Meet Jeannie

/Users/wordy/Pictures/mini dup pix/sr-jr-firehug
Originally uploaded by Microship.

One of the fun things about migrating from my legacy live page is that some of the more enduring content from the old medium needs to be replicated here... both for archive continuity and establishment of context (and besides, it's nice to have a few concepts "in the can" for those days when the good news is that there's no bad news, but the bad news is that that's all the good news). When a day's work involves hours of keytapping, it hardly makes for interesting copy (except, hopefully, what I've been working on), so occasionally we need feature material. Writing about writing can get a bit recursive.

So why not start with my sweetie? The lovely lady in the photo is Jeannie, whom I met a little over a year ago on Friendster. She "weekended" here until last month, doing a brutal three-way commute that also included her apartment in Seattle and job in Bellevue. At last we decided to go for it and are now in full cohabitation mode (although she still rides the bus 65 miles each way for work, which, if nothing else, has reduced the volume and frequency of my complaints about the 1/8-mile commute through the forest to my lab).

Jeannie is undergoing an interesting cultural transition, from a suburban lifestyle of consumption to a rural one of simplicity and efficiency. This relationship has made an astonishing difference in the quality of life around here; the contrast between my current state and that of last year is apparently dramatic enough to the outside observer that friends frequently comment on changes in my attitude and energy level. It is also nice to have regained an interest in creative projects, and I'm gradually getting used to the absence of well-established families of spiders, musty odors, and mysterious piles of yesteryear's detritus.

Jeannie will be the pilot of Art Throb, the other Microship (formerly known as Songline), and paddles Stella (photo), sister ship of Bubba. Integration of all these vessels is the first order of business once we finish the lab thermal/aesthetic retrofit that's now in progress. We are hoping folks will join us on some of our local kayak jaunts (like these) as well as the 7 Degrees of Freedom flotilla expedition slated for sometime next Spring.