Kate and I spent a week stomping around Colorado, hanging out in Fort Collins and ascending into the dizzying airs of Rocky Mountain National Park.
There are many more photos to be seen in this set on Flickr.
Category Archives: Travel
Setlist, 08/10/09 – 08/22/09
August 22, 2009
San Francisco CA > Minneapolis MN > Grand Island NE > Sidney NE > Fort Collins CO > Estes Park CO > Rocky Mountain National Park > Fort Collins CO > Cheyenne WY > Kearney NE > Des Moines IA > Minneapolis MN > Madison WI > Bloomington IL > Bloomington IN
It’s been a long two weeks.
Directions to Mark’s Work
August 14, 2009
Out to vine. Cross vine, straight to welding. Right side of welding. Two-track entry to nature. Entry behind. Natural area. Straight. Between ponds. Fenced-in area. Right of chain link fence. Straight. Little hill. Up it. On top of berm along river. Left on dirt single track, fifty feet to railroad tracks. Left to get on rails, cross river on rails. Immediately to right is Mark’s building.
Meanwhile, back at the farm…
June 22, 2009
I flew back to Minnesota for the weekend to catch Rock the Garden with Kate. We were too busy filling up on beer and wine to catch much of Solid Gold and Yeasayer, but Calexico was a sweet breath of hot desert air blown in from the Great American Southwest. Then, The Decemberists played The Hazards of Love in its entirety, rendering me a weeping ball of blubbery, emotional goo for sixty minutes. They followed it up with a killer encore, which had me trying to reel my jaw back up into my face.
Those cats can play, man. They’re the real deal. Kate proposed we move to Portland because, you know, The Decemberists are from Portland, and I believe she makes a sound argument. Moving to a particular town in order to be closer to your favorite band that otherwise tours nationally on a regular basis makes complete sense.
But.
Last night we (kinda, sorta) invited ourselves over to a dinner party at the Ingman Estate, where our tremendous peals of laughter dared set off car alarms in the street. We discussed such things as Super Fantastic tomatoes, sucker-popping, and a brilliant marketing campaign for propane.
We ate and drank and laughed and talked until the wee hours of the night, and this morning Kate and I woke up bright and early so we could get new iPhones. It’s a good thing we got a head start on the project, because we ended up traveling to three locations and spending four hours getting our plan in shape. Luckily we scored an incredibly helpful representative at the AT&T store, who got us all squared away after an hour of tireless effort.
Kate dropped me off at the Minneapolis airport where I spent a good half-hour going through security, and I made it to San Francisco just in time for a most-experiential ride on the BART. The doors didn’t work properly, the conductor spoke in an awkward and confusing cadence, they rebooted the train computer by shutting off power for a minute, and a homeless fellow panhandled us on the train. Which is mighty bold. Seriously, San Francisco has standards.
The Iron Legs of Thursday
May 26, 2009
Yes. I am alive. So very sunburned and alive, in this enchanted land nestled intimately between the ocean and a bay and the other side of a bay. I am snug here in the heart of Mission, living at the House of Many Doors with my trusty Frankenbike at my side. Together we will get to the bottom of this fair city, discover its history and nuance, and learn Great and Amazing Things that we will share with you.
From satellite images San Francisco appears relatively flat. I come to you bearing witness that this is not the truth. Indeed, today while struggling up the beautiful wooded hills of Presidio the giant eucalyptus trees filled my strained lungs with a soothing perfume.
Yes. We have eucalyptus trees. And koalas, as I can safely assume. Also, I have learned that fruit grows on trees, and that these trees grow in San Francisco. There are fat and healthy lemons and oranges and grapefruits that beckon for me to hop the fence into the neighbor’s backyard and eat my way into a citrusy coma.
There are mysteries in this town, such as a bridge that disappears into the side of an island only to emerge from the other side of the island. This is a mystery.
Let me tell you a story.
