Author: foxtongue

out of the house for summer

rubus strigosus

Mushrooms and bok choy simmering in butter and black pepper, the windows all open, sentences running through my mind, practiced words falling off my tongue like dry, pressed flower petals, to divide fractions, invert the second fraction and multiply, to multiply fractions, multiply the numerators, then multiply the denominators, reduce all to their lowest terms, attempting a memorization of everything I can before my tests this weekend. A gift, but terrifying. I am more hopeful than I was a week ago, but I can’t stop feeling doomed. According to the website, the five tests take seven hours and twenty-five minutes to complete. Doomed.

Tests aside, this upcoming weekend looks fun. Not only is there going to be a steampunk minicon at Barclay Manor on Saturday, World Cup is wrapping up this weekend, which means my neighborhood, Commercial Drive, will be closed to cars and open to PARTY!! Flags, shouting, free food, noise-makers, facepaint, dancing, music, and thousands of people gleefully losing their minds from how utterly freaking awesome it is that some guys in ridiculous socks kicked a ball around some other guys in ridiculous socks and between some posts. Wahoo! Seriously, though, it’s epic. EPIC. People travel from as far away as Portland to celebrate here. I came out of the last celebration with a frighteningly scarlet sunburn because my trusty SPF 75 was washed off by an intensely enthusiastic restaurateur shouting ITALIA! ITALY! ITALIA! and spraying the crowd with shaken bottles of champagne. Fwish. No more sunscreen. And rainbows everywhere. Did you know champagne makes especially pretty rainbows when misted through the air? Me neither, not until that party.

Also coming up: The Vancouver Folk Festival from July 16-18th, the Celebration of Light nee The Symphony of Fire, (USA July 21st, Spain July 24th, Mexico July 28th, and China July 31st), and a castrated Illuminares Lantern Procession on July 24th for those who want to try and cram thousands of people into a small building after parading their children through Crackton.

month long birthday sale very especially over

A gigantic warm and wonderful thank you to everyone who took part in my print sale and purchased a print, whether as a digital file or an actual physical object! I hope everyone loves what they recieved! In future, if you would like a print of one of my photos, please contact me directly or look through my Etsy shop, A Thread of Grace. (Almost all prints can be purchased in different sizes or mounted on sustainable bamboo panels.) If you would like something you don’t see listed there or if you like something there but don’t want to be bothered to join Etsy, no worries! I am more than happy to make a custom listing for you or to work with you directly using Paypal. Your business is delicious, especially as it helps keep food in my fridge.

Also, in case you’re local, remember that I’m also available to be booked for headshots, promo materials, and all sorts of various etceteras. Given my stunning lack of employment lately, I’m crazy ready, willing, and able.

why do I find numbers such a difficult language?

My GED testing dates are coming up, July 9/10. I am, in a word, anxious. I’ve been dutifully reading the numbers manual Becca loaned me, learning more about fractions and polynomials than ever before, but I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to bomb the math test. I’ve taken example tests for all the subjects and it’s the only topic I’m not getting 90% on.

Disaster update, more bad news

  • Documentary ‘Gasland’ shows flaming tap water caused by gas drillers ‘fracking.’ Industry speed dials its PR flaks. Most of the PR push-back on Gasland appears to be coming from an oil and gas lobby group calling itself “Energy In Depth” whose anonymous website lists other oil and gas lobby groups, like American Exploration and Production Council, the Indiana Oil and Gas Association and the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, as their members.
  • Toxic Oil Spill Rains Warned Could Destroy North America. The super toxic dispersants that have been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico could potentially chemically bind with oil in such a way that it could evaporate and fall as rain. I say potentially, but it’s apparently already started.
  • Scientists Warn Gulf Of Mexico Sea Floor Fractured “Beyond Repair”. Most important to note about Sagalevich’s warning is that he and his fellow scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences are the only human beings to have actually been to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak site after their being called to the disaster scene by British oil giant BP shortly after the April 22nd sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform.

