Part 38: End of day 5 / Phoenix resort with awesome pool
We’re only one day away from being in our new home in LA. In the mean time, we’re at this awesome little resort in Phoenix relaxing in the pool.
Part 27: Zooming through Oklahoma
I’ve been keeping a visual travelogue of our cross-county trip in Instagram. If you’re interested, follow garrettmurray. At the end of the drive I’ll try to compile them all in one location somewhere more publicly available.
I bet we’ve killed at least 200 butterflies. It’s not our fault—the stupid things fly four feet off the ground in the middle of a busy interstate freeway. I guess it’s a problem of scale: If they flew 200 feet up it would be the equivalent of our airplanes flying in space. They’re small, so being four feet off the ground is enough. But that doesn’t explain why they seem to be oblivious to the thousands of loud, fast cars zooming past until it’s too late. You don’t see the butterflies coming. They’re invisible and then suddenly you’ve murdered them with your windshield. The hotter the area, the more there are.
When we got out of the car in Memphis, there was a butterfly stuck in the gap between my car’s bumper and headlight. It was really mangled in there, wings obliterated, body half-smashed. Its last thought, if there is such a thing for butterflies, was probably related to flowers. It didn’t notice the 2,000 pound rock coming toward it at 80MPH. Flowers. BAM. Black.
The car wash didn’t even clean off most of their guts. The guts are tattoos now. When you’re going that fast, you don’t just kill the bugs, you atomize them. You make them into a multi-colored, slightly chunky paste. It smears up the windows, the hood, the headlights and bumper.
We’re carrying around a paste made from hundreds of butterflies. And we’re only two days in.
LA-Bound
Yesterday was our five month wedding anniversary and today we begin our cross-country drive to our new home in Los Angeles. Our stuff is packed and on its way out, our cats are prepared for their fancy pet airlines flight, and our car is filled to the gills with our most important stuff. Tonight, we head to Lexington, Kentucky. Then Memphis, TN, Oklahoma City, OK, Albuquerque, NM and Phoenix, AZ before arriving in Los Angeles next week.
It feels like we’ve been building up to this moment for forever. The anticipation is overwhelming and we’re excited to finally start the trip. California, here we come.
alexleiphart asked:
Do you have a picture of your updated setup (with the new iMac and MacBook Air)?
Coming soon! We’re in the process of moving to LA this week, and once our stuff comes and we get set up, I’ll surely post pictures of the new office. I’m glad people have an appetite for this kind of nerdery, because I love setup shots and I’ll never stop taking them (or looking at others’).
Remember that episode of Seinfeld where the valet who parks Jerry’s car has such bad BO that the car turns into a monster that ruins everyone’s lives? I’m pretty sure I found the guy who they based that valet character on. He’s in my apartment.
These jackasses from Verizon have been installing FiOS equipment and poles and wires in our New Jersey apartment building over the past few days. It was supposed to take four hours in total, but they were here for 10 hours on Friday and they’ve been here for 10 hours today. And hell, we’re moving in four days, so this is nothing but a huge inconvenience for us. They’re cutting into walls and drilling through the floor making a huge mess to install something we’ll never use. That part’s just annoying, but I can live with it.
But the smell. My god, the smell. These installers have the worst BO of any humans in history. This one particular joker smells so bad the hallways smell. When he was here on Friday, I smelled him before I opened the front door for the first time. After he left at 6PM, it took until the next afternoon for the smell to be gone from our apartment, and he was only in here for 30 minutes. Another guy working with him could also win several small-town BO contests, and these two have been working on and off in our apartment for the better part of 4 hours today. The smell is overwhelming. It’s hard to breathe. Worse yet: We can’t open the windows because we’ve spent several days building up air conditioning with our tiny little AC window unit and it’s finally cool in here. It’s 95°F outside.
This is a battle I cannot win. My eyes are watering. As much as I prefer to be comfortable climate-wise, the overwhelming stench of these guys has ruined two days of my life.
It has been nearly three years since I shot my first My Day, Yesterday video. A few weeks later I shot another one when I went to Vegas. I created a group on Flickr and over 200 other people created their own version. Since then, I’ve been thinking about doing another one of these on and off for years and I finally had a chance to make it happen while we were in Sydney (look for this on the site shortly).
If you’ve never done a My Day, Yesterday video, you should! Join the group on Flickr or post it to Vimeo or YouTube. The rules are simple: Keep the video to 90 seconds or less and don’t add extra audio (no music). Just shoot throughout the day and edit it down to a minute and half. It’s fun!
