Blah de Blog

1. The Thanksgiving trip to Peru with Krista (who has been busy finishing all sorts of projects you should read about) is canceled for me. I feel bad for flaking out on her, especially when it involves a place that would be so cool to see in advance of the apocalypse. I now have a more vested interest in hoping the Maya are wrong, so that I can live to get another stamp in my shiny new passport with the uncracked spine.

2. There was a big gnarly hurricane on the east coast a few days ago. I find it difficult to blog about the apocalypse with an actual one in progress for some people, while I am personally insulated from it in the mostly-loving embrace of the Mojave Desert, where I lectured today about our ancestral natives and how they used cliffs for their homes. I trust that the photos you'll see here on the Orlando Sentinel site are real, because I found the story from Tom Skilling's weather page.

3. I must keep this post short, as I have a date with the end of Going Bovine (read 2) right now.

She must have known that it was Tuesday, because Miss Gokey sent me the following quote in a text message this morning:

"The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning."

It is that thought with which I leave you on this fine evening, loyal readers.

Memoriam

"Social media executors" are a new trend.

???

I'm glad you asked! A "social media executor" is the person you designate to preside over/dispose of your social media accounts in the event of your untimely death. Here's a nice short video about it. Something to think about in the unlikely event that we die off in the 1st phase and our loved ones live on to the 2nd or 3rd. I say "unlikely" because, after all, we're the beastiest people we know, so...

This post...did not start out being what it is. The event that inspires it wasn't even something I'd planned to blog about, but being so far behind after having skipped a week, I thought the large sheets of foam core created an apocalyptic landscape in Krista's house. 

When Krista asked me if I wanted to be a model for a new style of photography that she is trying, I was excited for the opportunity because I have loved her photos since way back in 2007. It was a double opportunity: I got to sit for a portrait from a very talented photographer, and I also got to support the business of a close friend. Because she is (get ready for a shameless self-hyperlink) brilliant, Krista casually said, "How do you want to be remembered after the end?" And the "Memoriam" post was born. 

I am able to paste two of Krista's images of me below because SHE GAVE ME THE PHOTOS FOR CHRISTMAS. The photos can be a Christmas gift due to the following reasons: Krista owns a photography business by which she makes money taking people's photos. Krista is the person that Walgreens is trying to protect when Walgreens says, "Please verify that you took/own these photos and/or have permission to copy them."

A few people on facebook have said that these photos are beautiful, and I agree.

HOWEVER
There are only three aspects of them that portray me the way I would like to be remembered:
1) I have good taste in hair color.
2) I look fantastic in baby blue.
3) I have laugh lines. I love my laugh lines.

If you have ever met me IRL, you know that I have facial flaws like scars and moles and outsized hair follicles and...well, I'm sure I have other unsightly flaws as well.

You will notice that Krista has removed every one of them. She also put makeup on me and styled my hair. Then she painstakingly posed my reluctant limbs.

Is this how I want to be remembered?

Or would I rather be remembered sweaty and gasping at the top of Multnomah Falls, warts and all, with one eye squintier than the other?

Or?
...
(here's a thought)
...
both???

Krista knows all of this about me. As the photo session began coming to an end, she said, "You can at least ACT like you are having fun!" I said, "You know me well enough to know that I can in fact be having lots of fun with my natural scowl on my face!" She said, "And YOU know ME well enough that you know I pick on you." :)

If you are considering having a portrait done, so that those loved ones who mysteriously outlive your beastie self can have a more-perfect-than-you image to remember you by, I sincerely hope that you have a photographer like Krista: someone who knows you well enough to be able to painstakingly pose you.

The latter photo, the one of me having struggled up a one-mile stretch that is probably simple for many, is the one I want those family members who display photos of me to put up in their living rooms. The former photos, where I struggled to relax my fingers and to smile with my eyes, are the ones I want displayed on Krista's website.

They would be a nice memorial to me. But they are a far more appropriate memorial to Krista, along with the portraits of the other five women that she has transformed.

Here was an artist who took a rock and tumbled it to polished.

I think these last two posts of mine have been particularly good. The fact that I skipped a full week hasn't changed, but I consider myself all caught up now. I have an image to introduce you to for last Tuesday's post, but I'll do it next Tuesday and bring you back to your regularly-scheduled Apocalypse Blog. After that, look forward to some amazing information coming out of a little country called Bangladesh.

Until then, love and light, and may you always smile with your eyes. 

My Sweet Sweltering Mojave!

