June's Links to Love

Artsy:

Sun in a jar!

Art for Harry Potter fans.

DIY sprout-a-couch.

Egg carton crafts.

Don't miss these epic photos.

Make a modern paper lamp.

Need people to sketch? How about your Facebook friends?

Allover stencils.

Modern house numbers (and cheap).

Make-your-own modern firepit!

I was recently thinking I'd like my silverware to be color-coded. I didn't think of this.

Colorful doors.


Mormon:

Contribute to the giant Jesus statue fund! ;)

See where Mormons fit in the American religion income chart.

Kind of weird, but here's MoTab doing a surprise street performance:




Literary:

What should I read next?


Yes, I Love Technology:

Google Calendar now has appointment slots!

It took long enough to get a Blogger "Blog This" button for Chrome.

10 gadgets for your GMail. Here's the whole directory of Google gadgets.


Random:

The real way to go non-white-water kayaking.

Only Jake Scott would unicycle with a stroller.

Shoes I'm tempted to get. I also crazily like these rose ones.

Why I can't make mom friends:





93-year-old still teaching ballet.

Amusing ultrasound pics.

U2 has a fan cam. If you've been to a concert, find yourself here.

Less lawns.

Why are amazing stories on talent shows so touching? I don't know. But here's a Korean one:



A recipe for one of the best meals I've ever bought (at Wagamama's in London).

The USDA's "My Pyramid" has been replaced by "My Plate."

Ever tried a room escape game?

Beauty of Mathematics:



Anyone heard of Snapdeal.com, India?

Sleep process with a new baby.

Richard Dreyfuss reading Apple user agreements.

Beautiful bike culture:



Boredom busters for kids.

Everyday things you didn't know had names. (Sica: petrichor.)

Car salesman lie detector:

Paronychia

I'm sure you want to know all this.

Every time I've mentioned that I think I have a toe infection, people say they've never heard of it. Well, neither have I. And every time I look up my symptoms, it is suggested that I get help with an ingrown toenail. But that's not the problem!

I wake up every morning with the toe part right below my toenail swollen and painfully throbbing, and it gets hot again at random parts of the day. No amount of digging at the nail is going to affect that part of the toe. And after yet another try at going to a doctor for the never-ending problem in January and not getting relief like I was promised, I again scoured the internet.

And I found that there really is something like what I'm describing. It's called Paronychia. Sounds better than "toe infection," right?

Now I just want to know: has the problem cleared up for a while each time I was on antibiotics and I just didn't make the connection? And does topical cream really help with something that seems so deep? And lastly, how come the internet and I often seem to be better at diagnosing me (and sometimes treating--especially in the case of this lame toe) than doctors?

Cork Oak Tree

I know this sounds dumb, but I've been dying to know what this cool tree is that I saw recently. The bark was unlike anything I'd ever seen. I even went back weeks later to take pictures and gather specimens, hoping I could identify it using the internet, but I had no luck.







And then, simple as that, I showed my friend a picture and she knew right off what it was. Cork oak. Awesome.

That Moment

A moment came when I could feel that we were no longer jousting with each other, that things between us had already been settled. In thinking about this moment now, I am tempted to use the traditional language of love. I want to talk in metaphors of heat, of burning, of barriers melting down in the face of irresistible passions. I am aware of how overblown these terms might sound, but in the end I believe they are accurate. Everything had changed for me, and words that I had never understood before suddenly began to make sense. This came as a revelation, and when I finally had time to absorb it, I wondered how I had managed to live so long without learning this simple thing. I am not talking about desire so much as knowledge, the discovery that two people, through desire, can create a thing more powerful than either of them can create alone. This knowledge changed me, I think, and actually made me feel more human. By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well. My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact centre of the world.

-pg. 232 of The Locked Room (in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy)

Real Backyardigan Kids

Sadie's favorite position in the hammock in Redwood Corner:



(And she'll always remark on the "phone," which you realize later means "fern.")


James's favorite gardening tool:




(With which he'll make "nests" or "tornadoes" out of weeds.)

Women in 19th Century China

A few months ago, I read a book called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, leant to me by a friend. I learned fascinating things about 19th century Chinese women's culture.

There were really detailed accounts of foot-binding. I never knew that the toes were curled under the foot until the toe bones broke and then further until the foot bones broke. The girls started around 7 years of age at the latest, 3 at the earliest, when they were kept in the upstairs "women's room" and made to walk around with their blood and pus-filled bandages. Who knows if the number is correct, but the book said one in ten girls died of complications of foot-binding. Who even came up with such a painful tradition and how in the world did it spread?



