Which makes sense, of course, because that’s where it came from. It was the last remnant of our family vacation to Beaufort, South Carolina a few weeks ago. The rental car was given back, sand shaken out of the clothes, stories shared and pictures uploaded to the home computer. All done.

Except, that is, for the Holga pictures. I forgot about those. I only shot one roll in Beaufort, and I shot it all on Hunting Island, a beautiful place I hope not too many people ever find out about. (I also hope it doesn’t erode away and vanish into the sea, but that seems like the likely outcome by the time Veda would ever bring her kids there.)

So today these pictures, this roll of film, which I carefully concealed from airport security in two directions, hoping to avoid their high-powered x-rays, then dropped off at the local photo shop, then picked up in its little plastic sleeve, then waited to scan until I had a free moment that coincided with Penny’s computer being free, then scanned, straightened, transferred to the laptop and uploaded to Flickr, are now ready for you to see.

It was a long journey for a dozen blurry photos. But here’s hoping you enjoy them, and that flipping through these hazy, low-contrast, inaccurately tinted images is as strange and enjoyable as finding marine life stowed away in your pants pocket.

It’s kind of fascinating… The ancient Olmecs may have been the first to use your previous age, perhaps around 36 BCE, though it’s debatable whether the Babylonians had the basic idea down (after all, they did have a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, as we know, but they never used zero by itself or at the end of numbers, so there was no way to tell a small number from one many times its size; you had to go by context. This was one of a number of things that presumably sucked about Babylonian-ness.)

Did you know, Veda, that the Greeks used to argue over your age’s very existence? Zero just couldn’t quite be a number, they figured, and they are reported to have wondered aloud, “How can nothing be something?”

Well, now you’re something. For sure. You walk, and sort of talk, and even hold up your little index finger when we ask you how old you are.

(This is, I must admit, so cute I have to collapse on the floor and die every time you do it. We clap, and you clap, and everyone laughs and it’s wonderful.)

You’re getting so big so fast that I can’t seem to keep track of all your changes. I don’t really manage to scribble them all down here, and I wish I could. But I take lots of pictures, and write lots of little notes to myself. Let’s hope that there comes a time when it all makes sense, and I can speak knowledgeably, helpfully about it, and it isn’t just a mad torrent of growth and change and learning and frustration and boredom and chaos and wonderfulness. Let’s hope that’s soon.

I’ll be counting the days.

In the meantime, keep on rockin’, my one-year-old girl.

This evening’s exchange, which arose in an email thread over some unrelated issue, struck me as one for the ages.

It all started, see, when I signed off a message with my standard epithet for him – Meatman. (He’s staunchly carnivorous, and suspicious of any food that isn’t bread or dead animal, or some combination of the two.)

In response, naturally, he called me “Veg-Head.”

Which is fair. I have been a vegetarian for some time now, and goodness knows there are many worse things he could have called me. For some reason, though, I was moved to consider the name literally, and that led me to reply with this:

Gross thought:

Since birth, Veda has never consumed any dead animals — only milk, vegetables, pasta and so forth. Her mother also ate no meat during the gestation. Therefore my daughter’s noggin, along with indeed the remainder of her, is constructed entirely of matter formed by metabolic processes that used plant matter as their fuel. Her skull, skin, eyes, nasal passages, and even the tiny teeth she’s currently extruding from her gums… all of it grown without meat.

My kid is, in a very literal sense, a veg-head.

Strong stuff to discuss, particularly around dinnertime. But I must relinquish the Disgustibus Maximus throne to Jake, whose reply took the grossness of my notion and raised it several – maybe several dozen – notches.

Grosser thought:

I would also think that if we were flying together over the Arctic, with Veda in tow, should we crash and get stranded in a remote mountain pass – that she would be very tasty.  Kinda like grain-fed beef.

:)

Take a bow, Meatman. I can’t believe you went there.

Client: Capstrat Self Promotion

There are a million ways to “green” your daily routine. To highlight just a few, the great Todd Coats and I thought it would be fun — and helpful — if we made targeted little cards, designed to hang right there in the places where you’re best equipped to conserve a little. One goes in the car, one in your laundry room, and one in the bath. My favorite is the car one, but mainly because I love Todd’s “street fight” icon.

When we first got the First Citizens Bank account, the great Ryon Edwards and I were told, in no uncertain terms: “You will have to do rate ads. There will have to be a big number.”

“Okay,” we said. “Can we have little dancing silhouette dudes in there, then? And lighthearted headlines that don’t quite sound like your usual bank ads?”

Sidenote: I couldn’t believe we even presented the first one, which seemed like a not-a-chancer from the moment I wrote it down, but the client turned out to love it. Shows what I know.

2008 may well go down in history as the Year You Learned What a Carbon Offset Is. At least it will for me. To help other folks get a little less hazy on the concept, we built this handy website for Duke Energy and NC Greenpower. Here you can learn about carbon emissions and even calculate your own – then, naturally, purchase the offsets to “balance your equation.”

The website, it being 2008 and all, was naturally supported by a host of social media stuff, including seed packets that were given out (to help folks offset a little carbon the old-fashioned way), ads on Facebook, email marketing and, my personal favorite, a “treebombing” in which hundreds of evergreen saplings were distributed free in downtown Raleigh one morning. At first we worried that nobody would make the effort to pick them up, but once the local news picked up the story, we had folks coming in from Charlotte and lands beyond. Amazing. All the trees were spoken for by breakfast time, and site traffic spiked accordingly.

“Tabulation” :30

You’ve done it, Veda. After 11 months, and so much learning, so much falling, you can walk.

Unlike your birth, and your first smile, and the first night you went to sleep at 8 and didn’t get up until 6, this feels like it was entirely your achievement. Not just biology taking its course, though I’m sure that’s actually a big part of it.

You tried, and tried again, and tonight you did it. Now you can do anything.

In fact I’m a little surprised it hasn’t just disintegrated into little shards of hipster optic detritus. I’m still really liking shooting with the Holga, though. I hope you’re similarly enjoying the results.

Client: Literacy Volunteers
When you can’t read, you get very good at decoding things, and very good at hiding your problem. Close friends and family members often know nothing of their loved one’s challenge. We tried to reach the literacy-challenged directly, with a simple poster that grabbed their attention at bus shelters and other transit settings. A radio spot was also used to drive the point home, and was much, much easier to write.