travel

skeleton of a creature that might just find a way to come alive…

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

the project today was to begin to tackle the beast of the question of what i’m doing with myself for the rest of the summer. i haven’t talked much here about the lunchmaking business idea, but i did a one week trial run of making lunches for some folks in the office, and i learned a few good things:

  1. i love the idea of getting paid to cook: spending my time figuring out stuff to make and then sharing it with people is fun and rewarding.
  2. transportation and scalability are major factors in lunch delivery, and the number of customers i would need to actually profit from the endeavor is higher than i originally estimated.
  3. there are a number of travel opportunities in the next few months that are relatively high priorities for me right now, and it would be difficult to both devote myself fully to making lunches and be free to take off as needed to take advantage of said opportunities.

the repercussions of these lessons have been stewing this past week as i hung out with my mom and enjoyed the holiday, and i realized today that i have pretty much decided that, while i may continue to test ways to make food to sell while i’m in town, it is not my first priority for the summer, and if that’s the case, i either need to find another job or just embrace a month or so of continued debt and turn my energies to more important matters.

after exploring some part-time job options and looking at a calendar and playing sudoku with the potential pieces of my schedule (to steal victor’s amusing metaphor), i have tentatively decided to opt for the latter plan.

in other words, this weekend i’m going to try out the idea that i dive fully into travel and my own unpaid work for the next few months, using up my welch allyn cushion, making money where i can with food and whatever else presents itself as i go, possibly accruing a bit more debt, and letting the bits and pieces in the stewpot of my brain marinate a little longer before turning the heat down in order to divert more energy to the pursuit of income.

this might be an unwise decision, but when i’m honest with all the parts of myself that i can’t really sum up here, it feels very much otherwise, so i’m enjoying the chance to pencil in the first few pieces and see how the view opens up as i camp at crater lake this weekend.

here is the skeleton i have sketched out in my thinking today:

july 6 – 8: crater lake – car camping and hiking with friendly meetup folks
july 11: fly to pittsburgh – crash the edge, stay with reed, bum a ride to wv
july 12 – 15: masontown, wv – all good
july 20?: harry potter book party/wake for the unknown victim
july 21 – 22: san francisco – wordcamp
(allow the norcal contingent to compete for my company so as to save travel and enjoy good times? transport to truckee on the 30th?)
july 30 – aug 15: lake tahoe – backpacking the rim trail with christie
(fly to indy from sfo?)
aug 17 – 19: bloomington, in – sugar hill
(fly to sfo from indy, and either portland from sfo or san diego from sjc?)
if portland {
aug 25: portland – sue and michael get married!!
(fly from portland to vegas or san diego?)
}
else aug 20 – 26: san diego
aug 27 – sep 2: black rock city, nv – burning man
(fly ___ to indy? play with the bardzells?)
sep 8: bloomington, in – the 11th annual decadent garden party
(fly from indy to ___, ___ to portland)
sep 10 – oct 2?: breathe. make money. take a sailing class. keep up aikido.
oct 26 – 28: las vegas, nv – vegoose
nov 11 – dec 2?: palm beach gardens, fl – mom’s ordination. holidays. breathe. make money. help mom build up her online presence.
dec 2? – jan 1: coastal oregon? – NYE 2007
2008: portland, take two? new zealand? the ocean? italy? the summer festival circuit?

all those question marks on next year should imply that all those things are still considered very much up in the air, but their ghosts are staking out claims to some of my attention. turning question marks into periods is the point of all that comes before.

one step at a time.

comments? advice? warnings? interest in tagging along?

bonnaroo highlights

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

i took very few pictures at bonnaroo.

sorry.

my camera was running low on batteries, they didn’t want them inside centeroo (where the musics was) anyway, and i was focused on other matters, so…

here’s the view from our tent when i woke up friday morning:

Over the city skyline Friday morning

those are just a handful of the homes of the 80,000+ people who descend upon the otherwise deserted tennessee farm for three days of chaos and music.

and here’s me, after walking around all day friday, and acquiring a new piece of headwear to protect me from the sun. because no one wants to put on as much sunscreen as would be required to actually prevent blistering. so i decided to enlist material support. by sunday? i was wearing long sleeves. place was like a desert. heat and dust and tons of people higher than kites and in desperate need of hydration. fun times.

