Sleeping Outside the Box

This is not a made up picture. I was chowing down when I saw the devil in my sandwich:

I would consider selling it for upwards of US$10K, if only I hadn’t gone ahead and eaten the rest of it. It was just too good. Maybe that was the devil in it, preventing me from attaining my riches by satisfying a transient earthly desire. Next time I’ll have to listen to the wise followers of the Grilled Cheese and Potato Wedges and make bank.

So, I come home from work and parked outside my house, I see this truck with chickens in the back:

I figure it belongs to the neighbor next door and I shrug it off. But I snap a picture since it’s kinda odd in the middle of a Seattle Summer.

The next day, I’m working at my computer–It’s my day off, so I’m just lazing about half way dressed–and suddenly there’s a knock on the door.
This is strange because people don’t just drop by uninvited to my house.
I’m shocked, so I just go and answer the door without bothering to put a shirt on or fix my hair.

On my porch is this lady all dressed up like a park ranger, hat and all, with a badge that says she’s from animal control.
“I’m here about your chickens.” She says.
I temporarily forget that I saw the chickens the day before and I’m so confused I just say, “What…chickens?” in my most innocent sounding voice. I suddenly realize that I’m standing there looking like a typical white trash chicken housing lunatic, with my plaid boxers sticking out of my pants and no shirt on to cover my pasty white boy chest. My hair looks like the lead singer of Flock of Seagulls in the height of a cocaine binge. And I’m trying to play off like I don’t know anything about chickens. I start to fumble with the door knob and look back into my house and I get the strange sense that she thinks I’m hiding something.
“Oh, wait, those chickens,” I remember. “Those aren’t mine. I think they belong to my neighbor next door. I saw them in their truck yesterday.”
“Your neighbor said they were your chickens.” she retorts.
“Ah,” I’m sure I look totally mystified as I am really not quite certain what to say next. “um…I don’t own a truck.” My hand instinctively goes to my head for a scratch–I’m hoping to get across the international sign for, “I’m confused” so she will take her accusatory look away.
“Well, we had someone phone in a complaint and we were concerned because it sounded like they were being kept in a small container and were left in the afternoon sun.”
“Right, that’s how it looked to me…”
A bit of a silence.
“Well, let us know if you see them again.” She hands me her card and I thank her.
“Sure, yeah…will do.”
I don’t think she ever realized that I was innocent.

All of my dreams last night were in Thai and PHP. I don’t speak much Thai so I exhausted it all on a woman in a restaurant. She told me all I know and some things I didn’t. While this was happening, I was coding and re-coding the experience. They say you can’t read in your dreams but I think that’s not true. I’ve read before and I distinctly remember lines of code, characters and pages, all overlain upon reality.

William McDonough speaks about flaws in our usage of designs, specifically in relation to trees:
“Imagine this design project:
Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundred of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, and self replicates.
Why don’t we knock that down and write on it.”

TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/104