Feet on the Street, and the House, and the Office...

I had a crappy day. I tried to help a kid whose current awful situation painfully mirrors one I experienced in my youth and I ended up helpless and frustrated and in tears. And in the end there's just nothing I can do for this kid. It's not my place and I have no legal standing. And even though I pushed everyone away who tried to be there for me tonight, here I am feeling ridiculously and unreasonably abandoned and sorry for myself with a bottle of wine, a jar of peanuts and a bag of dark chocolate chips at my feet. Which leads me to this post. In a probably vain attempt to cheer myself up, I decided to post about one of my inane and amusing (to me) hobbies - photographing me feet. The rationale? Well, I can't very well take a good photo of myself with my own camera, can I? Oh but I can photograph my feet:

My feet while roasting coffee in my back yard:


My feet at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago:


My feet at my office:


My feet at home:


My feet at Fenway for a Yankees v. Red Sox game (and that's my Mom's foot to the left):


And in case you hadn't noticed, I like garishly colored and patterned shoes:



Nope, still feel like crap. Time to enlist the big guns - Jaws III.

And on an unrelated note...

Yes, this is radically different from my previous post of an hour ago, but a thought just occurred to me. When life means finishing a long day at the job you're passionate about, crashing at an apartment in Burlington where you can talk politics with a campaign finance director, read on the couch while eating your favorite thai take out from your ex-husband's tennis partner's restaurant, and being kept awake by Honky Tonk Tuesday at the coffee shop below where the bass player from Phish sometimes jams, all because the roads to your house were completely iced over, things are pretty darn good. Plus, I bought really kick ass apple green pajamas with magenta polka dots tonight. Yep, life is sweet.

Notes on society's inequity

Tonight I went shopping. Not my usual modus operandi to be sure, but shopping it was and shopping I went. But that's not what this is about. This is about a conversation overheard in J.Crew - also known as "I went looking for a sweater and found righteous indignation". So there I was, languidly browsing through overpriced dry clean only sweaters when I happen to notice two sales women, each in her early to mid 20's, having a heated discussion. A cheating boyfriend? No. Daddy not paying car insurance any more? No siree bob. Turns out I'm an ass for thinking that. Why? Because it's horribly stereotypical? Well yes, that too. Why else? Because these two young women were talking about their day jobs as teachers in a local middle school and how the budget for ESL for their refugee students was just cut and they don't know how they're going to communicate with their pupils. How many things are wrong with this? At least two come to mind:

1) Why do teachers, presumably teachers with multiple degrees and an exhausting full time job, need to work nights at the mall to survive?

2) In a town with over 400 refugees settled in the last 3 years and 44 languages spoken in a school district of 3,554 students, why oh why are they cutting ESL budgets?

There are a whole bunch more to choose from. But for now I'm mad and I don't know what to do about it. Do me a favor, ladies and gents. Vote for your school budgets, ok? Kids need a chance.

Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

Today was my day of rest. After working myself into oblivion for the last few weeks, I had the day off today and barely moved off the couch. I am energy free. But, good news - the fashion show was marvelous and the Burlington Free Press took the pictures to prove it. Take a look.

Too Bad, So Sad

Looking for something to do tomorrow night? Well you can't come to my fashion show. It's sold out!!! See?

Strike A Pose Because I'm Too Sexy

That title encompasses all the fashion show related pop culture references I can fit into one line. Fashion show related, you say? And why on earth would fashion have anything to do with this blog? Ah, you see, this is also my shameful self promotion blog and this Saturday is the fashion show that the Boys & Girls Club's Director of Development and I have been working on since September. So if you're in the Burlington area and you're not going to Josh's show at the Monkey House in Winooski at 9, come to the ONE Fashion Event at Higher Ground. Click on the invite to see it in a large enough format to read the details.

R.I.P. Beloved Mug

On this day of remembrance for Martin Luther King Jr., a man who was a visionary and a force of change cut down far too early in his life, I wish I could say I was out changing the world. I should be out changing the world. But I'm not. I'm cleaning my apartment. That's changing my world, right? Right? Oy. I stink.

However, the point of this post is not to bemoan the state of the world, or American apathy, but rather to morn the loss of a treasured friend - my polka dot mug. Most of you who know me well know of my love of polka dots. I don't know why, exactly. Maybe it's the symmetry, the whimsy, the repetition - I have no idea. I just know that I love them. And six years ago I found a mug by a local potter covered in, that's right, polka dots. Today, that mug left this functional world.


