The Cowtown Chronicles

Jenna and I had an interesting discussion today about art as an existential concept.

We agreed that we both felt like while we could appreciate art for art’s sake, that we both felt like it was much more fulfilling to enjoy something practical and useful that’s also beautiful and “artistic.” I suppose that’s what draws us both so strongly to the Arts and Crafts movement and to early mid-century modernism. Both focused on the purity of the object as the basis for its beauty.

I’ve been thinking about art a lot lately, or perhaps less “art” as the concept is widely understood, but really thinking about Craft as something distinct but necessary for art.

This is probably because of all of the baking I’ve been doing lately, something that I’ve discovered is just as much craft as it is science and following recipes. In baking I’ve found something that I really enjoy doing that really makes me feel good both while doing it and because of what I’ve created. Few things in my life have made me feel as good as being complimented on something nourishing and delicious that I’ve made.

For a long time I’ve felt like I wanted to have a skill or a trade. Something like woodworking or blacksmithing that involves strength tempered with finesse and attention to detail. I decide that I’m going to find someone to apprentice with and try to go out into the world to earn my living as a craftsman. Then all of the typical self-doubt happens, where I question how I’m going to sell my work, how I’ll support myself while I’m learning, and so on. I have boundless admiration and respect for the people who’ve managed to ignore those things and gone out and just done whatever it is they’re passionate about.

Instructions: “Five Ingredients”

Write something–anything–that includes the following five words/ phrases:

~urged

~When the servant entered with the soup

~show him the way

~zeal

~dead flies

Few things compare to the zeal with which a budding young writer likes to talk about his new passion. He’ll regale you with stories of how he’s reading the latest blogs about creative habits and getting things done — hoping they’ll show him the way to productivity and success.

He’ll start stupid mystery novels with lines like “When the servant entered with the soup” — hoping that a story will follow, or that just the act of beginning will propel him down the road. He’ll feel urged to take writing workshops, and he’ll probably start a blog (or knock the dead flies off his old one) where he shares his daily outputs and creative bursts.

Then he’ll realize that like any other job, writing is damn hard work. He’ll truly understand the quote he heard once: “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than the average person.” He’ll experience all the same struggles that he’s heard the masters dealt with, mostly the feeling of inadequacy and self-doubt.

In the end, something may come of it, or nothing may come of it, but hopefully he at least gives it a go.

As you’ve noticed, I’ve been posting more and more of my photos around the web. Two weeks ago I set up an account with SmugMug so that I could sell my pics directly to the public.

I’m slowly adding photos from my catalog, and I’ll be adding new ones as I take them — if you’ve ever wanted a print of something I’ve posted online, here’s your chance to get one!

To see what’s available, visit: http://photos.petewann.com

Instructions: Today’s exercise is this: in five minutes, write as many beginnings as you can that have to do with food. Write one, two, eleven, whatever you can do. Again, by a “beginning” I mean anything from a sentence fragment to three full sentences, but no more than that per beginning.

Eggs don’t stick to painted walls, but they will stick to the ceiling.

The ancients talked about breaking bread with friends, but I have found that a fajita buffet is better at bringing people together.

David sat down to his usual lunch, a Cobb salad and a fifth of Beefeater Gin.

When cooking bacon, it’s usually best to keep the dogs outside.

Last night’s pizza hung around this morning like a girlfriend that wouldn’t stop calling, even after you’d broken up with her.

On my quest to find the best BBQ in Texas, I found myself in some unusual situations. Last week, for example, I stopped at a roadside hut surrounded by white supremacists. Bad company, but good BBQ. (Adapted from an interview with Matthew McConaughey in Men’s Journal.)

In beer, as in life, it’s best not to shake the bottle.

Meringue is the funniest food word I can think of. It’s important to have a list of funny words from different genres, like food. My favorite aviation word is “Bernoulli.”

My sister-in-Law is gettin’ hitched this weekend, my father-in-law and his wife are visiting from St. Croix, it’s been a hectic but fun week so far.

