My new favorite things

I love Poladroid! A free program that turns your pictures into polaroids. It's so much fun.

The Space Needle from the Hamilton Viewpoint at dusk.

Someone paragliding at Elings Park in Santa Barbara.

Iced tea with fruit! I have been drinking approximately 45 glasses a day.
Step 1: Brew some black tea, stronger than you would normally drink it.
Step 2: Fill a glass with frozen fruit (I like strawberries, peaches, and mangoes).
Step 3: Pour tea over frozen fruit. Cool.
Step 4: Drink up, then eat the fruit.
Step 5: Repeat.

Tea with fruit next to dead herbs.

My mountain bike finally came! It's bright green and yellow with pink grips and I love it!

My favorite birthday present. Thanks Dan!

One of my favorite people ever came to visit. Emily was in town for a wedding. She is so very popular that I only got to see her one night, but we had a great time. We drank some $5 martinis, caught up, and played bingo.

Facebook wives reunited!

I figured out the macro setting on my camera. I disturbed this spider's home when I finally got rid of the evidence of our failed container garden.

Sorry spider! Keep eating mosquitoes.

Summer Update

1.) I am still job hunting. I have applied for, on the low end, approximately 15 billion jobs. Out of all of these jobs, I did get a temporary unpaid internship. Woo! Actually, I am really enjoying it because I got to design my own project, which I will hopefully be able to use when I apply to PhD programs. I'm studying food access in an underserved community in south Seattle for ECOSS, an awesome environmental non-profit in the South Park neighborhood. I occasionally blog for them here. Go read it. My other job (the paid one!) is beginning to wrap up. While I'll miss the money and the intellectual thrill, I will not miss looking at the websites of nanotechnology
companies for hours and hours every day.


2.) My roommate got a dog. Her name is Harper Lee. She is adorable, even if she does whine when I am trying to sleep inappropriately late and she ate my favorite sunglasses. Her major life skills: being adorable to strangers, flopping, pulling the stuffing out of stuffed toys, eating peanut butter, wanting to eat land-otters (cats), sitting, snarfeling peoples' hair, and having allergies. Kelly and I also started a mini-container garden. Then we ignored it for like 2 months and everything died. Oh, well, we did get to make a couple of drinks with the mint.

3.) I just got back from the Third Annual Better Lover's Camping Trip. This year we went to Lake Wenatchee State Park. The weekend was filled with Date, Do, or Dump, the Alphabet Game, wizard staffs, and campfires. There was no actual book club book discussion because BLMVP and book chooser E-Thomps wasn't able to make it. Also, none of us had finished it. While the weather was not great, E-Schu and I decided to go swimming anyway. This is me running into the lake with the dogs. Don't be fooled by the sun; it was windy and cold. Michelle even came up from Portland and surprised us. She found us singing kareoke in a bar because, "It looked like the kind of place you guys would go to." I suffered minor facial lacerations and my beloved Chacos fell apart. The soles just peeled right off! Thank goodness for REI and its life time warranty. Free new Chacos!

4.) I graduated from Grad School! Luckily, I graduated into a wonderful job market, and I was immediately innudated with high paying job offers. Ha ha! Just kidding. Whatever. I don't have to start paying my loans until....October. In celebration, I went to Mammoth Lakes, California to enjoy the scenery, visit Yosemite, and do some mountain biking. Unfortunately, there was too much snow to do a whole lot of biking (they were still skiing in the bike park!) but I did manage to do a little. I only had to ride through one or two snow drifts. Yosemite was absolutely beautiful, but I wished we'd stuck to the less crowded east side of the park. Nothing like enjoying nature's wonders with 2,000 or so strangers. We did see a bear though. Everything is better when you see a bear. Unless it eats you. My favorite things about Mammoth Lakes were the Base Camp Cafe, eating 2 pounds of strawberries per day, the Mammoth Brewing Company ($7 growlers full of beer!), and the geology. Here are some pictures from the trip:

Seattle Summer

This is the kind of weekend wherein I am so, so glad I moved from Southern California to Seattle. We were going to have an awesome BBQ and then watch fireworks. However, the rain threw a little wrench in our plans.

Instead, we BBQed, ate inside and watched four movies (including both Sister Acts!). It did clear up enough to walk to the lookout and watch fireworks. Unfortunately, after about 7 minutes of fireworks, the smoke was so thick that the fireworks were basically invisible.

