Slowing down.

It's very odd to me to have nowhere to be. It's something I'd forgotten about from my first taste of living in a car three years ago. I ended up spending a lot of time at the Burbank library.

The van is technically a machine for transportation and for the last four weeks I've been too busy to have any time with no where to go. Normally when I had nowhere to go I'd go home. I might not actually have anything to do at home, but it made sense to be there when there was no where I had to be. Now, when I get into the van I sometimes have to sit and think a minute deciding where to go. It's a feeling I'll have a lot of in the next year when I get on the road, but for the next three months while I'm still working the options will be constrained by time limits.

I did a tape sync* for All Things Considered on Friday in Malibu so I had Thursday evening and Friday morning with nothing much to do but hang out. I think It was the first time I've had a couple hours off since the 4th of July. I had a nice dinner at a park near Pepperdine, (I have photos but for some reason my computer and camera aren't talking this weekend), then visited a bookstore, a pet store and a Radio Shack. (I actually had three things I wanted from the Radio Shack, but they didn't have any of them.)

The next day I didn't do much with my few hours off between the tape sync in Malibu and my normal Friday afternoon/evening job at Clear Channel. Drove up into the Santa Monica Mountains, passed a hike I haven't done in years and thought about doing it again, (even ate my lunch in the parking lot of the trailhead), then decided against it drove up Mulholland Drive and took an hour nap at a scenic overlook.

I'm afraid it is not very exciting to read about. Drove through some pretty mountains, took a nap, went to work. But it was a pleasant afternoon anyway, and I'm working on slowing down and doing nothing.

That being said I promise I'll also do some more interesting things as soon as I stop working so much. For now it's nice to just sit around.


*A tape sync is where the person they're interviewing can't (or is too big/busy to) come into a studio to record so they send someone like me with good recording equipment and do the interview over the phone. Then I send them the audio and they sync up the interviewer and interviewee in post. Basically I'm half engineer and half mic stand.