Best of My RSS Reader

Whiskey Peanut Fudge! (Craft) I don't know anyone who could resist.

Why we're powerless to stop grazing on internet data. (BoingBoing) finally some justification on why I keep refreshing google reader.

The ultimate toilet paper storage device. (Apartment Therapy) I have to own one of these, but first I have to stock up on the TP.

How to fold a shamrock. (Craft) I tried very hard on this one, but it's quite difficult. I think I'll try again with a larger piece of paper.

DMX has no idea who Barak Obama is... (Kottke) I can't even comment.

Phallic fun straws! (BoingBoing) There totally is a market for these.

Another mini vintage camera I want. (NotCot)

Bush's War (Kottke) I'm planning on watching this tonight, hopefully it wont depress me into unexpectedly leaving the country.

Oh man! I'm back..

...and I'm really behind on blogging. There will be some picture, and maybe some stories, but I don't think my time in NYC was all that interesting. I walked a lot and looked at a lot of stuff. I'd love to go back, but I'm out of vacation days.

I'll be gone for a bit.

Tomorrow morning I wake up at 5 and get carted off to the airport. I'll be boarding a plane for New York City where I will be sleeping on my sisters floor. :D Be back monday!

I hope I'm not the only one who forgot it is St. Patricks Day.

I've been so fixated on how early Easter is this year, that I forgot about St. Patrick's Day, and I don't really care. It's Monday! Even if I did like beer I have the good sense not to start the week hung over. So I'll drink water in honor of the man who drove the snakes into the sea... or whatever.

I should probably post some photo evidence of this, but no camera in site. I'm not a complete dumb ass who only cuts her own hair. I got my hair cut over the weekend, and it's a fabulous choppy bob. I absolutely love it, and I think it makes my face look thinner and my neck longer. My hair stylist always does the best job.

Tyler and I were supposed to have gone skiing on Sunday, but my knees have been bothering me. They've been extremely soar, and I'm worried that I may be injuring myself at the gym. I'm going to take a break from the heavy lifting this week and see if it helps.

I've been playing Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings quite a bit. So far I like it, but the real time battle aspect of it is hard to follow in such a small screen.

Pitotubes Review

I am trying really hard not to be bitter about this, but honestly I'm so ticked off about this product that I want to throw it in the trash.

Pitotubes are refillable travel bottles that use and airless pump to dispense your product. I've heard that high end cosmetic and personal care companies use these pumps because they help get all the product out. I first heard about these bottles back in 2006 in this CoolHunting.com post, "Cool" I though, but I'm not a jet setter so there is no need for me to have a set of travel bottles. Fast forward to now; I go to the gym three days a week, and I shower there. Dragging around an entire bottle of shampoo was getting out of hand, so I decided to find and buy the best leak proof product available, and I settled on Pitotubes. The bottles range in price from 5 to 10 dollars each, and you can get a set for 40-50. I don't think that's cheap, but I did my research and they came across as a quality product.

The bottles came, I filled them, and they worked great... for the first month. I'll get into my Pitodrama after I hash out the basics of this product. So, I really don't like the way these look. Maybe I'm conservative, but shampoo doesn't need to look like it's been flown in from the future. I do like how they work, as you pump out the whatever, the bottom of the bottle moves up with the liquid. I'm don't like the pumps much because they really force the whatever out, which can result in a mess, and you can't control the amount they pump out. This seems pretty excusable though, since all technology has it's limitations.

Here's what I really hate about Pitotubes: THEY BREAK. I started with six working bottles and three of them broke after about a month of regular, but not heavy, use. WTF?! I said and promptly emailed the company. I expect a travel bottle that costs 10 dollars to work for longer then two months. The back and forth I had with the rep was pleasant, and to her credit she really did cool off my bad mood and "fix" the situation. They sent replacements, and I sent back the broken bottles. The rep told me that it was bad luck and that they have a less then 2% return rate. Hmmm, well ok, as long as my overpriced, over-engineered hunk of plastic does it's job. Which of course it didn't. The new bottles are not starting to break.

I'm done with this company. They tried, I tried, and we obviously can't come to an agreement on what a quality product is. I will not being trying to get my broken bottles replaced again and there is no way in hell I would think about buying any product from this company again.

