we’re officially in camp + picnic phase
- originally posted on Dec 22, 2002

“Camp + Picnic phase is when you’ve sold, given away or ditched all your major furnishings just slightly too far in advance of your move date, and are left with nothing to sit on, sleep on or eat over. So you camp on the floor with sleeping bags and blankets and you picnic in your dining room on spread-out sheets and paper plates.

Post-move, this is immediately followed by the Chic Poverty phase: the period of time between unpacking and furnishing, when you tip over a big sturdy box for your dining room table and four smaller boxes for your chairs, and buy a cheap mattress to put on the floor until you have time to shop around for an appropriate dining set and bed frame.

Throughout the full process of moving, of course, there’s the omni-present 2×6 board-and-brick bookshelves that somehow always manage to survive and transcend each phase, camouflaging itself into the surrounding landscape so as not to be mercilessly singled out and sacrificed to the gods of transition.“

Posted by tee in wandering
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Posted by tee in kids + pets
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I come across so many examples of great storytelling in my travels every day that there’s just no way to pass all of it along, I’d never leave my computer. But once in awhile the writing is just so fantastic I feel like I might explode if I don’t share it. Below are two such examples from the past few days.

“I filled the pickup with four-fifths of my books, at least those I hadn’t given away in the previous month, and coaxed that overloaded truck over the mountains and into the desert. 420 miles of heavy wind and awkward center of gravity, an ungainly migration, and it had daunted me Thursday morning as I carried the boxes. Flinging yourself into the abyss is a scary thing to anticipate. I needn’t have fretted. Rolling down the east slope of the Tehachapi Mountains I felt it leave, this stale and cloying sadness I have carried in me the last months. It evanesced, blew off toward Harper Lake in shattered wisps under Mojave’s constant wind, and I was free.”

– from “Exfoliation”, over at Creek Running North

“You imagine, with shameless arrogance, that when you depart a place that’s been yours for so long you will be missed as much as you miss it. And you are. For a bit. But Africa is used to transience; people come and go all the time. No point in wasting emotion on those who’ve gone. Chuck a rock into a pond and notice the splash, the lingering ripples. Some people make bigger splashes than others. But pluck the rock for the pond’s murky depths and its surface will remain intact. Quite unperturbed. You can’t make a hole in water. That’s what leaving is like.”

– from “Home”, over at Reluctant Memsahib

other good stuff
Chris Guillebeau over at Art of Noncomformity offers some pretty fun-to-think-about, better-to-do advice about creating your own early retirement — not in 15 years, not in 5 years, but now. Check it out.

Chris was also kind enough to send me an invite for the beta version of Evernote.com. Therefore I, too, have a bunch of invites to offer so if you’d like one just leave a comment (and make sure you use the email address you want the invite sent to) and I’ll send one.

Lastly, but most importantly, it’s last call for donations to Shane’s mom’s Team in Training ride happening this Saturday. She’s almost there, only $625 more to go! If you’d like to make a donation in honor of someone you care about who was lost to or is battling cancer, please consider supporting her ride.

Posted by tee in sidetracks
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Just picked it up for $14 on Etsy, a small one to stuff in my pocket while I’m wandering around the shores of Lake Tahoe later this summer.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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Posted by tee in fun stuff
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I may be the last one to hear about FriendFeed (after all, I feel like the last person on earth to sign on with Twitter), but in case some of you are on the last train car with this stuff, too — FriendFeed is an aggregate service that lets you view all the services your friends are on and participating in, all in one place.

In other words, instead of checking their blog, then their Flickr page, then Twitter, then Facebook, then Linked In (and so on), you just log in to an account on friendfeed.com and it’s all there in one place. If you’re using services like delicious, Digg, LibraryThing, GoodReads and others like it, you can add those too. Kind of like a multi-service RSS collector.

Not sure how much I’ll use it, but it’s an interesting concept for anyone tired of checking three or four or five different places just to keep up with one person. If you sign up, here’s mine. Even if you don’t sign up for your own account, you can find and bookmark the profiles of people you’re keeping up with.

Speaking of GoodReads, I was jazzed to find it and now have an account there too — this one I’ll definitely use. With an Amazon-like model, the service recommends not only similar books from friends, but from the community at large, based on how you rated your own books. You can swap books with other users, and get a groovy little widget to put in your sidebar of the last 12 books you’ve read. I stuck one up there yesterday (right-hand side).

I dig it. If you’re currently using or sign up with either one, let me know.

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Me: “Geriatric GPS?”
Shane: “We could lo-jack your grandmother.”

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