as we may blog

We finished our taxes online but had to mail some supplementary forms, so we fed the googly-eyed mailbox before lunch.

We walked over to Park Slope and had a giant sandwich at Bierkraft. Foreground: Defiant Porter, pulled from a cask.

On the way home, we stopped at Park Delicatessen for some Valentine’s Day flowers, then had a very nice piece of salmon for dinner.

Last night, despondent about our seemingly limited choices for property ownership, we pulled up the Craigslist site for Maine and started looking for Maine farms and Portland houses for sale. We spent maybe an hour clicking on anything that looked good and learned a lot. A good rule of thumb: if the realty company has the word “moose” in its name, the house you’re looking at is too far away. It was a good hour of escapist thinking; we traded in the trash on the sidewalk for empty two car garages and laughed a lot about how all our stuff would look great in “that corner” of a 2000 sq. ft. farmhouse. It was therapeutic on some level.

I was back at work this morning and put on my headphones to listen to the new Avett Brothers album. I’d heard it a couple of times in the office and liked what I had heard but I hadn’t been listening closely. The very first song began:

Load the car and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north.

One foot in and one foot back
But it don’t pay to live like that
So I cut the ties and I jumped the track
For never to return.

Headed north! It don’t pay to live like [this]! With visions of 50 acre farmhouses and easy access to lobster fresh in my head from last night, I concluded immediately that this was a sign! I stopped and listened closely, eager to make even the most tenuous connections between the song’s lyrics and our thoughts of setting up residence in Maine. The music swelled at the chorus:

Oh Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in!

*sigh*

Good song though.

Maggie writes:

THIS is currently outside of our apartment, making one helluva racket. I don’t think I’ve actually seen or heard the word “cesspool” in serious context since David Macaulay’s Castle.

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.

Bunk: [on detail] A different look for our boy.
McNulty: Yeah, Perry Ellis, or something.
Bunk: Now, how would a just-rolled-out-of-bed-looking motherfucker like you know the designer?
McNulty: [pauses] Okay, I’m guessing.
Bunk: It’s a Joseph Abboud. He puts dark buttons instead of brass on his blazers. That’s the Abboud signature.
McNulty: You know what they call a guy who pays that much attention to his clothes, don’t you?
Bunk: A grown-up.

Perhaps it’s the sweater-tie combo I’m rocking today. More likely it’s that we just watched this episode last night and it cracked me up. Anyway, Bunk’s right.

In the spirit of keeping this blog from degenerating into a total pastefest… I’m going to try my hand at a little letterpress design with Maggie tomorrow. I have some ideas for some cards aimed at designers. A thank you card with lorem ipsum, or something super nerdy like that, I’m still kicking around a few ideas. After that, we’re off to the legendary (and final!) Bushwick birthday party where I will no doubt, as Bunk would say, have a taste.

Have a great weekend.

Could the Laundry Super Centers really be two years old?