Halfway home

July 2nd is the 183rd day of the year...  the midpoint of 2010.  It's an opportune time to catch up with some blogging after some pretty busy time at our halfway house in Spencer.  Since the last blog post, Nick and I have spent a fruitful month of May in Massachusetts, where Nick signed up for his first semester at the Quinsigamond Community College and I tied a few loose ends at home, wrapped up the Bump project and attended the 2010 commencement at WPI.  I even managed to squeeze a quick trip to UNH for an update on the DEW project and a concomitant trip to Maine to help my friend Jonathan put his wooden boat in the water.

 The highlight of that trip was an evening cruise on Jonathan's Lyman Runabout from Georgetown to Boothbay (a 15 min. boat ride vs. a 50 min. drive!) for dinner at Scoop's house there, with John Meehan and Evelyn Ansel, a talented young lady who is following in the footsteps of her father and grandfather by building her first wooden boat while on a semester-long hiatus from Brown University.  It seems likely that she may become the second Venice intern from Brown in the summer of 2011, after her fellow brownian Ben Lichtner of the Santa Fe Complex, who is in Venice this summer as part of the SantaVe exchange, whose alumni now include Tyler White, Kyle Miller, and Ilan Shomorony, who collaborated with Ben on a great piece of interactive art in the summer of 2009.
From the porch of the McAskill's cottage in Boothbay - which I had last visited approximately a quarter century ago - we witnessed the most triumphant moonrise "ever-ever" (as Nick would say)  and then proceeded to circumnavigate Southport island to cap the evening.

Sublime!
Immediately thereafter, I attended the second annual DSO weekend at Hampton Beach and even saw a very powerful Michael Franti & Spearhead concert with Scoop and Brenda on Lansdowne street, in the former home of the mythical Metro club of yesteryear.  Franti's reggae is extraordinarily energetic, and his message, attitude and persona are among the best I have witnessed firsthand.
Right before leaving Massachusetts again, I met up with Adrian on US soil and spent an afternoon visiting with the New Urban Mechanics duo (Chris and Nigel) and then meeting up at Thoughtbot with my old ATΩ pal James McElhiney and his Haitian business partner Rousseau Aurelien of FutureFridays, a very exciting entrepreneurship incubator company they started after successfully launching gazelle.com.  Over a very special homemade Negroni, we discussed how Adrian and I will be able to contribute to their goal of starting four new successful companies every year.  I am very grateful to Jamie's wife, Louisa Bertman for being such a great artist and for including me on her mailing list for her open studio, which allowed me to reconnect to Jamie, another "brother" that I had lost touch with, but whose professional life has much in common with mine.
The next day, Adrian and I attended the wedding of our de-facto Energence legal counsel Jason Cofield with lovely Twilight Seward at Boston University.  Finally, Adrian, Nick and I got on the same plane and traveled to Oxford together for the start of our European working vacation, which will be the subject of the next few summer posts from Venice, where Nick and I will be until the end of July, after my real meno uno birthday...