Yelp

Okay, so today is the big day!  I'm going to stand up (with a group) and try to sound like I know what I am talking about in Swedish.  All other times don't really count compared to this one, cause it's a real presentation.

So, in the words of my favorite senior citizen ex-coworker:

"Buck up or Fuck up"

A bad-ass named Sara Grimes

http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/

Nerd heaven.  And she's hot.

If you need a control for who I consider a bad-ass, examine the following:

This is Ms. C. Martin.  She didn't practice Muay Thai or sport bruises on her face when we lived together in Brooklyn/Queens, but she was just as scary.

This here is Ms. Rinjee.  She already had a black belt when we met as teenagers, but the skull tatts came later.

Sara Grimes' status as a fighter is unknown to me, but there are in fact several qualifications for being a bad-ass when last I counted.

Mental Health Breaks aka Why Blog?

I had to take a mental health break from blogging after a manic week.  It lead to quite a few good things:

1.  Going to the ice rink with a new friend to teach her how to skate in the hopes of us both joining a hockey team in the near future.  This really wasn't a function of me not blogging, just one of getting out of the apartment.
2.  Skipping doing any work for my group project that will be presented on Friday.  This in itself was maybe not so good, but it lead to me rapidly searching through the faculty list at the University of Toronto iSchool this morning when our group met to plan.  That lead me to one lecturer's personal blog, to another lecturer's professional blog (from Vladivostok!), to his personal blog, to THIS.  Which I am currently enjoying so much that I propose:  Why read anything else or write anything with more than a blush of real information or ideas?

Here is a visual from the link that makes this post more purdy.

For a more hands on web experience, click here.
My score was 7 and it took me approx. 5 minutes.

AND if you click on this link you get taken to all the May 2010 posts from XKCD (see first link in this post) wherein you will find some simply amazing links to fan-analyses of the information contained in the first link.  And you will also read a post dedicated to sex/gender questions with regard to above link, which I found particularly interesting to read, in terms of the thought process, etc.

Coldest day of this half of the year, so far.  Gonna go check on my pumpkins, and then cuddle up in my blankets and read a book make a spreadsheet for comparing different LIS programs (Royal School of LIS in Denmark, University of Western Cape, and University of Toronto) for a presentation next week.

I guess I can't really complain.

A New Normal

UPDATE:  After seeing the IRL response to this post on Saturday by someone who is extremely clever and a genius and and and really gets a lot of my jokes/sarcasms in English, I feel the need to elaborate.  Baconnaise in no way qualifies as a normal addition to the often sorry world of consumer goods.  To eat what I'm trying to serve here, simply put a question mark at the end of the post title.

Dinner for one.

My ol' man is at a hockey game.  So this is how I'm doing Wednesday evening:

• Chick peas (again) cooked in my own spice blend of allspice, cinnamon, cayenne, garlic and sumac, and a lil water and olive oil.
• Haintari - a yogurt dip with lemon juice and carrots sautéed with garlic, parsley and dill.
• With ww pita and veggies.

This really looks like quite the hippy feast.  What goes around comes around, I guess.  I did do a search for "time lapse mushrooms" after the last post.  This is what I found:

Happy Equinox

I love autumn the most.  The first picture was taken yesterday on my way to the grocery store, the other two from previous years, although that mushy is a late august mushy, but that is basically fall here.

twyns

Ha.  No, we aren't twins, we just have the same initials!  We do look quite alike though, for an aunt and nephew.  This is us:

And here is lil hombre one month later:

Now he is almost 10 months old and weighs 25 lbs.  Yes, he is a giant and he gets to wear a helmet.  Lucky, huh?  I think this is a picture with some kind of therapist or doctor, or whoever outfitted him with that helmet.  He has to wear it 23 hours a day, for 3 months.  So I suppose that means I won't see him with it on ever, which is slightly disappointing.

Lil hombre is one reason I would move back.

Speaking of twins though, I once saw a documentary about twins/birth/life or something Discovery Health-ish (An old hobby.  Half-ton Man? Seen it.  The Girl with Two Heads? Not sure if that was the title, but I saw it.  Okay, I can't actually remember all the names of the crazy shit I used to watch, but if you look at the Discovery Health Channel's website, you get a pretty good idea.  If you don't care to look yourself, some choice titles on this week's schedule are The Boy Who Bit Himself, The Tiniest Girl in the World, and Is That a Baby in Your Pants?).  Now I know this is not unfathomable in these times, but this documentary about twins showed twins that were born years apart.  As in, some people saved the fertilized in vitro egg turned blastocyst.... oh wait, now I am totally confused about the nature of human reproduction.  Okay, so identical twins exist in this world, and they were born years apart.  So, lil petri dish fertilized eggy divided in it's glass and they saved one of the things for later.  Don't they usually harvest multiple eggs?  This must have been a conscious choice, as in "let's have twins but have them in different years."  I can't see how saving other embryos for later implantation would have been more difficult, unless of course, they had a crazy Octomom doctor who had no squabbles/squibbles (you know, those ideas we have called ethics) and went right ahead and implanted all of them.  Except the twin.

