P I C N I C

I think this is Coeur d’Alene lake, in Idaho.

On approach to Portland.

Somewhere in flyover country.

I love looking out the window on airplane flights. Partly it’s to reassure myself that the plane isn’t falling into an unrecoverable spin, an event which I have frequent nightmares about. But also I feel that this is such an extraordinary experience, cruising along 6 miles into the atmosphere.

Louis CK has a joke about airplanes. He was on one of the first flights with wi-fi a few years ago. He signed up and was quickly watching youtube and surfing the web. Suddenly their was a hiccup in the service and the stewardess announced that there would be no more internet. The guy next to him said, “oh that’s bullshit.” He thought to himself, since when do we feel entitled to things that didn’t even exist until recently? “You are in a chair flying through the sky!” I guess that’s how I feel on a plane. Everyone is watching TV on their iPads, or reading on their kindles. Of course I’m acting nonchalant myself. But really this feels like such an extraordinary thing, something previously reserved exclusively for the gods.

I took these photos on the two flights from Portland to Minneapolis for Christmas.

The box frame is made of salvaged 4×4′s. The cuts, even with a miter saw, are never straight and so some slight alignment was needed. If I ever make a list of essential iPhone apps a knot reference manual will be there. One can never know too many knots.

The cuts were made both into the bit and across the bit.

I’m building two wood boxes to store firewood in my living room. The wood is all from my scrap pile.

A photo of the calculator I was using in the cart next to my iPhone running the skeumorphic calculator app. After running the cart for a few weeks I felt that this summarized the before and during very well. Now that I’m taking a break over the winter I thought of this photo depicting two states of reality. The old and the new. The drawing of the viking was done by Martha.

I’m sorry for not updating the blog. I had gone into a sort of home organizing isolation, but I’ll put up some photos of Steve, who is doing well.