… after two very busy and stressful school semesters, I have an honours degree in biology with a computer science minor, and I’m very ready for summer vacation and doing things (like this) … for fun! how strange!
Things will be happening here … in the meantime, here’s a picture of spring coming into the kitchen
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
After a call out for help selling out from PZ Myers (Pharyngula, a biologist and popular liberal athiest blogger), I made these logos. The octopus is a (lightly modified) commons image from the a wikipedia page about the glass octopus, and the beard comes from PZ Myers’ profile picture (which I assumed was fair game).
If they get used for anything I’ll make them better, especially the font on the texty one, but the idea is there… both can easily be inverted to be put on white t-shirts instead of black.
Posted in crafting | Tagged photoshop | Leave a Comment »
I hadn’t realised how much everything had grown until I looked back at the pictures on here … for your viewing pleasure, here’s what photosynthesis has been doing for the couple months
Two weeks after planting (May 22nd, as pictured in the first post):
Five weeks after planting (June 15th):
Seven weeks after planting (July 1st):
As you can (maybe) see on the far left, the spinach is almost going to seed, so I harvested a bunch of it and made this delicious shrimp-spinach pasta:
Recipe:
Throw spinach and shrimp into a pan. When the spinach begins to wilt, add a couple tablespoons of butter (be generous!) with 1 clove minced garlic. When the butter melts, add the other herbs (I used about a tablespoon of each), salt and pepper to taste, and a couple pinches of flour to make it a bit saucy. Stir everything regularly. When everything is warm, put it on some pasta, and that’s it! Makes 2 servings, total time about 15 minutes (20, if like me, you spend 5 minutes just chopping garlic as tiny as you possibly can).
Posted in gardening | Tagged food, garden, photography, plants, projects | Leave a Comment »
I don’t wear a lot of jewelry, partly due to the fact that I periodically lose anything and everything smaller than the average kitchen appliance. I made this organizational device in an attempt to save at least some of my possessions from entropy, as well as to use some empty space on my long bathroom wall.
I’d seen some pictures of things like it floating around the intertubes, and hadn’t done any productive crafting for awhile, so I decided to wing it when I found an appropriately long and empty frame at the secondhand store. Apart from the frame, I used white paint (2-3 coats acrylic; it dried extremely fast), tacks, string, pins, and sticks. The sticks were from my parents’ backyard, and had been dried out for a few months in a shed (this is probably a good idea to get rid of bugs and to make sure the wood doesn’t shrink/warp post-use, although it wouldn’t matter too much for this project).
I cut the sticks to length and wrapped the ends with string, then used a tack to attach the string to the frame. There are probably better ways to do this (e.g. a staple gun), but I had tacks.
I left some nubs of stick to act as hangers, and also stuck in some straight pins (I arranged everything on the floor first to figure out how many hangers I needed). If you have heavier jewelry you might need small finish nails or something stronger, but if the pins are put in about half a centimetre and at an angle I find they’ll hold up most things.
The frame I bought already had a loop of wire at the top, and my wall already had a drywall screw in it, so hanging it up was pretty easy. You’d probably be okay with just a couple nails in the wall, but if your jewelry + frame = more than a few pounds, a drywall screw is probably a good idea.
Voila!
Posted in crafting | Tagged crafting, photography, projects | 1 Comment »
Yesterday I graduated with a BA in Environmental Studies. I’ll be back to the same university for another year to finish up a BSc honours in Biology (hopefully with a minor in computer science -robots!). Typically, there was every kind of pomp and tradition at the convocation ceremony, and lots of standing, but it wasn’t too long and my dad managed to get a couple pictures outside on the lovely campus before it started raining again.
Posted in school | Tagged life, photography, school | Leave a Comment »
For my birthday a few months ago, a good friend gave me some knitting needles and taught me how to knit. I made an (extremely thick and warm) eternity scarf, a hot water bottle cosy, and being couch-ridden I decided to get ambitious and make a laptop cosy with fancy criss-crosses:
A long way to go to laptop cozyness...
I’m following this pattern (my first time following a pattern), and I think those two inches took me about an hour each! I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a knitter, but I do think it’s fascinating to make fabric out of loops of string using two sticks. Who comes up with something like that?
Posted in crafting | Tagged crafting, knitting, photography, projects | Leave a Comment »
Since I created this site a few months ago in a flurry of well-intentioned self-motivation I’ve been avoiding it like the cutest guy in my seventh grade class. But it’s a long weekend, I’m stuck on the couch with a bad cold, and now that we’ve gotten a chance to hang out I think this relationship could really go somewhere! So to celebrate true love, perseverance, and vegetables, here’s some proof of my first major summer project (a container garden on my 3′ x 6′ balcony):
Awkward overhead view L to R: squash and peas in the boxes, tomatoes almost hidden, spinach, beets, and carrots in the smaller containers, geraniums and rosemary on the table, squash in the upright box, marigold in the basket, and onion in the stew-pot; herbs and flowers on the shelf.
On the shelf: herbs (chives, cilantro, basil, parsley), potatoes, flowers (viola, lavender, angelonia)
Almost all of the containers came from the thrift store or garage sales 1$ each or less. It’s very important to: 1. drill holes (2-3 per square foot) for drainage, and 2. use good potting soil (approx. half organic matter, quarter sand, and quarter perlite or something similar for good aeration and drainage) – I spent 20-30$ just on dirt. All in, I think I’ve spent about 75$ on this garden; if all goes well it will produce the food equivalent of at least 120$ (based on my spending about 20$ on vegetables per week, and a harvest period of 6-10 weeks). The flowers were chosen for their attractiveness to bumblebees (who are vitally important and currently disappearing) and their repulsiveness to pest insects.
It rained for almost a week straight last week; I was afraid everything would get waterlogged so our living room + tarp was co-opted as a nursery. At the time nothing had yet sprouted, and I was very pessimistic about the whole project … it was my first attempt growing anything from seeds, and I was so excited when it worked! Seeds are so cool!
Posted in gardening | Tagged garden, photography, plants, projects | 1 Comment »
I am a biology and environmental science student at a small liberal arts university where I also work in tech support. This blog is attempt to chronicle (and thereby motivate and organize!) various undertakings that are important to me, with the hope of learning more about myself and about the world around me by sharing with the vast and knowledgeable interwebs.
