Goodies

So my current phone is going...going...dying...almost....dead. The battery works alright. But the phone itself is not really functioning. The ear phone really sucks so a lot of times in order to hear someone I have to put them on speaker phone. It constantly dies suddenly or drops my calls (which is more than likely a Cingular problem). It gets pretty shitty reception and it used to rock. And it's supposed to take pictures but then they always come out blurry or messed up after I save them. Anyway, the phone is old. It's seen good times and bad times. And now it's going to be retired. For a beautiful new w300i!!!!!

Cloud Facts

Definition: a cloud is a visible mass of condensed droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body.

Study of clouds: nephology

A droplet of moisture in a cloud is about .01mm in diameter. It takes billions of droplets to make a cloud. There are three ways to make a cloud: 1) air is cooled below its saturation point. This happens when the air comes in contact with a cold surface, like a cold front. 2) when two air masses below saturation point mix. Examples are breath on a cold day, aircraft contrails and Arctic sea smoke. 3) The air stays the same temperature but absorbs more water vapor into it until it reaches saturation point.

So why does it rain? Well, the best I can do to explain it as simply as possible is that something happens inside the cloud and the present droplets start to make even more droplets or ice crystals and fall from the cloud and melt, and you can only assume that if they don't melt then we get snow etc.

The color of cloud tells you whats going on inside of it. It doesn't really take a brainiac to figure it out though. If a cloud looks dark and ominious you can safely assume that more than likely a certain size droplet is forming rapidly...and melting on it's way down....etc.

Bottom line: I really wish it weren't cloudy outside. But obviously I can't do anything about it. Boo.

The Weekend Review

This weekend had a great kickoff with active civil disobedience, a birthday dinner, close friends, some hookah and vodka, and unfortunately...Salad Fingers.

My friends, Gary and Nate, were mean enough to go to www.fat-pie.com/salad once everyone had some hookah. It's technically a deranged cartoon of a sick character called "Salad Fingers" that has a thing for rusty spoons. Whoever made these sick videos had to be on crack or needs to be locked up. I totally believe in freedom of speech...but that doesn't necessarily mean I need to know about this stuff. It's just creepy and wrong. But aside from that smoking hookah, knocking back vodka with crazy Israeli friends and debating liberal vs. radical feminism was a great kickoff to the weekend.

Crazy/Fun Friends

Saturday the highlight was the CSO concert with Jimmy followed by The Departed followed by a debate of Godfather vs. Departed. Excellent.

Sunday: biking, running, and strength training followed by a call home, practice, FOOD, and probably a DHW gathering at mi casa, followed by a prompt Good Night. And then...another week of....CCM.....

the truth

Film Review: An Inconvenient Truth
I had been wanting to see this film for a while but I had to get on a waitlist with Netflix so I opted to wait till it was more available. Since the summer, I've been reading up a lot on Global Warming or what I call "Anthropogenic Climate Change". I prefer that name better than "Global Warming" because it inferrs that the damage being done to this planet is being inflected by the human race, primarily the part of the human race living north of the equator...

And Al Gore emphasizes the same point. The film is great. I think it's a great tool for informing people of what global warming is, why it's a climate crisis, and what needs to be done to halt it, and what we can do individually to help in the fight to save the planet.

GREAT WEBSITES:

http://www.climatecrisis.net/

http://www.onetonco2.com/index.php

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/home.cfm

check out CFLs: this is one huge way to save lots of $$$$ and lbs of CO2
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?tagid=483&campaign=mts

http://zerofootprint.net/

http://www.seventhgeneration.com/index.php

http://www.truthout.org/index.htm

Israel yafeh meod!

My favorite chaverim: Debbie and Idan!
View of Yaffo from Tel-Aviv beach:
Vender selling sesame treats or b'ivrit "sum sum matok":
Underneath a Chabad outside the Kotel and down the street from Chadaya:
Camel ride in the Negev:

Taylor'd for a Graceful Legacy

This is my mom's beautiful pup. It was supposed to be Ned's, but as always, the dogs bond to her instead... and it doesn't help that Ned is on travel most of the time.

So this is him. At 4 months. 40 lbs. He'll be about 80 lbs of pure power. A massive pooch, yeah?

So I would post pictures that I have taken, but Nooooooo. Those pictures are lost. Gone. You don't understand what I do with pictures! I treasure them. And I keep my little disposable camera for months, and pull it out on a random, memorable occasion and take a picture. And they are lost. Gosh. Freaking. Darn. It.

Oh well... I'll just have to get batteries for my digital.

