I need to vent for a moment. To wit:

I was sitting here minding my own business and looking for some information on the Website of one of the several professional organizations in my world, and I noticed that they were plugging their new social networking site, which is sort of like an industry-specific version of LinkedIn. So I went to investigate it, and browsing around, I noticed that they had a job forum. I’m not job-hunting, particularly, but I always like to keep my eyes open for new possibilities, so I looked at it. And lo and behold, there was a job that sounded perfect for me.

It’s a long story, but there are a bunch of subspecialties in my field, and my particular subspecialty is a little more obscure and less “hot” at the moment than the others, so jobs that are truly just right for me are kind of few and far between. This one, though, could have been invented for me: it requires someone with a content/writing/editorial background, and a library science degree is preferred.

And it’s at Zappos. Zappos, the online shoe store that is my favorite place to shop, from which I’ve bought countless pairs of shoes. The perfect job at the perfect place, in other words.

Before a) jumping up and down with excitement and b) zooming my résumé to them right away, I looked for a location in the job description. I had this vague recollection that Zappos was someplace in the Southeast—not my ideal, but not out of the question, either, depending on where in the Southeast we’re talking about. This could be good.

But no. My recollection was faulty. They’re in Las Vegas. I loathe Las Vegas.* Of all the places in the country that one might consider moving to, on a scale of 1 to 10, Las Vegas falls somewhere in the region of Miami. Or Camden, NJ. Or to put it in early Talking Heads terms, I wouldn’t move there if you paid me; I wouldn’t live there, no siree.

Not even to work for Zappos, alas. Why couldn’t they be somewhere else? It would be too much to ask for them to be someplace I actively want to move, of course, but couldn’t they at least be in Des Moines or Raleigh or someplace I could even remotely conceive of considering moving to? It’s no fair, I tells ya. No fair at all.

*I didn’t actually know that I hated Las Vegas until recently. I mean, I knew that the weather wouldn’t appeal to me, and neither would the city’s status as one of the fastest-growing in the country, especially because the growth seems to be mainly concentrated in new, faceless suburbs. But I didn’t have anything against Las Vegas, particularly. Kitsch doesn’t appeal to me (<–understatement) and I’m not much on gambling—no moral objections or anything, I just get bored as soon as I lose more than $5.00—but I was still fairly curious about the place, and believed that like any good American, I should see it at least once. Then I went to a convention there this past spring, and slightly to my surprise, I absolutely hated the place. Hated it. Everything about it. It’s depressing, it’s skeevy, it’s unpleasant. I hope never to go back.

So I joined a CSA this year. All organic produce, grown about 30 miles away. So far, it’s been pretty good, although it has stricter work requirements than the one I belonged to back in Mpls.* Actually, it’s been very good; it’s just that I’ve been kinda bad. I guess I’d underestimated the degree to which I just no longer do any real cooking. As a result, I’ve had to throw away a fair amount of produce.

But I’m trying to do better. And right now, I have literally about 15 beautiful heirloom tomatoes just waiting for me to do something with them. I also have various Japanese-type eggplants, a few peppers, some basil, and a bag of various types of baby squash. Oh, and some new potatoes. And green beans. But mostly, I have tomatoes, and I’m determined not to waste them.

With that in mind, I need help: What would you do with all those tomatoes? I suppose I could cook up some tomato sauce—I forgot, I have onions and garlic too—but that would be pretty boring. I remember making a tomato tart a number of years ago, but I have no clue where I got the recipe. Can canning be learned quickly, like in a day? Anyone got better suggestions? Please?

*Needless to say, I’m overwhelmed with sorrow and horror at the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. It’s particularly upsetting to me because I know that area well; I didn’t spend much time on I-35W heading north, but it’s quite close to where I lived, and I drove under that bridge every day for years. In fact, parts of the bridge apparently landed on the River Road, which was my route to work (and which was a delightful road to commute on—scenic, no traffic, very few stop signs). I just can’t even begin to imagine what people are going through there, and my heart is with them, and with the city.

There’s a question on my profile page over at LiveJournal that asks: “How did you spend summers when you were a kid?”

I decided that question deserved a longer-ass answer than I was prepared to post on LiveJournal. It’s started to get hot here, and my summer isn’t off to a very good start, so it’s kind of refreshing to think back on a time when I actually enjoyed this part of the year.

New Yorkers like to get their kids out of the city in the summer if possible, which is very sensible. When I was a little kid, that wasn’t possible, but we used to visit friends who had a house on a lake in Putnam County, about an hour outside the city, on weekends. Then for a couple of summers we rented our own house up there and spent pretty much every summer weekend there.

The summer I turned 8, I joined the ancient Jewish tradition of going to summer camp. The camps I went to for the next four summers were in the Berkshires, which is undoutedly why I still want to retire there–probably my favorite place in the US.

During my last summer at camp, my dad wrote a series of articles about the life and history of East Hampton, which “required” him to go out there every weekend in August. The next summer, he managed to parlay that into a longer series, and got to stay in a motel suite with its own private stretch of beach in Amagansett for six weeks. I joined him (my mom and brother came out on weekends), and during the day, I took riding lessons and cleaned out stalls and just generally hung out at the barn. That was one of the best summers of my life. The next summer, I stayed in a house near the stable in East Hampton with a bunch of other barn rats, riding and doing barn stuff every day and competing in horse shows. That was the summer of Watergate, which will forever be linked in my memory to my last days as a member of the horsey set.

I turned 14 the next summer, and got to do so in Sibford Ferris, a Cotswolds town so small that addresses there include the name of the nearest big town. That was a life-changing summer, boy howdy. I fell in love with England and everything English, not the usual touristy/stereotype stuff but the actual people—that was my first prolonged exposure to British humor, which went well with my own sense of humor—as well as minutiae like how much better their chocolate bars are than ours and the typeface that they use on signs (Gill Sans, I learned years later) and stuff like that. Ever since then, whenever I’ve had enough money to travel, I’ve gone straight to England. If I hadn’t had a job that allowed me to travel to Italy and Germany on business, I probably still wouldn’t have been anywhere else outside the US.

And I wound up there almost by accident. I’d wanted to go to France on the Experiment in International Living, but it turned out to be too expensive. To make it up to me, my parents found a summer camp in England called, er, Summer Camps in England. “Camps” because it was actually four camps in one: a travel camp, a boys’ soccer camp, a drama camp, and an archaeology camp. I was in the drama camp—not that I was really all that interested in drama, but I’d been in plays at previous summer camps and enjoyed it, and that was as good an excuse as any.

It was my first time out of the country (unless you count a dimly remembered trip to Puerto Rico when I was four), and it was also pretty much my first exposure to people who weren’t from the East Coast; the soccer players were mainly Midwestern and Southern, and I didn’t know quite how to react to them. That was good for me, learning that there was a world not too far away that was so different from my own. I preferred hanging out with the locals, though—mostly a group of older teenage boys who would descend a few nights a week on the school that housed the camp. They were small-town, working-class, slightly yobbish I suppose, but I felt more at home with them than the nice suburban soccer players somehow. And Sibford itself was so beautiful—I’d never seen countryside quite that green and lush and rolling, and it was impossible to imagine anyplace better at the time. But then late in the summer we made a four-day trip to London, and even in the sticky heat and our nasty cheap hotel, I knew I had found my favorite place in the world. I wanted to stay there forever, and I hated leaving and going back to plain old NYC.

That was my last summer away from the city, pretty much. I was a teenager by then, and capable of finding fun without leaving town. Which was just as well, and I had some great city summers during high school and college. Besides, it would have been hard to top a summer in Sibford, anyway.