We'll call it a "series"

Posting in "series" seems to be all the rage these days in the blogosphere. So, it seems appropriate that I join the trend in my sometimes I post and sometimes I don't sort of way. And truly, my series is more of a series of re-posts than anything.

A number of years ago I started a wordpress blog because I'd heard that wordpress was pretty cool and I felt the need to have separate blogs for food and for books and for everything else. I still think that wordpress is pretty cool, but I've realized that one blog is really almost more than I handle.

Last year for one of my classes I took my wordpress blog and completely redid it so that it now functions as an online portfolio. Feel free to visit it and check out the cool things I do (or not, whatever). When I revamped that blog I kept all the blog posts that I had posted in their own neat little tab. All the posts were book related and were pretty interesting. I've since decided that they don't really go with the rest of the content of my website, but since they are interesting and kind of cool I've decided to repost them here so that you all can enjoy them.

As a disclaimer. When it seems like super old news, that's because it is.

To kick this series off I present to you:

A reference desk made entirely out of used books!

And there are even more photos of this desk here.

Book dominos

I watched this video today and thought it was pretty awesome. I will admit though that I watched it on a computer without sound, so I have no idea what kind of explanation/audio the video has. I'm sure something informative. But it's still a cool movie. Way to go Seattle!

More Gardening Tales

I commited the number one gardening crime this weekend. I pulled my tomato plants up by their roots to see if they were growing. Now you all can gasp and sputter and wonder why I would commite such a heinous (and obviously stupid) crime. Well, I had some (questionably) good reasons for digging up my plants.

My tomato plants were grown from seed by someone else. And they had been grown in some kind of peat-y thing that had a sort of fabric-y thing surrounding the roots (which made them super easy to transport) and I'm sure is the best way to grow seedlings. For whatever reason it didn't occur to me that the fabric-y thing would be a problem for the roots, so when I planted them, I just planted them as they were.

A week or so after I planted my tomatoes I was attempting to repot a couple of my indoor plants and one I was trying to split one of them into two pots I discovered, among other things, that it was planted in styrofoam (this is a story for another day). While I was trying in vain to split the two halves of the plant I broke up the roots and generally gave the plant a good shock. I figured I'd killed it. But it sprang back better than ever in less than a day. I've never seen that plant look so good--which was fabulous when I gave it to a friend for a house warming gift. (Apparently I've become one of those people who has plants and gives them as gifts and stuff--this caught me by surprise. Almost as much as when I discovered that I'm one of those people who actually really likes vegetables.)

And then not long ago I was reading a blog post about planting/designing pots for your front porch and it talked about the importance of making sure you break the roots up and such when you repot things. This seemed to jive with my experience with repotting my own plants. And seemed like a good explanation for why my tomatoes after having been in my garden for a couple weeks are no bigger than they were when I planted and if anything looked worse.

So, I decided the only thing to do was to pull them up and take off that fabric-y stuff I should have taken off originally. And I did (and you know, pretty much none of them had any roots that had poked through the fabric-y stuff). Sadly, I can't say that they've since grown amazingly or even look any better. But maybe when the sun comes out they'll grow?

Tomato plants

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently became the owner of four little tomato seedlings. Last weekend (when it was stiflingly hot outside) I planted my little plants in my garden. And then today I put tomato stakes in too.

Getting the tomato stakes was quite the ordeal. I have a friend who had offered them to me a while back and for a number of reasons I hadn't picked them up yet. Yesterday this friend moved out of state and told me to just go behind his house and get them out of his garden. So I did. I wasn't prepared for what I found. I had figured they'd be a couple feet tall (like the ones my parents have) and so riding my bike there on my way to work in a dress and heels would be fine. Nope. These tomato stakes are about four feet tall and were still tied to the remnants of last years tomatoes. I quickly realized that there was no way I could get these stakes home on my bike after work. Some quick thinking though found me a solution. I called up my roommate and arranged to drop them by her work on my way and she'd bring them home with her. I'm pretty sure I looked a sight riding across the JFK St. bridge on my bike, in my dress, wearing heels, and hauling three large pointy tomato stakes. One other biker did compliment me on my self-defense-resourcefulness. No one was going to mess with me...He had a point.

