On January 2, I drove down to CarMax and sold my trusty car of the last 12 years — a green Nissan Sentra I called Jenny. Incidentally, I bought Jenny from a CarMax in Maryland when I first moved to the DC area after college, so it felt like coming full circle. In the process I learned a valuable lesson: never get yourself into a situation where your mother, your best friend, your first pet, and your first car all share the same nickname. Emotional confusion will inevitably ensue.

Regardless, here I am! Carless for all but one day of 2012. Carless is the wrong word, really. Exploring new models of car ownership is more accurate. I take the T to and from work and most social activities, and then use a combination of Zipcar and Amazon Prime to accomplish the rest. I am lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where most of my daily needs — food, employment, medical care, wine — can be met within a few blocks of my house. Add in a cell phone, a T pass and a secure wifi network and I’m set!

What I am most curious to see is how this little experiment affects the way I interact with my neighborhood. When I was driving to work I struggled with the feeling that I could be driving through any city in the US and not really notice the difference. The last time I went back to Virginia I realized that I hadn’t really lived there, not in the true sense (a sensation that I suspect is quite common in a city of transients like DC). Contrast that to my hometown, where every block of my neighborhood is layered with memories and connections to people.

Part of my choice to get rid of my car, aside from the very real financial and environmental reasons, was curiosity. How does someone, particularly someone who spent three years of graduate school contemplating being Everywhere at Once, begin to live where she lives? I don’t know the answer to that question, but for whatever reason getting rid of my car has felt like a step in the right direction.

I’m off to enjoy some much-needed family time down in lovely Lake Charles, LA this week. Here’s to the land of lagniappe, boudin, and Community Coffee!

This week I fulfilled a long-time goal of mine, which was to volunteer with the group that puts on Shakespeare on the Common every summer here in Boston. The closest I had gotten up til now had been to sign up for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company newsletter during one particularly cold day last winter, but promptly forgot about it. Then last week the call went out for volunteers, and here was this incredibly easy sign-up form for me to fill out! At work, no less — I do love me a social transaction that I can accomplish entirely online.

So this Wednesday (and Thursday) I left work a little early, hiked up Joy Street to the Common, received a very stylish “STAFF” t-shirt, and was promptly put to work handing out programs and collecting donations.

They were long nights — two hours of working, three hours of show, and then another hour of hauling chairs and breaking down tents — but satisfying ones. It brought back memories of heading to Shakespeare in the Park with my family as a kid, and of hanging out behind the scenes at various ArtFest events.

This summer’s production of All’s Well that Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and more problematic plays in that it resolves itself in a rather murky way (or not at all, depending on your point of view). I had no previous experience with it, so I came to both the plot and the production with fresh eyes. I’m looking forward to sitting in the audience next week and experiencing the whole things from start to finish!*

I was volunteering for both a preview performance and opening night, and it was clear some of the kinks were still being worked out. It was particularly neat to watch the cast and crew after the first show, working through scenes on stage in a completely empty Common.

The one thing I did observe as a volunteer were the impressive preparations of the audience prior to the show. While several Park Rangers were on hand to make sure no one was enjoying wine on the Common, people set up the most amazing picnic feasts in the hours leading up to the show. One group had a full dining table set up, complete with cutlery and glassware!

* I won’t be going quite that far, but I am hoping to pull together something cool for when I meet up with the lovely Cris to watch a performance next week.

Back from another lovely week on the Cape. Food was eaten, beaches were explored, sandcastles were built, fireworks were watched, bubbles were chased, s’mores were cooked, conversations were had, naps were taken, and books were read. We did the same things we’ve always done, and it was exactly right.

Well, almost. We’re still a little weird.

The annual trek down to the Cape is upon us! I shot three rolls of 120mm film on my Holga last summer, and then heartlessly allowed them languish at my old roommate’s place until only a few months ago. It was such a treat to open them up when it was still cold and rainy here in Boston!

The weather that week was warm, humid, and cloudy cloudy cloudy.

Best shower in the world.

Tiny pants. :)

I did actually vacation with other human beings, fyi. But I saved those kind of pics for my — gasp! — Hipstomatic. I did break down a few times:

We also had a rogue photographer in the neighborhood, because I obviously didn’t take this one:

What have I got cooking? I’m so glad you asked.

I survived my first semester teaching, in no small part due to the number of evenings spent eating Old Bay fries and making ridiculous doodles with my design peeps:

I met a 6-hour old Mollie Danger, the world’s newest, tiniest superhero:

Spent St. Patrick’s Day with two authentic Irishmen and a handful of impostors. One of whom might have been a five day old superhero.

Went to Brimfield. Came back with piles of vintage maps and patent filings:

Flew home to wish my not-so-little brother a happy 30th:

Took a little trip. Enjoyed the ho hum view:

Up next: Cape Cod! I’ve already started the limoncello.