Green Thumbalina

On Sunday it was gorgious and sunny outside, so I ventured ouside of my apartment and took a trip with Rachel *pictured below* to Home Depot.
I felt that I desperately needed some life in my apartment. It's been snowy, icey, and grey outside for about a month. Not being able to be outdoors and being cooped up inside all the time and not being able to see the grass started to become pretty depressing so I got some plants.
They really brought some life into the apartment. I bought a lot of primroses in different colors: orange and red with yellow in the middle, some cacti, and some "folliage" (sp?) as well as simple pots to put them in. Makes a huge difference. And it's even becoming warmer outside. Very nice changes! These plants have also sparked an old interest of mine: Botany (a topic Lady G and I loved studying in high school).

Here are some links to some interesting plant sites: http://plants.usda.gov/
http://www.botany.com/
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/botany/

Spring Break

I'm looking forward to Spring Break.
I'm coming home to OK. I think I'm leaving Wednesday March 14th, in the a.m. And I don't plan on coming back to Cincinnati till March 24th or 25th. I can't wait! I can't wait to see my friends and family. I can't wait to see Oklahoma. Go biking. Practice in my bedroom. Etc. I need to get some warm weather.

Yisrael...

View from the top of Tzipuri

rachov yehudim: (translation) Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem

Top of a wall outside of Tzion Gate: the glass is to keep people from climbing. Built in security system.

Masada: King Herod's cistern

A Thousand Words...

I am going to try to get back to my former love of photography. Nothing huge, but I want to do something here and there... even if it's with a disposable camera (undoctored) --->

There's this album that I'm also getting in to... just testing it out right now, but I really like it. Can you guess what it is?

Justin Timberlake's Future Sex Love Sounds.

Yeah. That's right.

Visualization Board

I know this is going to sound "hokey" (sp?) but I have a Project 2A: a Visualizatin Board.
I got the idea from watching a DVD called The Secret (http://thesecret.tv/) which I had heard about on Oprah (http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200702/tows_past_20070208.jhtml) and had to watch in my Sports Psych. class. The Secret focuses on the Law of Attraction. Essentially, the idea is that you attract things to yourself in some way or another. And if you know this you can use it to your advantage. The way this tied into Sports Psych. was that in sports psychology (mainly Psychological Training Skills- PST) people have to have motivation and goals in order to have the results they want. And one of the strongest tools of successful people is imagery: being able to clearly and vividly see what you want. And James Cambell, the author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, had a board hanging in his office. He had pictures of the things he wanted to see in his life. There was a picture of the house he wanted. A picture of a family. All sorts of things. And years later he dug up the board and he found that he had all the things that he had taped to his board. I'm not saying it's magic or anything silly. I just think that because he had a clear tangible vision of what he wanted he was able to maintain his focus, remember his motivation, and attain his goals.

So I've accomplished Project 2A: empty corkboard.

Project 2B: put something on it. have a clear vision.

An End to A Week

This weekend I plan on having one of these kinds of weekends --->

So I went to pick up my disposable black and white pictures that I've been looking forward to getting for the past 4 days, and they couldn't find them. They were supposed to call me back today, and they haven't... It really makes me sad. So hopefully they'll find them because some pictures you just can't replace.

TGIF

All the snow days are over and slowly the ice and snow are melting. Very slowly. At the rate it's going the extra H2O will be frozen in some form or another till spring.

I wish I could take credit for this photo. But my friend Travis took it. Very gorgious. Anyway, I only have one class today and I think it's going to kill me. I'm out of cat food. Boo. And I need some other things. Which means....I have to run errands...I don't mind running errands very much. What gets to me is usually the amount of money I end up spending. Whenever I go through the check out line I always end up ditching three things from my basket before half my things are even rung up...Instinct perhaps? And then once I get home it's a chore to carry all the bags in. It's not like I have a garage. I have a parking lot with ice-covered snow 7 inches thick. And it's between 1-11 degrees F. Not fun. But...it's nice to have shampoo and cat food etc. At least, the cat thinks so.

Cheeseball Day

I saw this card. I enjoyed the humor....


Anyway, I was talking to my friend Debbie yesterday about the pending doom of V-day. Pretty much we agreed that on some sort of terms V-day is a day for all the "cheeseballs" to come out and be themselves. All those people who secretly desire to let their cheesiness reign and reek havoc on the world. I'll be completely honest, as a child my only connection to V-day was the candy. I hated pink and red. And the combination of the two was really a bit too cheeseball for me. But V-day was like a second Halloween...without the awesome costumes. And you have to admit the cheeseballs come out of the woodwork. Heart shaped boxes of chocolates, powdery/sugary candy, teddy bears holding hearts, and childrens cards with lolipops. It's so cheeseball. It's so American. It's so....cheesy!

Life's game.

I just took a test in a class that I know nothing about. But a lot of the questions are similar questions to the quizzes, exercises, and reviews... so if I memorize how to do those problems, I'll know how to give the answers on the test. I'll know how to pull of the class.

So what's the lesson here?

