We’re about 60 minutes from arriving into Charlotte for lunch at Hillbilly’s Barbeque with Steve Knight, a friend of emergent, and a friend of a friend named Migum, who’d helped me with putting on a 2002 conference together in less than 2 weeks. Steve and Migum were both part of a relevant church community called Warehouse 242. (Migum also had moved maybe 6 months ago from Charlotte to the San Francisco Bay area with less than 2 weeks notice.)

Today’s morning fuel-up was courtesy of a Shell gift card from Eleanor Tse. She’s an old friend from my Virginia Tech days who’s lived in Southern California for years now.

[update] great meetup with Steve (with 3 kids) and another emergenty friend Jon; wow, that was some very delicious BBQ pork, and the ribs were smokey outstanding! Hush puppies with bbq sauce delish too. photos and podcast later when I can get more bandwidth.

Artistically I have always been drawn to texture, both visual and tactile. I’m about to go to bed in the hip Meader loft after Jeremiah abdicated his right to sleep here tonight. He dudn’t know what he’s missin’. I’ve just spent the perfect summer day with good friends eating fresh, unprocessed food off the farm, walking down a country lane and taking in the wonder of childhood. I am musing on the “texture” of memories. Is a memory just a mere documentation of facts, a précise recollection of a shared past event? Tonight we spent a couple hours sitting on a breezy porch pulling up random recollections and laughing less at the memory and more at the presentation (you know who you are!). Conversations meandered freely and openly with no forced performances or pressure or false pretensions. When you can palpably feel the joy in the telling, the sharing, the giving and the receiving of stories, then to me that’s the texture of memory and the satisfying touch of friendship.

Thanks porch gang.

I was not very happy during our two years in Raleigh but call it divine sovereignty that God allowed us to meet some terrific folks that sweetened the ache.

30 minutes before we meetup with old Raleigh friends from almost a decade ago. Most are married with kids now, so there’ll probably be lots of family talk over dinner at Jason’s Deli. [update: Yvonne shot 5 great photos at Jason’s]

I managed to finally get a decent mobile Internet connection during the drive between Greensboro and Raleigh, so we lifestreamed and broadcasted for about an hour of our driving, switching between a view of the road and a view of the vehicle from time to time. From time to time, I got an “The server is full please stand by while I attempt to reconnect” error message. We had as many as 6 viewers simultaneously, so it wasn’t like we brought the Ustream.tv servers to their knees. So, what this means is we probably can’t broadcast with a predictable schedule, and maybe less broadcasting than we’d hope, b/c mobile Internet coverage isn’t pervasive enough along our route.

Just before 8:30am, we left Winchester, fueled up at Sheetz for $2.79 per gallon, and hopped onto Interstate 81 South. First destination will be Blacksburg for lunch and a Virginia Tech campus visit.

Was going to turn on the live video lifestreaming early, but the Ustream.tv technicians are performing scheduled server upgrades. So I’ve got the webcam recording a time-lapse video of what it looks like to drive south along the Shenandoah Valley. [tech note: I’m using a mobile broadband card for Internet connectivity on the T-mobile Total Internet network, and it looks like connectivity is decent so far.]

Sorry, folks, may not be able to run live video every day on the cross country drive. During the 11:00am portion, best we got was an intermittent signal and that won’t cut it for lifestreaming. Plan B is to record some videos and shoot photos that I’ll upload via Wifi in the evenings.