More content when I’ve recovered fully.

You obviously came here for a reason — some of you subscribe to my feed, some of you searched Google for “what goes with pizza” (the answer is beer, BTW), some are looking for pictures of the “prettiest dog“, and then there are those loyal few who just come directly to the site and read whatever’s on my mind for the day.

Here’s what’s on my mind today — What do YOU want me to write about? What’s on your mind?

I’ve been working hard to get back in touch with my inner outdoorsman — I was a Boy Scout and a Marine, and I’m definitely not afraid of nature, but I have become detached from it due to my sedentary office job and general lack of physical fitness. One of my goals for this year was to spend more time in nature, and these are the places I go to get that done. Where do you go?

Fort Worth enjoys quite a few natural areas close to the heart of all this Urbanity. Here are my favorites:

5) Gateway Park — Home of Fort Woof dog park, a GIANT athletic complex, and several wide open grass and picnic areas with a nice bit of trail along the river. If you haven’t heard, Fort Woof was selected as the #1 dog park in the US in 2006, and it’s only gotten better since then! It has huge areas for the dogs to run around off-leash, segregated by weight so that tiny dogs don’t get knocked around by horse-sized Great Danes. Gateway Park is the home of the FW Rugby Club, with purpose-built rugby pitches for matches and tournaments. Gateway Park also boasts several softball/baseball fields, as well as the aforementioned river trail access and picnic spots.

4) Lake Mineral Wells State Park — A great place for water fun without having to worry about being run over by a speedboat. Also decent rock climbing and camping facilities. Hiking is somewhat limited, but there are trails open to horses and bikes, so at least there’s some variety.

3) The Trinity Trails system — This should be thought of as really the whole area along the river through Fort Worth, where you can ride your bike, run, walk, kayak, canoe, scull, whatever suits your fancy. Many people commute to downtown via the trails from outlying neighborhoods, but even if you’re not commuting, they’re a great place to ride.

2) Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge — Really just for hiking and wildlife spotting, the FWNCR is a truly wild area with several miles of trails and many opportunities to spot deer, bobcats, and countless species of birds. Along the river they’ve even spotted alligators! It’s totally worth a visit, but if you want the full experience, plan on getting there early and spending the whole day. Overnight camping is not allowed. Also: bison!

1) Tandy Hills Natural Area — An often overlooked gem in Fort Worth’s outdoor recreation crown, Tandy Hills is the most urban of any of these areas, with the exception of the Trinity Trails. Tandy Hills is a really nicely preserved bit of the original Grand Prairie that Fort Worth was built upon. Thanks to the efforts of an obsessively dedicated group of folks, Tandy Hills is slowly being restored to its original state, which would have been much less heavily treed than it currently is. My favorite part is the stream that runs through it and down to the Trinity. There’s about a 30-foot elevation difference between the main area of the park and the streambed, and it never fails to be refreshing, even on the hottest of days. This is a particularly good time to visit, since many of the native grasses and wildflowers will be starting to bloom. There are no facilities, so take care of any personal business before you get there.

Bonus spot: Log Cabin Village – Although “technically” not an outdoors activity like hiking or biking, Log Cabin Village is strongly in the outdoors column due to the very nature of the life the pioneers lived. In their day, everyday was an outdoors day, and often a struggle for survival in pretty harsh environment. It’s also important for us to know our history and where we came from/why we’re here, and Log Cabin Village does an excellent job of making our heritage come alive.

If you’ve been following the blog “Stuff White People Like”” over the past couple of years, you already know that essentially it parodies the affectations and trends among educated white urbanites. I’ve been able to get a chuckle out of it most of the time, thinking to myself occasionally that I do or have the thing they’re making fun of in a given post. Ha-ha, all fun and games.

Until the last post, which hit a little too close to home:

(Yes, that’s my MacBookPro, flanked by my TWO Moleskine notebooks — on the left is my plain (unlined) journal, into which my REALLY important ideas go, on the right is my weekly planner, where I jot down phone numbers and reminders to call my mom that I ultimately ignore.)

