{"id":8680,"date":"2025-09-11T22:13:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T05:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/?p=8680"},"modified":"2025-09-11T22:13:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T05:13:40","slug":"view-of-a-hotel-window","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/11\/view-of-a-hotel-window\/","title":{"rendered":"view of a hotel window"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of<\/em> our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else – except I’d looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place — and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it’s pretty small, and I can’t go and check right now to confirm — my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting — but as best I can reconstruct it, here’s what I see in that window:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My laptop bag is what I call my “portable office” – containing the book(s) I’m reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I’m working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn’t look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the “portable office” is a stack of books and a clipboard with my “todo paper”, a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next to that are more creative piles – a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the “active pile” of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don’t always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I’ve got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All that seems a lot, but it’s way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can’t quite turn off, and I agree – except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I … don’t think I’m that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-the Centaur<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-8680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-life","tag-we-call-it-living","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8684,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8680\/revisions\/8684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}