Me, new hat, old glasses, long day

here’s my short list of highlights from the weekend:

  • meeting our underage friendly neighbors from connecticut, one of whom used “phatty” at least ten times a sentence, as a general descriptor of the awesomeness of the universe entire.
  • being able to loan an extra tent to the people a few cars down from us who were missing their poles. good karma from hour one.
  • seeing richard thompson and feeling time stop and texting jeff when vincent black lightning was playing.
  • john paul jones came out and played mandolin with gillian welch and david rawlings. it was an awesome moment. but honestly? she was super cool all on her own.
  • renee taught me to play some card game with gold involved, and i could do it!
  • regina spektor and damien rice both kept me wrapped around their adorable, beautiful, charming, subtle, sweet, nuanced fingers, even though some would say i should have gone to hear ziggy marley and ben harper. i don’t regret it.
  • sting on a big screen with 50,000 screaming onlookers is indeed impressive.
  • the flaming lips are a joy to behold. and dance to. with no restraint. and bonnaroo is brilliant because there are so few places on this earth where one can walk from the flaming lips to gov’t mule to sasha and john digweed all within the space of a night and then strike back to your tent with the sun coming up and the world feeling like a glorious marvel.
  • at one point some jokester walked by us muttering under his breath “plutonium!! weapons-grade!! depleted uranium!!” as a commentary on the black market. it was amusering.
  • bobby weir was there, and a bunch of hippies who came only for him. it was awesome. he played come together. and we did.
  • many of the not hippies were there for widespread panic, about whom i knew very little. they put on a damn fine show. consider me schooled by the younguns. ;)
  • i made two new friends of rather different stripes, but i hope to remain in touch with them both.
  • as we were packing the car, we learned that our neighbors had never heard of hair. the musical i mean. we played it. they laughed. it was the campiest scene Ever. and awesome.
  • on the way out, we groundscored a baby pool for jarien, a couple buckets, a sleeping mat, a decent pair of boots, a bunch of stuff i did not even process but renee found room for somehow, and, i kid you not, a four-foot tall red stuffed animal with a cardboard sign around it’s neck that proclaims: “Feed the Dragon!”

so quite the weekend, eh?
:)

on with the show!

life is change

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

today i got some news that is very likely going to sound a lot more out of the blue to you than it does to me, but that’s just because the situation has been so weird and wishy washy that it hasn’t seemed worth writing about it.

now here it is, though, and no sense beating around the bush: my job is ending in two weeks.

as my supervisor was kind enough to state very clearly, this decision is not at all a reflection upon my performance over the last few months. it just turns out that shifting the design culture of a large company from the inside out requires quite a bit of a political maneuvering, we hit a few snags that were a bit larger than anticipated at this stage of the game, and, well, i’m the temporary contractor who wasn’t really planning to stay with the company that long anyway, so it makes sense that i’m the first (and hopefully only) casualty of budgeting rearrangements.

honestly, a lot of me feels relieved. i first heard that this might be possible about a month ago, but it was always at some unknown future point and it was never clear how real the threat was and it was impossible to really do anything with the news other than use it as ulcer fuel or ignore it, and so i did my darndest to do the latter as much as possible. but it still took its toll, as there is only so much patience i can muster for showing up at work and not really knowing if there is anything to do other than watch meetings be postponed and stretch simple tasks out over several days to fill the time. especially when i can think of lots of other things i want to be doing.

which leads well into the next reason i am not devastated by the development.

one of the major questions that i hoped to answer by taking this job was that of whether i am in a headspace for longterm full-time employment right now, and the past three months have provided quite a bit of useful data that has begun to suggest an answer quite a bit earlier than i anticipated. i have learned that there is a lot to be excited about in the professional design world right now, and i enjoy being a part of the conversation about where things are going. at the same time, however, i have learned that i still basically think of myself as a student, that i have Lots of stuff i want to work on for my own reasons that have nothing to do with any company that i know of at the moment, that the travel bug has not left my system, and that i am increasingly convinced of the merits of finding ways to work for myself.

with all that crystallizing in my head, i was honestly starting to get a bit antsy, and once it became clear that it was possible the job might not last the full 9 months after all? well, let’s just say i had no difficulty coming up with ideas of what i might like to do.

the anxiety, as usual, will hinge on money. the last month of my travels and the first month of my move and transition to employment put me once again in the red, and i had been employing a strategic approach to paying that back over time because i thought that my income was assured for a while. so it’s frustrating to have to deal with that. but not unmanageable. and i am hereby stamped as genius for adhering to my policy of sinking money into camping gear instead of furniture in an attempt to limit the number of things i will have to store, sell, or give away before i am able to uproot myself again.

on that note, look at what else i did today!

