Much thanks to all our friends who came out today, despite the near 100 degree temps. About 200 folks came by, pitched in, and planted the southern wall of The Armadillo. Much thanks to our fabu staff, and our friend Kate for all your hard work. Today was pretty sweet.

Planted

Garth Kemp & KABC Morning News was LIVE (all morning long) at Side Street Projects’ Mobile HQ. Featured the Spartan Trailers, lots of love towards The Armadillo & looming planting party on Saturday, plus the Bus. Lots and lots of bus footage. We actually mustered up our neighborhood favorites and other star pupils for a special early-morning Woodworking Bus class. 7 live remotes in all. Lots of fun. We’re so grateful for the opportunity. Big shout-out to Kate & Jennifer for their luv & support in making this happen.

Garth Kemp & the kids

Dueling Diesels

One strange & tragic side note: remember the other live lead story? The stabbing in Pasadena? Right. Across. The. Street. We watched their live shots in between our live shots… like, hit-it-with-a-rock close. This detail wasn’t mentioned once in the 2-hour broadcast.

When:
Saturday, July 18th, 11am-4pm

Where:
Side Street Projects Mobile HQ
730 North Fair Oaks Ave.
The NE Corner of Fair Oaks & Orange Grove
Pasadena, CA 91103

You are invited to a homecoming, planting party, and open house for The Armadillo: an actual FEMA trailer from Hurricane Katrina that MIT transformed into a mobile, sustainable, and vertical community garden. MIT awarded The Armadillo to Side Street Projects after a nationwide search. Side Street Projects just completed a 25-state tour to retrieve The Armadillo from MIT’s Boston campus and bring it back to it’s new home in Pasadena… with educational stops along the way in Washington DC, New Orleans, and Houston.

Bring your kids, grandkids, and friends to experience the latest addition to Side Street’s unique family of mobile community art classrooms. Join us for tours, family art workshops, benignities, and lemonade! Plus, you can help plant the very first crop of seasonal herbs in this utterly unique 21st century community garden, born from one of the biggest fiascoes in US history.

So Doug MacCash, the the art critic from the New Orleans Times Picayune, came out to visit us and The Armadillo on a crazy hot & stormy Sunday afternoon. Doug shot this awesome little video… far beyond our current in-house video-editing kung-fu (pardon all the hyphens).

Mission accomplished. We pulled into Side Street HQ tonight around 8:40 pm. Exhausted, but excited. Emily & Jon are going to sleep now, and play with their dogs for the first time in 25 days. Photos, videos, and more to follow this week, promise.

Hi folks. What a crazy, exhausting couple weeks. We’re looking so forward to coming back home. We had an intense and rewarding day Houston yesterday, preceded by 4 intense and rewarding days in New Orleans. Today is the home stretch, aka the voyage home. It’s like Apollo 13. We’ve spun around the moon, and gravity hurling us home. According to Google and Garmin, we’re only 21 hours away from LA… that’s 21 un-interrupted hours. Sadly, we’ve gotta eat, and get gas, and visit rest stops and such.

Kids from St. John's Church #5