I want to go recycling with you

From this blog. Read it today. LOVE IT.

“i’d rather see you once a year than someone else seven days a week.“

Congostyle bookends

I still get some questions about Congostyle, the Zein-coined term for creative ghettoness.

here’s a perfect story that happened not ten minutes ago.

My friend and I were discussing how to create cheap and cool bookends for a bookcase. I came up with the idea of decorated bricks or cinder-blocks.

I was going to go to Home Depot but had an itching to work on them today, because I’m trying to procrastinate writing this silly 30-page term project that’s due tomorrow and of which I only have five pages written.

So I “found” two bricks lying around somewhere, and borrowed them. I painted them red, and when they’d dried after my jaunting around Pasadena for a few hours, I lay them down on my desk.

One of the things I’ve done this semester is picked up discarded photos at the photo lab and dried them and taken them home and used them in collages.

I happened to have two matching photos that were really pretty, and long, so they would be perfect on the bricks, and I cut them up and pasted them with gorilla glue on one side of each brick as so:

Gorilla Glue, as you arts and crafts freaks know, has to dry for one or two hours with pressure. Bricks being bricks, I thought that I could lay them on top of each other, picture facing picture so they could mutually apply the needed pressure.

one problem: I needed a plastic barrier to prevent them sticking to each other.

one congostyle solution: an old ziplock bag with pita crumbs inside, gleaned from the kitchen counter. I could have used a new bag, I could have emptied the pita chips, double NO. I just zipped up the bag, and put in between the bricks, crumbs included, at the bottom of the bag of course.

one word for this entire story: CONGOSTYLE. Any more questions?

My squirrel visitor

My friend Art and I have been on a mission to feed all the animals in Pasadena. Caltech turtles, PCC squirrels. Now I have two bird feeders and I’ve put out peanuts in a bowl on my balcony for my cute squirrels but they haven’t found them…until TODAY!

So I was watching Auntie Mame and laughing, when all of a sudden, my eye caught something moving on my balcony. And there it was, a cute squirrel, eating a peanut diligently with its little hands. I turned the video on and got these two really funny clips. Notice how the Auntie Mame soundrack seems perfect!

This is the first video: squirrel gets freaked out by bowl

This is the second video: squirrel SUCCESS!

update later in the day: Third video, she is now a regular!!

PS: name suggestions please? Mangoferret, I’m looking at you!

Bruno

I am going to have to see this in Paris!!

It looks HILARIOUS! Of course they’re no fun and disabled embedding, so you have to click here to see it.

Fire in Congo

This is an amazing story, and it’s fresh off the press.I got woken up this morning by a phone call from my dad saying “We’ve had a fire. We’re OK, but we had a fire and the entire house almost burned down!”. I had enough time to make sure they were OK, say I love you and then he was gone.

An hour later dad calls back, and I hear laughter in the background is laughing. Dad says “Hi kid! So the fire is put out. The firemen are here, but they came without water in the truck, so they had to borrow water from the gas station down the road. Tommy (our naughty new lab puppy) is asleep in the driver’s seat. The roof melted, but we stopped the fire before it got to the bedrooms. It was like in a movie, people were passing buckets of water and sand in a line. Wait a minute, here talk to people, I have to get money out.”

A few notes are in order now about the conversation above.

First, yes, you read that right, the firemen came without water in their truck. And in Congo there aren’t fire hydrants.

The people I had to talk to, were all members of the National Baha’i Asembly of Congo. For those of you who don’t know too much about the Baha’i Faith, there are groups of nine people at the local level and at the national level who basically do administrative work for the community, and take care of issues in the community, so their responsibility ranges from purchasing property, legal status of the community, socio-economic development activities. The national assembly deals with important, big stuff on a national level. So when the national assembly of Congo found out my parents were having a fire, at 8 PM, they all canceled their meeting, and RAN to my parents house and started throwing water and sand on the fire. They were the people I was talking to while dad was getting money out. Some of them I’ve known since I was 14 and I was laughing with them at their funny comments and light-hearted stories abou the night. No one goes through a crisis like Africans, it’s amazing to witness.

The money dad was getting out was to pay the firemen. Yes, that’s right. CONGOSTYLE! He had to get a few hundred dollars out to pay the firemen for their work, and to compensate the employees of the school who stayed and put out the fire.

It was a close call, because it happened at 8 PM and not 3 AM. My parents are fine, they’re laughing, theyr’e surrounded by friends, and the puppy is at the wheel.

Dad called back another half hour later and said that I could not imagine how scary it is to be caught in the middle of a fire. He said that five minutes later, the entire house, and everything they have in this world would have been gone. He said it was such a close call, they were protected by God. I can believe it. I mean…untrained people contained a fire with buckets, when the firemen showed up late and without water. Everything is made out of wood and the fire was raging, it only stopped one room short of where my parents live. Daily life and small miracles. I’m so happy they are OK, I’m so happy they live where they live and that they were surrounded by community!

Mr. Bean’s car and the Banana museum

Tina and I decided to go see a photography exhibit in Riverside (I posted about it here) but of course, this being a Friday on a long holiday weekend, the 10 freeway was jammed. So we exited, and decided to make up our own adventures, and as we exit, we see THIS:

We couldn’t believe our luck! So we passed by the driver and enthusiastically gave him kisses and thumbs up and happy honks, and exited the jammed freeway very happy with our decision.

Driving through the streets of Claremont, we found a rusted old car that I had to take a picture of because it sort of looked wedged into the bushes:

Tina and I kept driving and laughing at random things. I recounted to her the Office episode where Jim sends Dwight faxes on his own letterhead from Future Dwight, and we both laughed abou that for a while. We finally got back to Pasadena and stopped in at Roscoe’s for a quick late lunch. We managed to enjoy our food even with the terrible art in the place:

Jonathan came through for us and texted us the address and phone number of the Banana museum, and we headed up North El Molino to experience the randomness. Of course the economy of the last few months has taken a toll on the most original among us and the Banana museum moved to Riverside. Maybe when we eventually make it for the photography exhibit we can make it a double-whammee and see it too!

So on our way back, we stopped at Bulgarini gelato and enjoyed some random flavors (Olive oil yogurt gelato and pomegranate granita) which were very good, although in retrospect cocoa would have been better than a yogurt flavor with the delicious pomegranate.

So that was our road trip. Random and Congostyle. Just the way I like it!

Whilton Camera

You can get any camera dis-assembled and framed for about $100 at Whilton camera repairs in Pasadena**. Here are two pictures I took of the frame box on display at the shop:

** phone number:(626) 449-8086

river

No duh

Congostyle: the L.A. Matatu

I wished I wasn’t alone when I saw this SUV in Pasadena this morning, but I managed to snap a great shot at a red light, very safely. This is the epitome of CONGOSTYLE.