I arrived in San Francisco at one o’clock Friday afternoon. By four o’clock my friends had already bought me a burrito from a truck and built me a single-speed bike out of spare parts. Thusly armed with my Frankenbike, they pushed me out the door to go toe-to-toe with San Francisco rush hour. Despite a few wrong turns and some freaky-crazy intersections between here and SoMA, I found my way to the Adaptive Path office and joined them for happy hour, Battledecks, and a brief tour of their studio. For how much I love Post-It notes, whiteboards and Sharpies, I may have just found my heaven.
Then.
After returning to the Mission I dashed out the door with my friends to catch a burlesque show, as this would seem the only proper introduction to San Francisco culture. Zooming down city streets with a pack of friends on bicycles made me feel like I was ten years old again, on my way to blow the week’s allowance on a sugar rush at the Minnetonka Mills gas station. This time, however, the goal was a bar in Mission, serving up IPAs that taste like grapefruit.
The next morning we took a surf trip down to Pacifica. I got my first taste of surfing a few years ago, during a scorching-hot fall weekend at the Oregon Coast. The water was still blindingly cold despite the air temperature, so I had some idea what those guys were paddling out in. While I am certain my future in San Francisco will entail taming the mighty surf, I decided that surfing through traffic on a bicycle was harrowing enough, and I didn’t want to push my luck by tackling the ocean. Yet.
Sunday the city of San Francisco threw a carnival in my honor, welcoming me to the neighborhood. This celebration featured an awesome parade that went right by my house and was jam-packed with thongs.
Yesterday I set out on foot, exploring Mission, Dolores Park, Castro, Buena Vista Park, Haight, Alamo Square and Market. I put some serious miles on my Converse All-Stars, which to this day remain a staple of hipster culture. I feel I have a lot more cred than a lot of the posers here, though, cuz these All-Stars I got way back in ‘97. Hear that? These kicks are Pre-Dot Com Boom, suckas.
Today I took in an epic bike ride to the Golden Gate Bridge, which was named after the Golden Gate, which was named long before there was a bridge. This I learned from the San Francisco Maritime Museum, which was amazing and had awesome things like copper plates that were more than a hundred years old from which nautical maps were printed. Yes, the San Francisco Maritime Museum is a wonderful little museum, and it broke my heart that I was the only person there. I gave them a donation, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if you were willing to give them a reach-around as well.
So yes. I blasted through SoMA past Adaptive Path and IDEO and a Ferrari, through Fisherman’s Place-To-Get-Lousy-T-Shirts and Impossible-To-Spell-Something-About-Chocolate Square, almost fell off my bike laughing at a pack of tourists on Segways, took in Alcatraz, talked shop with some windsurfers and kiteboarders at Crissy Field, and before I knew it I was freezing in the shadow of the Bridge.
Now, I tend to observe a rule, perhaps unconsciously adopted from Goonies, that one should never go out the same way that he came in. Thus I went up and over Presidio, descended into Golden Gate Park, went out via the Panhandle, and did the Wiggle back into Mission. All told it was probably a 19-mile bike ride, which is not too shabby considering that graduate school has destroyed any trace of my athletic physique.
Tonight my legs feel like rubber, and tomorrow they will no doubt burn like crazy. However, I know that in those Fires of Tomorrow will be forged the Iron Legs of Thursday, and such are the legs that will carry me forward into the summer.
California Here He Comes
May 21, 2009
Okay ya’ll, listen up. In not too long an hour I leave for San Francisco, and by this time tomorrow I will be snug in the womb of Mission, no doubt suckling at a maté and swaddled in soft cloths of florescence. Indeed, such will kick off a two-month pilgrimage back to my beloved west coast, and I intend to greet the Pacific with a roiling fury heretofore unknown by its vast depths.
Upon my back I carry three books, three of my favorites, which set the proper rhythm for this grand excursion. One, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, written in a brilliant prose that one day I hope to emulate, if not the drug-wild carnage that lent to its inception.
Two, John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise, a champion of creativity and invention that has given more to the imagination than anything of late.
“I am not romantic about squirrels.”