So lonely.

It sort of takes the twin out of being a twin.  I mean, shared genes are shared genes, but missing the shared developmental experience when you are twins just sort of blows my mind.  Not necessarily in a bad way, but it is blowing in here.

Triplets, on the other hand, are totally creepy.  Anything upwards in count, I mean, any group of more than three monozygotic siblings who are also human beings, are just too incomprehensible to me, so their creepiness is nullified.  Anyways, I met triplets once.  Three tall extremely blonde dudes, like white blonde.  We hung out with my friend Tim who had the hots for all three of them.  I think one of them left soon after I arrived, so I was really just hanging out with two of them, and it just felt so strange the whole time that there was a third one walking around somewhere in the world.  Maybe if he was there I would have gotten used to him?

UPDATE: redheaded sperm is banned

UPDATE dos: only a ginger can call another ginger "ginger"

Old time's sake

Helloooo, having a new blog is so much fun, but I have so much work to do today.  I have to:  clean up this disaster of an apartment; read about library design, the future of libraries and the functional divisions of libraries; prepare notes about librarianship as a vocation so I can speak at length about it in Swedish. And it's almost noon!  And it's sunny outside!

This post might not be wholly appreciated by all parties involved, but I just have to post this for old time's sake.  Or is it "old times' sake"?  I mean, for the sake of old times, because this makes me really happy.

Amerikuhh

There are a lot of times I wish I would just move home to the United States and give up on this pipe dream.  There are also a lot of times I am so thankful I live in Sweden.  Which are sort of like the times that I realize how much harder my life would be if I moved home:

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

http://gawker.com/5840024/ron-pauls-campaign-manager-died-of-pneumonia-penniless-and-uninsured

Now that I'm all forward-thinking 'n stuff, I think about having kids.  A lot.  A lot more than my anti-marriage, anti-reproduction self of the past would think possible.  So, how could I consider leaving the relative safety of this place for the possibility of not have health insurance for my kids over there?

Not gonna do it.  Above all, the message that I like to send home, with a mischievous and cynical twinkle in my eye, is that living here is easy.  It's efficient, and without paperwork, comparatively.  Welfare states are good for lazy people.  You just show up to the emergency room, or call and make an appointment.  It frees up your time so you can be more creative and start things like Spotify or The Pirate Bay.  Or be ABBA or The Knife or Lykke Li.  Or my acquaintance Lovisa and her brother Jakob:

Freedom is:  having nothing left to lose?  just being able to show up?  making music videos on islands in the Baltic Sea?

One pot chick pea quinoa goodness

There's something really beautiful about one pot meals.  I love the efficiency, and I love being able to make something so easy-feeling taste so damn good.  Or maybe I just love being lazy.

This chick pea quinoa pot is something I made a lot last winter, on days I was off of work (which was typically a weekday.  I worked a lot of weekends, and weekends are always a good time to put more energy into the basics).  Anyways, I plan to make this a lot this winter too, especially since I am back in school now, as it's a perfect lunch box meal.  It's also vegan.

• one can of chick peas, drained and washed
• one cup (or two dL) white quinoa (i like white because of the yellow color)
• coarse salt and peppar
• juice of half a lemon
• turmeric
• ground cumin
• green onions

Put everything in a pot, except for the green onions, add ratio of water for cooking the quinoa, bring to a boil, then simmer with a lid on till the quinoa is done.  Toss in the green onions and let rest a few minutes.  You can make this with or without olive oil.  Sometimes I like to drizzle the oil on afterwords, as I love the taste of uncooked olive oil.  It's probably good with butter too.

When I make this, I usually just eyeball the spices, so I'll have to update this post later on with the measurements next time I make it.  Also, it might be a lot of lemon juice for most people.  In my world, almost everything tastes better with lemon juice in it.

UPDATE: I think most people don't include a used spoon in pictures of food they post, but that's what you get here.

hehehe. hehehe. redux

This makes me happier to be alive, and not because I think I'm cooler than they are.

besides not appropriating native culture, this tumblr sort of makes me ask myself what the fuck I've been doing lately.
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/spirithood?before=1315365930

Look at this new picture I got at a second hand store.  I love it.  I stared at it for maybe 10 minutes before I decided if I was really going to buy it or not.  Even though it looks good to me, it makes me a little sad.  For reasons too convoluted to explain in words, (but more likely just something about birds and flocks and feathers - although my interpretation hasn’t much to do with outward appearances)  it reminds me of how lonely I have been these last few years.  Having moved far, far away, I had to make new friends; anyone that I hang out with now is a new friend.  I live too far away to see anyone from my previous life regularly.   Of course that does have advantages as well as disadvantages.

