You might be a Flash geek...

...if you dream in Actionscript. Like me.

But I also dreamt last night that a lion was coming to eat me, so I sat down and looked all meditative and wise, and the lion didn't eat me because he thought I was a god. In fact, he asked me to use my divine intervention to help him find someone to eat. I answered by giving him Cartesian coordinates of where to find his prey.

I find babies

Last night I dreamt that I found a baby named Belinder Pratt. Its mom had dumped it because she could tell that it was going to grow up to be like Lennie from Of Mice and Men — hurting people without meaning to.

Beautiful crime-free Montreal

Looks like Karla Homolka has moved to the Carribbean.

Poop back and forth forever

You don't often see poop in the news.

Why does Canada rule?

Because they make sure that their residents know all about the local wildlife! For example, I know that the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird is one of Canada's smallest birds and a welcomed summer visitor to backyards across most of Southern Canada. Its nest is made of cobwebs and lichen, is the size of a toonie, and is designed to look like a tree knot. To attract these colorful little birds to my backyard, all I would need to do is plant a garden. Why not visit hww.ca to learn more about the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird?

Or for now, you can learn about the Loon.

He lies

This is Matt's real latest obsession:

Doin' it for the money

This summer, Matt told you all about his favorite busker. Now you can read about other Montrealers' favorite buskers in town. No pictures to go with their descriptions, but the descriptions are pretty good on their own. If you're really aching for pix, try this.

Revenge?

A few months ago, I dreamt that Danger Kitty beat Matt in a free throw shooting contest. Then yesterday, Matt dropped Danger Kitty in a bathtub full of water. On purpose. Hmmmm.

Take Action

This was originally posted on My Green City Life Blog.

Today is October 15, which means it is Blog Action Day, the day I am supposed to remind you to live green and take care of our planet as best you can. Isn't that what I've been saying all along? I certainly hope that's the message you've been getting.

So today, I would like to impress upon you the importance of living a truly green life. Why go green? There are so many answers to that question it's overwhelming to know where to start. Let's see... Because landfills are not only filling up the land but also the oceans. Because gas-guzzling vehicles — commercial and personal — are polluting the atmosphere as well as sucking down oil, a resource that many other aspects of our lives depend on, and a resource that is finite and quickly being depleted. Because there is only so much fresh water on our planet, so we need to use it wisely. Because pesticides sprayed on crops gets washed downstream, effecting wildlife and humans alike. Because the weather has been acting kind of freaky across the board in the past few years, and I'm not a fan of violent storms.

I could go on. Protecting our environment means protecting ourselves. We need to step it up and take action now. As in right now. Today. Here's a way to start: I've typed up 60 ways to start making your life a green life. Pick three items off the list that aren't currently part of your life and that actually pertain to you. Start them today. No cheating, no dilly-dallying. Push yourself, and do it!

Three small changes to your life is a good start, but it's not going to save the world, unfortunately. However, that doesn't make it futile. Talk to people and get them going on the green path too. Take on more green changes. Be the green example. I believe that the action of the individual does make a difference, a very tiny difference though it may be. The real change comes when that individual influences those around her, and the individual becomes part of a larger group. Please join me. Let's be the group that affects real change.

Donde esta el baño?

Thanks, Redneck Mother.

Happy holidays

Happy Thanksgiving to the Canadians. Happy Columbus Day to the Americans. Happy normal day to everyone else.

Click for cans

Hey, ya'll, it's football season, which also means it's Campbell's Chunky Click For Cans season! Hit up the site everyday and vote for the team you like best (obviously the Chiefs). I *think* that at the end of the promotion, they donate cans of soup — as many as the team with the most votes has votes — to some charity. So if you're in it for the hungry tots, vote for the leading team to up the number of cans that will be donated. If you're in it for the glory, vote for the Chiefs. Yeah, that's right: Chiefs = glory. They also have a field-goal kicking game this year that you can play to increase the number of votes you add each day. The more field goals you kick, the more votes your team gets. It also increases the time you are on their site and exposed to their branding.

BTW, you can vote only once each day... but they track you by cookies, which are browser specific. So really you can vote once per browser per day. If you want to play the game in each browser, you'll have to delete the cookie that the game saves on your computer. (Technically, it's not a cookie but a Flash Shared Object. Yes, I am a Flash geek.) All you have to do is search your hard drive for a file called lastDate.sol. Delete it. It's that easy.

UPDATE: I was wrong about how many cans are donated. They donate one can for each pound of the winning team's weight. So, uh, vote for a fat team? Nah, just vote for the Chiefs.

Squashed

This is why I should never attempt to make any sort of baked good involving zucchini ever again. They always end up like this.

