More of the Strip

 

Hi Jan!

 

See that watermelon behind Jan? We turned it into a work of art for a party she was invited to (which I crashed.) She made fruit salad and we sculpted the watermelon into a basket. Of course, I never got a photo of THAT. Duh.

What a beautiful house!

 

Jan and Jim have a gorgeous house, it's so peaceful and relaxing -- although mowing that lawn is nothing to envy! This is the view from the back deck. She has a back deck AND a front porch, and I stayed in a guest room suite with my own bathroom, walk in closet, and jacuzzi and shower.

The house next door is for sale. Well, it was. I really would like to buy it. But I think they've already got an offer -- aside from which, Frank and I don't have a job out there....

Jan's gone gourmet!

 

She made the most beautiful and delicious meals for me while I was out there!!! The salad had homemade dressing, which she gave me the recipe for, and I'm going to try making it myself one of these days. And she made me blueberry pancakes one morning and we had a WONDERFUL eggplant parm, because she knows what I love.

But yes, she served diet coke, not diet pepsi. That has been a sore point between us for years. I drink Diet Pepsi. She drinks Diet Coke. But I was polite, and drank it. :p
JK, it's fine...I really don't care much about soda one way or the other.

Go Pens!

 

This, for those who are not hockey fans, is a representation of the Stanley Cup. Pittsburgh is PSYCHED because the Penguins are doing well so far... hopefully they get the cup back. This was on the front lawn of someone in the neighborhood.

Gorgeous houses in that neighborhood!!

We went walking through her neighborhood, and came out here....

 

The view from the Breakfast Nook

 

We went shopping several times, and we bought bird seed for the feeder. Her feeder takes thistle and attracts these lovely little things, and we can watch them as we eat breakfast right out of the window in the breakfast nook.
I'm gonna get me one of these feeders. But I bet it only attracts sparrows.

Aside from buying thistle and plants for her pots at the garden center, we went to the outlets one day and shopped 'til we dropped. So much that I ended up borrowing luggage from her and taking a whole different suitcase home than the one I brought with me. I got hiking boots, tons of clothes... I'm out of my mind, but these were some serious bargains... Jan and I always did shop well together!

Lovely Western Penn!

 

The view off the deck is the most lovely view possible, complete with a gorgeous sunset.
Thanks for having me, Jim -- (I know Jan never checks the blog!)

On the Computer for now...

Hola! Having a great time in PITTS PA with JAN... I have tons of photos to download when I get home, we're eating and drinking and having a merry old time... but she won't sign up for facebook. :(

Talk to ya later...

Its not shop rite, its giant eagle!

Turns out pittsburgh is margarittatille!

We just landed..

Ok, i'm on the plane. It's tiny. I can almost reach across from one side to another.

The plane has arrived and spewed its passengers. I've taken mymotion sickness pills. I'll probaly fall asleep and miss the plane.

This gate is way out the end of the terminal, added as an afterthought down stairs and underneath.

Sitting at the gate with a book and a burger. This is where they cancelled me last time.

Blogging my trip, last time i took pix and posted all at once. This time, i'll tweet a bit...

I'll Fly Away

 

Tomorrow I'm flying away to visit one of my best friends from childhood.
(And one of my other best friends is also flying away -- have a nice trip, I'll see you when you get back!)

I'm taking a propeller plane to Pittsburgh, and leaving the family behind to fend for themselves, and I'm very excited. (Hence the pictures of the whirlygig seeds off my tree!)

I tried this trip once before and it didn't work out because of bad weather, but this one should be better because I'm going on a nicer weekend and for a longer period of time.

Maybe I'll blog some posts, although I doubt they'll be poems. I might even send a few photos back. Or, I might not have any time at all. It's up to Jan, actually. We have a lot of catching up to do.

About Friends
The good thing about friends
is not having to finish sentences.

I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once
on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud
and watching the small chunks slide into the water
and listening to them - plop plop plop.
He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...
like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...'
We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed
and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon.

I first thought there was a sad thing about friends
when we met twenty years later.
We both talked hundreds of sentences,
taking care to finish all we said,
and explain it all very carefully,
as if we'd been discovered in places
we should not be, and were somehow ashamed.

I understood then what the river meant by flowing.

-- Brian Jones

From The Writer's Almanac

Jan and I are still that kind of friends, even though the river is flowing and we are in different places, that we can finish each other's sentences. I can't wait to connect with her again, I've missed her!

The Writer's Almanac

Food for Thought.

This was a good article, I need to think about it some more. I decided to post it right now, and read it and think about it more later. I've got too much to do right now to really give it the consideration it needs. But I do plan on getting back to it either later or tomorrow, and when I do, I'll comment further....

On The Web: Living In The Now
By Eyder Peralta From NPR

I've been reading a whole lot about how the Web has finally evolved from a page-based medium, something modeled on old technology like printed books and newspapers, to this idea of a "stream."

Eric Schonfeld over at TechCrunch writes about the mechanics of it. He points to Twitter and Facebook's news feed as examples of how the Web is now a real-time, living creature as opposed to "periodic musings."

In his estimation, these feeds have become a sort of global consciousness.

But I was especially interested in Nova Spivack's quick assessment on how this new "era of the stream" can change our sense of time and probably already has.

He writes:

The transition from a slow Web to a fast-moving Stream is happening quickly. And as this happens we are shifting our attention from the past to the present, and our "now" is getting shorter.
...
The era of the Web was mostly about the past -- pages that were published months, weeks, days or at least hours before we looked for them. Search engines indexed the past for us to make it accessible: On the Web we are all used to searching Google and then looking at pages from the recent past and even farther back in the past. But in the era of the Stream, everything is shifting to the present -- we can see new posts as they appear and conversations emerge around them, live, while we watch.
That brings up lots of questions: How every time you dive to swim in this metaphorical stream, you may have missed the brilliant red maple just seconds before that is now upstream, how a furiously moving stream can drown you with too much information.

But the more I thought about it, the more I turned to economics and how our society has already switched tenses: from past, to present, to now.

I think it's fair to say that our intense interest in the now was at least in part to blame for this great recession.

In the near past, in my parents' time, Americans toiled in the now to save enough to buy a house in the future. In the New York Times Magazine this weekend, Edmund Andrews, wrote that his personal financial disaster started when he wanted a house now to make his marriage better, to make his family better -- now.

I'm not sure when, but in some ways, Americans have transitioned from a society that worked toward a future, to a society that lives for the now. We watch movies on-demand; we send instant messages across the world; we get news as it happens and there's no use waiting for the six-o'clock newscast or the next day's paper.

Perhaps, this technological evolution of the web is just a mirror of our society. Perhaps it signals a deeper plunge into the immediate.

If so, I ask, in a world of now, how do we get the future right?

9:43 AM ET | 05-19-2009 | permalink