It's not Thursday. It's not even Tuesday. Via apathy, distraction, and a brief love affair with German movies, I managed to skip three whole blog posts, even though I swore while leaving Krista's house four days ago that I would attempt to backdate two that very afternoon.

I'm hoping that the magic of the internet will render it impossible for you to REALLY know when this post is being composed. Watch for similar deceptions after the apocalypse!

Speaking of...you may be aware that the Maya calendar ends on 12/21. Coincidentally, this is also the date that my teaching week ends before winter break. Which means that I'll be spending the apocalypse in Vegas. Thus this post's title. As I commuted home this afternoon, the temperature reader in my Subaru reported an outside temp of 102. Weather.com reports that my car exaggerated by 4 degrees. But weather.com has a vested interest in making people feel good. My Subaru does not.

Even if I were spending it in Indiana, however, I would still be warm. The first time I saw the little gadgets I'm posting about, I scoffed at them thinking, "as long as I have a copy of City Life and a baggie full of dryer lint, I can start a fire." And that's true. However, after seeing it work just one time during a trip to Great Basin, I was converted. The firestarter is a much more efficient tool for making and sustaining the force that gives life back to frozen appendages and makes marshmallows toasty, delicious, and possibly carcinogenic.

Here's the process:
1. Buy a fundraising candle from your favorite schoolchild and dig your melon baller out.

2. Fill the cups of a used cardboard egg carton with dryer lint you have previously harvested.

3. Set some water to heat on the stove while you attack the fundraising candle with the melon baller.

4. Pull a tin can from the trash (Vegas) or recycle bin (everywhere else) and get ready to float it in the warming water double-boiler style. (I took the liberty of hyperlinking "double boiler," because I get frustrated when tasks call for materials or ingredients and I have no idea what they are.)

5. Throw the candle shavings into the tin can.

6. Put your heat-resistant glove on and get to melting the wax.

7. Drizzle the melted wax over the lint in the egg carton.

8. Repeat the entire process several times until the wax just holds the lint together, ensuring it won't blow away if it is windy on the mountaintop. *ahem* I mean...if it is windy on the long and winding road you take to wherever it is that you will choose to go on 12/22.

Remember: your new preparedness toys may prove to be fairly useless if you don't take them for a test run. It is also still in the low 100s, so you'll want to do your test run in a place where nights are nice and chilly and you can wear sweaters and hoodies and possibly wool socks and funny hats.

*Flash forward: mountaintop/long, windy road...

When you arrive to the destination where you will build your fire, rip one of the cardboard cups off of the egg carton and position it neatly under your firewood. Because Miss Gokey made a carton full of firestarters in a demonstration lesson, perfectly integrating the Components of an Effective Lesson in an I-do-we-do-you-do scenario, we had plenty of firestarters and I used three of them along with a trusty Bic (because we've come to the time of our last year ever when it is prudent to conserve our magnesium, having practiced and verified that we can indeed use it) to come up with this:

while we enjoyed this:

(them's some Doritos @ 8,000 ft!)

and gazed upon this:

So, although the impending end of the world seems all-bad, preparing for it doesn't have to be. Stay toasty warm (or cool, if, like me, you're sitting on a desert patio tonight) out there, loyal readers!

Can We Talk About the Weather?

Using NLV and Las Vegas's brilliant network of surface roads, I was able to meet up with Krista tonight, because apparently we are planning a trip together! I refuse to tell you anything about it until it happens (unless you already know about it), because it will be really good blog fodder and I want your anticipation to build all the way up through Thanksgiving. I bring this up because at the end of our visit/planning session, we discussed how late our blogs have been posting recently.

On my way home, I stopped at my trusty CVS for provisions and hair dye. They were out of my preferred color, "spiced truffle." They have apparently dropped the truffles in favor of the pralines. I hate fashion. I have met the pralines before. I have a special word for praline. I call it, "orange." Therefore, I'll keep this post short because I have an appointment with something called "medium golden mahogany brown." Seriously!?!? A.k.a. "chocolate carmel." Post-apocalypse I shall use my handy teacher scissors to cut off my hair myself and let my natural gray do its thang with reckless abandon.

Whist trolling the aisles at the CVS, a day late and a dollar short I came upon the September issue of National Geographic. Cover: "What's Up With the Weather?" Photo: Huge tornado that Tom Skilling would call, "ominous."

Apparently, there were 14 extreme weather events in the United States last year, more than there have ever been. Each cost at least a billion dollars in damage, and worldwide the cost of weather-related disasters totaled more than $150 billion.

Signs and omens, kids, signs and omens.

