Archive for the 'Travel and places' Category
20
Jan
A bit of silliness
16
Oct
Lazy Saturday
A mid-weekend, mid-October day…the sun is shining but the wind is blowing brown and red and orange and yellow leaves from the trees and I can tell the weather out there is chilly.
Or I can simply Google my zip code and learn that it is…currently about 57 degrees, with gusts of wind from the North-north-west.
Original plans for the morning were derailed, due to businesses being open only on business days, so the afternoon is 
open and we sit in our PJs wondering what to do with our day until we bring cookies to Bellevue this evening and watch horror movies with other people.
A mild hike through Schenley has been proposed and tentatively accepted, crunching through autumn leaves and snapping pictures at squirrels before stopping for the seasonal salted caramel hot chocolate that is my current obsession. But for the moment, sitting nestled in blankets and a soft sweater on the sofa and telling unknown readers that may not exist about my recent days seems the appropriate activity for this lazy Saturday.
I am two weeks into my internship at the educational lobbyist non-profit organization. On the day that I interviewed, I was asked if, as my start date was four days into October, I might be able to complete layout and design of the quarterly newsletter that was due at the end of October (I would be supplied with all written articles and photographs), and though I knew I would have to be attentive in management of my time, I thought I could manage without too much problem. On the day I began, I learned two things: the newsletter was due to be complete by the 22nd of the month, not the 30th or 31st (a slightly tighter squeeze, but one I thought I should be able to appease) and, though I had thought I might start my first day with a complete set of articles and photos to be input into a 12-page layout of my division…great fool, I — only one or two were even written! Today is the 16th of the month, and to date, I have not received anything but promises. Instead, I re-designed their membership brochure into something highly functional and was then told to redesign it twice in increasingly less functional fashions, stretching a two-day job into a two-week trial.
I feel I am learning a lot about the industry.
Meanwhile, school is at once overwhelming, and a heady experience. So far, at least, the quarter is exciting and so are the classes. With one quarter remaining after this one, I feel balanced on a precipice — at once ready to leap into the real world, and also sure that I need more feathers in my wings first and that the wax has not yet dried nearly long enough.
On the subject of wings, and school and the real world, however, I have finally designed a logo that I intend to be my long-term professional identity, rather than a stop-over until a real logo comes along. Perhaps I’ll post it some day.
I have not been interested overmuch in cooking over the past week or two–at least not cooking meals and nutritious things. Baking and notions and culinary adventures, have, however, grabbed my fancy. I made:
My own chai (for which I will not link a recipe, as I looked at a few and surmised that one simply throws into a pot with black tea, whichever portions of the appropriate spices one desires, and then allows to simmer for a while.) 
Pumpkin spice bagels (Two recipes — the first is more dense, and though the blogger comments on the excessive amount of spice, even more would still be appropriate — they were delicious but could have been spicier. Oh, and the directions were for using a mixer like KitchenAid or Hobart, but you can totally mix and kneed by hand. For the second, I didn’t have vital wheat gluten, so I ended up having to add a great deal more flour than is in the recipe…they came out quite tender, however…but i think not as sweet as the first set.)
Molasses Ginger cookies (very good, but make sure to read the comments, as they give some pointers that really make the recipe better and easier.)
Other obsessions of late:
Starbucks Salted Caramel hot chocolate. I know I have mentioned this at least twice before…once perhaps in this very post…but it is incredibly good, if you like that kind of thing. Which I do. Almost a little butterscotchy. Almost tied for the position of ‘favorite drink of the month’, however, is the raspberry hot chocolate we got at Penn’s Colony — it is made locally, but can be ordered online, and is PARTICULARLY delicious mixed in with morning coffee.
The art of Tara McPherson. I mean, seriously….look at this stuff:
Her work is just kind of awesomely weird and bright and cute all at once, and I love it.
My third obsession of the week is my new sketchbook.