Kickin' my own ass

Last night I reluctantly left my warm, cozy apartment mid-Phillies game to venture out into the chilly night and make my way to Club Lambi on the Plateau to see Portugal The Man, The Great Depression, and Rocky Votolato. You may or may not know this, but I hate going to shows. I especially hate going to shows by myself, and last night I was on my own. Happily, it ended up being a really good time, and I'm extremely glad I dragged my butt out the door to have a little adventure.

Portugal The Man was rocknroll. The Great Depression was full of lovely harmonies. And Rocky kicked some serious ass. Yay Rocky! He played mostly new stuff but some older stuff too, including "Like Silver" from "Burning My Travels Clean" and "Montana" from "Suicide Medicine," which I really wanted to hear. While the first band was playing, I attempted to purchase a t-shirt from the merch girl (who I think may be his wife, as she is on the cover of one of his albums) but was thwarted by lack of funds. I only had $8, and they were $15. Damn. After The Great Depression played, I tried to put those same eight dollars to use for one of their CDs, but they were $10. Damn again. When the whole show was over, I did something I never ever do. I went back to talk to the merch girl/Mrs. Votolato. I told her that the show was awesome and I was so glad they had come to play in Canada, and wonder of wonders, she told me I could have a shirt for my measly $8. Yay! Humans are really nice sometimes.

As I walked all the way down St. Laurent to the bus stop at Sherbrooke (and just caught the bus, thank goodness!), I was in a haze of lovely Rocky Votolato music-ness. Mmmmm, good shows are so very good. There were tons of people still out and about, lining up to get into clubs, drunkenly leaving clubs, shouting across the street to each other, chatting on cell phones. It was such a nice feeling to be in a city where stuff actually happens at night and to have just taken part of a little bit of the action.

And the Phillies won.

Don't click

Celebrity Faceoff might rival Snood for most addictive game.

Whirlwind Tour

Vacation! Weee, I just got back from a vacation to Colorado, sadly without Mister Matt, but his absence was somehow appropriate as I was revisiting a pre-Matt time in my life. The main reason for the trip was that one of my college roommates got married. I hadn't seen anyone from college since I graduated five and half years ago, so the visit was long overdue. It's strange how a change of scenery and the company of some friends from the dorms can revert you back to 19 years old.

I would post pictures but I was a moron and forgot to pack my camera. Here are some highlights of the trip. You'll have to use your imaginations to make up the images:

• Seeing Harold, Mar, Crazy Andy, Alley, Woolfe, and The Greek for the first time in over five years.


• Taking one name off my People From College Who Don't Talk To Me Anymore list. Sadly, it's a bit of a long list.


• Eating Mexican food (made by real Mexicans!) and drinking margaritas.


• An absolutely gorgeous drive from Denver to Pagosa Springs (and back again). More beautiful than should be allowed.


• My first ever dip in natural hot springs. Mmmmm hot springs.


• Einstein's Bagels and Target.


• Hanging out with Mar for an action-packed 48 hours.


• Wine with Harold and Quinn the plumber.


• Eating at Watercourse, my sister's favorite veggie resto in D-town.


• Off-roading in an Impala along a muddy ridge overlooking a rushing creek in the San Juan Mountains... and then reversing back out at high speed. Without dying.


• Seeing that The Breakfast Palace is still there... whew!


• Visiting Alley's coffee shop.


• A trip to the Dikeou Collection.


• Drinking American microbrew beer.


• Driving around the DU campus, marveling at all the new buildings and laughing that the library building still sounds and smells the same. And I sat in the (now cleaned and reupholstered) egg chair.


• Oh yeah, and a wedding in a beautiful aspen grove!

What I did on my weekend vacation

This past weekend I went to the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival. There were sheep. There was wool. There were also alpacas, llamas, goats, rabbits, and border collies. I enjoyed looking all all the fibers in their various stages of processing, from being attached to the animals, to being sheared, picked, dyed, spun, and knitted. Meeting people who do the sheering, dying, spinning, etc, was also pretty cool. I only bought two skeins of yarn: one intended (the wool below) and one impulse (the silk).

Besides the festival, I enjoyed a bean and cheese burrito. Mmmmm... even mediocre Mexican food tastes amazing when you come from the land of Quebec. I really like being in Burlington, Vermont. Being a college town, and this being the beginning of the school year, we did see some stupid college kids, but compared to many other college towns I've visited or lived in during the same time of year, the Catamounts were overall a very tolerable bunch.

Were we to leave Montreal, Burlington would be my first pick. I haven't spent a good amount of time in any of the rest of Vermont, so perhaps there are other places in the same state I would like just as well. Burlington has a nice small town feel, like there is a strong sense of community there. It's nice and laid-back and pleasingly hippy. I know Matt is against living in a hippy town. As leftist as he can sometimes appear, he actually has a deep dislike of hippies (you'll have to ask him what his definition of a hippy is since some might think he is married to one) and is disgusted with liberals. It can be trying for me sometimes. The anti-hippy part, not the anti-liberals part.

