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The Great Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Aubs.

Taken directly after I finally escaped from the hay maze, no small feat.

So until recently, I had what you would call a moderately inappropriate
Facebook photo. It wasn’t obscene, or anything, it was just a lot of
cleavage. A. LOT. OF. CLEAVAGE. Which – if you know me – isn’t that
rare. I mean, whatever. It just isn’t. Yet as more and more people
joined Facebook, it became less of a "friends from college who wouldn’t
be phased by the low-cut dress I wore for my 30th birthday party" and
more of a "hi, boss. Hi, former boss. Hi, head of all advertising sales
at Google." While I’m proud to say I enjoy keeping in touch with former
– and current – employers, there’s a reason we wear business clothes to
work and going out clothes to get our DebauchAubrey on. Web 2.0 is much
more Bub.blicio.us than Boobilicious.

As such, I figured it was due time long overdue for me to find a better profile photo. So I started trolling through my Flickr favorites and Aubs-tagged
ones only to find out that I basically hate all the pictures of myself.
I don’t know if this is because my father, an avid photgrapher, had a
camera perpetually stuck in my face and has caused me to be
hyper-critical of my appearance. It might just be me being
hyper-critical about everything I do. Regardless, I had the hardest
time finding one of me that I actually LIKED, and the process was
nothing if not painful. Hello, world, I’m apparently vain.

Yet alas, the lovely Willo comes through in a pinch – the photo I
finally chose was one she used for her website and it’s her awesome "Words are so delicious"
t-shirt that I’m modeling. And, amazingly, kindly, many people have
commented nicely on the photo, meaning perhaps I’m just my own harshest
critic.

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IMG_2367.JPG, originally uploaded by dearanxiety.

Even though this photo is a bit blurry, I love it. Shows us after a HARD NIGHT of Pumpkin Carving. Exhausted, truly.

Oh, and I love my shirt.

   

       

   
            

       
               
       
            

            

               

03 no ones gonna love you

               

Band of horses

            
            

   
       

   

Originally posted on aubs.vox.com

My "Go Tribe!" Pumpkin

Originally posted on aubs.vox.com

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I’m not a
die-hard baseball fan. If I were, however, I would OF COURSE be going
totally apeshit about my Cleveland Indians being one game away from
this year’s World Series. In fact, I’m following them, and as any good
Clevelander will admit, we’re a loyal crew. Loyalty trumps fairweather
any day (or at least for those who also grew up in a city often
ridiculed for its crappy weather and burning river. I mean, any support
helps.) Baseball is one of those sports that I find myself attending
for social reasons; sure, I’ll root for our team, and who knows…if I
was still living in Cleveland I probably would have season tickets at
the Jake. But I don’t. So I don’t. Instead, I live in a city where summer is theoretical and the Giants suck. Still, I made it to a few Giants games, one even with Lila Belle in tow. So there.

That’s
not to say I’m not a sports fan at all – there’s little more I love
than college game day at Carolina, the place that taught me how to
tailgate like a Southerner. I had to quickly learn to replace fleeces
and hoodies and grills with Bojangles Chicken and sundresses and dates
(yes. Football games were DATE EVENTS) and discovered various places to
stash airplane bottles of liquor. (Cleavage. Waistbands. Inside your
knee high boot. Hidden in a black sock against the bottom of your black
purse. I could go on…) I also love me some Carolina Basketball
because – hello – it’s UNC BASKETBALL. Heard of it? Yeah. It’s an
institution. But baseball…I don’t know. Maybe it was the years
PLAYING softball but it’s just one of those sports I’d rather play than
watch.

Despite that long-winded tangent, I’m really excited
for the Indians. This has been a good year for Cleveland sports – first
the Cavs, now the Tribe. Aww hell yeah. As such, I decided to place a
little wager with a Red Sox fan friend on the outcome of the series.
Now he’s a TRUE fan, I can say that with resolution, especially given
the (confidential) terms of the bet. But if you love me – ok, if you
like me, if you don’t hate me, if you for one second thought fondly of
me EVER – you’ll root for the Indians tonight. Because the stakes are
high. And I like my humility served best on someone else’s plate. It’s
tastier that way.

GO TRIBE!

It’s pretty embarrassing that I’ve had this site for 7 years and it didn’t occur to me until last night – when a friend POINTED IT OUT – that I hadn’t published the RSS feed in any other way than the default one by Typepad. Which means, apparently, that I could be obsessed with my stats on Feedburner as well as on Google Analytics. I mean, just what I need…a new obsession!

Actually, what I need is a crush. But that’s another story for another time.

Anyway, the point of this seemingly-pointless post is that I now publish a feedburner feed so may need to change your feed for me. So, either click that awesome little button over to the right, or subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/aubs

Hallelujah. I’m all Web 2.0-ey.

I’ve long lamented the lack of seasons here in San Francisco – while most of you are trudging your hot, sweaty selves to the local pool for a break in the summer sweltering heat, we’re bundled up in our trusty cashmere sweaters shivering underneath our scarves. Yes. In the middle of July.

