It’s always fun to think of slippery words like facilitator and think about how they’re put together… like, “facile” isn’t really the most positive word I can think of, but it’s about ease, which isn’t necessarily negative, and if you’re a facilitator, it sounds like you’re doing something very nice, modestly enabling. Anyway, here I am in cloudy Portland, Oregon, tucked into my hotel room (a “facility”) and listening to the news on CNN as I type, where the term “facile” actually applies nicely: there’s a certain blissful ease with which the news is being reported about the war. One anchor actually referred to the conflict as “The Big Dance.” If that isn’t the nastiest sort of unearned ease of affect, I don’t know what is.
But, hey, enough about that. Why am I here? Well, I’m here for the AIFIA | Information Architecture Leadership Seminar of course! Where I am a “facilitator” — which is like being a “dictator,” but more about making things easier on others (“facili…”), and less about being a … well, you know.

Never been to Portland before. There have been protestors arrested, squatting in the streets here. But it’s pretty… reminds me of Louisville, if Louisville had a rocky range of home-spotted hills surrounding the river. It’s actually like Louisville, KY and Asheville, NC squished into one. Though I probably would think differently if I were here in, say, January.

For some reason ‘love your hearth’ seemed a very Christopher Alexander-ish thing to say in the title. Though I’m still a neophyte when it comes to his writings… I’ve read only small chunks of his gorgeous A Timeless Way of Building and other amazing books. I’m thinking about delving in again now that I’ve run across this excellent synopsis of his work.