You see, since getting my computer, I have drawn pretty much no traditional art at all…but even before that, pages in my sketchbooks had become far more focused on pages that were scannable line art for finished pieces. I did not work loose and fill my space…I hardly ever had more than one drawing on a page, much less interfering with or overlapping each other. I sacrificed loose, care-free drawings in favor of neat, space-conscious work, and that is not what a sketchbook is for. A fact I realized and bemoaned when I stumbled across some beautiful sketchbooks full of random drawings everywhere. (I posted about it here)
Well.
I had to get a new sketchbook for unrelated reasons, but the combination of those lovely books lingering in my mind, and the knowledge that a school friend of mine had begun a full on sketch-journal, which she was filling with every medium she had on hand, and experimenting and going crazy, and then seeing the inside of a classmate’s sketchbook…I tore into the pages of my own spiral-bound with a vengeance. Well..with a couple pencils and a ball-point…but I have been spending free time doodling, drawing and depicting, trying to fill up all the space that pages provide, for the most part…playing as much as I can with ideas of form and shape and concepts of characters and shapes of faces and eyes and mouths and shading and so forth.
Perhaps I’ll post a few pages soon.
And with that, two weeks of my life are mostly neatly condensed into a medium-length journal entry. So, for now, I shall shower and prepare to meet the day.
…Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our vacations….
Yet again, feel as though I was JUST putting the finishing touches on my Real and Imagined Creatures project, and wondering whether my strange and somewhat rambling psych paper would gain me an ‘A’ for ingenuity or a ‘C’ (the worst grade EVAR) for being strange and somewhat rambling…but it could not have been as recent as it feels, because tomorrow is the last day of my break.
However, unlike some breaks past, I feel not that my time was squandered or empty. Despite the fact that the first official day of my vacation was spent at the dentist after some truly fiendish sourdough bread managed to mangle a filling, in this case, the old adage about how quickly time passes when one is enjoying one’s self and keeping busy is, I think, quite apt.
First of all, I spent a great deal of time (as one might guess by the flood of work I’ve posted in the past two weeks) snuggled up with my tablet, drawing for hours and hours. I didn’t, by any means, achieve all goals or finish all projects to my own satisfaction…but I got much more done that I imagined I might*, and completed both work purely for my own entertainment and work commissioned by others.
However, despite the fact that my customary spot on the couch is beginning to retain a perfect likeness of my backside, I DID occasionally leave this spot and do other things. Occasionally even the fabled ‘stuff outdoors’:
-Last Wednesday, I went into town. I visited the gym, found a pretty post office and braved public transportation during rush-hour…at the end of my journey was a session of Game, during which we came up with some awesomely awful ideas for how to breach our opponent’s defenses.
-Last Friday, a little late-season heat prompted Anna and I to return to the park in which exists Jackson Falls. Instead, however, of heading straight for the swimming hole, we decided to wander down the trail and play in the stream a 
little. Two amazing things happened: first, Anna caught a trout. With her hands. It was truly amazing. Second, the stream we were walking down eventually lead to a river. Not one of the local three giants, but a perfect little swimming river called the Kiskiminetas.
-Last Saturday, we took our annual trip to Penn’s Colony. It wasn’t bad — it certainly helped that we managed to make the trip on a day that we were not destitute, and were thus able to bring home fudge and cocoa and purchase a lunch without fear of financial failure — I had my first turkey leg. Or, half a turkey leg, I suppose. We shared it. I will concede that it WAS delicious…but it still didn’t hold a candle to the sandwiches we used to sell at the roast beef booth. Overall, the trip was…okay. I think I have been missing the ferverous excitement of Faire, which a puritanical colonial reenactment somewhat lacks.
-Last Sunday, however, was the true day of fantastic adventure. Briggs and I returned to the Jackson Falls park (I’m 
not sure if it has an official name…I think the area is known as the ‘Roaring Run Watershed’?) Anyway, we hiked down to the river, then decided to take the very well-maintained trail (a Rails to Trails kind of thing) that followed the river in either direction. We walked to it’s somewhat visually stunning terminus (the area is thick with really big rocks) a few miles down, then headed back. Inevitably, it was suggested we take another trail back, and just as inevitably, we ended up scaling a pathless hillside that was nearly vertical and covered in slippery leaves that hid treacherous hollows between rocks. We eventually ended up back on a trail that went up and down and around and finally dropped us off right back by the little beach at the river. I took a quick dip to rinse off the sweat and grime and then we embarked on the final leg of our trip back to the car. By the time we got there, it was verging on dark, and exhausted and hungry, we grabbed a pizza and went home. I am hoping to do it again tomorrow, going the other direction down the river.
