compost fail

Yeah, so we gave up on composting. After a year of trying with our 5 gallon bucket system and winding up with compost that killed my plants and smelled bad, Chris decided he would dig a trench for compost in the back of our new apartment, only to find that we had hard clay, not dirt back there. So since we don't have the money for a real compost drum or anything, we're back to throwing away our food trash and calling our year-plus experiment of saving food waste a total waste of time and effort. Bummer.

Studies show that Prenatal Air Pollution Lowers Children's IQ

So I just read the first article to really make me paranoid ... a new study showed a link between exposure to smog before birth and low IQ in children. I live in Atlanta and, until about two months before I got pregnant, would walk a mile down a really smoggy street to the train station and back 4 times a week for work. Sometimes in July/August even the short walk from the train station to my office building would make me feel sick from the car exhaust. I'm just glad we happened to move to a less busy area right before we got pregnant... but it still makes me a bit paranoid about living in a big city.

My new favorite sea creature

I think this is my new favorite sea creature... Alien Octopus Baby! Some day I will need to make a crochet pattern for one of those! I just can't get enough of those big baby alien eyes.

baby gators

Because I just can't get enough, I wanted to show a close-up of a couple of the baby gators we saw. Aren't they just so cute and tiny?

Paynes Prairie

This past weekend we drove down to Fort Myers, FL for our baby shower. On the drive home, we stopped at Paynes Prairie in Gainesville, to have lunch and take a walk, since I can't really handle long drives anymore, "in my condition." This is one of my favorite places to go ANYWHERE, and we haven't been in a few years... partly because we are rarely in Gainesville for more than a couple hours, and partly because the last time we tried to go, it was flooded from hurricane season. Now there's a new boardwalk that will help that issue when it rains really bad, but then there's still another mile of walking past the path.

This is at the La Chua trail and the Alachua Sink in Gainesville, Florida. Chris and I counted 120 different alligators on our 1.3 mile walk (one way; we only counted on our way back from the end), including 9 brand new baby gators. There are also bison and wild horses living in the prairie, but I've never seen the bison, just the horses. You see signs of them on the trail though, in the form of nice big droppings.

We took tons of photos for those of you who have never enjoyed the fun of walking along the trail watching alligators!

BABIES! There were 9 total, but I think only 7 in this shot. That's momma in front. We could see them so well because they were on our bank, so we had to be careful not to get too close and upset the momma gator.


This one was probably the closest to us of all the gators, actually being up on our bank. But gators don't really bother people unless they're bothered first. Like if we stepped on his head or waved a chicken in front of his face, then we'd be in trouble. Otherwise, no worries.


Large gators on the opposite bank.


Lots of gators lounging at the Alachua Sink. Warm water comes up from the springs below, which is why this is such a "hot spot" for alligators.


This is what most of the trail is like; we walk along the path, and to the right is the stream with all the gators, and to the left is basically nothing. This shot is taken from the overlook at the end of the trail. Walking back from here, we counted 120 gators between the end of the trail and the beginning.


Here's the new boardwalk, at the beginning of the trail.

random funniness

The last panel of today's Dinosaur Comic sounds like something Chris would say. I now expect him to say this to me the next time I say "Thanksgiving" when I mean "Valentine's Day," or "knife" when I mean "scissors," or "New Year's" when I mean "Election Day." (Blockbuster when I mean Best Buy, and the list goes on!) Yes, this happens often. More often now that the baby in my belly makes me forget things. But I will not pin this one entirely on the baby - I do it plenty without a baby in my belly as well.

teapot giveaway

Found this from my friend k-dawg's site, it's a teapot and skirty giveaway! Given my love of teapots, I figured I'd have to enter, and if you post to your site you get an extra chance. I mean, what else is my website for if not to use it to try and get cool things?

New Look!

So I just got really tired of having the old look up on the site, and of having such a small area to post, so photos and video couldn't be very big. And that design had just been up for years. And I was feeling kind of restless and needed to do something different that wasn't work-related. So here ya go. Did it last night and finished it up today. I think it will stick around for a while.

