But still, here I am and here are some notable numbers to give some cold, hard scale to my and Team Great Job’s adventures over the last two months.

I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty hectic right now. I apologize for being completely MIA from this blog; today was the deadline for an article I’ve been working on through Spot.us about school meal programs and the challenges in offering more nutritious food, which has been sucking up all of my time. More about that to come shortly, but alas, it is out of my hands — at least for the moment — so let’s talk about some of my audio mishaps and discoveries throughout the process.

So, if I haven’t already made this clear in previous posts, I’m broke. Consequently, I’m also very cheap in terms of the equipment I use for reporting. To record audio, I still use an old-school tape recorder or an $80 voice recorder that attaches to my iPod, which I bought four years ago to record lectures in college. Both of which have been doing an adequate job, aside from the times my iPod is full of music and doesn’t have space to record. But what’s not broke, I can’t afford to fix. That is until

Day three of my epic, 11 person, 1 dog, three car road trip. We have been to Chicago, taken a chilly dip in Lake Michigan, put our toes in the Mississippi and taken over a bar in Omaha to throw a dance party. Next is Gothenberg, NE for some rope swings and then on to Boulder. I am sending photos to my photo editor at Nerve.com to see if we can do an end of the summer photo essay, so cross your fingers for me!

We arrived at the Mongolian border after driving all night, passing through frigid Russian mountains just before dawn. At around six in the morning, just as the first light was making a jagged outline of hills visible around us, we found a circle of Mongol Rally cars parked in a circle like Conestoga wagons, protecting a handful of tents.

…is doing a week long blitz on how to “make it” as a freelance photographer. While its geared towards photogs who left their staff positions, its giving me grants to look up and ideas to pursue. Check it out now.

Greetings Comrades from Moscow,

I’ve taken thousands of photos thus far on our journey, but I can only edit a handful every several days, so here’s just a few to get the ball rolling.

We finally escaped Latvian purgatory by making minor repairs to the Team Great Job! car and getting it reinspected, thus obtaining a crucial holographic sticker that some guard looked at for about two seconds at the Russian border.  The delay since our first failed border-crossing attempt had been two weeks.

After taking all night to cross the border and then driving all day without a good night’s sleep, we arrived in Moscow with our little yellow Nissan Micra.  Think of the most hectic freeway junctions in Los Angeles, stick them in the middle of one of the world’s largest city centers and then subtract eight hours of sleep before trying to imagine me at the wheel on Sunday afternoon, trying to find our hostel.  Russians don’t feel obligated to obey lane markers, which is too bad because in the heart of Moscow t

I am slowly but surely taking over Village Voice. I shot for an article on NYC’s pop up putt putt (say that five times fast) courses and two weeks ago the paper had me hanging out with an Italian pop star. The photos above are what ran. I’m posting some of the other shots I liked so they get to see the light of day.

A week from Saturday I start my “Forever Young” roadtrip with a group of 12 (plus 1 dog) across these great united states all the way to Boulder. I am definitely looking at Ryan McGinley’s “I Know Where the Summer Goes” to get inspired.

Will hasn’t had time to e-mail any photos or write a post, but he did manage to get quite a few shots up on the good ol’ flickr. Even though they are from earlier in the trek and not the Eastern European photos I eagerly await, they will do for now. Check them out here.

I reluctantly subscribed to Gawker two days ago, reluctantly only because my Google Reader feed is out of control and they are notorious for posting. A post this morning made my increasingly chaos-theory-proving Reader worth the headache.

A Gawker blogger made fun of an article in the Washington Post about a “generation guru,” a woman paid obscene amounts of money to explain to adults how us kiddos think and work and all that rot. Gawker pulled three excerpts from the article, with the longest one hitting 93 words. Unlike some reposting, however, the Gawker blogger put in commentary and analysis instead of just block quoting the article. Fair usage, right? Guess not, at least not for the Washington Post. The journalist, Ian Shapira, is furious that his hard work is being ripped off and making someone else money while pulling the best (ie funniest) bits and he said as much in a response on WP’s Outlook and Opinion page.
Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder brought the pain in her take on the whole thing to my utter de