In this video, Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha makes like silly string and rocks out with her dad to the Jungle Book song “I wanna be like you.” They are so totally adorable together, and are clearly having a blast. Watching this video was definitely a happy way to end the day.
It reminds me of me and my dad a lot. He and I are both completely silly people, both music lovers, and we’ll frequently break into comedic warbling or scattered dance routines when we’re blasting the tunes together. Silliness: definitely one of the most awesome and underrated foundations of friendship.
I was thinking too how special it is that she’ll always have this video to watch even after he’s passed on. Is that morbid? Well, whatever. I don’t think my family has any home videos, but recently I’ve started to capture small snippets of the things people do that so completely define them or just really make me smile. Like my stepmother’s infectious laugh, or seeing her and my dad clowning around together and giggling; or one of my grandmother’s unintentionally hilarious lectures with the wagging pointed finger, where we all end up laughing. I guess I’m just thinking more about mortality, and realizing how important it is to pull together some of those scraps of life into hard-copy memories.
I kind of love this “USB stick” on Etsy…”re-connect with nature and keep it in your pocket.”
With 4GB of space, it’s plenty big enough for my purposes, and I love it conceptually and visually, but I think from a practical standpoint it’s a bit too clunky to take around. Still, it’s pretty awesome
As a plant lover, this “grassy lawn charging station” strikes me as a really neat way to banish the tangle of unsightly gadget charging bricks and cables. Plus, the nice clean white “plant pot” would match my mac Now if only ThinkGeek sold a magic wand that would dig my desk out from underneath the paper avalanche…
Today I’ve been meeting all kinds of interesting and inspiring folk at Change Camp Ottawa, an “unconference” on reimagining government and citizenship in the age of participation. It’s been a really neat event – the participants set the agenda collaboratively, people were free to roam between sessions, there were lots of great discussions, and people were live-tweeting the whole thing (see #cco09 if you’re interested). Seriously, I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one room!
Here’s a description of ChangeCamp from the site:
ChangeCamp is an event format, an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.
A ChangeCamp event is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question:
“How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”
ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. We seek to create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that drive transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment.
All that to say, there were a whole lot of enthusiastic and tech-savvy people gathered together to imagine new ways of doing things. It was hard to get out of bed so early on a Saturday, but definitely worth it!
Lifehacker had a great post today about a totally ingenious idea – gutter gardens!
Building a windowbox garden from gutters is such a great space-saving solution. You can position the gutters in just the right location for sun exposure, and can have neatly organized rows of produce growing right on your house!
It would also be so much easier on the back to do all your gardening…planting, watering, weeding, harvesting. No hunching down and crawling under the dirty netting that you have covering your garden so the groundhogs don’t eat everything and getting your crocs full of dirt and earwigs.
Not to mention, getting your lettuce up off the ground might increase the odds that you actually get to eat it before the critters do. I totally love it.
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Famous last words from my last post re. spring cleaning:
We’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space.
HA! Well, the universe certainly didn’t have that in store for us. We did make some great progress on our spring cleaning in the first few days of our holiday, but eventually life caught up with us. I got clobbered with a nasty migraine for a couple of days, and later my stepmum ended up going to the ER with appendicitis and having emergency surgery. Yikes! (She’s recovering very well, by the way. Phew!) Needless to say, some things are higher priority in life than re-alphabetizing the spice drawer.
But we did actually manage to relax a little too. My partner and I spent his birthday luxuriating at Le Nordik, an outdoor spa in Quebec, followed by a wonderful lunch at a great little vegetarian place, Le Cafe Soupe ‘Herbe. Absolutely wonderful. I also had a fun day hanging out with my mom, and went to see a totally sweet movie – Bedtime Story – with my volunteer match (part of a group I volunteer with). And hey, the weather wasn’t half bad. So all in all, I think it was a pretty good week off.
Now our challenge is to keep hacking away at the spring cleaning now that we’re back to our busy work schedules. The apartment is totally nutty with sorting boxes blanketing the living room floor, not to mention the plant re-potting station set up in the middle of the kitchen floor. The half-way mess is driving me even more crazy than the initial mess! Hopefully we can blast the rest of it on the weekend.