Since then, I have pretty much been here, working on projects. A few days were drizzly, but the past couple have been more sunny.
On Monday, I begin my internship, and on Tuesday I begin my fall quarter. Farewell, sweet break.
*On a related note — this year’s calender is almost completed. “But Ra,” you muse, “isn’t it only October, and barely even that? Is it not tradition for you to be scrambling at the very last minute to squish work into the appropriate page layout…at times not finishing until after the new year has been rung in…occasionally LONG after?” well I have decided to break with tradition this year. Sorry. On the other hand…there is a chance of people getting calenders on TIME this year, so there’s that…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
So, though there have been things, I didn’t go into any of them from…pretty much the time we landed in PGH. I aim to avoid a long, detailed retelling of every nuance of every moment, but I had that aim in my last blog as well. But at least I have good intentions, and good intentions never led to anything bad…right?
Life in the ‘burgh has been moving at its typical (of late) frantic pace. The day we got home, we had to drive to Freeport, then I had to shower, change and we had to drive about an hour the opposite direction so I could make an interview that proved to be, basically, a waste of my time, and was conducted while I had enjoyed a full…I don’t know how much sleep, but little enough that I was literally unable to fight it’s pull on the car ride there and back, and fell almost instantly unconscious for four hours when we got home again.
Wednesday, recovering from a sinus infection, I put on a dress and makeup and came into town for the Student of the Quarter luncheon…which I was late for and then couldn’t find and eventually gave up on, so instead of doing homework at home, in PJs, on my sofa, I did it in a dress, make up and jewelry, on a bench at school.
On Thursday, my last minute thrown-together paper for my Psych presentation beat the pants off of the theoretically 
researched and not-last-minute papers of everyone else in my group.
Friday and Saturday were spent very specifically not doing homework and recouping from the CA trip a little… on Friday I went for a walk and had a tea with Anna, then cleaned the living room and dealt with my mostly-untouched-since-returning suitcase, and on Saturday, Briggs and I (finally) got to go see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which I liked a lot, aside from his choice of the bored, issuey hipster chick over the adorable and sweet and fun Asian girl.
Yesterday I finally did at least a little homework, and made some yummy-tastic spinach lasagna. And we (finally) got around to watching Inglorious 
Bastards…which I liked a lot, aside from the fact that at least 2/3 of the long movie is subtitles (which I have no problem with, except that you can’t do anything ELSE while you watch a subtitled movie) and also that the ‘Bastards’ were big jerks. I liked the French Jewish girl with the cinema. (However, look at that poster design…is that not GORGEOUS?)
Other stuff that’s been happening:
-Since returning to Pittsburgh, the weather has been much more habitable. It gets hot during the day, but not so humid you need a snorkel (which wouldn’t work anyway, if you think about it), and cools off at night.
-Along with the one disappointing and one successful interviews so far, I have one planned for tomorrow, one for Thursday, and another next Tuesday. This is both exciting and nervous-making.
-I’m on a hiatus from coffee again…when I quit a few years ago I thought, for some reason, that espresso drinks were to blame for my stomach lining screaming in pain…but no…it’s just coffee in general, and how much I drink (usually on an empty stomach) in specific. So, I’m back on tea for a little while, and hopefully, by the time it’s cold and I really want coffee again, I will be able to drink it with impunity, for at least a little while.
-I began to wonder today if the coffee really WAS to blame, as I’m only drinking tea and still getting twinges…almost as though the stress of school and internships and portfolio and being broke and a million other things were effecting my stomach acidity level.
-um…..
-yeah…i think that’s everything.