Tomato Stakes almost as big as my bike

Moral of the story: Don't try to haul tomato stakes on a bicycle. Get someone with a car to pick them up.

But at least now with my giant stakes my tomato plants can grow to be huge.

Heels anybody?

Quick update

I feel like things are pretty same ole' same ole' here and that consequently I have little to write about. But at the same time I definitely have had some interesting things happen in the last couple weeks that I keep meaning to write good posts about. Clearly that isn't going to happen today, so here are some one (ish) liners about what I've been up to.

I got about a wardrobe's worth of clothes for free from a good friend's attic. They're amazing. They're clothes that are my size and my style.

I watched the parade for my town over Memorial Day and got lost in Mt. Auburn Cemetery (which is easier to do than you'd think)

I had some really good fish. It was so good that my leftovers were still amazing. That's how moist it was.

I rescued a 7-speed bike from my basement. It's pretty cool.

I worked on my own bike and learned how to true wheels. Yeah, I felt empowered.

I took an awesome book repair class. It involved ripping pages out of books (which is surprisingly satisfying) and then putting them back in.

I made samosas. I got lazy though and baked them instead of frying them. I should have fried them.

I started reading Zero Waste Home. It's fantastic. I can't wait to finish it. 

I became the owner of 4 baby tomato plants. And spent an hour getting my hands dirty today weeding what will soon be my very own garden.

Bathroom inspiration

Remember last week when Melanie posted pictures of her bathroom? Well, I was a little bit inspired. The apartment (/house) that I live in is old. Very old (though compared to some apartments around Boston it's just a baby since it hasn't quite reached centenarian status yet). And because it's old, it's also dingy. About every time I have a break from school I do some deep cleaning and a couple weeks ago that resulted in me spending several  hours cleaning my bathroom. And for about 10 hours it looked great. Though the dinginess doesn't go away. Now I'm not ambitious enough that I painted my bathroom, or even hung pictures in it, but I did get a new shower curtain. And I think it's an improvement.

Bay State Bike Week

This week is Bay State Bike Week!! As part of the festivities there have been a number of free breakfasts. With a little planning I'm pretty sure I could get free breakfast nearly every day this week. I haven't quite managed to arrange my schedule to take advantage of all of them, but this morning I headed over to Broadway Bicycle School before work and had some delicious free pancakes. They were good. And something that I liked even more was that they were served on real plates, with real silverware and real cups. And you know it didn't seem to be that big of a deal to have to wash the plates before they could be used again. And it seriously reduced the amount of trash generated by this event.

One of the other great perks of this event was that Mass Bikes was there giving free mini tune ups. Nothing big, mostly just lubing chains and pumping tires, but the guy was super helpful and explained some things to me that I should get adjusted on my bike (my new-old bike--a story for another day), and it was great. My tires were super low and so riding since he filled them up has been wonderful.

I love that I live in a place that has such a strong bike culture. And it was great to get to spend a quarter of an hour in the company of people who think that bicycling is important.

Giving back

I had a pretty exciting weekend this past weekend. I gave back to my community. A couple weeks ago there was supposed to be a community wide service project to clean up the Charles River. This is an annual event, but owing to shootings and what not it got pushed back a week. This was very fortunate for me because the delay made it so that I could go (my classes being over and such). My ward got up a group together and we were assigned a section of the river to clean up. We spent a couple hours and collected tons of trash. It was fun, and it felt good to do something to help my community.

And then on Sunday I was lucky enough to participate in a choral concert at Trinity Church. The music director at Trinity Church decided last week that he wanted to put together a community-wide concert to help bring peace back into our community after our recent tragedies. The concert was called "A Song of Peace" and featured about a dozen different choirs from around the area that each sang one or two pieces and then they all joined together to sing one piece at the end. It was cool. The ward choir for one of the other wards in my stake was invited to participate, and they extended the invitation to other members of the stake. We sang "Come, Come Ye Saints." It was really cool to sing in that church. The concert was wonderful and very much invited the Spirit. 

I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to give something back to my community this weekend. It was wonderful.