Seriously — All through the campaign I recognized the next path of spin or rhetoric a day or two before the campaigns started spouting it, and would share that with my wife, or comment on another blog about it.

Lately I’ve been saying that the solution to the energy “crisis” isn’t centralized power generation using renewable sources; the answer is distributed, small-scale production, close to where the energy is used.

I’m not sure if Amory Lovins is reading my mind or not, but he says the same thing (basically) in this post on the Freakonomics Blog.

How do I monetize my apparent clairvoyance? I want a job where I get to think about stuff and make predictions every day…

I’ve been working over the last few weeks at making my life easier to manage. The impetus for this was when I realized that I easily had 10+ email accounts, all of which forwarded to each other in a confusing, Kafkaesque way. I also personally own at least 6 different domain names, not counting the ones I own on behalf of Panther City Media.

In the interests of my own sanity, I’ve consolidated all my email down to ONE address: pete AT petewann DOT com. If you have a different address for me, it will likely still work, but this will be my one and only personal email address from now on.

I’ve also made the jump to managing everything “in the cloud.” This was a difficult one for me. I am a BIG fan of the ease of use and integration of Apple’s built-in apps for personal information management — iCal, Address Book, and Mail. I like the way they all work together and how they all integrate with the other Apple apps. But keeping everything in sync between the two different systems I use at work (my Mac Pro desktop and my MacBook Pro laptop) and my iMac at home was starting to become a major hassle. Yes, MobileMe helped with that a lot, but I wanted to try to get away from the $99/yr. charge for what would basically be synchronization services and some online storage. I don’t really have any interest in using the email account or the web space, since I have my own more robust solutions for both of those.

So, I finally got myself set up on Google Apps for Business. Don’t be fooled by the “for Business” part — anyone can sign up, and the service is free. Once you’re signed up, you can host your email, calendar, and documents all “in the cloud.” I’m slowly moving my documents up there, but I’m also using a few other tools to manage the files and information that I need to have available on every computer I touch.

The first is Dropbox. It’s free for up to 2GB of storage, and it works essentially like MobileMe’s iDisk feature. An upgrade to 50GB — 2.5 times what MobileMe offers — is $99/year. I’m using only the free storage until I find that I need the upgrade.

The second sanity-saver is Spanning Sync. It synchronizes my Address Book and iCal to and from my Gmail account, on every computer I use. It’s $25/yr. or $65 for a one-time purchase. (Click the link in this paragraph to save $5 on your purchase.) I’m paying yearly now to see if I continue to use it consistently, but I suspect that I will soon switch to a paid-up license.

Next up is Evernote — With which you can store notes, pictures, brief audio clips, and whatever else happens to be on your mind. This is handy because once you make note of it, you can allow yourself to “forget” it. I use it to store notes about things that I don’t want to remember, like the name of a particular wine that I like and the schedules for the bus lines that run near my house and work. Evernote is equally awesome-tastic because it’s completely cross-platform and web-ified. There are versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, other mobile devices, and you can also access all of your notes through a web interface. Evernote is free with some restrictions, and $5/mo. or $45/yr. for more storage and file sync features. Again I’m using the free account until I find a compelling reason to upgrade.

Last for now is Backblaze. Essentially this is a backup solution for your computer that works over the internet. If things get sideways on your backed-up computer, you can download the hosed files, have them send you DVDs of your files, or have them send you a hard drive with your data on it. If you’re on a Mac, think TimeMachine writ large. (It’s not exactly feature-for-feature identical to TimeMachine, but it’s good enough for most.) I haven’t had occasion to use it yet, and I also use TimeMachine to a local disk for backup, but I have tested restoring files and it seems to work really well. Backblaze is $5/mo. or $50/yr. per computer. Storage (and therefore backup space) is unlimited. I’m using a $50/yr. account.

Those are the big ones that I use the most often. There are several other applications that I use regularly, but the ones listed here really are what keep me sane and tie my digital world together.

What bit of tech would you be worse off without?