Green Rascal Design

I have taken time for granted! Just this morning I was thinking, Geez! There is WAY too much stuff to do! I haven't posted a blog in forever, and have been meaning to participate in the blogoff much earlier today.

Business has been very busy. I have a house plan I'm working on slowly. There have been several lunches, etc. I still need to send follow-up messages to thank all the people I've had lunch with, etc. Really, I do plan on sending out thank you messages! Promise!

And I've been working on stuff for a new project somewhat unrelated to my Rascal duties. I'm doing business development for another entrepreneur who has been working in a similar industry for years. It's fun because I studied home automation at Penn, and I find it really interesting. Hopefully it will take off. I will probably post links at some point, however things need to settle down first!

The little chickens are laying eggs now! I know I mentioned it before, but the fluffs are taking up some more time lately because of the heat. I have to furnish them with stockpiles of ice underneath their house in an attempt to keep them somewhat cooler. They seem to want lots of attention, too, and mommy just isn't around much this week.

The garden is awesome, but we're not really getting any blackberries like we hoped. Also, there were some teenagers back there last night really late smashing things up. They didn't really do any damage here, but next door they destroyed some plants and things. It was really upsetting, and I didn't get much sleep after they woke us up at 2:30am. So I lost sleep time too!

And this Thursday is the kickoff for the 422 ARCH. We have been running around like, well you know what, trying to figure out who is coming, how many of them there will be, and how do we collect all this info for next time... It's a madhouse. I'm very much looking forward to Thursday evening when we will finally all just be there hanging out, and can collect biz cards so we know who actually showed... We're already starting to plan the next official event. (there are two unofficial events scheduled in between!) At our August event we hope to have a speaker! It'll be really cool - but this all takes so much time to set up!

So there are so many things going on that I have not had a moment to think about what I have been taking for granted - other than time itself. It seems like only a few months ago I had some time and it was grand. The blog was being updated somewhat regularly and all was well here in Rascal-land. I'm really sorry I haven't been able to read the other blogoff posts yet today, but at this point I think I will have to extend my blogoff into tomorrow.

Time strikes again!

This is going to be a short discussion about traditions, spurred on by LetsBlogOff. They ask "Of the traditions that were handed down to you, how many of them do you keep? Which ones have you altered and how have you adjusted them to fit your life? Can you see your traditions being passed down to the people who follow you or do you think of them as just some things that you do"

It might seem really depressing, but I can't really think of any traditions that were handed down to me from when I was young. I mean, our traditions included mostly staying home and doing nothing on holidays. Ok, maybe we lit some candles and watched fireworks on tv or something. It was always very low-key for holidays growing up.

In the last couple of years I have been going to very large family events where I seem to always end up crying in a dark room with a headache from the stress of it all.

For a few years we had regular summer vacations up north at a cabin on a lake that mom's friend rented out to us and other friends. Those were good times. If I can do something similar in a few years it would be nice.

Currently I don't feel like we have traditions. They're just some things that we do. Maybe once we're more successful we can tear ourselves away from the chickens and the homestead for periodic short trips. The one thing I think we've been doing well is an annual fall get-together with friends, but that party is so big that I end up not getting to talk to all my friends that much. Go figure!

Although, this blogoff thing is a nice tradition!

For the blogoff today, I'll be talking about my favorite tv show. The bloggers decided it might be fun to give everyone a chance to talk about their guilty pleasures when it comes to the television, and at first, I must admit, I struggled with this topic. I have a lot of tv shows I like a lot or even love. Some of my favorite shows are intellectually stimulating or provide some kind of mystery to solve. Some that I watch teach life lessons or just plain earth sciences type knowledge. Still others I strongly identify with the main character in some way, which  keeps me coming back. I thought about stuff on DIY and HGTV. I considered fantasy stuff like Inuyasha and Stargate. I strongly considered Star Trek and the like...

But you can't beat Doctor Who.

I love Doctor Who. I watched it as a little kid. I've collected as many old episodes as possible. I've made at least one very good friend because of Doctor Who. I bought a Dr Who graphic novel from the year of my birth when I was in London. My mom gave me a remote control Dalek for Christmas one year - and I also kept the box because it was so cool looking.