I also heard the first I'd ever heard about nüshu, a script created by and known only by women. Cool. This writing is the most simplified written form of Chinese ever concocted--it is phonetic instead of having each symbol stand for something. Women made contracts with friends so they would be committed to each other for life, and they wrote back and forth to each other.



It was interesting to see how much of women's lives were directed by religion and traditions that seem rather old-fashioned and superstitious coming from my perspective--so much was based on numbers, for example.

And to close, here are some favorite quotations:

• "I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one and the same." (3)
  
• "We women are expected to love our children as soon as they leave our bodies, but who among us has not felt disappointment at the sight of a daughter or felt the dark gloom that settles upon the mind even when holding a precious son, if he does nothing but cry and makes your mother-in-law look at you as though your milk were sour? We may love our daughters with all our hearts, but we must train them through pain. We love our sons most of all, but we can never be a part of their world, the outer realm of men. We are expected to love our husbands from the day of Contracting a Kin, though we will not see their faces for another six years. We are told to love our in-laws, but we enter those families as strangers, as the lowest person in the household, just one step on the ladder above a servant. We are ordered to love and honor our husbands' ancestors, so we perform the proper duties, even if our hearts quietly call out gratitude to our natal ancestors. We love our parents because they take care of us, but we are considered worthless branches on the family tree. We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another. As happy as we are in our natal families, we all know that parting is inevitable. So we love our families, but we understand that this love will end in the sadness of departure. All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality." (59)
  
• "But the love between a pair of old sames is something completely different. As Madame Wang said, a laotong relationship is made by choice. While it's true that Snow Flower and I didn't mean all the words we'd written to each other in our initial contact through the fan, when we first looked in each other's eyes in the palanquin I felt something special pass between us--like a spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. But a single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love--true-heart love--must grow. Back then I didn't yet understand the burning kind of love, so instead I thought about the rice paddies I used to see on my daily walks down to the river with my brother when I still had all my milk teeth. Maybe I could make our love grow like a farmer made his crop to grow--through hard work, unwavering will, and the blessings of nature. How funny that I can remember that even now! Waaa! I knew so little about life, but I knew enough to think like a farmer." (60)
• "'I am thirty-eight years old,' Aunt said, not with sympathy but with resignation. 'I have lived a miserable life. My family was a good one, but my feet and my face made my destiny. Even a woman like me--who is not so smart or beautiful or is deformed or mute--will find a husband, because even a retarded man can make a son. Only a vessel is needed. My father married me to the best family he could find to take me. I cried like you do now. Fate was crueler still. I could not have sons. I was a burden to my in-laws. I wish I could have a son and a happy life. I wish my daughter would never marry out so that I would have her to hear my sorrows. But this is how it is for women. You can't avoid your fate. It is predestined.'" (78)
• "Uncle Lu was the ultimate master, but I secured my place by being the first daughter-in-law and then by giving my husband his first son . . . For these reasons I have told the young women who have married into the Lu family, and the others I eventually reached through my teaching of nu shu, that they should hurry to have a baby boy. Sons are the foundation of a woman's self. They give a woman her identity, as well as dignity, protection, and economic value. They create the link between her husband and his ancestors. This is the one accomplishment a man cannot achieve without the aid of his wife. Only she can guarantee the perpetuation of the family line, which, in turn, is the ultimate duty of every son. This is the supreme way he completes his filial duty, while sons are a woman's crowning glory. I had done all this and I was ecstatic." (151)
  

Hairdy Hair Hair Hair

I like trying out new hairdos. So when I saw one I thought was cute, I decided to try sporting it at a wedding reception I went to with a friend. I thought my hair looked pretty good. See?



And then I arrived at the wedding reception and realized that I had the exact same hairdo as . . . the bride. Oops. I hope she didn't notice. And at least she was blond.

Christina Courtin

Loving this sound:

Benjamin Button's Wise Words

Redwood Forest Steam Engine

Apparently there are only two running steam engines in the U.S. We went on one that goes through the Redwood Forest. Sweet.

Satisfying, Though Seemingly Worthless, Projects

I put my enormous music, movies, and books lists in spreadsheets showing availability at libraries and online sources.

Then I finally got around to finding album covers for every album in my iTunes (the program was able to find a lot, but I had to manually find about 500 of them).