Here are some alternatives to Pitotubes that I think I'll try once the rest of the bottles crap out. (I haven't tried any of these, but they don't seem to have Pitotubes biggest failure, which is too many moving parts to break)

Silicon bottles by PKOH, a bit expensive, but how could a squeeze bottle break?
Nalgene set that I doubt is leak proof in air travel, but Nalgene does use some durable plastic.
Eagle Creek set I like that the bottle shape is a little less random then the Nalgene bottles.
PlasticTravelBottles.com not sure about the quality, but they certainly are cheap.

Skin Update

This is just a short little post, mostly for me, about how my skin is doing. Today is day 7 of the meds! and I'm seeing a difference already. My skin isn't clear by any stretch of the word, but the pimples I am getting are closer to the surface, and less extreme. I've had a few cystic zits, and after a night of Retin-A Micro they get small and less swollen. The oral medication doesn't really seem to be doing much... other then getting rid of all my retained water (I went to the gym today and I've lost 3 pounds of water! Weird!), but I'm going to give it 3 months because I think these hormonal things take time. The only thing I don't like, is how oily my skin is. I used to use all kinds of stuff to keep the oil at bay, but I'm not supposed to use anything with the Retin-A, so I'm a total oil slick. I guess you could call it dewey, but I just think it's gross. :P

Arne Bendik Sjur

My posting has been, and will probably continue to be erratic. Blogging just falls down my priority list really fast.



Last Thursday was the gallery walk and considering how close I live, I should really go more. A couple of my friends from Oly drove up, and Tyler brought his friend from school. We had a grand time that consisted of deconstructing art and eating hot dogs. I didn't see a much that impressed me, and some of the work at the TK Artists Lofts was horrible.

So what I absolutly loved was at The Davidson Gallery. The main show was by a Norwegian print maker named Arne Bendik Sjur, and I have no idea how to correctly pronounce his name.

Here is what the Davidson has to say about the show: Personal Transformation is an exhibition of finely detailed drypoints spanning the past twenty years by contemporary Norwegian artist Arne Bendik Sjur. His work is about people and relationships. Sjur creates his evolving series by working on a single plate, printing an edition, then reworking the existing plate through multiple states. This continues until the series is complete. By obscuring and adding elements, the artist is able to portray the passage of time, transformations, and metamorphoses - suggesting the transient nature of reality. The small scale of each work and the meticulous rendering draws in the viewer and captures the imagination. Also included in the exhibition will be Sjur's most recent insect images and subjects revisiting his Chinese experiences in a series of sampans. Mr. Sjur's work has been exhibited in numerous museums in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.



Unfortunetly, The Davidson's website doesn't have examples that show how narrative these images are, which is what I love the most about Sjur's prints. I guess this comes from years of comics (ahem, Graphic Novels), but when two images are framed together all I can see is the gutter, and what might be going on. I'm also attracted to the weirdness of prints. Even the portraits have an otherworldly quality which I think comes from the etching plate, but could be all style.



I think I'll be adding Arne Bendik Sjur to my favorite artists list.

Edit: Some how I completely missed Sjur's personal site. Here is the link!

The War on Acne!

This post isn't really a war on anything, I just thought the title might drum up some google hits. Before I get to the point! Did you know that my website is getting three or four hits a day off searches for "www.drawing.com". Crazy!

Mmmmk. At 21, a college grad, and financially independent; I am a pizza face. I'm sure I've had acne since I was pubescent, but for some reason it didn't seem that bad. I don't remember my skin in middle school, which makes me think it wasn't that pimply. In high school I got the occasional zit and drug store products were enough. College was me just flat out not caring, I was grumpy and emotionally unstable, and I'm sure people where more fixated on my bad attitude then on my skin. Now that I actually care about my appearance and, you know, want to act my age, my skin is terrible. Two weeks ago I had at least thee gross, painful, and extremely swollen pimples. I'm not sure if cystic is the right term, as ever website seems to have it's own definition, but this was severe. I kept op with my face washing and used the strongest products I could buy, but nothing was working. Finally I said fuck it and did what I knew not to do, which was poke and prod till the zit did something. I consider myself extremely lucky that my skin doesn't scar really badly because I think that could have left big pitted marks in my forehead. Enough grossness! At that point I called my sister's dermatologist and set up an appointment for today.