Other news from above-the-fold: avoid armadillos. Apparently they cause leprosy.

I have been put in charge of finding a writing prompt for next week's departmental assessment. There's a video. I used to have a nifty youtube downloader tool, but I no longer have that. You can see the video here, but the children can't. The poor, poor children will have to...ugh!...read. Most students agree that maps will go the way of the dinosaurs. Most students don't believe in the upcoming zombie apocalypse.

To their credit.

We're going to ask them to write about it.

I hope that they do a good job. Wish us luck.

Time is Running Out!

time to compose my post, that is1as you can see from the lack of capitalization and end punctuation, i am composing this  post on my ailing t mobile sidekick, beezlebub.
i just cannot tear myself away from the women's individual gymnastics and now|swimming.
i also cant see any cursor communicating is going to prove difficult for me.
time is also running out because there are less than three weeks left of my seven day weekend, before i report back to the front lines of public education in america.
dare i mention it? at this point, it should be self-explanatory: time to learn the skills that will help us thrive in the upcoming New World Economy...is running out.
I think me figuring out how to effectively use
 the buttons on Beezlebub to write a blog post is one of the horsemen, isn't it?
What Have We Learned?
Well, from evaluating Dana's readiness, I have learned (as if I didn't already know it)that I
............................................................................................................................................................
I couldn't take it! I had to get up from in front of the TV and switch to the real computer before my phone met with an unfortunate accident involving the bow window. >[

I have learned as if I didn't know it already that, in no uncertain terms, I am ready to move to a place within easy walking distance of a large body of fresh water so that I can not only stay alive but also to, as Miss Gokey says, "Calm my anguish." I'm just putting that fact out to the Sensei in hopes that the Sensei will send me a magic banana.

So, I've been doing that. I've also nearly finished the first skein of yarn that I wrote about so long ago, about a month ago. If the Status Quo Economy survives to the Christmas season, I think I'll be buying my scarf-presents, not making them.

I have become close to obsessed with the idea of apple cider, and I resolve to make it in the fall.

Finally, I have been practicing using a specimen of post-automobilism transportation excellence by riding around on a Collegiate bicycle from the 1970s. The blue one is mine.

So, I'm getting ready to go: down the trail, back to school, to a lake.
And you should be, too. On that happy note, I remind you to check out The Wannabe while you're trolling the blogosphere today. Krista is offering travel tips, and she should have good ones: she's composing from China!

One week from today I won't be cycling anymore, because I'll be away from the flat land.
I'll be back in Las Vegas. Between here and there is a plane ride during which I will dive into a very juicy book that I can't wait to review for you all.

See how much I love you, loyal readers, that I would tear myself away from what may possibly be the last Olympics that the world will see within our lifetimes?

Oh, and as a final note: I heard that zombies dig on the brains of people who eat lots of Chik-Fil-A because their brains are nice and fat. And that's all I'll say about that.

From the Food Network to the Quick Care

Are you familiar with Alton Brown?

I bring him up because several years ago while watching the Food Network, I became agitated and asked my friend Krista why he had to stop so often and bore us with technical details about food. She informed me that he is actually a food scientist. I'm not sure what that means, but Alton Brown does have a very good blog that has a current entry about foodscaping that is worth the read while we prepare for a possible apocalypse.  

I bring him up because he (and Sara Oberle) would be appalled at what I am about to say: I invented a raw s'more. You take a piece of graham cracker, a raw marshmallow and a square of chocolate, and you stuff them in your mouth at once, not bothering to heat them in any way whatsoever. 

I bring up my raw s'more to introduce you, in case you did not already know, to my most treasured personality trait, impatience. 

Of course, the very minute the school year ended (a few minutes or hours beforehand, in fact), I fell ill, the victim of a phlegmtastic event. Following the advice of my friend Jodi, I started a Mucinex regimen. Following the advice of my friend Miss Gokey, I quadrupled my water intake. These actions made me feel slightly better. 

Being sick reminded me that I meant to order, but never did, a book recommended by James Wesley Rawles, Where There is no Doctor by David Werner. Lacking this proper manual, I went to the next-best resource, pinterest, where I believe it was Shannon Koistinen who had pinned a link to Mountain Rose Herbs. Clearly, according to the website, you have to sleep at night on top of a large pile of money in order to be healthy and natural. 

Which brings us back to impatience (in this case, also frugality) and raw s'mores. The fourth recipe down the page on the Mountain Rose Herbs website talks about a throat spray made from essential oils. Yeah, I went ahead and threw a sliced lemon and a handful of mint leaves into a pitcher of water and have been drinking lemon-mint water all day. And I feel slightly better.

