as we may blog

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.

The tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or a body in motion to remain in motion unless disturbed by an external force.

With a nod to Chicago (the band), here are a few photos from around the ‘hood this weekend.

Many of you remember last summer’s experiment with home improvement. I certainly do. Sometimes I dream that I’ve been sitting for a long period of time at that slightly-too-tall table and I wake up in a cold sweat, arms asleep from the shoulders down. That Mags gritted her teeth and worked at that table all summer is a testament to her can-do attitude and OSHA’s inability to arrest me.

Anyway, after agonizing over how such a well-planned intentioned project could have turned out so lackluster, I realized the fatal flaw. The solution was so obvious!

We needed shelves this summer for all those books that we read two chapters of in college and just keep around now to impress friends. Armed with my own righteous sense of direction, we headed again to Home Depot, purchased the requisite lumber—no pressboard this time, thanks to a 3rd place finish at CHI—and found hardware more suitable for joining wood than last year’s shelf brackets. We returned home and consulted the drawings one last time.

After an in-depth examintion of user needs—taking special care to understand the environmental factors and cultural contexts into which the shelf would be born and from which it could not possibly hope to disentangle—it was time to put my new plan into action. I grabbed the drill, a bracket, and a few screws. I handed these things to Mags.

"You probably should start on that end."
"Mm-hmm."

And with that, our new bookshelf practically built itself.