This much snow, right now, interbedded as it is with slippery slippery ice, would shut down any city, even the ones that own snow plows.

I am getting pretty good at this “working from home” thing. Just now I SSH’d via VPN into my work machine (which I have trained to turn itself on and off every day) and committed a bunch of files to the SVN repository that I neglected last week. I had a fine through-the-looking-glass moment when my remote box dropped me into vi for a commit message — vi in a Coda terminal window, running remotely on a desktop machine. A text editor on a desktop box running inside a terminal inside a text editor inside another desktop box. This was the WIRED magazine crap I used to dream about ca. 1994.

Driving in this stuff is like skiing. You don’t so much steer as suggest a direction to your car.

I feel especially bad for Jenny in this. Inasmuch as I am not a homebody or an indoorsy person at least I have the experience of being stormbound in a 10' x 15' hut in Alaska for a week as training. Jenny and Orion are used to being out — running, running errands, swimming, shopping — from 9am to 5pm every day.

Lately I don’t regret buying such a big house after all. Or a TV. Or the kinetic trainer Jenny bought me for Christmas (in direct contravention of our mutual “no gifts” agreement.

Well, Orion seems to like them, anyway...

	Dr. No Monty Norman
	On and On Jack Johnson
	The Music of... Raymond Scott
	The Latin Side of... Vince Guaraldi
	Storytellers (live) Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash
	Rushmore Especially the Mark Mothersbaugh tracks
	Flood They Might Be Giants
	One Cello x 16 Zoë Keating
	Little Creatures Talking Heads

What if Americans aren’t buying American cars because they aren’t buying any cars?

What if no one else on Earth is buying cars either?

What if this has nothing to do with gas prices?

What if mortgages are failing because the houses are mainly vinyl shacks built fifty miles from economically-productive cities?

What if the cost of owning a car was too great for most families, even if gas were free? (And what if gas prices went up again?) What would happen to the value of those vinyl shacks then? (And why haven’t all the mortgage-company bailouts fixed that problem yet?)

What if cars are a fantastically stupid thing around which to organize America’s productive activity? What if we talked about organizing it around something else?

I’m scoping a little extra freelance right now for some former clients, and one of them asked for a portfolio. A portfolio! I suck at those things. Off the top of my head I figure I’ve produced 650 to 1300 client-approved deliverables in my career. Some of these I have all my production art for. Some of them were produced for dynamic websites with exotic server environments, so there’s nothing left to look at but unexecutable source code. And some have just plain gone missing: not on my dusty old hard drives, not on my stacks of CDs, probably long gone from clients’ systems.

Not counting the hundreds of unique webpages and emails; and not counting the boxes-and-arrows information designs; and not counting intranets or extranets; and not counting the dozens of comps or concepts or templates or moodboards or spec designs; and not counting the art-directed work someone else designed; and not counting sites I developed but did not design; in the last ten years I have designed sixteen web sites. Web sites where, if you typed a URL that ended with a TLD, you’d land on a page that I designed. Of those sixteen websites, only three still use anything remotely like my original design. Five of them are entirely deceased: the domain registrations have lapsed. One is still in development but very very close to hatching.

1. ecoartspace.org (b. 1999 – d. 2002)
2. medianet.quakeroats.com (b. 2000 – d. 2001) †
3. nwnatural.com (b. 2000 – d. 2004)
4. capncrunch.com (b. 2001 – d. 2002)
5. techtracker.com (b. 2001 – d. 2002)
6. flashbackgames.com ? (b. 2001 — d. ?) †
7. thesmallerthings.com ? (b. 2002 – d. 2003) †
8. chalkboardproject.org (b. 2003 – d. 2003)
9. chalkboardproject.org (b. 2004 – d. 2005)
10. stylemetrics.com (b. 2005 – )
11. adrianandemily.ca (b. 2006 – d. 2007) †
12. actioncenter.org (b. 2007 – d. 2007)
13. globalenvision.org (b. 2007 – )
14. thefilmconnection.org (b. 2007 – d. 2008) †
15. sitkatech.com (b. 2008 – )
16. mercycorps.org (?b. 2009) ‡

†Domain no longer active
‡Design still in development

I am absurdly proud of about ten of these designs. With two exceptions, none of these websites aren’t even close to my best work.

My longest lived design (nwnatural.com) lived four years. I can’t guess which was my shortest-lived design. Perhaps the design I did for an unscrupulous agency for a client called “Flashback Games,” which I recall seeing exactly once, and which had been so depressingly bastardized by the agency’s Flash developers that I literally destroyed all files related to that design. Or so I had thought, for the last seven years, until I stumbled across this:

I spent the whole weekend cleaning. I mean like the whole weekend because I got up at 6:00 each day and fell into bed exhausted at 8:30. And I mean like cleaning as in rake up all the leaves and windfall from last week's storm, and pick up the dog poop in the yard, and sweep the porch and the patio and the street in front of the house (and did you know red cedars lose about half their needles in the fall? I did not), and mulch the garden¹, and air out the garage, and scrub the bathrooms and kitchen, and vacuum the basement and stairs.

Then last night I shaved my head and shaved my face like I do every Sunday night and I woke up this morning feeling new born.

¹So I have this theoretical method of garden mulching inspired by a phrase I heard somewhere: “compost is what happens when you pile up organic material.” In September, I cleared the vegetable garden (which had become badly overgrown under the previous owners’ tenure) and have been fighting weeds there ever since. So instead of spending the winter fighting those weeds, I piled up all the pine needles and leaves from the yard, which cover the garden to a depth of about 8 inches. My theory is that some of those leaves will compost into the soil (which is pretty rich already), and the rest will a) discourage weeds and b) encourage earthworms. I can pull away the mulch in the spring and add it to the compost pile, which should be pretty mature by then anyway. We’ll see how that works out...