Aye, lad. Nor am I. Nor is anyone, for that matter. But a good point to clear up, nevertheless.
Finally, The Dharma Bums, notable as Jack Kerouac’s best work. Yes. I still call bullshit on On the Road, even after reading it three times and despite the accolades layered upon it.
However. I am ashamed that I left my copy of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America back in Indiana, and I feel that somehow my San Francisco experience will be incomplete without such a cultural field manual. No matter. I am certain that the San Francisco Public Library has at least a hundred copies and an entire wing named after the author. All I need to secure a copy is a prescription from a doctor with questionable credentials, and the brilliant spoils from one of the city’s many LSD dispensaries.
It’s been said before but it’s worth saying again.
It will be a lovely summer.
Summation
April 20, 2009
Our trip to Boston was great. Our favorite part was the cemeteries.
The CHI Student Design Competition went well. Our poster went through about fifteen revisions until we called it good, but all that hard work definitely paid off:
Out of twelve finalists who presented posters, our team was one of four chosen to advance to the final round. Thus, we spent the next three days with our faces in our laptops, putting in 17-hour days working on our design presentation. We didn’t get to see a whole lot of CHI as a result, but we pulled down fourth place in the design competition, which is pretty cool considering there were, like, 70 original submissions.
As an aside, I’m not so sure that having the final round be a “competition” between four teams is really the most productive way to advance the state-of-the-art of academic interaction design instruction. Rather, a panel where each team openly shares its design process, discussing any hardships, techniques or insights discovered along the way, would encourage collaboration, and redirect competitive energies towards actually improving design education in the world. Interaction design is far too young a field, and there are still far too few of us in the community, for us to be actively snapping at one another.
So that’s that. Boston rocks. CHI existed. Jon Kolko is awesome.
Meanwhile, I really need a haircut. Fortunately I have been signed up for an extra-swanky one this summer, as I’m going to be working as an intern at Adaptive Path. Yes. Five years ago I slept in my car on my drive from Bend to San Francisco, to attend a series of workshops about redesigning Blogger and building Basecamp. Those workshops, hosted by none other than Adaptive Path, blew my mind wide open in regards to human-centered design, and set me on the path that ultimately led to the HCI/d program at Indiana University.
Yes. Adaptive Path. Needless to say, rollin’ with those homies is an honor beyond my wildest dreams, and I can barely sleep at night out of excitement for what awaits. It’s been a lot of hard work, a ton of thanklessly hard work, to get to this point, but it’s beginning to seem as though it was all worthwhile.
Meanwhile, how about a few samples of some stuff I’ve been cookin’ up, lately? I’m putting together an Akzidenz-Grotesk type specimen book for my typography class, and my theme is “European opulence meets American ruggedness, via turn-of-the-century railway hotels.”
It’s still a work in progress. Notably absent is any usage whatsoever of the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk.
And finally, this is just plain awesome:
“It doesn’t fit in a Rolodex, because it doesn’t belong in a Rolodex.”
Load-Bearing
April 10, 2008
After finishing some client work this evening I intended on watching Into The Wild, which just arrived from Netflix. For ten years it has been one of my favorite books (its challengers include Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rand McNally U.S. Road Atlas) and I have to admit I was a little bit apprehensive to watch the movie.
My nerves about it are prickly not because of the usual “OMG they better not ruine mine favorite Book!!1!” but because I’m afraid of what I might find out about myself. You see, aside from the whole “starving to death in the wilderness” thing (which I’ll admit has a fair amount of romance to it), I want to be Alexander Supertramp.
At least, I used to want to.
Or do I still?
My post-collegiate path has been a winding one, both of place and of being. The spring I graduated from college I skipped my graduation ceremony so I could leave Minnesota and start driving to Oregon just one day sooner. I loaded up all my worldly possessions in the Green Dragon Wagon, not knowing if I would be gone for three months or three years. In the end, I worked as a windsurfing grunt until I ran out of summer, a snowboard instructor until I ran out of unbroken legs, and a web designer until I ran out of Vicodin.
