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This past week, I spent the night ahead of a family road trip at my sisters.  I’m not sure why I’ve never paid attention to this before but I discovered she charges her cell phone at night, in the kitchen of her two story home.  Now I know that I’m a tab dependent on my device but seriously, if I charged my phone at night in a different room other than my bedroom, I would wake in the middle of the night in a panic.  Actually I wouldn’t sleep as the single app I use everyday is not only my sound machine but both my actual alarm and bedside clock display.

I am a hoarder, of magazines.  You wouldn’t really know it by looking at my office desk or at the coffee table in my house.  As a middle child, I know how to hide my shit.  I also know that there is seriously no reason why I continue to make the poor mailman shove them into my tiny mailbox each month.  But for some reason I cannot let all my traditional media habits die.   So it was with conflicted guilt that I filled a whole bag with monthly magazines for a single night road trip out of the city a couple of weekends ago.

That Sunday morning, as I relished in the success of brewing a rather delightful pot of coffee, I settled into the couch with my bag of magazines before anyone else got up.  I devoured my weekly gossip rag because that is a guilty pleasure that I won’t ever give up and was about to do arm lifts with the two Vogues I’d brought when I decided to actually take a real stab at reading one.  I discarded the previous months issue without a second thought and cracked the March 2012 spine instead – Adele was on the cover so I was interested enough to began my search for the cover story among the hundreds of ads.  I won’t lie, it took a long while to find and yes, I used the table of contents.  In the process, I’d dog-eared a few other stories to come back to.  One of those was an article on Twitter.

Twitter, in Vogue.

So, for those of you that know me, you know I can’t cook. And for those of you that don’t know me, It’s not that I don’t like to cook, it’s really that I can’t. The only time I’m at a big name grocery store is when I’m out of TP or laundry detergent. I instead prefer to do my grocery shopping in places that I can walk to versus have to park in a lot at. See, it’s in those types of local groceries that I can get quality pre-made eats or things that require very little preparation. And by local grocery establishments, I don’t mean the corner liquor store that is also good for an occasional carton of milk.

It was with some confusion then that I entered my local meat market on Saturday, in need of my deli favs and some hash of the corn beef variety, and encountered twenty something in PJ’s – seriously, the average age of the mid-day clientele was cut in half. It took me a moment to realize that earlier in the week, Paulina Meat Market was one of the daily Chicago Groupon deals. My worlds had collided; commerce of the digital variety, hottest internet start-up and darling of Chicago had invaded my local little traditional marketplace. And as I wandered the store and filled my basket, I realized I was grinning with pride.

This past week, my little sister and I headed West on a roadtrip; the final destination was one very familiar to us as we’ve been visiting cousins and uncles and aunts there since we were born but for most others, you’d have a hard time finding it on a map. And so apparently did Google via my iPhone.

I recently traded my city condo, yellow cabs and laptop for a three story house, a Suburban with two car seats and limited to no cell phone reception in a smallish town in KS that is home to my sister, brother-in-law and nephews. My summer “vacation” was spent trying to keep up with (and frankly alive) two boys under the age of 4. Thankfully their parents didn’t totally disappear but I was basically on my own from breakfast through to bath and bedtime.

I’m fascinated with people watching and this past week, all that energy was put towards watching them and the events/people that surround them. I often pay particular attention to how they interact with tools and technologies that weren’t even a pipe dream when I was their age. Lucky for you, I’m going to share a few of my observations…