Play it right.

Life is a game in the sense that you have to play it right. It can be a gamble, but if you think smart, you can act smart. And therefore, you can be smart.

Trolls

Sometimes when I'm down or something is getting to me my mom says, "Don't let the trolls get ya down." Well...today was a Munday not a Monday. And the trolls definitely tackled me today.

the cheer factor: http://www.lileks.com/institute/index.html James Lileks is insanely hilarious and sharp. And the Official Institute of Cheer is a no fail cure for any frown.

Death To Answering Machine

Problem: it works.

Symptoms: excessive voicemail pileages; over-usage; voicemails containing expressions of distaste for getting voicemail; phone operator incapable of answering damn phone which is why operator has damn phone so why have damn phone if you're not going to answer damn phone!

Cause of death: stressed caller.

Time of death: 1:00 am, Monday, Feb. 12, 2007.

Hey, You thought it. I just posted it.

Project 1A

Project 1A: Refurbishing Vintage sterio cabinet
I plan on taking this wonderful piece of furniture and stripping the paint and I was originally planning on staining the wood but I'm not sure that's a possibility. SO now the new plan (1A) is to strip it and then paint it a light green color and put a nice finish of some sort on it. I want to possibly take the handles off and either switch them out with something else or I want to take them and make them look a bit dirtier and make them look like they are made out of copper.

By the time it's done it's going to look just amazing.

Not only will it look amazing. It's going to be ripped. I'm hoping that if I give my current sterio system, speakers, and turntable to my brother perhaps my parents will help me get a new dj turntable, speakers, and a smaller system to fit into the cabinet. The current equipment is ancient and amazing. But I'm worried the needle on the turntable in there will scratch up my records and the radio system works wonderfully, but it was built before casette tapes were even used so the system in the cabinet is essentially worthless even though it is still in functioning condition. Anyway, this is going to be a project that I plan to finish in a year...it'll be a while till this pops back up on thepapermoon.

Game Over

My Sports Psych. Class concluded with a class excursion to the Cintas Center to watch Xavier U kill University of Dayton in the first period.






















So I got to go home from class 3 hours early! Talk about a good deal. I really love these accelerated courses. They are perfect for me. I'm seriously surprised that more UC students haven't caught onto this. And not only are the classes optimal in appeal but they also focus on topics that can help people in their everyday life. For instance, I'm taking a stress management courses next quarter. I would love to learn techniques that can help me cope with my pressures.

Anyway, all this extra could mean that I have time to practice and do homework. Or...it could mean that I have time to get some sleep and maybe watch a movie, right? I did just go 7 days straight without a break and I'm still holding up.

French Toast

Anxiety is a negative motional state characterized by nervousness, worry, and apprehension and associated with activation or arousal of the body, Thus anxiety has a thought component (cognitive anxiety) and a physical component (somatic anxiety).....

Bla bla bla....

Our Close Up

Recently, I have been talking to a guy (through facebook messages, of course) and he says that he's continuously "caught up in laughter with my lucky insightfulness." He says that I speak with wisdom and confusion, with curiousity. That I complicate things because I try to find the positive and negative in everything.

Perhaps I try to look at life too closely?

Life has both good and bad. When I'm looking at it from every angle, I'm just doing that. I'm just trying to understand the things that come my way. Usually, it makes me appreciate them more. So I think that it's fair to find the positive and negative in everything, as long as you don't let the negative affect you. And I don't, for the most part. I did for a while there, but I'm not now. I'm all smiles.

Op. WU

Today, following my lesson with Ixi (one of a few clarinet extraordinares that play in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and grace CCM with their presence http://www.cincinnatisymphony.org/home.asp) I plan on working on a little something called Operation Warm-up which is being run by my good buddy, Nate. Essentially, once every year people get together at Hillel and take toiletries and other oerishable goods and package them so that they can be taken to Over-the-Rhine (a depressed area in downtown Cincinnati) and hand the packages out to homeless people during the harshest and coldest time of the year. I'm really excited. I have a lot on my plate right now and it's not going to be easy to set aside time to do this, but it is something I really want to do.

Where does it all go?

Where do the calories you eat go?

Here:
25 percent to muscles
23 percent to the liver, pancreas, kidneys, spleen, and adrenal glands
10 percent to the kidneys
10 percent to the brain
10 percent to breaking down the food you just ate
5 to 10 percent to the heart
2 to 3 percent to fat cells

As for which 'fat cells' I cannot tell you. You're on your own. But it is interesting. And I'm sure those %s also depend on the person.

2 Degrees F outside

And F stands for Fucking COLD. That's right. It's cold outside. So cold that they say with the windchill that if your skin is exposed for more than 5 minutes you can get frosbite or something. They said that on some channel. Maybe I'm wrong. But either way....I don't want to leave my apartment, let alone my bed. It's so cold I stand in front of my oven sometimes just so that I can feel my fingertips so I can practice. I hate hate hate this cold weather. This is the coldest month of my life so far.