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of work and school, and my semester is finally over. I handed in my thesis proposal last week, and my partner and I are currently enjoying a much needed staycation to relax and get organized.
Naturally, I overplanned our holiday with three pages of to-dos and spring cleaning plans. But honestly, I am just so excited to have the time and mental space to get the apartment organized! My partner and I have been mostly staying away from our computers, enjoying the quiet, and getting to bed early. Then in the mornings, we’ve been leaping out of bed ready to clean! (Well, I leap into cleaning while he leaps into making a delicious green smoothie!)
We’ve been making excellent progress, but haven’t yet hit the tipping point. The more we clean and declutter, the crazier the apartment is looking, because we have boxes and piles of “actionable stuff” – the things to take places – returns, special recycling (electronics and batteries), stuff to donate, a garage sale box, etc. all spread out on the living room floor. But we’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space. In the meantime of course, I’m oscilating between feelings of resolve and overwhelm, but trying to make sure to have some downtime and do actual fun stuff on our holiday too. Later this week we’re going to an outdoor nordic spa for the morning for my partner’s birthday. Winding down in a bubbling hot tub in the forest will be absolute bliss, and looking forward to that is keeping me motivated to keep chugging along with the spring cleaning! Ahhhh…can’t wait.
Whenever I read about personal finance, specifically stuff about how to pay off debts, the mantra is generally “decrease spending and increase income,” but the emphasis always seems to be on decreasing spending. I don’t doubt that that’s the better of the two strategies, since if you’re in the hole it’s best to stop digging. But at the same time, as I try to curtail my unnecessary spending (which I’m having mixed success with, *cough..shoes..cough*), I thought, why not balance this with trying to bring in some extra income? So I sat down and made a little plan:
1. Apply for a $500 scholarship that my school has for part-time grad students. It’s probably a long shot, but since my grades are good enough I thought I should give it a try. I dropped off the application on Monday, so now I just have to cross my fingers and wait.
2. Do some freelancing. I signed up for oDesk and so far it’s working out well (and I like it better than elance). I stick to my standards, don’t apply for anything that looks sketchy or lame, and look for positive feedback from providers before bidding on a job. Right now I’m still wrapping up my semester but I’m hoping to do more freelancing in the summer.
3. Promote my favourite blender. I am a total Vita-Mix devotee, so I’m happy to promote them. People who buy one using my link save $35 on shipping, and I get a little commission to throw at my debt, so everyone’s happy.
4. Sell unneeded “stuff”. I did that when we last moved and ended up making $1000 by downsizing – that’s almost a year’s part-time tuition for me so I was thrilled. There’s still too much “stuff” though…I need to declutter in a big way! I haven’t ever used eBay as a seller and I’m hesitant about the shipping aspect, but I’m thinking about trying it this summer to get rid of various things that are cluttering up my life.
5. Blog? I write a shoe blog for fun, and I may see if any shoe companies want to advertise with me, but that’s a tricky subject since I don’t want to gum up the whole place with ads. I did write a sponsored post last year, which was interesting. Might look into that a bit more.
6. Mystery shopping. This one’s a bit “out there”, but I signed up with a few local companies to try it out. I have no idea if it’ll work out or not, but I thought, why not give it a try.
Anyway, these are my ideas so far. But the main thing is, I really do have to cut back on my spending. Maybe if I can make some good progress on the freelancing, I can designate that as my “fun money” in my (non-existant) budget and be really disciplined with my 9-5 paycheque.
I kind of love this “USB stick” on 
Today I’ve been meeting all kinds of interesting and inspiring folk at 
Whenever I read about personal finance, specifically stuff about how to pay off debts, the mantra is generally “decrease spending and increase income,” but the emphasis always seems to be on decreasing spending. I don’t doubt that that’s the better of the two strategies, since if you’re in the hole it’s best to stop digging. But at the same time, as I try to curtail my unnecessary spending (which I’m having mixed success with, *cough..shoes..cough*), I thought, why not balance this with trying to bring in some extra income? So I sat down and made a little plan:
