wife and my dogs, I recorded an audiobook. It took about 24 total hours, spread across four days, to perform my friend John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars. I'd read this book a couple of years ago, but performing it aloud was an entirely different experience from reading it. I had to create distinctly different voices and characters for everyone in the book, and that brought the material to life in a way that simply reading it did not. I love Agent to the Stars, and I'm blown away that this was John's "practice novel" that he wrote on the weekends while he was working full time on what was, at the time, his real job. Briefly, the story: Tom Stein is a junior agent in Hollywood, and when an alien species decides to make First Contact with humanity, he acts as their agent … to the stars. There's much, much more than that, obviously, including characters I really cared about and became invested in, but that's the basic MacGuffin. At least once a day while working on the project, I marveled that I was getting paid to read a book I loved. I mean, for one week, that was my job.

I seriously mean it when I say that I don't ever want to wake up from this wonderful dream.

Oh, hey, it's raining outside. I love the way the rain smells when it's warm outside.

That reminds me: one day this week, when I got home from work, Anne and I watched this huge thunderstorm blow up from way out east, and eventually over our house. It was probably 85 degrees when it passed over us, so while we watched the gutters on our street swell with a miniature flash flood, I grabbed Anne's hand and said, "Let's go run out in the rain!"

Some of you may remember a story I first posted on my blog a thousand years ago, about dancing in the rain with Anne; it made it into Dancing Barefoot as We Close Our Eyes. It's a tiny story that's really just a love letter to my wife, but it remains one of my favorite things I've ever written. Strangely, since that happened back in 2001 or 2002, we haven't intentionally run out into the rain, so this was especially lovely.

The afternoon sun was low in the sky, and the trees on our street broke it up into golden shafts of light that turned the sudden downpour into a glittering cascade of tiny jewels. We kicked off our shoes and skipped across our lawn like children (or a middle-aged couple deeply in love with each other). When we got to the street, it was still hot under our feet, and the cold raindrops were creating little clouds of steam that sat around ankle level. I brushed my hair back off my face, and looked up into the sky, with my arms out and my palms turned up.

"Remember when we danced in the rain in Santa Barbara?" Anne said.

"Yeah," I said, "that was awesome."

"I liked that a lot," she said.

I turned to look at her, and remembered how much I loved her at that moment, so many years ago, and wasn't surprised in the least to discover that I love her even more, now.

I kissed her face. "I love you so much," I said.

"I love you too. I love that we're walking in the rain!"

I took her hand in mine again, and we walked up our block and back. We were soaked through to the skin when we got home.

—

Last night, we went on a date to an arcade (I know, right?) where we played the hell out of Centipede. I'm not sure exactly why (some may say my reflexes were affected by a Guinness) but Anne destroyed me on our first two games, and got a high score. For her initials, she put in ASS, laughing hysterically the entire time.

"I really love that we still do stupid stuff like this, even though we're all old and shit," I said.

"Yeah, we're totally twelve," she said. "Play again? Or are you too chicken?"

"Nobody calls me chicken!" I declared, and started another game. This one, I focused, did my best, and not only did I win the game, I got an even higher high score … so of course, I put in SEX as my initials. We made a stupid cellphone video of the moment, because it was important to preserve that for posterity.

When we got home, I played Xbox with Nolan, and fell asleep a little after midnight, happily exhausted from a wonderful week doing things I love with people I love.

This is a very, very good life, and I'm grateful for it.