It is what It is

I can never stop wondering about the beautifully, infinitely glorious things thate are around. Especially those that I haven't even imagined yet. And when I get a taste of it, I'm simply in awe. And I remember how much I don't know, how small I am, and how beautifully complicated it all is, And yet, how terribly simple. But the good thing is that it is never enough. So I will always be reminded about these wonders, and I will always be seeking more. Perhaps I will find my place... but until then, it will always be what It is, and that is reassuring.

I love...

My Depression Era vintage vaseline glass juicer!
That's right...I went to an antigue annex off of Red Bank Expressway (Exit 9, N. I-71, OH). I was looking for a sturdy good looking table of some kind to put my T.V. on or a book case to replace the audacious piece of crap that has been decomposing in my living room for the past 6 months. So I found something for my T.V. A vintage sterio cabinet. Misha and Mike helped me pick it up and get it into my apartment. It's from at least the 1940's, if not later, and it has an old turntable in it and radio. And it all works!!!! I plan on stripping the paint and either staining it, if the wood is good, or repainting it with some fun colors (Albeit, not too fun. Just sensibly chic, appealing, and smart).

Anyway, I crossed paths with a sexy cheap green juicer...I couldn't leave her there. So I bought her. And then I came home to find out how absolutely amazing it is!
And just now I found out some pretty insane facts about vaseline glass on http://1st.glassman.com/vaselineglass.html.

For instance, in 1835 experiments with uranium as a glass colorant were being carried out by Whitefriars Glass Works in London and that in 1836, a pair of uranium glass candlesticks were presented to the Queen. Production of uranium glass in Britain ceased by the end of the second world war but a small amount is still being manufactured in the USA and Czechoslovakia.

HEALTH AND SAFETY ASPECTS OF VASELINE GLASS / URANIUM GLASS
One of the most significant aspects of uranium glass is that it is radioactive and does give a positive reading on a geiger counter. This may cause some concern as to its safety with regard to health but I am now able to report that in June 2003 I assisted the UK's National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) in a study of uranium bearing glass. During this study, technical representatives of the NRPB visited my home and conducted extensive tests on a very wide variety of uranium bearing glass from many manufacturers and time periods. They confirmed that the radiation levels detected were low and quite safe with normal use. The full results of the NRPB study will be published in the near future and at that time I will be providing a link to the publication.

ADDITIONAL SAFETY NOTE: The grinding or abrasive polishing of vaseline glass cannot be classed as 'Normal Use' as the dust and residue produced by these actions can be toxic if inhaled or ingested and therefore should be avoided.

The other significant aspect of uranium bearing glass and that which is of major interest to collectors, is that it glows a vivid bright green under Ultra Violet light (blacklight). This is due to the Ultra Violet radiation exciting the outer electrons of the uranium atoms which as a result give off energy and which is seen by our eyes as a bright green glow.

"Now that's whack!"

Follow the Leader

I am happy with where I am at, but I am still somehow unsatisfied. I wish I could just be content. I wish I could not wonder, or want... Sometimes I wish I could see where I was going. Most of the time, I wish that I am satisfied that I am follwing Someone who knows where we're headed.

Fred

Recently I got these "MonKeys" So that I can tell my keys apart. A lot of my keys are the same color and same shape and I go through minutes everyday trying to pull out the right one to get into my apartment etc. Anyway, I checked out the company that makes my MonKeys (http://www.worldwidefred.com/goods.htm) And they are amazing! They have so many things I really want...but...will probably never buy. That's what dreams are for right? Something to look forward to? Like...a dream home...

I have a problem with my sink plug sealing and I thought this was hilarious and cute.
And these coffee cups were unique, playful and funny.

Pepto-Bismol

Is for: nausea, heart burn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea!

Haha.

Chamber Music

So today I have a Chamber Winds concert. And I'm really excited. But I'm also kind of anxious. I play on two of the music selections: Parthia for two solo horns by Krommer and "Sept Dances" by Francaix.

I love both the pieces. Krommer is like solo clarinet flourishes with horn duo. It's stressful and in every rehearsal the tempos varied. Sometimes I felt like I was rushing, other times dragging. In the Francaix it's all gravy except one lick at the end of the third movement. Anyway, regardless of what happens I'm sure I'll perform fine...It's just that it's the last two pieces. I have to sit there and wait for that. It's not going to be easy. Especially because it is an atrium concert and it's so cold outside, all the people walking in and out is going to bring in the cold...

Anyway, once I am up there performing these feelings will go away. Until then I'm just going to feel like I'm holding my breath underwater, waiting to come up and breathe.