The last couple days have been filled with talk about all kinds of futures. Last night, Amy and I had dinner with Erik and Rebecca at the Hotel George (1 - 3) to talk about their first day of interviews with various people at our headquarters. These two practitioners from the Global Business Network are here to continue driving our Web 2011 project to develop several future scenarios on how older people will use the internet. The interviews continued today while I went to a meeting on a new web development process (4) and a design presentation on our future office space (5). In the few minutes I was able to spend at my desk today, I found that my DVD of the PBS Frontline program on the advertising and marketing industry, The Persuaders, arrived from Amazon Prime. Note the futuristic cover art (6). Now Amy and I are here early at the AMC Union Station (7, 8) waiting for the midnight show of the last installment of Star Wars, one of the most fantastic futures ever imagined.

- mike lee - washington, dc

I just finished another shoot at Keri and Adam's apartment of some of their friends in costume. The photos are of the fictitious Flurry Family who in the 1970s set out on a family trip to Las Vegas, but their car breaks down and Elvis picks them up to take them to their destination. The story will be performed as a water ballet by Fluid Movement in early August. I will be sihouetting some of my shots to add an electric blue background to match the look of the back cover of the Talking Heads album Little Creatures.

- mike lee - baltimore

Besides eating, playing and napping today, Cianna was practicing walking down and up steps (3).

- mike lee - baltimore - notes to myself on recent posts: thu the playground build was coordinated by kaboom in partnership with home depot, officemax, playworld systems and aarp; our ceo, bill novelli is pictured in photo 2 here; wed the camera was a canon eos 1d mark 2 8.2 (not 16) megapixel digital camera

The playground is mostly up, and final remarks have been delivered in front of some of the kids who will benefit from this $135,000 investment. Busses arrive in 20 minutes.

- mike lee - washington, dc - ncc &

After lunch, Mayor Anthony Williams made an appearance, and then the building started up again.

- mike lee - washington, dc

...turn into a few big pieces with caring hands.

After some speeches (1), the teams have assembled here at the National Children's Center in SE Washington to build a giant playset. I'm on team shamrock. We couldn't have asked for a better day--it's overcast and breezy. Because this playground is wheelchair accessible, foam rubber sheets will be placed on the ground instead of the dreaded mulch, which requires lots of shoveling.

- mike lee - washington, dc

With waivers signed and badges on, we're heading out on busses to the Kabloom!-sponsored playground build.

- mike lee - washington, dc

The last two days have seen a blizzard of paperwork around our second attempt to place a winning contract on a house. Since Amy is away at a conference in Seattle, dozens of pages had to faxed or scanned-to-PDF (2 & 3) to circulate between the buyers and agents of our old house and sellers and agents of our new house. For good measure, we were advised to write an illustrated soulful letter of appeal to the sellers (4) and a check for $10,000 "earnest money." The home buying market is so competitive now, I wouldn't have been surprised if the owners required us to dance naked in their front yard. The number of details to manage has been staggering. Though we ended up being the high bidder on the house, the escalation process pushed us $22,000 over the asking price. Spicing up the stress was today's brief Homeland Security Code Orange alert (7) and several URGENT (8) requests to put content on our web site during the hours it was locked down due to the re-launch. By evening, we were feeling confident that we will be owning a new house soon, AND at 8:43pm, our team successfully pushed our new web site out to the world! (9)

All this before our company's Day of Service tomorrow, where 99% of the organization will be out volunteering at a variety of offsite locations.

- mike lee - langley park, md