Rumors of dirt

Shelley "Harrison" Powers has posted an absolutely beautiful, wonderfully written story about travel, home, and dirt.

I don't have anything to add; just go read it and enjoy the pictures as well.

Posted at 3:33 AM
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Living really modern

I've been spending a lot of time looking at LiveModern, a site for people who are into modern design for their houses. Most of the stuff there seems to be about architecture rather than interior design, and a number of people are building their own modular houses and blogging the process. One of the coolest entries I've read so far is from Sara Sage out in California. She and her husband took an interesting approach to testing out the design of their house before it's built; they used their floorplan as the basis for a house in the computer game The Sims 2, then watched how the Sims use the house. They found a couple of surprises.

Absolutely brilliant. Their architect was floored by the idea and may start to incorporate it into his practice.

Posted at 9:11 AM
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It's a miracle!

Holy flying ghost monkeys! There I was, shivering in the freezing office that forms the warmest room in our temporarily furnaceless house, huddling up next to the radio for warmth and listening, of course, to freeform behemoth WFMU, when program host Station Manager Ken announced to the world that one of their volunteers had just purchased a grilled cheese sandwich down the street from the station and was astonished to find that it had the image of station mascot The Old Codger burned into it! It's a miracle! It's a sign!

This can only mean one thing: go pledge and give WFMU your hard earned bucks so that we tin-eared misfits can listen for another day.

Flash! This just in! Station Manager Ken informs his listeners that the miraculous sandwich is now up for bid on eBay, and that the winning bid will be a marathon pledge to the station. No link yet.

Posted at 11:47 AM
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Ten Years

We had a funny bit of synchronicity this past weekend. Laura wanted to have lunch out on Saturday, but we didn't feel like going to the places we usually go. I wanted to stop at a lumberyard in a nearby town to see what they have available for a set of shelves I'm hoping to build in the near future, so I suggested a restaurant near the lumberyard that we've only been to a few times. It's a decent place, part of a small local chain, and not far away, but in a direction we don't usually point, so we don't usually think of it.

So when we got there, we realized that ten years ago this weekend, we had been in another outlet of this same restaurant, the first time we had met face-to-face after some years of corresponding by e-mail. We refer to that as "date 0", because it wasn't a date, but it led to our first date a week later, and we've been together ever since. Totally unintentional, and totally appropriate.

I could go back and figure out exactly which dates it was, but it seems better to think of it as "the first weekend in March". This being the following Tuesday, it was ten years ago today that I called and asked for that first date and changed my life. It's hard to believe it's been that long. Ten years since the best thing that ever happened to me.

I'm a lucky man.

Posted at 2:30 AM
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A reunion, or just raising their heads above the parapets?

Douglas Wolk notes on Lacunae that Scrawl, one of my all time favorite bands, is playing a "reunion" show opening for Shellac in Chicago next month. Now, I may be mistaken about this, but I don't think Scrawl ever broke up, making a reunion show a bit difficult to pull off. When their drummer Dana decamped to Sweden, the band changed, but Marcy and Sue still played shows as Scrawl, at least in Columbus, using a drum machine. Shirley, you know them; correct me in comments if I'm wrong on this. I know they've kept an awfully low profile the past few years, but I didn't think the band was over. Maybe "reunion" means that Dana is back? Or maybe, given that Douglas' post was about the band's intention to release a compilation of tracks from their (wonderful) early records, they're playing a show with their original drummer Carolyn?

Posted at 12:45 AM
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