GALFROMDOWNUNDER UPOVER

Camping geeks rejoice - boonies-quality Dark Chocolate Cheesecake.  There are generally 3 ways to live the New York Dream if you still have to work for a living: 1. Earn an astronomical salary on Wall Street or similar, and live in a loft and eat out several times a week 2. Get a steady and coveted city/government job with benefits that make you basically unfireable 3. Piece it all together - act, sing, sell, wait tables, volunteer, teach, sell your own product online, knit condoms for Etsy - and still manage to eat out once a week and pay your rent on time. Mostly. Having surrendered my 9 year Oregon-based career as a Customer Evangelist , I've entered the realm of option 3:  I volunteer teach yoga , make and sell my original schtick , do freelance copywriting and social media, and today, I entered the world of retail - working a casual shift at Eastern Mountain Sports , the northeast's version of REI. Now, if you're an outdoor gear freak, EMS is the place to ...

I'm still waiting for i-Pearl Inc to say "I got it" and refund my $29.95 for the damaged laptop case. Or at least tell me to go to hell. The year has begun well. My best friend Julie from waaaaaaaaaay back in kindergarten, had the top of her lung removed a couple of days ago and has been given the all-clear. This, despite a very informed friend (head of a pulmonary critical care unit) telling me lung cancer is a tough one. I'd sent her a hamper of goodies but the internet hamper company didn't acknowledge right away for some reason. During that gap I had ample time to start wondering if my money had disappeared off to Nicaragua (a country I love, but you can disappear - voluntarily - pretty easily there). When I finally got an acknowledgement, it still left a lingering mistrust. I asked my friend to tell me what was in the hamper - just to see if the stated goods matched the actual. I thus declare 2010 to be the year of "I Got It". I assert...

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. I managed to rustle up a table of four to do turkey at the Standard Grill . It was OK for the price, considering it was Thanksgiving, New York City, last minute etc, although it was a bit mean on the sides, and the best dark meat was clearly spirited away for a more worthy class of diner. I jested with all my friends who had free invitations to eat  with families that only the friendless gotta pay! Walking around afterwards at Times Square - for want of nothing better to do - I came across the Charmin toilet man. This is a man dressed up as a toilet, inviting you to ablute in sanitary style at their pop-up toilet facility. He is accompanied by a pom pom girl, dressed far less imaginatively than she could be for such an important job - come on Charmin, don't tell me your political correctness prevented her from wearing a skimpy maid's uniform and wielding a toilet brush? This Charmin effort was all new to me, but Google tells me it's been a...

Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Houses, Oak Bluffs. They're not all pink ... I'm just back from a weeks riding on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket with 40 or so cyclists, courtesy of Friday Friendly Tour Company BikeandtheLike and 5 magnanimous Bike Friday customers. I have these customers to thank: Sue, Glen, Leo, The Knables, plus Charlie (he must be inside getting some chowder) for sponsoring my visit to the Cape How magnanimous? I cajoled them into signing up for a Friday Friendly trip in the Berkshires, but due to the recession? Hills? The tour was undersubscribed, and thus cancelled for this year. A bit of fast webgotiating and within an hour I had them switched to a completely different Friday Friendly tour company, $400 less expensive, and subbing my attendance to the tune of $100 each. "If you can get them to sponsor you, I'll kick in the rest," said Suzy the tour operator. Of course, my part of the bargain was to write a full multimedia...

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Sandy Thompson, formerly of xploring.com, a division of ideas company Saatchi & Saatchi. (I was a copywriter for Saatchi in Australia, Ireland and Creative Director for an afiliated agency, Tribu, in Costa Rica). xploring is about super curious cats like us getting out there among the pigeons, seeing how they eat, sleep, fight, make up, brush their teeth and win Nobel Prizes , multimediaclasting and customer evangelizing - just up my silicon alley. The meeting was fueled by a mutual friend, my former boss Jorge Oller at Tribu. Thank you Jorge for your persistance, not only am I honoring you with the attached photo, I am honoring your capitulation to my Customer Evangelism by showing your Bike Friday tikit in stylish repose (see below). I was excited to meet Sandy because I'm always keen to meet anyone who's been pursuing a similar path to me - out on a limb, living a nomadic life pushing relationship marketing to the nth degree b...

