Started this:

‘Twas a great week for music. I’m really loving the new Black Keys album and LCD Sounsystem’s playing at my house. Right now.

45 days between posts. That’s how it goes. Spent a wonderful Valentines Day in Malibu and a relaxing Presidents Day doing nothing. I’m not sure which I enjoy more, a three day weekend or a four day workweek.

And like that, 2009’s in the past. These seem to be going by faster. It was a year of transition for me. Baby steps.

My Resolutions:

Create.

Travel.

More Art.

Less Stress.

Simplify.

I also want to start a daily, handwritten journal/sketchbook. That one should be easy. I’ll return to this post a year from now and see how well I followed through. Let 2010 be a year of growth.

Thanksgiving 2009. from Matt McDonald on Vimeo.

It’s the week of Christmas. That means it took me 4 weeks to make the above video from Thanksgiving. That means I’ve been busy. Happy Holidays from sunny Los Angeles.

The sun came out today. That’s a step in the right direction.

Successful weekend.

• Exercised both days.
• Photoshopped.
• Began a video from our Thanksgiving trip to the Bay.
• A little Christmas shopping.
• Christmas tree installed with lights but in need of an angel topper.
• Farmers Market.
• Shared lots of laughs with my beautiful wife.

I’m thankful for this cool weather and looking forward to some rain. Clean it all away, please.

New layout. Hopefully it gets my ass posting again. Lots of changes in the past three months. New job. Working like crazy. More photos to come of our wonderful trip to the Bay Area for Thanksgiving with Brad and Alyssa. Perhaps a video too. I still haven’t mastered the 7D’s video capabilities. So wobbly.

So. Much. Fun. I really love San Francisco.

Los Angeles is on fire.

Finally. With my wife out of town last week, I decided it was time to sit down and put together a video from all of the footage I’d gathered from our road trip. So in between job applications I did just that. Unfortunately my Flip camera was dead for pretty much the entire time we were in San Francisco. But that’s ok. It’s long enough as it is. Now it’s back to the job search. Happy Monday.

We left the hotel a little before 11am the following morning. We hadn’t made plans about what we should see or where we should stop. We’d made it a lot farther north the previous night than we’d realized. We were just over an hour from Portland. Looking at the map, we were trying to decide between Mt. Rainier and Mount St. Helens. Mt. Rainier was pretty much agreed upon but we weren’t sure if we were ready for another long day in the car. The trek from Arcata, CA through Crater Lake and into Eugene had really changed our collective opinion about our rental car, at least for those of us who had spent the previous day’s 10 hour drive cramped in the backseat.

We’d loosely decided on just Mount Rainier. The highway would venture eastward and then north to meet up with the 5 just before Monroe, WA. I was pretty excited. Mount Rainier’s a beast and I’d never seen it. We cut through Portland just after lunchtime, and we were in the state of Washington before any of us had realized it. I think this caught everyone by surprise. This was the last state border we’d be crossing while in the car. Before we made it to the Mount Rainier exit we decided to head straight for Seattle. I know, wtf. The way we rationalized it was that we still had five days in Seattle and could easily make a day trip out of Rainier. So soon enough we were through Seattle and pulling into the awesome small town of Monroe, greeted by blue skies. After we unpacked the car, we ate some dinner, let it settle, and then walked down to the What a way to end the road trip. Awaiting us were five days of PNW exploration.