04-01-11

Vote!

My mom is in the Carnegie Photo Contest, please go vote for her!

03-21-11

You put the lime in the coconut…

There is something about guacamole, scratch that, there is something about the feeling you get while eating guacamole and after eating guacamole and while rolling around in great delicious, green slimy clouds of guacamole and rubbing guacamole in your hair and into your pores that makes guacamole amazing. Guacamole in and of itself isn’t the most amazing thing in the world (damn near it though) but when you have been laying in bed, fevered for a week and the only two things you were obsessing about were 1.) babies and 2.) guacamole, guacamole becomes like air.

Somehow in my delirium I was negotiating with myself over guacamole: “WAKE UP! If you lay in that position the guacamole will NEVER come. Dear god, MOVE! MOVE!” and so I would wake up in sweat drenched fear and drag myself to the other corner of the full size bed (read: 5 inches) and collapse again, hands clenched in yearning for my dear guacamole. Guacamole danced in front of my eyes. I’d roll over, grab my guacamole-gator-aid and become dismayed when it tasted like blue.

At one point I got a banana. It was not guacamole, but since it came self contained, I could spend two hours preparing myself to leave the bed and venture to the kitchen, grab the banana-y goodness and then return victoriously to my bed toting my treasure. I’d collapse in weakness from the journey and wake up a few hours later to eat said banana. Bananas, contrary to popular belief (read: shell’s fevered mind), are not made of guacamole. Dismay.

7 days.

Today I got better.

Just like that. Poof. Better.

So I padded up to the grocery store looking like a drowned rat: 15 pounds lighter and wet from the shower. Blue veined, grey skin taunt over skeletal hands and I bought tomatoes. I came home and made guacamole. I lie, the angels made guacamole through my hands. Mortals are not able to make things this good. It was miraculous. I ate my damn guacamole and it tasted like baby kisses and sunshine on a cloud of magical unicorn down.

03-11-11

Middle School

The shark in all of its cold rubbery glory sat in stark juxtaposition against the slate black table top. The smell of formaldehyde wafted through the background of my memory as the day drifted back to me. He was hitting on me. Over the nauseating task of dissecting the baby nerf shark, this kid actually had the audacity to be flirting with me. But that was years ago. These tables looked a lot bigger than they do now.

Science labs freak me out. I’m sitting in one now watching my sister and her friends hunched over binders and iPods giggling as I pour over the news of the Japanese earthquakes and impending Tsunamis on the west coast. It was “bring your awesome sister to school day.” it was hazing day for parents.

When I survive, I will get a sticker.

02-25-11

Transient Gardening

Since I’ve given up on the pack-of-wolves mentality of the UH crowd, and beside the fact that it is obviously “trend” now (ick) I’ve decided to change my tune. Not wanting to associate oneself with TREND , I have devised a new name for the category (since everything can be anything anymore it seems): transient gardening.

I don’t technically own any of the gardening I’ve done the past few years. I create gardens for other people. I come, I dig, I conquer and I plant. Then I walk away. Seems transient to me. Purveyor of plantery: observe, I am not a plant, therefore I am also not a geek.

Some of the newest shots from the Houston Transient Garden:

The End. ~Shell

02-20-11

3pm with a pick ax

Today, at 3:00pm I was sitting in the dirt, picking up chunks-o-palm that I had just obliterated with an ax and it all came to me. You all are completely right: friends, strangers, even my mom. It’s weird. I went along with it for all these years just because of an article I read in Cosmo when I was twelve.

I totally hate meat.

02-17-11

Frakit, I am NOT an Urban Homesteader

I used to consider myself one, at one point. Now I live vicariously through other’s gardens. Like the lemon grass in the water glass I left in Pittsburgh for my mom, or the new landscaping in my dad’s front yard. My sister looked at me like I was insane when I pointed to the rosemary next to pansies next to roses and told her she could eat most of it.

Today I realized I’m not.
In my heart I’m still a gardener, and gardeners are versatile. Much like my Grandfather was and his grandfather before him, be it a farm or a plant in a tin can on a window ledge. Take one Polish farmer and an equally bullheaded plant and you have the beginnings of a beautiful relationship. That relationship is a very different thing than the beast that I saw today.

The point is, Urban Homesteading/Garden/Agriculture has been around for ages. Today I found out the Path to Freedom people trademarked the term “Urban Homesteader” and have been hammering down on bloggers and business owners. The irony is that the majority of their success is from the people who they are now turning against. The movement spread because of bloggers, so their success (THEIRS, not the movement. That started during the agricultural revolution) spread because of the same people they are oustracizing now. They have forgotten their community.

The community is turning against them
I’m watching the social movement take place now: a facebook page with 1500 people in 24 hours. Twitter trended #dervaes and #urbanhomestead, even the petition that I started. The first few hours were intense, things were moving forward, we were all coming together to define what we felt and share our gardens. Change was in the air. Our fellow homesteaders who were attacked would soon be able to talk about their passions again.