Getting the full knee-down from bike fit guru  Andy Pruitt , knee guy to the cycling stars (including the US Cycling Federation).  A-fitting we will go...  Watch  VIDEOS See  PHOTO GALLERY TODAY I received some good news - and in this recession, any news is good news. My knees, which were starting to sound like I was hiking through granola when descending a stairs, are not falling apart after all. I merely have a relatively benign form of crepitus . Wiki it and you'll see it's a term for anything that leads to innoisy knees. In my case, no bones or diminished cartilege seems to be involved - just fluid. The ass-ometer measures, well... I consulted RoadBikeRider.com's Ed Pavelka on this last year, who wrote: Lynette -- you need to see a cycling medical specialist. The best in the business is Andy Pruitt at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine . If you can't go to Colorado maybe he can recommend someone in your area. Generally, ...

This morning I switched on my Blackberry Pearl and clicked on a link a customer Leon in South Africa sent me. His email simply said: When we tend to complain how bad things are sometimes we do not know how fortunate we are. This is an article out of today's Sunday Times . The first thing displayed in my little handheld window onto the world was the above picture with this caption: No grocery deliveries: Food is much scarcer in Zimbabwe’s rural areas than in the cities. Kudakwashe Chiveura prepares to catch a cricket he has dug up to eat in Mutoko, northeast of Harare. Picture: AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi When I switch on to a news site from the west, like NYT or CNN, the first thing that's windowed is "Democrats set to offer loans to Carmakers". Even on a salary of $1 a year, think of how infinitely better off an auto exec is compared to the above gentleman about to breakfast on a cricket. How ever hard it may seem, we must try to be thankful. Thank you Leon for you...

Dumbo Feather is very nice to touch-and-sniff coffee table mag featuring interviews with people who've spent a bit of time physically and/or mentally outside their own postcode (or zipcode as they say upover). If your internet connection doesn't complain about downloading the very stylishly art directed PDF, do avaread . You can find this link to it buried in my bio . They've made some of my snapshots look very arty indeed, including a classy cropping of the above shot, which is simply a close up of a topo map of the Nanawale Estates subdivision where I have my sliver of foliated lava on the Big Island of Hawaii . I was contacted by Kiwi editor/owner Kate Bezar while downunder 2008 , and she came over to my apartment and let me ramble into her little dictaphone. Since it came out I've received emails from some wonderful people from my past: Sue Carey and Gigi, from my days at Saatchi. And some coincidences: I was wandering down 19th street in Chelsea, Manhattan a mon...

Thank you to Peiheng Tsai for this cellphone image, taken in Union Square, NY, 1:18am on November 5 It's the day after the election. With the line "the election wasn't about color, it was about the economy" being bandied about, I, as a person of color, beg to differ. BARACK OBAMA: The Power of Positive Discrimination is my take on my FastCompany blog. In that post you'll see I also mention Little Person (that's dwarf or short statured person - but never midget) Dan who, like Obama, is doing great things for his minority group - by being out there, and being successful. Celebrate our differences, because as Obama shows, they're the true catalysts of change. Watch Dan in action . Speaking of little people, I saw one enter the same pizza place I was in. I found myself avoiding looking at him for fear of being rude - how many of us know that feeling? OK, now imagine you are that little person, feeling people's eyes shift away from you but knowing you are...

Today I blogged on FastCompany about Dr Doug Meyer, who jumped 17 floors to his death. Read post Thanks to Doug's colleague Steve Chang, a great friend and Bike Friday customer, for providing insight into Doug's life. The last time I saw Doug was at Halloween in NY; such a low key and unassuming man, he stayed clear of my video. Steve, however, appears at the end. Halloween in NY movie clip I've been busy tripping north to spread the low-hydrocarb gospel in Brisbane . Here's how I arrived in Brisbane, 14 hours in a folding hotel room. Check out the folding frenzy of the Countrylink sleeper cabin (Movie clip) Before that I interviewed REMO, the purveyor of Stuff with a Story (Movie Clip) - astounding, given that I'd upset them by critiquiing their email campaign. Finally, here's the kind of urban jungle we'd all welcome - hidden in a fold of suburban Paddington in Sydney: Heading back to Sydney July 17, then to Eugene, Oregon, Aug 6.

My my NYT book review has attracted at least one new sale as evidenced by this fan letter I received just today: Dear Ms. Chiang, I just finished reading your book "The Handsomest Man in Cuba" and I must comment that I have never read such egotistical drivel from a so-called travel writer. Your website says it all when it states "the self-indulgent writings" et al. If you're going to write about your travel adventures and expect other people to read them and enjoy it, please write about the culture, the people and the history of the countries that you visit and your experience in relationship to these cultures so that you can convey to your readers a sense of the country. All you did in "The Handsomest Man in Cuba" was basically bitch about everyone and everything in the most untrusting way. I have been to Cuba several times and my experience was totally different than yours. Perhaps because I didn't think solely of myself the entire tri...