My tent in my house!

those wheels are tiffanie’s bike, which she lent me, and which i will now perhaps return. the thing that should jump out at you about the fact that you see those wheels is not really the bike, however, it is the fact that my new tent? it’s like one big window. this is nice in circumstances such as the present where it is pitched inside where there is little crosswind and you are still inside a sleeping bag for some reason. it is also nice, however, when it is inside your backpack weighing securely under 5 lbs. even with the rainfly and footprint, or when it is pitched outside in the summer and you want to separate yourself from bugs but not from breeze or scenery. and summer is the season which is about to be upon us. and did i mention that i might have more free time?

so yeah. options abound. and it is somewhat symbolic to me that i decided (and it was a somewhat spontaneous decision as well) to go ahead and buy the tent today of all days, with timing such that i was actually in the process of erecting the last major component of my bare bones self-sufficiency kit right when my phone rang with news to suggest that i might not want to buy the few pieces of furniture that i had decided to splurge for after all. i might have hesitated tomorrow, and i have many days ahead of me to decide if i want to trade it in for the other tent i was considering that is a fair bit cheaper. but today? today i just kept clicking the poles into place. i felt the metal bend, watched the fabric billow and tighten, listened to the silence on the phone and the buzz of the world out the window, and said: “oh. ok. how much time do i have?”

so here come an interesting two weeks, folks. on we go.

a disadvantage of traveling is that it’s hard to have a garden

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

i had the idea the other day of several people pitching in and buying or renting property in a range of locations, and then sharing them all.
so everyone can broaden their sense of home without needing to afford/support (you pick your politics) a model wherein a person has more than one residence.
and someone is always there to water the plants.
:)

who’s in?

news from syracuse

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

reading the syracuse post-standard on my porch in skaneateles with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and an unexpected morning off:

state trooper shootings shake up the community, suspect found dead “in the wreckage of a house destroyed by a towering fire after a police raided it [sic] Wednesday evening.” Cause of fire unknown. “I cannot tell you whether he was dead or alive when the fire started.” … an art student who makes mock meth labs and pipe bombs and then displays them on end tables or inside teddy bears to provoke thought on the everyday nature of their components runs into trouble with his university public safety division … Stephen Hawking gets a complimentary ride today on a commercial “zero-gravity” flight, expects weightlessness to be “bliss” … a drunk German man is found sleeping in the foyer of his bank at 4:15 am with his horse standing nearby – “Aside from an undesirable deposit made by the horse inside the building, the man – who has an account at the bank – had not breached any bank rules.” … a man in a Captain America costume was arrested for disorderly conduct after groping a woman during a costumed bar crawl – “Several patrons who had also dressed as Captain America were asked to step outside so the woman could identify the suspect.” … the veracity of the civilian death toll in Iraq, as reported by Iraqi officials, is questioned … the House passes an Oct. 1 pullout start date by 10 votes but a veto is expected if it passes the Senate … the Dow breaks records … the country grapples with the VT shootings … the death penalty is proposed in NY state for killing law enforcement officers … a one paragraph nod to a Harvard professor with a new book on terrorism that includes the advice: “Addressing the demands of terrorists should not always be dismissed as appeasement.” …

I stare at the lake and marvel at how we take so much comfort in our ability to scoff and tell people to grow up as we hurry past the headlines and flip to the sudoku.

I think we don’t want to admit that our lives are becoming a daily devotional to a series of gimmicks that we hope will keep the pane of glass between us and the enemy opaque enough that we can pretend we never even knew it was there.

We don’t want to think about what causes other people’s glass to break because we’re afraid that if we make eye contact it will sweep across the room, kiss us on both cheeks, and greet us by our first name while asking about the kids and the dog.

The enemy is not terrorism. It is desperation. And we all know its face.

tiffanie has dibs on the daylight savings time story

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

but i will report that we have made it safely to chicagoland, and the hotel here is already way ahead in the contest with our former pad in baltimore. i’m about ready to go enjoy the cushy bed.

but first, i point you to the newly added photographic summary of my last few days, which were spent in a veritable candyland of medical paraphernalia.

For those late-night gauze cravings

we also managed to hit the famous aquarium, so you can also check out our stylin’ tourist selves.

Tiffanie is so not interested in my art

and a few pretty fishies.

Tetras plus turtle

and a chilled out amphibian or two.