The reason I had to change the actual URLs for our blogs was so that we could use the new Blogger features that weren't around years and years ago when I first set up the site with these blogs. Now blogger is hosting them so that we can use the widget madness. Hooray for widgets!

Kudos to The Chris for helping me with picking out photos for the pages and for checking layouts in IE 7 while I was on my mac using Firefox. Some pages may be funky in IE6 but... well, in the real world I care about that, but on my blog I really don't care that much. You guys are too cool to be using such an outdated web browser anyways. Especially when you can download Firefox for free, even if there's some reason why you have to be on a PC and don't have IE7, like half the state of Georgia.

And that's all I have to say about that.

restless and transition

i am restless. and so i'm thinking of redesigning this site and making some domain name adjustments so i can take advantage of some of the cool new features blogger offers, that i can't use with the way i've got it set up right now. that means i may not be able to post for a while until i get it all changed out. we'll see how it goes. If at any point your bookmarks or RSS feed or whatever gets weird for this page, try going straight to youarenotyourjob.com and click new links to get back.

electricity vampires and sleep deprivation

I cannot sleep. I don't really know why. Sure, I had a half-caff americano around 5pm, but should that really keep me up at 5am? I've been tossing and turning for 5 hours! So I finally gave up and just got up to stare at the glowing laptop screen. Today will be a tough work day. Not to mention Brooke hooked us up with free tix to a midnight screening of The Happening for tonight. Ouch.

So Chris sends me emails full of links to interesting things sometimes, and when I have a few free minutes I'll go thru them. But I've been really busy at work, so they are backing up and I've got about 7 emails of 2-8 links each that i haven't looked at. So I decided to check some of them out, and I found one I wanted to make sure everyone knew about.

Did you realize that your phone charger is still sucking power even when your phone isn't plugged into it? Same with your laptop even when it's got a full battery? I don't understand this concept AT ALL. What can my cell charger possibly be doing with that power if it's not going into a phone? Regardless, this is resulting in a lot of wasted money and greenhouse emissions. We are going to start trying to remember to unplug things whenever we aren't using them, but there are some sites that have other tips for reducing these electricity vampires.

Pi day!

It's my favorite math-alicious day again, and I almost MISSED it. Luckily some random website tipped me off. So I went out looking for pi-themed crochet, and I discovered that last year's post about pi day is in google's top 10 list for a search of pi day crochet ... go figure. I'm a nerd. (For those of you who have no idea what Pi Day is, including all my coworkers, here's the wikipedia page to explain it all.)

In honor of the day, here are a couple of pi-themed crochet things I found:

Transcendental Number as Personal Chronogram (Pi)

And a little less high art: the Pi Calculator Case

Happy Pi Day!

and since we've no place to go...

I really love the weather widget image for snow. Seems so much nicer than the real stuff outside.

lol of the day

Chris says I am a total loser, but today's Dinosaur Comic made me laugh a lot. So much that I had to share.

Bomb Art, or Stupidest MIT Student Ever?

Wow, this article is pretty bizarre: Woman at Logan claims fake bomb is art, police say. I have to assume that this girl expected to be arrested, wearing a fake bomb into an airport. But the fact of the matter is that she very well could have been shot and killed if she slipped up at all and any of the officers were afraid she was about to detonate her "bomb" ... they have no way of knowing if it's fake or not when it's strapped to her body. (I mean, they thought LED signs were bombs a few months ago).

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's silly when people get scared of Mario Blocks or LED signs and think that they're bombs, but because people are afraid of that anything out of the ordinary is a bomb, I also think it's really stupid to actually PRETEND to have a bomb. Especially in an airport. Even if you think you're being a risky conceptual artist (and this is coming from the girl who was indoctrinated for 4 years in an art program that is ALL ABOUT risky conceptual art). And that's my 2 cents on the matter.

for Angela...

