“…the first week of September will always feel like a new start, a new time, the right time to get organized and excited about new people, new routines, and new ideas.”
“…it’s been a busy little day, and it’s bedtime.” —MJC
Here’s video from our unexpected road trip last week. This is my first pass with iMovie, please forgive the cheesy transitions. If the whole thing strikes you as long and boring, well… the camera doesn’t lie.
Matt and Maggie’s demi-continental journey from Matt Raw on Vimeo.
For those of you wondering how we found ourselves in a rental car in Indiana last week: flying standby seemed like a good idea at the time.
I admit it, I was one of those people who made sarcastic comments when the first camera phones came out several years ago. At the time, it felt like an arranged marriage between two uncomplementary technologies. Many “Nuts and Gum, Together at Last” jokes were made.
At any rate, I was wrong. I use my phone to take pictures all the time. What I love about camera phone pictures is that they’re the exact opposite of digital camera photos in so many ways: where the latter are planned, high-quality, and of events deemed memorable, the camera phone captures only the spontaneous stuff I come across every day.
coffi yes ready today (My office)
Digger Phelps Ct. (Beacon, NY)
Parsley Plus: Cleans with the Power of Parsley (Met Foods, Vanderbilt Ave.)
I’ve taken to sitting on the floor. The book on the floor is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, a book I’m told is extremely insightful and influential. About every four months or so I’ll pull it off the shelf with the intention of reading it, but I never get very far.
I sit on the floor because it got really fucking hot last week, hot enough to swear. Our window air conditioner does the best it can, but on the warmest days we usually find ourselves loitering in the four foot radius the little Frigidaire is able to cool reliably. Those days usually result in a lot of sleepless nights, which I’ve had my share of lately.
If you’d told me five years ago that the primary means of cooling my apartment at age 28 would be a fan on a chair… well, honestly, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that.
You might remember last year’s attempt at fire escape gardening, which yielded dozens of thick-skinned, pugnacious little cherry tomatoes. They were the product of their gritty urban upbringing, to be sure. We moved tomatoes to the roof this year (so far so good) and use the fire escape for a few houseplants that could use some direct sun in the morning.
A few weeks ago Cheeks decided that sleeping on top of these boxes was luxury living. Her residence here meant that the top of these odd storage boxes was quickly matted with cat hair. So, she got a towel today. There’s something comforting in watching a twelve year old cat pick out a totally new place to snooze. Granted, she’s not doing anything differently, but hey, it’s never too late for a change of scenery.
I was caught off guard yesterday during a very brief business trip to San Francisco. I haven’t been on a flight in probably twenty years where the pilot bothered to point out the sights below, but the captain of yesterday’s flight did. About halfway through the flight he announced that we had climbed just a little bit and reached our final cruising altitude of 40,000 feet; those of us on the left side of the plane would be able to see Omaha in fifteen minutes; right now we were traveling over northern Iowa.
At that moment I strained to look out the window as best I could from my aisle seat. Fields and crops, a few roads intersecting neatly at 90 degrees. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to identify any river, road, or city looking south, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I was. I thought for a moment about how odd it was to be screaming past family and friends at 600 mph, a tiny speck in the sky if any of them had happened to look up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. It was a strange, homesick couple of minutes.
For whatever reason I think that I do my clearest thinking on long flights. The suspension of time, that placeless feeling I get when I’m in an airport, being forced to sit for six hours with two hundred strangers, well… it gives me a chance to step back and look at where I am, so to speak. There was no great revelation yesterday, just a few poignant minutes considering the pilot’s words while I watched my old home pass below.