Neato

unfortunately the aquarium killed my camera battery so i have no documentation of our lovely visit with my dear friend jen, her husband mike, and the -3 months and counting baby ?brandon?, who live (and gestate) in the greater baltimore area. all of them are doing well, and it was awesome to get a chance to see them, even if only for a couple of hours. next time i promise i will bring an extra battery.

i’m in the windy city until friday morning, and some of the points on this hotel’s scorecard are wireless internet and a room of my own, so some more thoughts on business travel soonlike.

it’s going to be an interesting nine months of work.

note for the future

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

if you’re considering reading options for a flight and you’ve narrowed it down to “A History of God” and “Psychedelics Encyclopedia”, at least consider and prepare for the potential reactions of TSA employees if your bag is selected for a random search in security. it’s best not to be caught off guard with your reaction on that one.

whereabouts and whatabouts

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

for those taking notes, i’m in london for one more day, though i have relocated outside of the city proper and am staying with a friend from scotland in lovely welling, about 30 minutes southeast by train.

apart from seeing a movie tonight, we have toured some of the nearby shops, and i went into town yesterday to say hi to tania on her way to the airport to go to brazil. i also got the chance to visit the national portrait gallery, which was a lot of fun. tomorrow i’m going to see rock n’ roll, tom stoppard’s latest theatrical offering, and if i get up in time i’m going to go to greenwich to stand in two time zones at once.

after my final british culture spree, i get up early on thursday and head to dublin for 5 days, where i’m visiting an old friend from bloomington and her new irish husband, both of whom i am excited to see. next week i head to amsterdam for a bit, and then i will be back in indiana for a short time. i don’t know the actual date of my arrival yet, but when i do, i will let you know, and hopefully many of the folks reading this will have the chance to see me and eat avers or play sink the biz or guitar hero 2.

i will send a pigeon with the details once they are known.

acting like a tourist

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

well, i forgot my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but i did manage to spend the whole day out of the house yesterday and quite a day it was!

i had an appointment with the sushi restaurant job, and i am taking it! starting next monday i’m working every day for the following two weeks, and hopefully i won’t have to spend it all on a place to stay for the second week, because i’m set to leave the room i’m in now on the 20th. all the other people in the flat are leaving as well (except the one who’s coming back to the room i’m in), so part of me is hoping that one of the rooms will stay empty for a week while they look for someone new and i can just crash there. but no guarantee of that, so we’ll have to see.

in the meantime, i’ve got to start getting my tourist on before i’m working all the time, and i started after my interview with some museums and a polish cafe. it was fun!

the polish place was one of the cheapest listings in my lonely planet for the neighborhood i was in (south kensington/knightsbridge), and borscht and potato pancakes sounded good to me, so i searched it out for lunch. it didn’t open until 12:30, so i killed time in the natural history museum. the moral of that experience was: natural history museums are kind of boring when you’re not a kid. Or at least when you’re not With a kid.

i mean, it’s not that i have No interest in the eating habits of the saber-toothed tiger, but it’s also rather easy for me to just let that knowledge slide. i decided that a phenomenon is in effect that is something like: i know enough about what makes a mammal a mammal and how cells work that i don’t feel compelled to run and push every blinking button that offers another pearl of wisdom on those matters, but i Don’t know enough about the details of such things to derive geeky entertainment from scrutinizing bone fragments and commenting on the authenticity of the dioramas. so as a result i just float along in this purgatory of both knowledge and ignorance, and can’t really be bothered to look too closely at the things passing by.

that’s a rather accurate description of the plague of everyday adulthood, actually, so maybe natural history museums just bring it into stark relief.

that really isn’t entirely fair, though, because i have quite a capacity for fascination in everyday things, and i also have a very fond memory of spending a day in the new york museum of natural history when i was a freshman at nyu. i had the rather opposite takeaway experience then, actually, because i was enlightened by the exhibit on the differences between egglaying and internal gestation, and i felt saddened that we didn’t spend much time as adults just wandering around and learning things about the world around us.

so it might just be that the london exhibits suck and haven’t really been updated since the 70’s.

a downside of that whole “the museums are free!” bit, perhaps.

either way, the building itself was gorgeous, and i’m not saying that i regret the visit. i just didn’t stay for long.

i went to lunch at the polish place, and the lonely planet did itself proud. the borscht, which they made a point to recommend, was excellent, and the potato pancakes were just fine, served with very good chunky applesauce and enough sour cream. i also had a taster of cherry vodka because it was quite cheap, and the waitress recommended it (along with “bison” flavor, which totally left me stumped. google says it’s bison grass, which makes much more sense. but sounds gross.)