I think I should point out that I don't have poor hygiene. I wash my face twice a day, I tone, moisturize, etc. I do wear a little makeup, and I think Bare Minerals may have had something to do with my cystic acne (obviously I've stopped using that stuff). I really do my best to stick by this even when I'm at the gym or someone else's house. So this trip to the dermatologist was basically out of frustration. I was doing everything right and I was still getting pizza face.

So this is what the dermatologist told me (and she was really quite nice about it too): The acne I have is most likely hormonal and this could also be the cause of my oily skin. I don't have exceptionally sensitive skin so I have a few options available to me. The most obvious being balancing my hormones, with some kind of medication. OK I'm all for that! So I got a prescription for a diarrhetic that some how binds to the hormone that causes acne and expels it from your system. My other option was switching birth control pills, but the brand suggested doesn't have a generic. She also suggested a topical treatment, Retin-A Micro, which I'm supposed to use at night. I'm not sure how this works, but it's not an antibiotic so I'm down with it. I didn't get the oral prescription filled today and I got some samples of the Retin-A so that all I'm using right now. I'm going to be very disappointed if I don't wake up with dry peely skin tomorrow.

I'm hoping this doesn't turn into a long quest for the perfect acne medicine. So many blogs I've read recently have gone on an on about how the author used x amount of products before seeing any results. Fingers are crossed.

Best of my RSS reader.

Drawn.ca is an amazing art blog that features both old and new. This post about Matthieu Bessudo definitely caught my eye. This guys art is an amazing mash up of vintage cartoons and contemporary surrealism. Besides just thinking his art is great, I'm really impressed with the continuity between highly detailed environments and stylized figures.

My mom found this stack of dish towels when I moved out of my apartment in Oly, at the time I was really excited, but now that I've tried to use them, I'm really disappointed. My roommate and I really only have 2 good dish towels, which are always dirty. I'm hoping This pattern (CRAFT) might be a good solution to the problem. I think I'd knit it a little more rectangular, but i love the way it looks. I wonder if it would make a good loofa.

Cutest book ever! (NotCot) I really wish I could have a dog, and if I was going to go for an actual breed, I'd get a shiba-inu.

DIY laundry soap? (CRAFT) I like the idea, but I'm not sure how these would stand up against a store bought natural brand. Personally I'm a fan of Country Save.

I like the idea of Foodsel (Lifehacker), but it was a little hard to find some of my more eaten foods.

While looking for きなこ (kinako) recipies online I found this post for Delicious Kinako Pancakes. Tyler and I tried them, and they were fantastic!

Life update? I think so.

Tyler and I have been spending way too much time at University Village recently. For those of you outside of Seattle, this is an expensive and bloated version of a strip mall. I think the only reason we end up there is because it's close to where Tyler's parents live, and he thinks of it when it comes to shopping. Personally I'm more of a downtown person, but downtown doesn't have free parking. Anyway, I need to stop going there.

Last weekend I went downhill skiing for the first time. Tyler had been threatening to take me since we started dating, and now that I'm finally comfortable being semi athletic (we also live in the same city) things have come to fruit. I didn't really know what to expect, but any time I think of mountains, snow, and falling down, cold and wet is my first assumption. It really wasn't that cold for being in the mountains, and I had lots of water proof cloths so it wasn't wet either. :D I started on a really gentle hill covered with 3 year olds learning to ski, and much to my pleasure, it was really easy. I wasn't carving or anything, but I learned to control my speed and turn. The rope toe was closed, and hiking back up the hill with skis gave me more of a work out then skiing. After lunch we took the chair lift up an intermediate hill, which wasn't that great for a few reasons. First, I hate the chair lift, almost enough to try and hike up the hill next time. Just because you can stand to slide down hill, at say 12 degrees, does not mean you're ready for 45+ degrees. That mountain was way too steep and it completely freaked me out. I was pretty much paralyzed till I realized there was no other way down. Then came the slow decent of screaming, Tyler snow plowing backwards, and falling down. We made it down, and I now understand trust exercises better, for pretty much the entire hill, Tyler skied backwards while holding ski poles in front of him, I held the poles too and tried to follow him. Thinking about it I'm quite impressed that he was able to do that. We're going again next weekend, and I'm hoping something stuck and I'll be able to ski a little better.

I've almost completely transitioned to my new job, and I'm really enjoying it. Most of what I'm learning is color correction, and I think is working the left side of my brain which hasn't been getting much use lately. I'm much happier with this job.