The loneliness I feel here goes in cycles of pain and relief.  There is also resentment.  I feel irrational a lot.  I cannot just plug new people into empty slots, yet sometimes, that is what I need.  The empty spaces have to be filled, and I think that takes years.  

I want to be included and I want to include others.  I want to depend on my new friends and I want to be dependable.  To not have philia here is what I lament.

Winter is coming.

Seriously though, where I live, winter lasts almost 8 months, and just a few days into September you can feel that the man who lives in the sky and controls everything has flipped the switch.

The phrase “winter is coming” is also the motto of the House of Stark, the family of Winterfell, for those who do not yet know the craziness that is Game of Thrones.  I say that with a touch of sarcasm, I do.  I am an avid fantasy/sci-fi reader, and although I like GofT, and am amused by it, it doesn’t have the depth of character analysis that I prefer.  On the other hand, although the characters are all quite thinly described, they are done so in a rather defined way.  There is an economy to Martin’s writing that is pointed and which moves swiftly along, but somehow still seems to be… thorough?? I guess I have a hard time describing what I mean… it is an effective style, that does not feel empty, despite it’s thinness.  Maybe that is why he is so popular?  

After the big hubbub caused by What’s Her Name, from the NYTimes, (aka Ginia Bellafante) who wrote a universally-accepted-as-lazy/stupid review of GofT, (the tv show), I was found myself in a long discussion with a man in my town known as “The Bull.”  He hadn’t seen the show or read the books, and I was trying to express the big deal-ness of it, and of What’s Her Name’s comments about the sex scenes in the show and how they are only there to draw in female viewers (and how no women she knows read or watch fantasy/sci-fi).  I, of course, was miffed by that summation, being a female, and being attracted to fantasy/sci-fi for reasons other than sex (although of course, I’ll take anything with a dash of sex on it, or in it).  SO, in a grand gesture for the whole of this weird northern city, which is stuck in an eddy of prudish sex-negative pseudo-radical feminism (imho), The Bull asked:  ”are the sex scenes feminist sex scenes?  like feminist porn?”

LOL.  

Beginnings!

Yesterday I packaged seeds from some heirloom tomatoes.  Tomato seeds have to be fermented first to get rid of the gel sack surrounding them. 

Likewise, my own gel sack of nervousness must be done away with because today is the first day of school!  I have already been to school though, 7 on-and-off years of it, much of which I made a royal mess of.  So now is my chance to do things right.  The end goal: to be a librarian or archivist, and to have been a damn good student during the process.  I’m 30 years old and finally ready to own my decisions.  No parent or other sort of bully has forced me into this education, I did it on my own.

(That sounded like more of a condemnation than it was.  Truth is, I’ve always been a bit of a pushover, letting the desires of others dictate my decisions.  I’ve swallowed their wills, tried to incorporate them as my own, and thus neither succeeded very well or formed much of a will of my own.  And… my history also comes with some very strong-willed characters.)

A parallel metamorphosis to grabbing life by the balls has also shown itself to be a 180 degree shift in time perspective.  I’ve focused so much on the past, almost only on the past, and now I find myself looking forward.  I’m interested in creating, as well as is possible (which maybe isn’t very well) life experiences that are to come.  

The timeframe for all this is a little unclear, but it sure is serendipitous, what with starting school over again, wanting to have kids etc.   Or wait, maybe that’s just part of growing up.  I’ve already noticed I am miraculously slow at that; I even look a lot younger than my age.  ANYWAYS, although the time frame is unclear, I know exactly when I was conscious of this change in perspective, and that was on August 30th, sometime in the morning, when I saw this lil ditty: 

In other news, last night me and my man were talking about the dent that some people have above their ass crack.  We discovered that it is called the coccyx, and when doing an image search (uhhh, yes, i wanted to see pictures of other people’s coccyxi.  Or cocci?) the only real picture of a coccyx was on a cadaver.  In fact, it was on the cadaver of an adult male with the knees pulled up so the body was closest to, let’s say: a diaper changing position.  

With all respect to the kind and rational man who decided to donate his body to science after death, I am really glad I am not a doctor.  I wonder if that donation also included a provision which allowed photos of his cadaver to be google-able?  I guess there probably is a wide world of cadaver pictures to be found from the comfort of one’s home, now that I think about it, but I don’t think I will ever EVER get that image out of my head.