Lindsay and I are just returning from dinner with an old grad school friend, whom we love but inexcusably haven’t seen in years. There’s not much to say other than, when you’re someone who once lost his memory, it’s great to have people around you that act as a thread to your own past.
Speaking of, Lindsay and I also have an online friend who helped us through our tougher times, someone I have lots in common with by coincidence, and she recently did a very nice thing for us, which has put her squarely on our list of people we want to visit if we can ever get out for a vacation to California. Which would be a heck of a trip: we’d see my sister-in-law, my wife’s best friend, two of my best high school friends, my college roommate, another close college friend, and probably a few other people I’m forgetting. Perhaps it’s even a chance for us to drive cross-country in our 1991 Ford Explorer and push it into the Pacific, except that it has absolutely no sign of ever dying. It would just drive itself out of the sea and say, “That was fun. Can we go back to the snow in Boston now?”
Good friends of ours are starting their own marketing company. First off, that’s awesome. But just as awesome is that they asked me to design a logo.
They’ve named their business—Bulldog Marketing and Sales, Inc.—after their love of bulldogs. So incorporating a bulldog into the logo was a no-brainer, especially since chances are they will focus on marketing pet products. And after skimming my 1,000+ typefaces, Rockwell Sketch seemed to be the bulldoggiest font.
The funniest part of the process was having one of them sign off on the design but with the caveat, “How much does the bulldog image royalty cost?” I laughed and wrote back, “What royalty? You mean you don’t recognize your own dog?”
Their dog:
My outlining:
And the final head:
Certainly there’s room for improvement, but they seem pretty stoked, and then so am I.
Today marks two years since I went to the hospital suffering from complete short-term memory loss, only to find out that it was caused by Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I covered all the fun in a post last year.
I would simply like to say thank you again to all friends and family who helped during the first rather helpless weeks and the six months of chemo that followed. But especially, on this particular July 16th, I offer a special thanks to Patrick Winter, a good friend since just before seventh grade, who, despite having just moved to a new city, Chicago, this week two years ago, turned around and came to my hospital in Boston. It’s also when he mentioned that the friend he was staying with in Boston had a sister in Chicago he liked. So my thanks and congratulations to Patrick, for tonight I get to lose some short-term memory again during Patrick’s “menfolk party” ahead of his wedding in two days to that friend’s sister, the lovely Rachel. Way to go , Paddy!
This past week was a complete wash at work, what with one supervisor away, the other supervisor just having left MIT, and everyone else still recovering from the Future of News and Civic Media conference that we hosted the week before. But a week like that was needed, desperately. And it leads, after a few more days, into my first real vacation since my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2007.
With Lindsay and me trying to save for a house, vacations for the foreseeable future will always be to Easthampton, NY, where her family has a lovingly unpretentious second home. We’ve been looking forward to it for months. We’ll take Gatsby, we’ll see Lindsay’s parents, and we’ll even get to see a couple of friends on the last weekend there (starting their own well-deserved vacation as we end ours). We’ll sleep a lot. We’ll walk Gatsby a lot. We’ll barbecue. It’ll be great.
Meanwhile, mostly Gatsby-centric, the latest photos to share…
Gatsby’s was in her shedding season a couple weeks ago. This was the result, after having swept the week before:
Around the same time, my mom was in town, meeting Gatsby for the first time:
Lindsay’s friend/coworker Courtney just got a Boston Terrier/Pug mix named Cagney, who visited us today and was tough keep still:
Not that Gatsby is any better:
And mysteriously, despite loving to chase squirrels, we bought Gats a stuffed squirrel at Petsmart this afternoon, and this is how we found them soon after:
Lastly, completely unrelated but just because I’m proud of it, a Photoshop/Illustrator job I did showing MIT’s most famous building partially underwater:
What my friend said after I offered to write her a LinkedIn recommendation if she would let me use the line, “Despite the abovementioned odor, she does spectacular work.”
Friends from college and I keep in touch daily using a forum, and our most favoritest thread has to do with fate’s ability to hand one of our friends terrible employment experiences. He calls it his Aura of Suckitude, and the very best parts are quotes from his old boss’s emails. His boss (who took over after many other people quit all at once) is unqualified, confused, and self-absorbed. But for our benefit, his emails make him look like a modern-day Police Squad character:
boy you guys sure are quiet. must be all of these plants i put over here, sucking up all the carbon monoxide.
Subject: RE: Chef’s
Yeah I need a vacation from u!!!!!1 LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOOOOLLLLLOOOOOOLLLL
Just got off the phone from catching up with an old friend who’s teaching a summer course to well-to-do high school students in New York. She said she recently attempted to teach her students about internet privacy, and they were baffled by the concept. First, they didn’t know that you could keep things private, perhaps because they don’t remember a time before the internet. But amazing to me is that they didn’t know why you might want to keep things private.
My friend then proceeded to cite a case where someone was turned down for a job because to Google her name brought up evidence that she was “a silent but deadly farter”.
To her teenage students, that got the point across.
My old employer just included me on a mass email, asking me generically to apply to its revamped company. The following arrived five minutes after I got off the phone with the only friend left at Houghton who managed to avoid being laid off in the past year (or who read the writing on the wall and jumped to a competitor or freelance work): Continue reading
