Three weeks ago, we moved to our new house. Here are three last shots from the old place.
The kids made a car on their penultimate night at this home. They filled the trunk with stuffies, turned off the lights, and drove the dark roads following the sat-nav until they found a motel.
Here are the last two pieces of bread that I baked in the building. The gods gave me a run of good loaves for the past few weeks. (If you want a great sourdough info, check out Chapin‘s newsletter).
Finally, the last morning routine in this bedroom with a quick gesture sketch, continuous line drawing, and tiny poem. Shoutouts to ashlyn, Citlaflor, Hazel Burgess Art, Beth Kempton, Wendy MacNaughton, and Nadia Gerassimenko for helping mold this regular morning jaunt…which has unfortunately become irregular after I was coincidentally dragged back into the office after four years of working from home after this same weekend.
So in both ways this was the end of an era. Four years ago, we were living with my in-laws. Their tenant left this rental house a few months in late 2019 and they had not found a replacement before the before the pandemic hit. Given the parents’ age, I exiled myself to this place for a several long months—which included my first grind through the brutish biennial budgeting season as a state worker.
After things settled down the family joined me here. The kids were 6 and 2. They kept growing. I guess we did too. At the end of 2023, we bought our own place. The kids are now 10 and almost 6.
The “real Vegas” is not the spectacle of the Strip. It’s our quiet lives in these beige stucco boxes carpeting the Valley. Like most of suburban America, it’s a splendorous existence that we barely appreciate.
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It’s been three weeks at the office. It’s a treat to regularly hang out with my coworkers in person. But that marginal benefit is far outweighed by the cost of commuting every day.
There are so many things I’d rather do than piloting a metal box across the town to accomplish tasks that I’ve done at home for four years. But I’ve also heard horror stories about workers who have taken ill advantage of remote work. So I get why my massive organization settled on this brute solution.
I can’t complain too much. Commuting is a mere annoyance, even if the unnecessary nature of this blanket directive makes it particularly irksome.
So I thought up a new project to redeem the time. I’m going to march through my collection of CD’s in alphabetical order by performer.
I will listen to each disc at least once through. After that, I can re-listen and skip tracks before I move on to the next album. If I buy any new CD’s, I’ll listen to them once and then slot them in line.
This project popped into my noggin while listening to an ambiance album featuring the didgeridoo. I was underwhelmed, but I thought about the artist. I presume he thought it was a great piece of art, at least the best he could do at the time he published it. At that moment, I decided to give each of my musicians at least one generous, full hearing.
For three decades I’ve been listening to the spoken word—sermons on tape, talk radio, and podcasts. As I get older, I’m being overwhelmed by the verbal clutter. Let’s fill that metal box with music.
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