Holley's boat

Those of you who attended Ephemerisle may remember my floating-beam-lightsaber-duel partner Holley.  It turns out that since Ephemerisle, she's decided to become a full-time floating resident.  I checked out her boat yesterday -- it's still well under renovation and offers a glimpse into what actual floating life is like.  I met some of her neighbors as well.  There's clearly a strong community at her marina.  I chatted with her neighbors about Ephemerisle, and it's clear that you need a completely different mental toolkit for managing concepts related to transportation on water vs tranportation on land. 

Here are some pictures of Holley's new home:

 
 
The bedroom is interesting... you really have to get used to the 2 1/2 foot ceilings you get with the mattress in place. 

I assume that if I hang out on boats long enough, the "on a boat" song will stop being a continuous soundtrack in my head every time I see one?
For reference, "One Night In Bangkok" was stuck in my head for two straight days while I stayed in Bangkok. 

Laser-cut zebrawood design #2

I made another zebrawood design last week.  It's a new design, and the first one to utilize the program I created.  The workflow from the images generated by my program to a lasercuttable design is still 2-4 hours, which is a pain. 

I haven't stained the design yet because I'm waiting for some glued broken bits to dry, but I want to share anyway.  Here's the finished product:



Here's what my simulator program had generated as a prediction of the outcome (The simulator does not take the placement of the cutouts on the wood into account, and that does have a big influence on the final appearance):



Here are some pictures from the construction process:

( Construction: )

LA / San Diego trip pt 1

Some miscellaneous memories of my trip to LA and San Diego with D last week:

Snow! On Highway 5 just an hour outside of LA!  This photo was taken at 2am, with a full minute of exposure.



A very slowly flowing waterfall:

 

Beautiful sand patterns at the beach, and a scale-invariant canyon that's really only a foot tall:

   


Coronado Hotel:

 

Balboa Park:
 

What stuffed animals do all day when we aren't looking:

 

Oh look, a full photoset on flickr!

A retrospective on journeys and climbing trees

While I traveled around the world, the first picture in my camera over the course of the entire trip was this one:



It was of great preciousness to me, and I'll get to that in a moment, but it did have a very practical use in convincing random families in odd parts of the world that I could not date their 14-year-old daughter because (among other reasons) I had a girlfriend. 

It was from an adventure I went on a couple of days before my trip.  The photo gently reminded me of home every time I turned my camera on.  The tree itself was a special tree to me as well.  My grandmother lived in a house near the tree, and when I was a small child I enjoyed climbing to scary but giddy heights on it, aided by densely packed branches.  When I returned as an adult, I expected the tree, like so many things from childhood, to actually be very ordinary and small.  This turned out not to be the case; the tree was still fun to climb, and the tight branch density let me easily ascend over 30 feet.

---

Fast-forwarding a year, I found myself in San Diego with D, and we were once again contemplating climbing an enormous tree.

 


After she took some photos of me, I browsed through to have a look.  I hit the right button one too many times, and it went past the last photo, landing me on the photo from almost exactly year ago.  It was a moment of accidental beauty, a tradition born unconsciously.  To some degree, I see nothing wrong with arbitrary traditions.  If they're interesting enough, they help us provide structure to our lives around which our other memories form.  Used properly, they can bring us together and remind us of the grander trajectory of our lives.