Rest in piece, my polka dotted friend. There will be no more coffee for you.

Sharing mean caring. Especially when fire is involved.

As I mentioned earlier, I did a bit of burning in my backyard today. Here's what I started with:


But three months of paper that would have been shredded if I owned a shredder quickly became:






So much for thinking the text would be destroyed:




The best part of the day was my upstairs neighbor in his window staring, pointing, and laughing at me, his crazy downstairs neighbor, as she burns paper in the middle of January, photographing it as it ignites...

Neglect! It's what's for dinner.

It has been recently brought to my attention that I have been ignoring this blog. After the shock wore off that anyone actually reads this thing, I realized that tis true, I am a neglectful writer. Though I have, as always, been obsessively photographing the world, I can't really come up with anything worth posting on a Sunday morning. So instead, I give you the highlights of some of the more random moments in life I have experienced in the last couple of weeks:

1) Seven year olds acting like seventeen year olds.

This is an actual conversation I overheard at work from a seven year old on the cell phone with god knows whom at 3:30pm on a Tuesday:

7 year old: No beaatch, that's totally not what I said to her.

Uh, whatever. Call me when you get it right.

No idiot, it's not yahoo, it's gmail. No, gmail. G.M.A.I.L. God you're so stupid. Just text me.

Me: Yikes. Why do I write grants for these wee ones?


2) Mattresses by mail.

I've been sleeping on my couch for the last two weeks without heat since my landlord is a deadbeat and my bed moved out (long story). So, I did what any frugal, bedless girl does - I ordered one online. I admit being awfully curious about how they would deliver this queen sized 10 inch deep foam mattress to my backwoods, snow covered apartment. In fact, that was part of the allure. And lo and behold I received a 6 foot bright blue tootsie roll of a mattress. They vacuum sucked my mattress and all its foamy glory into a 50 lb barely portable tube. God it was neat. After releasing it from its bondage, it slowly and wondrously expanded into an impossible 60"x80". It was like one of those dinosaur sponges we all bought as kids that expands to 10 times its size with water. I'm in love.

3) The travel bug.

I have discovered lately that Burlington, Vermont is an exceedingly small town. Six degrees of separation? Right. One, maybe two at the most. And thus my almost pathological desire to travel. I'm open to suggestions on this one. Ideas?

4) Liquid magnets.

Josh emailed me the most intoxicating thing the other day. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ferrofluids. I fully intend to do this very soon:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/demonstrationsexperiments/ss/liquidmagnet.htm

All I have to do is figure out how to keep ammonia at a low simmer for an hour without killing myself from fumes.


Ok, that's it. I promise something better and more colorful soon. I will be burning a large pile of papers in my snow covered backyard today, so if the pictures are at all entertaining, I promise to share.

Animating the Inanimate

I have a bit of a problem. No, not the caffeine problem. Or the being attracted to shiny objects problem. Or the... ok, I'm going to stop playing this game before I admit to the... nevermind. But back to the matter at hand. My problem this time is that I for some reason feel the need to anthropomorphize everything. And I mean everything. Case in point. Sitting around an apartment with nothing to do? Nonsense! There's entertainment around every corner. Where there's a tool, there's a way:




Or, of course, vegetables will do in a pinch:







You know, from reading this blog you'd never know that I'm almost 30 and in charge of raising over $500,000 in government and private foundation grants a year. Ah well. C'est la vie, c'est la morte.

Ooh Ooh Ooh!

Once upon a time, in the great land of Chicago, my sister and brother-in-law were kind enough to take wayward little me out to a swanky vegetarian restaurant called the Green Zebra. It was interesting. Furnishings were tres moderne, the food came in tiny little portions at regular portion prices, and the accompanying soundtrack was reminiscent of techno. But by far the most entertaining portion of the evening was when I attempted to order a cup of black tea (silly me!) only to be handed what has to be the largest tea menu I have experienced to date. I pondered, I considered, I laughed. That is, until, I came upon a tea that had once been hand picked by trained monkeys. Oh...my...god. I had never heard of such a thing. My world was at once exponentially expanded and enhanced. Hand picked by trained monkeys?!? Yes please! Then, to my dismay, I read that it had once been hand picked by monkeys. Alas, my visions of traveling to far off nations to see a cadre of simians working their little monkey tails off to bring me my beverage of choice (no monkey, I want that leaf. The one waaaaay over there.) were dashed. Until today...

My friends, I give you tea that is still hand picked by trained monkeys:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/drinks/9f1f/?cpg=66T

God bless them, every one.