Impulse

My new favorite toy is a small para­sail kite I’ve named Marcel. He’s a lit­tle kite that rolls up to about the size of a coke-can and fits in the satchel I carry every­where. I don’t know why I named him Marcel, nor why I might think it’s male, but I do know that it’s a whole lot of fun.

The idea is sim­ple: to have a tiny kite I can have on me all the time and thus be able to fly it wher­ever I am, any time the weather is good — at a park, on the deck of a ferry boat, or even down­town (hey, if the wind’s right). It’s a ran­dom act of play­ful­ness. Or whimsy.
Thus inspired, I headed down to the Gasworks Kite Store and found the per­fect thing — a 2 foot parafoil kite that’ll fly in as lit­tle as 6mph of wind and only costs $18. I’ve been car­ry­ing it for a few days now. Marcel’s first flight was at Seattle’s Gasworks Park where he flit­ted amongst a swarm of remote con­trolled glid­ers. A few days later while shoot­ing pho­tos down­town, a strong off-shore wind inspired me to go down to the water­front and fly the kite off the end of a pier amus­ing sev­eral young passers-by. I’ve found that Marcel really needs very lit­tle wind to fly about 10 feet off the ground mak­ing urban fly­ing easy.
It’s delight­fully imp­ish hav­ing this lit­tle aero­dy­namic blast of color tucked away, ready to deploy against Seattle’s grey skys at a moment’s notice. It’s purely play­ful — won­der­fully friv­o­lous; a per­fect anti­dote from the demands of Productivity. I had for­got­ten how much fun can be had in sim­ple plea­sures like watch­ing Marcel bob & dance in the sky.
So, I highly rec­om­mend­ing that you plunk down a twenty and get your­self one.