I stayed in Oregon for two years and lived in two towns, moving back and forth between them until I moved back to Minnesota to work as a wilderness guide. I took an eight-day Wilderness First Responder course. I met someone lovely. I spent three months growing a beard and living in the woods. That fall, my reintroduction to civilization involved getting choked up over such amenities as toothpaste and ice water.
The following summer I did it all again, only this time I was joined by someone lovely. I grew a beard. I stomped through Yellowstone for twenty days with five guys and three mohawks. That fall I moved back to Oregon as my love traveled all over the Western United States, living outside and learning about land rights and trying not to freeze to death. We reunited that December, though she was kind of freaked out that I had shaved my beard.
For 1 1/2 years now I have been planted in Hood River, working with the intertubes, kiteboarding during the summer, snowboarding during the winter, and occasionally visiting Walla Walla for some reason or another. In four months Kate and I will be moving across the country to attend graduate school at Indiana University, she to study environmental policy and me to study interaction design. After finishing my program I want to be involved in some Pretty Big Shit in my industry, which likely means I will no longer be taking three months off at a time to guide trips or teach snowboarding or fret about not having work during those unfortunate “in between” seasons.
Aye, and there’s the rub.
Part of me thinks that I’m ready to move on from this lifestyle. Another part of me fears that for all these nomadic experiences, for all this living in the outdoors, I have still managed to miss something, some hidden meaning. This elusive nugget of truth drove Christopher McCandless in his travels, and is what gave rise to Alexander Supertramp. I’m certain that Christopher would agree with me when I say that the logical conclusion of this journey is something besides starving to death in the backcountry of Alaska. What it is, however, I haven’t figured out yet.
I’ve changed a lot over the last five years, especially over the last two, and I’ve noticed my nagging sense of wanderlust begin to fade. With it I fear my curiosity goes as well, my unconventionalism, my identity. I speak of piling all my furniture on the front lawn and burning it, and people laugh as though I speak in hyperbole. I do, to be sure. But for me, owning more stuff than will fit in my car is painfully embarrassing, every bookcase and file cabinet a trophy to defeat. I have lost my mobility, but I have gained… what, a sofa? A coffee table? These are changes I have not been dealing with well.
It was in this context that I started to watch Into The Wild.
I got as far as the DVD menu. I watched it loop a dozen times. My vision blurred and my chest tightened. A dozen times Christopher burned his money, hitchhiked to Alaska, grew a beard, and posed in front of the bus.
I turned off my television.
The Gallery of The Awesome
March 24, 2008
Last night I welcomed upon you a great injustice, in that I described a number of truly awesome products without actually showing them to you. Tonight I hope to make things right and proper, and with the help of this “Multi-Media” tool will magic their images to you, with absolutely no post office, telegraph cables, or Speak & Spell device involved.
First up in our Gallery of The Awesome, we have a Colon-Shaped Brownie Tray:
Next, we have a litter box designed for one-legged cats:
If you thought the one-legged cat market was so small that it couldn’t possibly support more than one specially-designed litter box, you thought wrong:
Last and certainly not least, we have Taylor Fay. He’s totally stacked in this picture, probably the result of his patented “ripping the legs off cats” workout:
That is all.
Travelog
March 23, 2008
After two weeks of leading a jet-setter lifestyle, crisscrossing the country in economy class, and enjoying only the finest plastic cups of Canada Dry, I have returned home. Ahh, Hood River, where all the postal clerks know my name, I have the EDGE network all to myself, and there are no more than two places to eat in town.
Having flown on no less than eight flights and two different air carriers over the last couple weeks, I feel I am in a position to accurately report on the current state of air travel in our nation. Here’s the gist of it: Fewer flights, packed flights, longer flights. It’s a totally awesome combination, considering that you are free now even from the in-flight burden of consuming a bag of three broken pretzels. As far as I can tell, air carriers are running fewer flights to most destinations, and packing all of their remaining flights to maximum capacity. Every one of my eight flights was completely full, with additional travelers on standby in case of no-shows.