    • excellent links and a job interview

  • Vintage Design: Hidden posters of Notting Hill Gate Tube station, 2010
  • Green Upcycling: High Line Park transformed a derelict elevated railway on NY’s Lower West Side into a mile-and-a-half-long “park in the sky”.

    I had an interview this afternoon for a job I’m sincerely hoping to land, an ace position with a respectable creative sector company, that requires such a perfect fit for my skills that it’s almost a little silly. Plus, bonus, it comes with room for independant thought. (The number of executive assistant jobs that have replied to me lately that should have advertised for a receptionist instead has really been getting me down. Note to potential employers: Personal assistants and executive assistants are two different things.) My only concern, as I know I’m well qualified and have no worries there, is that it’s been so long since I’ve done an interview that I might have come across as either incredibly dull or even a bit repetitive. I found myself agreeing with so much the interviewer had to say, after all, that I must have spent an entire ten minutes nodding my head and replying, “Right.” How.. pedestrian. How incredibly, incredibly bland. On the other hand, I did walk in with an asymetrical purple fedora decked out in six kinds of feathers, so there’s hope.

    I kid. Well, not about the hat, that really is my hat. But about my concerns. In my heart of hearts, my anxieties don’t stem from such superficial worries, but the very real chance that one of the other applicants will get the gig. This terrifies me. Not because being underemployed well and truly sucks, but because the position I interviewed for today is the first job to come along in a long time that I truly want. Not only would I be good at it, I would enjoy being good at it, I would thrive, and that’s precious in a day job. I hate having to constantly choose between doing something I appreciate for flaky employers who “forget” to pay me or steady yet tedious work that painfully reminds me that every minute on the job is a minute I will never get back. It grinds me down. If I’m fierce about anything, it’s that I want to add to the joy of the world, not the grime, and this looks like a chance to do that and get paid for it! Be still my beating heart! And yet, I am flawed and I doubt. What if I don’t get it? What if another person is better? Thankfully, they’ll be making a decision by Tuesday at the latest, so I don’t have long to wait.

    • also, it’s “tank top” not “tanky top”

    Dear Vapid Stoner Girl Talking on Her Cellphone Right Outside my Window,

    You are making me fear for the survival of multiple syllable words. “Like” is a not a comma, “pot” doesn’t have a built-in exclamation point, and ending every sentence with a question mark does not make it sarcastic or more clever.

    Sincerely,

    The Girl Old Lady Upstairs Trying Not To Laugh

    PS. Please, think of the children when you dress in the morning. They will discover puberty on their own. I promise. That is not a skirt, that is a belt.

    BP oil disaster update


    Oily waters breaking on Orange Beach, Alabama, more than 90 miles from the BP oil spill, cannot distract from the mess 4 to 6 inches deep on parts of the shore.

  • Video: A Possible Rain of Oil in Louisiana.
  • If It Was My Home, trying the spill on where you live for size. Worth revisiting as the disaster progresses. When I first took a look, it was half the size of what it is now. Also see their HOW TO HELP section.
  • BP Burning Sea Turtles Alive. A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP’s controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.
  • Judge who overturned drilling moratorium reported owning stock in drilling companies. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman issued a preliminary injunction today barring the enforcement of the president’s proposed six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, arguing that the ban is too broad. According to Feldman’s 2008 financial disclosure form the judge owned stock in Transocean, (which leased the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP prior to its April 20 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico), as well as five other companies that are either directly or indirectly involved in the offshore drilling business.
  • As oil continues to gush from a BP wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico, critics say the company has quietly broken ground on a controversial project in B.C.’s Rocky Mountains.
  • BP Is Pursuing Alaska Drilling Some Call Risky. BP’s project, called Liberty, has been exempted as regulators have granted it status as an “onshore” project even though it is about three miles off the coast in the Beaufort Sea. The reason: it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.
  • BP spill response plans severely flawed. Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP’s 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005. Under the heading “sensitive biological resources,” the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.
  • ‘Reasonably High’ Chance BP Files for Bankruptcy. The specter of Chapter 11 bankruptcy terrifies Gulf residents because it could allow BP to delay, or even avoid, paying billions of dollars to businesses and individuals affected by the Gulf spill.
  • Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it. In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.