Shopping

I finally have internet at my house! My busy schedule, and the busy schedules of my roommates Tim and Jaime, have made the whole "moving in" process drag out over weeks. There is still art leaning against walls waiting to be hung, the odd random box in a corner. My room still seems half empty. I'm determined to be very picky about the rest of the things I put in my room. I've got my first big kid job, and my first big kid apartment, so I feel the need to be deliberate about the things with which I furnish my room. Shopping around for furniture and things, I can tell how much working for Tsao & McKown has influenced my thinking. I've got a vague notion about the type of things I like - antique lights, wingback chairs, anythings Eames or Wegner or Juhl,
heavy things made of metal, old wooden things, paper things - and I want my room to reflect my tastes. Its sort of a micro-project, a mini-commission for myself. Right now, the contents of my high-ceilinged room are all I can control. (Look out Cheapo Ikea Chair and Boring Ikea Bookcase, you're getting the boot as soon as I meet someone who I like better!) It'll be a slow journey.

But! Just up the road is a set of the metal shelves at the top of this post that Lydia and I tried to buy at the Brooklyn Flea a few weeks ago. Segue to a funny story! (Lydia, I actually haven't told you this yet.) So Lydia and I saw those awesome shelves, and we were totally sold, we wanted them whatever the cost. But the owner of the booth was nowhere in sight. We decided to keep browsing around the other booths, and circled back in 15 or 20 minutes...still nobody around to sell us the awesome shelves. We walked some more, browsed around, and came back a third

time. No owner! No joy! So Lydia and I leave the flea market and go have brunch. A week or so later, I was tlaking to my friend Georgia at work. She was telling me about the cool, huge metal mirror she had bought at the Brooklyn Flea. She was telling me what an ordeal it was, she bought the mirror from the vendor, and the guy helped her carry it to her car. But alas, it would not fit! So then the guy starts haggling with some random guy with a truck, and after ten or fifteen minutes of negotiation, they agree on a price to deliver it to Georgia. So now Georgia and the vendor have to follow this guy to his truck, and they finally get it loaded. By now, they've been at it a good half-hour. Georgia is telling me this story, and then shows me a picture of the mirror, and it suddenly hit me! The booth with MY metal shelves is the same one with the metal mirrors! Georgia had been off with the owner the entire time Lydia and I had been huffily stopping by the empty booth! Such a bizarre coincidence.

Lunar Geography

Yesterday I discovered one of the coolest Internet resources I have ever seen! Conner and I are researching for a competition to design a cultural center on the moon. In the course of our research, we started searching for any maps of the moon. I was expecting to only be able to find a few aerial maps made up of satellite flyover images. It's the moon, how well mapped can it be? Ha! I stumbled into a treasure trove of moon maps! Extremely high resolution, detailed maps at a huge range of scale. The coolest by far are the geological maps, with their incredible rainbows of rock types splashed out of impact craters and sprayed all over primordial moon oceans. Absolutely amazing maps! It is so cool to see such concrete evidence of our scientific exploration of the moon. There are also incredible aerial images of the moon landing sites from each of the Apollo missions, with detailed diagrams of where each photograph was taken. I find it so infuriating that conspiracy theorists can stare blindly into the face of such overwhelming, amazing evidence of man's greatest exploratory achievement.