Late last summer, we spent a week in a miraculously large vacation home outside Jackson, Wyoming. We were diverted to Jackson after plans for our yearly trip to Glacier National Park fell through at the last minute… but rather than pine for the great outdoors, we packed up our car and made the 15-hour drive out to Grand Teton National Park. We cycled and hiked, drank fine wine and listened to elk bugle in our back yard. Now is a perfect time to revisit… Enjoy a few photos from the trip.
Besides found objects, I love found art. Postcards, to-do lists, cast-off photographs… all the messages and images people leave behind accidentally or on purpose. There’s meaning there… sometimes nothing deep, and often hard to interpret, but always interesting.
These notes below were stuck in the noteboard at the back of a classroom on the fourth floor of the Seattle Center House. Justin and I were attending a few lighting workshops put on by Glazer’s Camera there earlier this month. I had just stepped back to take a photograph of the class when I noticed the wall full of absurd scribblings.
I have no idea what sort of classes take place in these rooms normally or what sort of people take them. I can only guess at whether these messages are tongue-in-cheek or deadpan. That’s why I love them.
Like this sort of stuff and want to see more of it? Check out Found Magazine or any number of other blogs dedicated to found objects like these.
This post was supposed to go up yesterday (when it was, uh, Friday) but Justin and I stayed out late celebrating 10 years together with friends… and I kind of forgot. Well, here it is…
Last week, I explained my fixation with found objects. This week, I’ll show you a few of the things I keep around to decorate our apartment.
I love the look and feel of objects that are weathered and worn. The beaches here in the Pacific Northwest offer a wealth of stones, shells, flotsam, carapaces, and any pretty much anything else that can be washed up by the ocean. I’m a sucker for beach glass… it’s awful litter that nature has transformed into something amazing. The sharp edges have been sanded away and all that remains of what was once a carelessly discarded beer bottle is a soft, beautiful stone-like fragment. Here’s some of my beach glass, which I keep in a vase in the bedroom with a few sea urchin carapaces and shells from the Pacific Northwest, Mexico, and Florida coasts:
When we met, I was the displaced Midwestern high-schooler sneaking out of the back door of her family’s house. He was the college kid from the big city who stole my heart with his smile. Six months later, I moved away for school and that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Somewhere, somehow, we decided it was worth the wait.
Sure, we didn’t love the long weeks between unbelievably short weekends, sometimes two or three at a stretch: Me cramming classwork and cleaning and all of life’s loose ends into between Monday and Friday so we could savor every minute of our 48 hours together. Him putting thousands, tens of thousands, and finally more than a hundred thousand miles onto his Mazda Protege driving across state lines. That little car–purchased that first summer just so we could see each other, now ten years old and going strong– is a testament to our relationship. Sure, it’s a little beat up and rough around the edges, but with one of us behind the wheel, it knows exactly where it’s going.
Our regular five-hour commute wasn’t enough to deter him, so I moved to Montana for a month and to Tokyo for a year because those were things I needed to do. He had the strength and solidarity to say, I’ll be here when you get back. I’m the roamer… the one who drives with the windows down and the music way up, not caring if I get lost as long as it’s somewhere interesting. He’s Mr. Precision, plotting routes around traffic and building iTunes playlists just to suit his mood.
I’m about the journey, and he’s about the destination… but we both look at the map and say, OK, let’s go there.
Now we’ve got a high school romance, those college days, our long engagement, and the first year of marriage behind us. Ten years today.
Ten years since you first asked and I first said yes.
Ten years down a strange and scenic road, and ain’t no sign of it getting any less meandering. He still lets me take solo trips because I can and puts up with my relentless need to see everything that can possibly be seen. I love the fact that he’d rather stay in on a Saturday night and can cook better than I can.
We’ve got a good thing going here. It was worth the wait.
