I was passing through Somerville last night and in Powderhouse Square I ran across photographer-stranger Tia taking some large format photos. Powder House Square was the focal point of 1774’s Powder Alarm during which British Soldiers took possession of potential militia firearms and supplies. The subsequent mobilization of militia forces “essentially provided a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Battle of Lexington and Concord seven months later.” ( Wikipedia: Powder Alarm).

A week and $300 I barely had later, I got my MacBook back with most of my files (including last week’s comic) intact. Dead hard-drive. So this comic was originally #2, now it’s #3. I hope you enjoyed last week’s low-tech make-do.

The hard drive on my two-month-old MacBook up and kicked the bucket and the whole darn thing is at the shop. So this week’s comic is done with a borrowed Sharpie and some watercolor paints I found on trash-day. 7-10 days they say. 7-10 days…

I was lucky enough to be invited on Talking Out Loud this morning with wonderful hosts Felicia Sullivan and Charlotte Crockford. The live show was aired on UMass Lowell’s radio station, WUML. I mostly discussed AmeriCorps*VISTA and the CTC VISTA Project and had a blast. Click here to listen to interview! Fellow VISTA Leader Danielle was awesome to make this recording for me. We made one from the soundboard, but our recording device accidently had its internal mic on as well, so there was lots of extraneous noise; though Danielle’s was made by putting a microphone up to the computer speakers. Danielle also made me the picture below.

It’s a little late to write about, but I spent Labor Day weekend in Rhode Island.

It turns out that Rhode Island is the largest producer of turf grass in the North East: more than 4,000 acres of turf. That’s a lot of sod.

It rained all day Sunday, so there was nothing else to do but take pictures of delicious wine grapes and eat them too.

Despite the fact that one of these days the whole darn school is going crumble into Boston Harbor, serving at UMass Boston isn’t so bad; I have lots of opportunities to ride around the harbor in the university’s vessels.

Santa Barbara, California is a beautiful town. I went to school there and when I can, try to visit…though now I live in Boston, which makes it difficult.

Online community maps are cool but they aren’t the only way that everyday people can interact with cartography; sweaty, dirty, pointing fingers work just as well. I took a photo a while back of a subway map in Boston that had been similarly affected, and here’s one for downtown Washington, DC. This was taken on 17th Street between the WWII monument an the Washington Monument.

I’m currently in Washington, DC for a VISTA Leader training; rather I’m in Virginia, an hour and a $50 cab ride away from our nation’s capitol. An upshot is that the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum (they have two, the second is on the National Mall) is only a short shuttle trip away from my hotel. The museum is a humongous hanger chock-full of airplanes, spacecraft and other strangers to the earth.