(trav-able): The quality of being easy to travel/travail with. I am currently preparing for a long trip, that unless a job offer comes thru will be 6-7/8ish weeks in duration. This trip will go from the east coast to the west coast and back again and hopefully include highlights such as the Grand Canyon, the Redwoods, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Boise, Vail & Marfa. 

With these different locations in mind there is the possibility & probability of lots of different types of weather and occasions. And things need to be "travable" as everything for the entire family needs to fit in the Airstream. (That's the silver trailer pictured to the left.) Travable is an essence, an idea that something will be an easy companion, comfortable, have explainable usage, & basically awesome! 


Disclaimer: None of these photos were taken by me. Just culled from the amazingness of Google. 

While driving past this billboard on a recent trip my brain went into question overdrive: What in tarnation does that mean? Who are Americans? How can AT&T cover them? What if they are abroad? I do not understand the idea being communicated here. So what do you make up about that? Well Mom says that it means a geographic region. Dad says out of the AT&T customers they can only cover 97% and some other things that I am not remembering because I still don't get it... Anyone have some insight?

Today Dad and I went to the transfer station. "What is a transfer station?," you might ask. Well, it is the dump. Except not really, because we live on a small island and all of our trash is taken to the mainland. Here you take your trash to the transfer station and then it is taken to the landfill/ dump/ incinerator elsewhere. Here I could digress into an argument for composting/ recycling/ no impact, but we know those arguments and I hope that everyone is doing what they can in those arenas. Anyways our conversation turned to the magazine bins. The recycle bins are large dumpsters, I think about 7ft. by 20ft. They are mostly enclosed boxes. Occasionally there is a dumpster that has what are like mail slots that you are meant to deposit your magazines in (pictured left) and sometimes there is a dumpster with what appears to be sliding doors, which are left open and provide a large space to put complete bundles of magazines in simultaneously. Dad and I prefer the later(pictured right). 

Our audience poll, meaning the two of us, reveals that consumers prefer the larger opening 100% of the time. Why would this other design exist? So naturally, "What do you make up about that?" is the next question. I propose that the mailbox-esque design is older and based on a solution that worked well for a different problem. The adequate design that allows for maximum load drops is a newer design that was actually thought of for this product. Dad went along with this answer. The mailbox style still exists because they are not going to get rid of these dumpsters until they have rusted apart, which means that every so often we are going to be faced with a poorly designed object. Let me know what you make up about it!  

In my family we make up stories. Some would say "big fish" stories, but I think maybe it is a way of getting closer to a truth. When I am making up a story my brain is filtering thru every random fact and image I have ever come across, trying to make the story as plausible as possible. And by the age of 28 when at least 25 of those years have been spent in school absorbing facts and images, aided by my newspaper reading which started seriously in 7th grade due to Mr. Schmelters newspaper reading assignment and has been greatly helped by my internet browsers home page being set to nytimes.com for the last 8 years... that's a lot of data.  And well my parents are "older" so of course they have lots of facts and images in their heads too. Okay so that's a lot of words to say we are kind of a factoid-y family... The question "What do you make up about that?" comes from the book, Failure and How I Achieved It, by Mike Courtney. 
In the course of writing this post, my mom called. Both of us were on our cell phones. There was an altered sound: "gobledy gouck, charlie, alpha, tango, grgwrrrrrrrr _______________" Beep, beep, beep.  Dropped call. Cell phone service is notoriously bad in our area. So in the time it takes for her to call me back I have already made up three stories. 1. Cell serivice is bad; must be solar flares. 2. It was a message from the military island across the channel and they are running tests on how to infiltrate the airwaves and broadcast messages sub-audible, but someones elbow just jostled the device and we overheard the conversation. (This idea is strongly influenced by Trenton Lee Stewart and The Mysterious Benedict Society.) 3. It was the black-finned monkeys similar to the blue-footed boobies which are like the mice in The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Those three ideas are not really "What do you make up about that?" worthy, but they are the "What do you make up about that?" moment of the day, so far, we haven't had dinner yet...