i didn’t think about the potential olfactory associations with cherry + alcohol until it arrived and i took the first sip but, yeah, to modify a friend’s comic witticism regarding cilantro and soap: it Did taste like cough syrup, but it’s the only cough syrup i like.
so that helped me to see how people in eastern europe can take vodka seriously for things other than completely smothering with juice, and that tolerance surely makes me a better person.

after lunch, i ended up deciding to leave the neighborhood and go to the british museum instead. i had thought i would take advantage of being right near the science museum and the victoria & albert, but since i wasn’t going to pay for an imax movie or anything i suspected the science museum would feel much like the natural history had, and the v&a sounded good but the british museum sounded better. seeing that it was also a higher priority on the “must see” list, and i could go to the v&a any day before or after work now, it seemed wise to take advantage of my flexible afternoon and go to the british museum right away.

this was a good plan, and it made me excited.

you see, as i had begun thinking more about the places i really want to visit in london, i realized that the british museum is high on the list not just because it’s really famous and would probably be cool in general, but also because i am actually quite geeked out by one of its most famous attractions – the rosetta stone.

as i get older, i am realizing that one of the quirks about me that could potentially mature into one of my adult armchair hobbies is that i really like alphabets. i mean, i like languages in general, and am not very secretly envious of those people who somehow learn to speak some double-digit number of them, but i also just really like alphabets, which i think is rather less common. i went to russia once for 10 days and, before leaving, i taught myself the cyrillic alphabet just so that i could sound out the signs. then a few years ago, after the revelation that my name only has six letters in greek because of θ, i decided to learn the greek alphabet, too, which i still sometimes use, to david’s amusement, to make crosswords harder when they are otherwise too easy. the fact that these could be signs of something more than just the weird ways i choose to pass the time first occurred to me when i read a whole book about the idea of the alphabet (as in, the idea of using a relatively small number of symbols to phonetically represent speech, rather than using pictures to represent whole ideas), and was completely fascinated. i mean it Was a short book, and very wittily written, but still…

anyway, the rosetta stone strikes me as particularly cool, and indeed, it was kind of amazing to look at it for a while and think about actual people chipping way each of those letters, and then academics poring over them thousands of years later to figure out the language underneath. it had that funny glow of something deservedly famous, even though what it actually says is quite mundane, and i stared at it a few times because those museum planners know their stuff and they put it near a hub where it’s easy to pass by rather than way in the back somewhere where traffic would jam up.

the british museum on the whole was very impressive. that whole sun never setting on the empire bit gave them quite a bit of daylight during which to collect stuff of all varieties, and the museum is immense and dense. i don’t really think they need that many greek vases, actually, but what can you do?

i didn’t see everything, and if i have time i might go back with my camera, but i spent a few hours there and saw a lot of neat things before my artifact appreciation circuits fried themselves and i began walking by exquisite chinese porcelain with a yawn.

then i went home.

before i left i bought a few souvenirs, including… are you ready to know this exists? a blinking rosetta stone pin.
i mean, come on.
because they have to fill as many souvenir niches as they can, right?
and people like things that blink!
i made a rather loud guffawing noise when i saw it, but as i began to put it back part of my brain was like “seriously, kynthia, one day that is going to be the Perfect accessory for something, and you are going to smack yourself if you don’t spend £2 on it now.”
no arguing with that logic.
i got a chocolate one, too, with a reusable mold, so if only i hadn’t already had that alphabet birthday party…

the other thing i got is more respectable as a museum souvenir, in that it’s one of those things that is a bit gimmicky but also rather clever, and so you buy it in acknowledgment of this even though it costs too much.
it’s a fold-up ruler that gets to be 2 meters long, and has a timeline of history imprinted on it along with centimeters and inches.
i am roughly the same height as when nightgowns were introduced, and if i wear heels i can be as tall as f=ma or the collapse of the mayan empire.
good to know, that.

odd jobs for hire!

Thursday, January 4th, 2007
  • Something quirky happening with your blog or website that you’ve been putting off fixing or don’t understand?
  • Tedious data entry or formatting that you just don’t want to do?
  • Research you’ve been meaning to undertake but can’t find the time?

Cut your todo list down to size for the New Year – resolve to do the best and outsource the rest to me!

Rates and currency negotiable, no job too small, not responsible for drops in productivity that may occur due to free time on your xbox.

Calls within the next 15 minutes get a free banana!