I just dropped Alicia off at the airport for her flight to Chicago for the BlogHer conference. I hope she has a great time out there, learns a lot and meets many of the amazing women who will be there.
What am I doing for the next 3 days by myself you ask? That is a good question. I’ll definitely be working some and relaxing. There is a new top-secret make-me-lots-of-money website idea that I had recently that I’ll probably work on some. There is a slight chance I’ll go up to Maryland for the weekend but I’m leaning against that at this point. If someone wants to come visit me, or if you are local just hang out, let me know.
Our friend David came over tonight and used his big Chevy Avalanche to help remove our pain-in-the-butt stump.
The first time the truck pulled on it the stump didn’t move and I feared we would be doomed to live with this thing forever… but after a little more digging and a little more root cutting it came out on the second try!
And now it is *finally* gone! Man, that is such an a relief! Now to finish this fence!
I split out just a little early(when my memory card filled up) from the Charrette yesterday to get Alicia and head up to Alexandria to go sailing with Ryan and Aoife. We were scheduled for two hours of sailing(from 4-6). Unfortunately we hit a lot of traffic on I-95 and got there an hour late, but we still got 1 hour of sailing in. It was our(Alicia’s and mine) first time on a sailboat. Ryan was good good captain and Aoife had picked up quite a bit on her previous time out, so we were in good hands. We had a lot of fun figuring out the little details of it and drinking a couple beers as we sailed around. Here are a couple pics from Ryan’s cell phone:
Afterwards we got some dinner in Alexandria and walked around some. Fun times!
Day 2 of the Charrette was also a pretty neat experience. There were 19 tables of people there to work on ideas for the city. After a recap of the night before we dug in and started brainstorming ideas with our group and drawing them on the maps we had. My group was an amazing mix of people. We had a bigtime developer(did The Jefferson, is doing Echo Harbor and lots of other projects), and architect, an urban planner, a historian(or two), a genealogist, a chaplain and myself. Needless to say I was quite a bit out of my league. I was amazed that most of them knew just about every single building in the city and people were pulling out stats on the number of cars per day on certain streets and average speeds. I liked most of their ideas and didn’t have a ton to offer besides them so I did some floating and got some photos and video.
After the design time each group presented their ideas to the whole group. My camera’s memory card filled up without me getting much from the presentations(need to get a real video camera) and I had to leave a little early anyways so I rolled out after a couple of them. Seems like it was a good experience all around. Here is the video I took from day 2:
Daniel Farrell is a neo-anabaptist follower of Jesus and owner/operator of Farrell IT. He lives, works, and plays in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond, VA.