About a year ago I took a little drive with a friend of mine up to New Hampshire. Our goal of visiting a local farmer’s market turned out to be ill-fated, but our impromptu visit to a local used bookstore was not! I immediately fell in love with this beauty, for obvious reasons:

Unfortunately that trip also included a tour of Red Hook Brewery, and on the way home my lovely purchase came into untimely contact with a growler full of Oatmeal Stout. The beer was a total loss, but the book acquired notes of leather and coffee grounds. :)

The students in my web design class are currently working on a project involving collections. They have been tasked with gathering 10–15 objects or ideas that are meaningful in some way, and designing a website that presents the collection to a larger audience. As inspiration for the design phase, and as a way of getting them thinking about how to tell the story of their collection, I posted a few examples on our course blog. I think they might be interesting for a wider audience as well, so I’m reposting here.

A collection of collections

Since we didn’t quite have time to go through these in class on Friday, I’ve collected a few of the examples I was going to show here. Hopefully they give you some inspiration as you think about organizing and presenting your own collections!

Pictory
Pictory is a curated monthly collection of photographs centered around a theme, along with their associated stories. They manage to make an incredibly basic structure — all on one page, read vertically or using the left and right characters to jump from story to story — and make it interesting using a strong typographic grid and photographs. The level of curation is also really apparent: each story and photograph is powerful on its own, but the order they’ve chosen for the overall collection of photographs, emails, tweets, etc, has its own arc as well.

Sweet Gifs
Who doesn’t like animated gifs?! If you take the time to go through it, though, what appears to be simple is actually a massive collection. They’ve kept the presentation in the spirit of an animated gif itself — linear, repetitive, and with a good dose of ridiculous.

Lisa Congdon — A collection a day
An example of organizing and presenting a collection (in this case many many collections!) using the physical qualities of its contents.

Andy Warhol — Time Capsule 21
Ignore for the moment that this is kind of a dated Flash app, and take a look at the field of overlapping images that serves as the main “menu” to this collection. Sometimes a collection is interesting because of sheer volume alone, or because of the randomness of its contents. There is no order you can put things in that makes sense, really, so giving visitors the ability to sift through the clutter visually is an appropriate choice.

Clip, Stamp, Fold
An exhibition site done by the excellent folks at Project Projects, showcasing a collection that is notable not only for its physical qualities (different sizes, colors, proportions) but also for its evolution through time. By using a timeline filled with thumbnails that remain in proportion to their full-sized counterparts, you as the reader get two ways of accessing this collection in one.

Mass MoCA — Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
If you haven’t made a trek out to the Berkshires to see this museum, and this collection, I highly recommend it! (The LeWitt show in particular will be installed for something like the next 25 years, so you’ve got some time.) Like the previous example, this site gives its users multiple ways of engaging with a collection — showing them all in a grid, and also locating them on a set of diagrams of the building itself.

This was also a nice example of choosing appropriate supporting materials: LeWitt left instructions for these pieces as opposed to finished work, knowing that any museum that chose to “install” the piece would effectively create a completely unique visual form. Knowing this, including a time lapse of each piece as its made is a really nice choice.

PhilaPlace
A collection of stories about in Philadelphia over the course of several centuries. Something we’ve all seen, I’m sure, but with the twist of dropping a very modern Google-style pin map on top of an historic map of the city.

MoMA — Bauhaus Retrospective
Pardon the second reference to Flash, but this was also a nice example of organizing and presenting more historical information.

Miranda July — No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ok, so this isn’t technically a collection. But I wanted to include it because it illustrates so beautifully how simple a website can really be. Its one linear loop of pages, made solely using images and a “next” button, and yet it’s an incredibly effective narrative.

Miranda July — Learning to Love You More
This site is hard to actually read, so proceed with caution when using it as inspiration graphically. But the premise of the site is interesting — it’s a collection of “assignments” for other people to complete and respond with their results. An intangible collection that elicits tangible feedback.

Michael Beirut’s The 100 Days Project in Design Observer
Not exactly related to what we’re working on in class, but an incredibly interesting article nonetheless! Consider it a bonus.

There are times in my life when I feel a lot like this scene in Amelie. I call them my Expansion Phases. Two weeks along in my first semester of teaching, they’ve been happening basically every Friday night as am packing up to take the train home. Its not necessarily a comfortable feeling, having your brain expand like that. All those new synapses forming, all that expansion of my world, and I’m usually due for several Advil and a quiet weekend to feel normal again.

Add in three dinners with some of my absolute favorite people, and the joy of finally getting to meet 5 pounds and 12 ounces of pure perfection, and this time I might need two weekends to recover. :)

In celebration of Texas Independence Day, I went looking for our original currency. Images from Crutchfield’s Currency.