However, it did clear up today, so I walked down to Alki to do some work in a coffee shop with a beach view. I googled about 4 things, but, honestly I've mostly been making a playlist of bluegrassy songs.

10 of my favorite movies that don't pass the Bechdel test

The Bechdel Test: The movie must have
1. Two women characters...
2. Who talk to each other...
3. About something other than a man.

Here we go:
1. Rushmore directed by Wes Anderson
Possibly my favorite movie. There are exactly 2 (named) women characters who never talk. The Royal Tennenbaums passes, Fantastic Mr. Fox & Darjeeling Limited fail.

2. Almost Famous written & directed by Cameron Crowe
A semi-autobiographical tale of the writer's adolescence following rock stars and writing for Rolling Stone. The "band-aids" talk to each other, about men.

3. Toy Story directed by John Lasseter
Andy's mom and Little Bo Peep are female, but they don't talk. Toy Story 3 passes!

4. The Shawshank Redemption written & directed by Frank Darabont
As it's mainly set in a men's prison, failing the test is understandable.

5. Superbad written by Seth Rogan & Evan Goldberg
The two named female characters don't really interact, until the end and we don't know what they are talking about.

6. Real Genius starring Val Kilmer & a bunch of people who never made another movie
This one pains me! There is a girl genius integral to the plot, but she never talks to any of the other 2 women, who only exist to bang the male geniuses.

8. The 40 Year Old Virgin written & directed by Judd Apatow, the king of sensitive feminist movie scripts
Women (other than the always brilliant Jane Lynch (playing a part originally written for a man!)) are flat, secondary characters, good for banging.

9. Ace Ventura starring Jim Carey in his oscar nominated role
You think that there are two women who talk to each other about something other than men in this movie, but nope! SPOILER ALERT: Lt. Einhorn is a man!

10. Indiana Jones Trilogy directed by Steven Spielberg
In the Indiana Jones trilogy (what fourth movie?!), there are 3 major female characters. One is a prissy prissy princess who screams, just beause she is covered by giant insects. One is a doctor, but, on the downside, a Nazi. One is kind of a bad ass, but she still ends up needing rescued. Poor showing, Steven Spielberg. I'll have to think twice about naming my first son Indiana.

This week in my life

In two days, I will be wearing a similar outfit, complete with silly gold hood:




















In six days, I will be wearing a swimsuit, sitting in a hot tub looking at this:















Hopefully, the snow will be melted enough for me to do some biking.

All women are REAL women

I was watching this video, "This is what a real woman looks like", and I found myself getting really annoyed. On some levels, the video has a great message. I think the media's incredibly narrow view of what women are "supposed" to look like is incredibly damaging. The diet industry makes billion dollars a year. Women are supposed to constantly care about what they look like (and spend lots of money to look acceptable). The average age of a girls first diet is 8! There's no way this is right.

However, I think the "real women" backlash against the media is also damaging. All women are real women. Short, tall; fat, skinny, curvy, flat...we're all women. A different narrow box of acceptability isn't any better than the previous one.

Models that have been photoshopped into un-reality: not real women.




















Super gorgeous super-models (even if they're skinny): Real Women



















Supreme Court Justice Nominee Elena Kagan: Real Woman


















Dottie Kamenshek, member of the All-American Girls Baseball League: Real Woman



















Kerri Walsh & Misty May-Treanor, multiple Olympic gold medalists and all around bad-asses: Real Women



















James Franco's Japanese Pillow: Not a Real Woman


















Any questions?

Roller madness!

I went back to California for a conference at UCLA. I didn't take any pictures as I imagine it would be extremely boring for everyone, except maybe the 200 or so people there. I also spent time in Santa Barbara, where a group of us went to a roller derby bout.

It was very hot out, so I cooled down the lady-like way, with a parasol and some cold beer.

The home team, Mission City Brawlin' Betties stomped (rolled?) the visitors from Ventura.

The crowd watches with intense anticipation.

I make funny faces while Dan smiles politely.
Other things I did: put a new cassette and hot pink grips on my bike, rode my bike, fell off my bike (just a little), did work for my job, worked on another paper I am writing with a Bren professor, saw Drake (free and terrible), attempted to make pizza dough with moth-infested flour, successfully made pizza dough with non-moth-infested flour, bought two swimsuits, applied for full-time jobs, and napped.