Here in Las Vegas, there is a doctor, and there is also really good health insurance that I'm fortunate enough to have for the time being and should definitely be taking advantage of. There is something to be said, however, for finding the online recipes, and for beginning to build up an Apocalypse medicine cabinet. Maybe it will contain essential oils.  

Be well, my loyal readers! Hasta la proxima. 

Blogger's Block

Here at the end of my year, which has been an academic instead of a calendar year ever since I was five years old, I am in full ADD mode, and I do not know if this is due to a lack of blog fodder or an overload. I specifically try to post on Tuesdays, Thursdays and sometimes Saturdays, because my friend Krista and I started our themed blogs at about the same time. You will know this is not shocking because if you read both of our blogs, you know we have some of the same good ideas, and you know what they say about great minds.  Krista posts the Wannabe on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays each week. Therefore, in my quest to fulfill my New Year's Resolution of usefulness, I like to give you something to read every other day so that you can dedicate the off days to the wannabe. This week I am hideously late. Why?

1. I have a magazine problem. At a recent professional development, I picked up an old copy of Archaeology magazine and learned that Europeans were using guns as early as the 15th century. I decided to dedicate a post to the fact that guns in the 15th century were likely to blow up in the user's face, since they were such new technology, and they were more of a fashion statement than a useful weapon. I wonder if the same might not be said today? The author interviews a scholar who compares the 15th century gun (the article was about the Battle of Towton) to driving onto a contemporary battlefield in a Ferrari.

2. I was going to link my comments about this article that I read to my comments on another article from the current issue of Discover magazine about the history of human warfare. Problem: I didn't read the article due to becoming distracted by the fact that Barack Obama is on the cover of the current Rolling Stone, of which I read half (distracted again by the need to choose multichoice questions for my departmental common assesment) whilst dancing around singing the old Dr. Hook song. So, there went yesterday's post, and I still haven't read the article.

3. Not finishing the 2nd half of my blog homework means that I will fail in my ambition to move Global Thermonuclear Warfare to the top of the Doomsday Dashboard.

4. Next, the discovery of some Maya glyphics that were older than the oldest discovered Maya glyphics prompted two of my friends on facebook to post links to articles stating that the world will not end at the end of the year. Problem thus solved, I decided to try again to move Mario into another world.

There is a fine line between a reason and an excuse. In the words of a French proverb, "He who makes excuses accuses himself." Hopefully I will be back on track again next week to update you on Discover magazine and any new developments. In the meantime, look forward to a special Sunday post dedicated to the West Rim. Until then, my loyal readers...

Apocalypse Birthday!

My friend Krista and I have an annual tradition to meet (or try to - one year we failed and ended at Red Robin) at our favorite Mexican restaurant, Bonito Michoacan, for 5 de Mayo, where we also celebrate our nearly-mutual birthdays. Imagine my delight when I pulled the tissue paper from my gift bag and found an Emergency Zone kit!  I am now officially fabulous. The kit contains enough stuff to keep me alive for nearly three days. I will add it to my growing stockpile of portable get-out-of-town supplies!

In addition, I'd like to offer my preliminary review of the ReVIVE series solar charger for my phone, iPod and Kindle. I stuck it in the window as soon as it came out of the box (thanks Mom and Dad!) and used it to plug in my phone. Works like a charm! Even the instruction manual warns, however, that it will only charge up to 50% from the sun. It works best when plugged into the wall, so solar charging is only good for a "boost," but whatever, it's still the coolest gadget in the universe, and it is only my second attempt at harnessing the power of the sun. (The first being my banana chip adventure, and there I go hyperlinking to myself again!)

For my more POST-apocalyptic fans, I offer the note that came with my mockingjay pin. (Weirdest hyperlink ever!)

Oops! It's sideways. And blurry. But it reports that my pin is an authentic prop replica. XD
And I don't have Jodi's permission to post it. So...it may have to come down. But not right away.

The reason it's blurry is that I'm rushing to go for a walk with Miss Gokey to see the supermoon. I was alerted to the Supermoon by my Sigma Kappa big, Michelle Gessler Terchila.

As a final note, if you'd like to wish me a happy apocalypse birthday IN PERSON, Southwest Airlines is offering a pretty cool contest to win a trip. But if you win thanks to my alerting you, you have to at least call me, unlike half of my cousins when they come to Vegas.

On that happy (birthday) note, I bid my readers adieu and go out to look at the sky.