Finally, I took a whole Saturday to go through my folders and files. I merged file backups and deleted and created files and folders with four or five Finder windows open at a time so I could drag things to where I wanted them.

The number of items in the Trash after the project? 34,000.

Even the pain in my wrists was worth it for the satisfaction of seeing a clean desktop and having an organization process that enables me to know where everything is without having to search.

Michelle Glauser, Discount Landscaper

Paul to me: "You should start a landscaping company."

Time for yet another shift in career?

By procuring root barriers, trees, weed cover, and workers (myself included), and by finding a cheaper garden supplies place for the bark and rocks, the total cost of a recent yard project for Paul and Amy was at least $4125 cheaper than the estimated price. How happy to accomplish such a huge task so successfully. :D

New trees that will eventually provide shade to a window-filled kitchen:




A cited-by-the-city park strip before I worked on it:




Same park strip after, with weed barrier, landscaping rocks, a cleaned-up weedy hill, and bark chips:




Weed-surrounded, empty garden boxes (this picture is actually from 2010, so it's not quite true to the pre-project situation):




Turned into this, with weed barrier, bark chips, landscaping gravel, and a thriving and varied crop:




Yay!

Hair Diaries 2011 Part I

To all you people who have hair that isn't super thin and straight, praise the heavens right now. I've been wanting to do something with my hair for years. Truly! I snuck this picture of one of my students at the Universität Leipzig almost two years ago:



(I love that intense German swoop.) But have I done anything? No. People probably presume that I just like having long hair. The truth is, the thin, straight, bland-colored nature of my hair discourages me from moving in any direction.

Then, in January, a friend told me about something called a digital perm. After I discovered this picture on Google Images, the wheels wouldn't stop turning:



The process was invented by a Korean company. Doesn't it look great?

I finally called to schedule a digital perm for myself a few weeks ago, after finding some care tips and another great results picture here. But, sadness. They told me on the phone that it usually works only on rough Asian hair. They told me to come in anyway and they'd take a look at my hair's texture. One look and they said, "Sorry, not gonna work." (I kind of knew that. I do have super fine hair.)

So I went for the second-best thing. I decided to get a body wave. These are the pictures I brought with me:







But no matter how much I insisted that these images were labeled as body waves, the beauticians told me that hair will only look like that after being dried and curled with an iron. Boo hoo.

They said it would look more like the following, which I labeled "grody":



I decided to get a body wave anyway, if only to use it for body and not for the curl. What an interesting experience. The place I chose was a most diverse beauty college. Two girls were assigned to work on my hair. The Indian girl had trouble understanding me, and the Vietnamese girl couldn't understand the Indian girl or me.

It took forever. And I don't like what it did to the coloring of my hair--the contrast between my roots and the darker ends seems (to me at least) even more extreme and spotty. A Chinese teacher started combing out my hair after the whole process, and I thought, "Yikes, I don't think she's supposed to be doing that." Luckily, another teacher leapt across the room and said, "Don't comb it, you'll loosen the curl!"

But at least I didn't pay as much as I would have anywhere else, my hair does have more body in it, and I got two shampoos/head massages.

My hair kind of feels like hay now, in a positive way, of course. I haven't even tried doing it curly, because I don't want to look disgusting. Maybe the next step would be some cutting options, like these:











Even so, I often think I'm almost done with the long hair thing. How about one of the following?





One thing though: bangs don't work with me. And even these hairstyles (with or without bangs) wouldn't look the same with my kind of hair and my lazy hair-doing habits. Meh. My sister Amy does a pretty great job with her similar hair, though. Sometimes I think I need to stop lusting after the green grass on the other side and just accept what I have. After all, Ellen Page can pull off thin hair, and I think she's cute.



But before I reach that point, let me go write part II . . .

Pinterest

I am loving the beauty of collected images at Pinterest.



Here is my Pinterest account.

Cheese Making

Did you know with one gallon of whole milk and a few other ingredients (two of which are a little hard to get, namely rennet and citric acid), you can make three kinds of cheese?

My friend Lindsay and I tried it. See?







DIY mozzarella instructions.
DIY ricotta instructions.
DIY Norwegian gjetost instructions.

Waffle-Ironed Chocolate Chip Cookies

With no oven for a few weeks, we were delighted to discover that it is possible to make a plethora of food items using a grill (like a chicken and biscuits) and a waffle iron.

Chocolate chip cookies? No problem:





(Anyone with that many stripes and a cookie in each hand should look that happy, don't you think?)