I'll leave you with some photos.


Sunset on Lake Champlain


An alpaca


Cormo wool yarn from Foxhill Farms in Lee, MA. One of the sheep who contributed some fleece to this skein is named Carabee.


Silk yarn

You can see many more pictures in the couple of blog posts the lovely Ariadne ladies have posted recently.

Three months down

It's a little crazy to think that a quarter of a year has gone by since I started the Riot for Austerity 90% Emissions Reduction Challenge! Here's where I stand after three months:

GASOLINE
On a daily basis, we are still use 90% less (or perhaps even less) than the average American uses. I haven't actually been keeping track since my primary form of transportation is the bus or the metro, and I don't even use them everyday. I am going to go on a number of trips in the last few months of this year, however, so this is one area where my "progress" is about to do a 180.
Three-month status: On a daily basis, we use 90% less than the average American uses.

ELECTRICITY
I said in my baseline post that we are allowed 90 kwH per month. I only get an electric bill once every two months, so the last bill I got was two months ago, and I was holding steady at my baseline figure of 125 kwH per month. However, since then, I have reread the rules of this challenge and noted that hydro-powered electricity users are allowed four times the standard allotment. Wikipedia (a site that would never lie, right?) says that 97% of the energy Hydro-Québec produces is, well, hydroelectric. So if 97% of my 90 kwH gets to be tripled, my goal is actually 265 kwH per month, which I am way under. I have made some electricity-saving changes around the apartment, so I am anxious to see my next electricity bill. I would still really like to hit 90 kwH per month.
Three-month status: Still waiting for the bill! The last time I got the bill, we used 95% (with hydro bonus applied) less than the average American uses.

HEATING AND COOKING ENERGY
When I did the baseline calculations, I decided that we should only be allowed 10% of the 90% allotment in this category because we only get billed for our cooking energy. I think I was being hard on myself, but I also don't have any more specific numbers about how much of this should go for cooking and how much for heating. Because we can't control our heat, I'm going to just throw up my hands and say we can have the entire 23.5 cubic meters per month. But I'm also not really going to count this category since it is compromised. I'm going to go for steady progress rather than a number goal. This is a hard one for us since we do a lot of cooking from scratch. Beer brewing also takes up gigantic amounts of energy in this category.
Three-month status: For cooking alone, we use 93% less than the average American uses.

GARBAGE
Our scale has been getting finicky lately, and it doesn't like heavy things, so I haven't been able to weigh our garbage or recycling. I have been reusing plastic bags more diligently and thinking hard about each container I recycle, trying to reuse it. I can't do much about the paper. I started a worm composting bin, but I still end up throwing out way more organic matter than I would like. When I have large amounts of it (after preserving foods or brewing beer) I take it to a friend's house where there is a proper compose pile.
Three-month status: Not sure. Still too much waste. :(

CONSUMER GOODS
This one is harder than I thought it would be, especially because textbooks are expensive! Here's how we did, with deductions in place:
June: $98 (88% less than average)
July: $277 (67% less than average)
August: $207 (75% less than average)
Three-month status: We spent 77% less than the average American.

FOOD
This is a hard category too. We buy a lot of stuff in the third (non-local, non-bulk) category. And we cook from scratch for most of our meals, so it's not as though we're buying lots of processed, pre-packaged food. We just seem to buy a lot of ingredients that we can't get (or haven't figured out how yet) locally or in bulk. Our CSA has certainly helped us improve in the local category. I've also started buying more dry stuff in bulk. This past week we hardly bought anything in category three, so maybe we are doing better.
Three-month status: This is only a guess. 55% local, 15% bulk, 30% everything else.

Where's Danica?

This blog has been all Matt all the time lately. That's because I've got me another blog. That's right. I'm a blog two-timer. Don't worry; I will still post over here. But over there, you can read about how I try to be a good treehugger. And maybe you'll learn a thing or two.

Brothers in poop

People find our blog through some pretty crazy keywords. Most of them have to do with well digging (sorry, folks, no practical information here), but there are some funny ones too: "suddenly have to pee", "absolute fucking idiots", "dating hand on breast", "mary poppins programming satanic", "how do i get rid of my stomach that hands over my waist".

Today we got one that I had to google myself: "poop on my head song". There we were, number two on the list. Awesome. But wait! Who is that at number one? Why, it's Bruno! Yes, Bruno the Brazilian, my former coworker, is number one of the 1,180,000 results for "poop on my head song". Way to go, us, and super way to go, Bruno!