... and Nicole... and Sam... and Emily.

Did Steve tell you that, perchance? Steve.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Because it's my duty to tell you about important, oft-forgotten holidays, I must pass on what Jaime reminded me - today is
International Talk Like a Pirate Day! While it's debatable whether this is more or less exciting than Pi Day, where you get to eat pie and sound nerdy reciting the numbers in pi, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, you get to say "Arrrrrrgh!" and, my favorite, "Aaaarh, I've seen it before!" ... and of course, it's the only day of the year you can get away with telling that awful joke... "Have you seen the new pirate movie? It's rated Aaaaaaarrrrrrh!" It's also a good excuse to wear an eye patch and drink rum. Or sing the songs on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney. (Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)

So now you know.

Sadness: Bear Grylls is a big phony

So a while back I was talking about some of the gross things that Bear Grylls does on Man vs Wild. And then Chris watched it and decided that Bear was his hero. But then he sent me an article online about how he's really a big phony, and why they tell us he does isn't actually what he does. Like he doesn't sleep in tents all night, he films with a big crew and then goes and stays in fancy hotels and stuff. And that really sucks. So he is no longer cool at all. I figure they must have known that at some point we would figure out that he was a big faker, so I don't understand how they think it's worth it to try... cuz now everyone will just hate him. Anyways, here's a sad video about what a big faker he is. Just had to set the record straight.

Blog to Email

You will notice a new option to your left where you can input your email address, and have new posts send to your email inbox. This is because Emily asked for it, not because I really think you all want to be notified immediately every time I feel like posting something. Although if you DO want to be notified immediately every time I have something to say, putting your email address in the box and hitting Subscribe would be the thing to do.

It's important to know that you have to subscribe to my posts & Chris's posts separately. So if you wanna know what we BOTH think, you have to put your email address in here AND on Chris's blog page.

Oh yeah, I'll eventually post photos of our awesome new apartment... but we need to get it just a little cleaner first. I'm sure Chris will eventually get some awesome pictures of it with his new camera.

Radio Lab

Have I told you yet how addicted I am to Radio Lab podcasts? I might just love it more than This American Life, for starters. This show is FANTASTIC. But they're limited run, so there's only 15 of them so far over three years, and, um, I've already listed to half of them. So before long I'll be going through withdrawal. I learn so many great and interested things. Tonight I made Chris listen to one on music, which he actually admitted to liking (Chris doesn't do talk radio) and then I proceeded to talk his ear off about the other two or so of them that I listened to today. Every episode I learn something fascinating that I have to tell Chris all about. He humors me. I think it's just great. Good times. Go listen. You will be happy you did.

In other news, we move into our apartment on SATURDAY! I cannot tell you how excited I am. Being in Atlanta Proper will make all things better and easier and waste much less gas. And it will be nice to have all my clothes again. And my bed. Oh, two months without my bed has taken such a toll on my body... I ache in ways I haven't ached since... since before we bought our fantastic bed. Blech.

Other things I can rave about Atlanta... West Egg cafe's black bean cakes, R. Thomas's quinoa bowls, and the pastor at Trinity Vineyard. Complaints - it's super muggy hot (but come on, I'm from Florida, it's not like it's WORSE but it still sucks a lot), and a smog alert level of Unhealthy today in metro ATL. Boo for toxic air.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah, Radio Lab rocks. Listen to any episode and then tell me how right I was. Go ahead, I'm waiting.

drive-by Christians

I wish more Christians would realize that handing out tracts is not ministering to anyone's heart or actually converting people. Where exactly in the bible does Jesus command us to make disciples by handing people little pamphlets that break down God's love into tiny impersonal bullet points?

This blog post comes from this comic which, along with her blog post below, is what I would assume to be a pretty fair assessment of how a lot of people feel when they get one of these... if they actually read it, that is. The thing that really bugs me is that this is obviously someone this girl WORKS with who has decided the best way to minister to her is by sneaking pamphlets on her desk. I mean... really?