Now, a completely full flight takes a ridiculously long time to plane and deplane, so one would think that this, combined with a record number of delayed flights, would result in a cascading disaster of lateness. Not so! It seems the air carriers have taken into account the additional time it takes to load up all that extra meat, and have padded their schedules accordingly. If the flight before yours takes an abnormally long time to deplane, and your flight takes an abnormally long time to board, you’ll still likely arrive at your destination “on time”, as the travel times between cities have been arbitrarily increased to allow for these delays.
If your flight happens to board quickly, however, it just means more time sitting on the tarmac, waiting for your takeoff window. The good news is, this allows you all sorts of extra time to peruse Sky Mall, which currently features such awesome products as a colon-shaped brownie tray, litter boxes for one-legged cats, and Taylor Fay.
So where, you ask, did I travel during all this? Two weeks ago I had an incredibly early flight out of Portland, so I spent the previous night at the La Quinta near the airport to take advantage of their “Park and Sleep and Fly and Sleep and Park and Fly and Park” program. Thanks to an utterly bizarre celestial alignment I drove to Portland State University that night, and caught up with a Hopkins friend who I hadn’t seen in over ten years.
The following morning I flew from Portland to Dallas, met up with my cohort Jake Ingman, and flew to Austin for the SXSW Interactive design conference. For the next five days we drank obscene amounts of liquor, fed Mark Bixby obscene amounts of bacon, and occasionally talked about interactive design. We also cruised around in RVs and ice cream trucks, got kicked out of bars, rode giant wooden unicorns, and established Awesometown, USA (population: You).
After all that (there is a whole lot more to “that” than mentioned so far) I flew from Austin to Dallas, where I had a five-hour layover until my flight back to Portland. After reaching Portland I didn’t even bother driving back to Hood River, because the following morning I had to catch a flight to Minneapolis. Instead I once again spent the night in a king-sized Tempur-Pedic bed at La Quinta Portland, still confused, drunk and disoriented from SXSW.
I met up with Kate at the Minneapolis airport and we flew to Detroit, an airport that is so utterly dominated by Northwest Airlines that in the baggage claim they have a sign that says, “Lost or damaged baggage? Then fuck you!” We took a shuttle to Enterprise Rent-A-Wreck, who sent us away with a Grand Caravan and five children who needed a ride to soccer practice, and we then drove to Ann Arbor to visit the University of Michigan.
We spent the next four days in Ann Arbor, meeting with our graduate programs and eating Silvio’s Organic Pizza and wandering through cemeteries, until deciding that we just weren’t far enough south and needed to travel to Indiana. We headed back to Detroit and traded in the Grand Caravan for a Chevy Rollerskate, a deathtrap of a car that gets 32 mpg and would likely get lodged under an SUV in a crash, and drove to Bloomington to see what Indiana University is all about.
Indiana University is all about rain and “hoosiers”. We know what rain is, and there is apparently a lot of it. As for the hoosier, no one seems quite sure what to make of that. Fortunately Bloomington is wrought with delicious Thai and Indian food, which is simultaneously foreign and familiar for both Kate and I. Bloomington is also far enough south that McDonald’s has sweet tea on the menu, the student union has a Chick-Fil-A in the basement, and Kate swears that she will pick up a drawl if we happen to go to school there.
The sun shown beautifully on the Red Lobster the day we left Bloomington. Bound for Detroit to catch our evening flight back to Minneapolis, we stopped in Ypsilanti just so we could say we had been there (it’s called the Sufjan effect). From Minneapolis my flight to Portland was delayed, but by that time it was already so late and I had flown so much, that you could have told me our plane was infested with flaming poisonous snakes and tiny clones of Samuel L. Jackson and it still wouldn’t have fazed me.
Upon reaching Portland I took a shuttle to the hotel, thought wistfully of a giant Swedish mattress, but resolved to collect my Subaru and make the dark drive back to Hood River. Eight flights and two weeks later, I stumbled through my front door at two o’clock in the morning.