Then something changed.
People stopped thinking, they lost track of what the community was and of the spirit that brought us together. The knee jerk reactions started. The name calling, the religion bashing and the energy of the community ignited into flames with the intensity I would imagine gasoline on a lake has. People began spiting anger in there posts, others started taking personal credit as opposed to acknowledging the community movement as a whole. People were quick to add their two cents but no one offered up solutions. The group started focusing on benchmarks and even benchmarks could not motivate them to act productively. I filtered rage out of the comments of the petition.

We didn’t try to rebuild, we didn’t try to help those whose accounts had been lost to the great and powerful FbOz. They called them nut-jobs, said they wouldn’t budge but nobody tried. They didn’t care about change, they focused on publicity and growth. BB fueled the fire. We became them.

Then it became a political statement about the Electronic Frontier Foundation and  C.O.I.C.A. and that is where I broke.

It was hostility. It was manic. and with one swift “unlike” I left.

I walked passed the pansies today with their giant smiling faces tipped towards the sun. This is what it’s about, call it what you want to call it.

02-11-11

Maslow Was Wrong Part 1: Bacon Theory

I’ve been spending a lot of time with dead guys lately. I almost enjoy their company more than the live ones at the moment. I’ve been playing over Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in my head and things are just not adding up. Then I figured it out: Bacon!

Bacon trumps safety. Let me explain via this amazing little graphic here:

At it’s basic form, the theory states that before you can move up a level, the needs below must be met (unless you are a metamotive), but this had me thinking about safety. The basic principles of motivation is that as humans, we actively seek out pleasure (stimulus fulfilling need) and actively avoid pain (stimulus threatening need).

Hence the problem with safety: I will run across the highway before stopping to bite into that juicy hamburger in my hand (unless it had bacon, hence the name). That negates it. My safety concern for my body superseded my concern for not dying of starvation. This displays a possible hierarchy of functional concerns as well, but that is for another time. (I’ll call that one the “Eggs Theory”…which comes first: caloric or procreative concerns?) I get it, perhaps he was trying to adopt a Hobbian “we’re concerned with society and our role in society due to safety/nasty-brutish-short reasons” but that still wouldn’t be a need, it’s an effect of a cognitive response.

Safety is bypassing a threat to an already existing need. Safety concerns should fall somewhere in the plane of its corresponding need (safety of health would be at the functional level for example). More complex safeties like “safety of employment” would fall under the level of its more basic constructs like security of food, clothing, home or security to provide the basic functional needs for our families or security of our “super pimp in our mad corner office” status (aka. self-esteem).

02-10-11

How to kick a stalker off your blog

I decided to be a jerk to San Diego (nothing new there) and kicked his butt off of my blog a week or two ago. When he brought up The Madness, this is what he saw:

That’s right, I redirected him to the Wikipedia entry on stalking.

He has since sent me a text message pleading his case, and since my pageviews took a noticeable hit with him gone (and with it my self esteem, sigh) I decided to take him back. It was all done in jest, but here is how it is done for those of you out there who have masochistic friends you like to beat up on. It’s really quiet simple:

1. You need their IP address. In wordpress you can find it under the comments section if they left you comment, or there are other ways of doing it, but I’m kind of lazy and really didn’t want to go through the trouble.

2. .htaccess, grab yours or make one.

3. add a mod_Rewrite, replacing the ## with the IP address, formatted accordingly. You can replace the URL with whatever you wish.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^###\.##\.##\.##

RewriteRule \.php$ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^###\.##\.##\.## [OR]

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^###\.##\.##\.##

RewriteRule \.php$ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking

02-10-11

Vintage Find!

Here is a certified original Shell design Circ. 2002. I was googling my name,  cleaning up my rep and came across this on a lone angelfire.com site. Swoon. There was a flash file that went with. I will have to try to track it down one of these days. enjoy!

01-31-11

Dating = 404

Errand running with Darc yesterday, we were on our way to the mall and taking quizzes on her phone (she was also introducing me to pop music, have you heard of this Ke$ha chick? yikes). At the end of the “What is your dating style?” quiz, I found out that I needed to carve out time to actually accomplish more dating before it could give me an answer. That was it’s answer: You are too busy to date which was ironic b/c it didn’t ask me anything about my time management skills. It asked me what I do when I go to clubs (yeah, right) and how I hook up with the cute guy from work (once was enough to learn why they say not to do that) and something about online dating profiles.

That’s when I found myself thinking I needed to schedule in time to look at my schedule and see where I could schedule in dating time (yes, scheduling time to schedule)…I knew I had a problem.

What I needed to do was learn how to focus and say no. So that is what I spent the day doing: focusing and saying no. First I focused: goals, needs, wants, hobbies. I made my K.O. lists. Then I started weeding it out: no to new clients, no to new dates (with people I was unsure about, trust your gut), no to distractions. Weeding days always make me exhausted.