Come November, we enter into our form of winter; namely, constant rain. The type of rain that is so pervasive that at times you feel like even your soul is damp. The type of rain that causes people to be grouchy, short-tempered and all-around dour. I’m sure that the composer of many a dirge was inspired by winter in San Francisco. (Note that the only up-side of this nasty weather is that when it’s raining in San Francisco, it’s often snowing in Tahoe. YAY, ski house!)

Yet I must admit I too often get caught up in the negatives of the weather (this coming from a girl who grew up in Cleveland!) and don’t spend enough time regaling the beautiful days that we DO have. Namely, Fall.

Fall, for us in the City by the Bay, is often disguised as Indian Summer. Traditionally, our warmest months are August, September and October, to be followed by the aforementioned rainy season. It’s not unusual to have an 80-degree day in the beginning of October, and almost overnight it seems that we go from the heat to the rain with no traditional sense of Autumn interspersed. Yet when we do – wow. We may not have the glorious changing of the leaves, we may not get what I call “quintessential football weather” (again, I hail from the Midwest; this is how we gauge most of the seasons) but there are those days when the air turns brisk, the sun warms you only as much as the wind instantly blows it away, and the air just smells like Fall. Those are the nights when bundling up isn’t a chore, but a privilege; when warm cups of cider are the drink of choice and when the chilly wind blows through the open window, you’re really glad that you sprung for the extra-warm down comforter. Now if only I had someone to cuddle up with…

Never fear, I’m still here. (Wow – what a loud collective sigh of relief. And to think I thought y’all had forgotten about me.) No, alas, I’ve just been busy (yeah, yeah, you’ve heard that before) but this time, I mean it. Really busy. Busy as in the awesome sense of when you leave work you’re exhausted, but in a good way, the way that means you’ve worked all day on stuff that matters and are beat both physically and mentally and just want to crawl into your bed without dinner. What? That doesn’t sound good to you? Clearly you’re not as Type-A as I am, because that’s my favorite type of busy. Seriously.

We’ve been prepping for our big conference tomorrow, "The Business of APIs", which I hope to see some of you at. I’ve been in a battle royale with a little program called Powerpoint (formerly the bane of my existence, now my Frienemy) and have been working with our team to make sure everything is set for tomorrow morning. I’ve never been so involved with putting on a conference (nor developing the content) and let me say that while it’s certainly daunting in concept, it’s been a great learning experience.

So please hang tight – I promise I’ll return in due time with fabulous stories and much to tell about life, love and how I may in fact be a secret gourmet in training.

I started dancing when I was 2 1/2. As many people know, dancers often shove their feet into ridiculously small, painful shoes (toe shoes, “character” shoes or tap shoes), so we’re used to pain. REAL dancers – those in a corps or at least those who spend many, many days a week dancing – wrap their toes in sheep’s wool to help protect them when they’re balancing all of their weight on the tip of their toes. Point of this rambling is that I used to dance; therefore, I am no stranger to painful feet.

Why, then, am I completely incapable of walking in  high heels as an adult? Just watching Carrie Bradshaw teetering in her Manolos makes me cringe, knowing that I’d make it a half of a block, take off my shoes, and say a silent prayer that I didn’t step on a hyperdermic needle. I don’t know if I’ve ever made it through a wedding – or hell, an entire evening – in high heels…even in college you could often find me, pizza slice in one hand, shoes in the other, wandering down Franklin Street after a big night on the town.

Take today. I got up early (to watch the Today Show wedding, my yearly guilty pleasure even if Cody’s hair really was a travesty-in-the-making), showered, and spent a leisurely morning getting ready at my own pace. Put off running until later this evening or – at the worst, tomorrow – because damn. It’s Friday. And sometimes I like moving slowly in the mornings. I dressed with care (note that I’ve been attempting to be a bit more businesslike in my attire; that, and my favorite jeans are presently a WEE bit too tight, so black pants have been donned on more than one occasion this week) and even curled my hair. Yes, you read that correctly. I. CURLED. MY. HAIR. Anyway, I chose my new pair of black heels – a steal from Target, which is good since I hate buying shoes – and strode out my front door only a few minutes late to catch the bus.

Except “striding” soon turned to “wobbling” and after a few blocks, that evolved into “hobbling”. At this point, I should have promptly turned around, gone home, and put on my one pair of cute low-ish heels, also from Target lest you think my cheap shoe purchase is correlated to my inability to walk in them. Nope – not the case. But, since I humored myself by watching a few extra minutes of The Today Show, I didn’t want to be late and figured that I’d rest my tootsies in my bunny slippers that I keep at work for this exact purpose. Only by the time I walked the block and a half from the train to my office, I could barely move my feet were in such pain.

9am and we have a problem.

So, at lunchtime, I stopped at this awesome store, “Jeremy’s”, that sells designer clothing and shoes at a fraction of the price. There wasn’t a huge selection in the “Size 8″s but alas, I found a pair of Charles David footie boots and regardless of the price, they were a relief to my feet when I stepped in them so decided to make the purchase. $18 later (note that these boots retailed for well over $100 – I love a deal) I was walking to lunch with friends when I realized that I could barely walk in THOSE EITHER. Seriously. What is my problem? Is my future confined to ballet flats forevermore?

Those boots might be made for walkin’, but if they have a heel, they weren’t made for me. 

Originally posted on aubs.vox.com