Okay, I might not know lots of trivia. And I don't follow the websites and stuff that talk about the show. But we manage to watch the newest episodes online, on the big tv regardless of quality... We get together with friends from the UK who live here now and set up super nerdy ways to watch the show... And for a good long time I and my two roommates and one friend used to watch several episodes from the 70s every night while doing homework or work work or whatever on laptops. It was a beautiful thing.

I don't really have a favorite Doctor. If you know anything about the show, you know it's been on for a very long time, since the 60s with a break in the 80s and 90s, with several actors playing the main character. I'm not a huge fan of the first two Doctors. I really like Tom Baker - the one with the scarf. Not the frilly shirt one so much. The one with the celery was fun. I didn't like the one from the movie. But I really like all three of the most recent Doctors, even Matt Smith, the most recent one.

The Doctor has companions who travel around with him, and they always add something interesting. The most recent couple of companions are really great. I like Any and Rory a lot. Martha was brilliant. Rose was cool. Ace was a blast, literally. And then there was Sarah Jane Smith, and what a girl was she! Most of the companions are okay in my book. There are a couple from the 80s who I could do without, but usually they are fun and interesting. I like their accents and the costumes they wear - especially when they had impractical shoes.

One other companion was K-9, a robotic dog. I have a picture of myself with K-9 outside of St Paul's in London, actually. For some reason there was a lot of Doctor Who stuff going on when I visited there, but the lady who I got to take the picture said it wasn't what I thought. I never found out what was going on, though.

As far as bad guys and aliens, you can't get better than Doctor Who bad guys and aliens. I LOVE Alpha Centauri with the giant eyeball head and plush curtain as a cape. I like the really super old-school Cyber Men - the ones obviously made from HVAC parts, you know flexible air vent pipe as arms and such. I like the Ice Warriors who look like lizards. The spider puppets are awesome. The hemavores were hilarious in my opinion. Who could forget the Master and his hysterical laugh? And don't forget the Daleks, with their little goofy eye things, suction cups and laser wands - and their inability to go up stairs until recent years!

Then there's the TARDIS: time and relative dimensions in space. What a hottie. She's the space ship/time machine they travel around in. The TARDIS has also changed a lot over time. I didn't like the curvy slimy columnar version from the Christopher Eccleston era. And I didn't really like the metal grated floor version from the David Tennant era. I think my favorite version is the clean white circles version from the late 70s and 80s. Perhaps they had a budget cut, but that version was around a long time, and it was sleek and cool in my opinion.

Well anyway, I guess it's obvious I could go on and on about Doctor Who. It's a great show now, and it was a great show when I was a kid!

I'm interested in finding out about everyone else's guilty tv pleasures. Here is the list of other participants in this week's blogoff!

Links courtesy of Wikipedia. Support Wikipedia if you can! Thanks.

I was going to say red is my favorite color when I thought about it yesterday while picking the first real bunch of strawberries of the season. They are beautiful, and we're so happy the excess rain hasn't destroyed every single strawberry in the patch already. I did have to toss out just as many rotting strawberries as these perfect little jewels here.

Then, of course, I remembered how awesome green is when I made the salad with our home-grown lettuce. This is the Amish deer-tongue lettuce (with a little spinach) that we planted quite a while back. It's the type of lettuce that you can pick individual leaves from instead of killing the whole plant to harvest some salad. These leaves were miraculously saved from the onslaught of leaf-eating slugs which are attacking just about everything. Luckily the chickens LOVE to eat slugs, so all we have to do is find the little buggers and introduce them to the birds.

Speaking of birds, I love orange/gold/brown... and white, and black... They're such sweeties lately. Here are the big fluffs with some new straw.

And here are the mini fluffs in the FUV. Pumpkin is SO PRETTY, and I LOVE the peachy color that Clover is developing.

I really like yellow too. In the birds' eyes it is really striking. Yellow is also the color of the sunshine and our kale flowers. I wish I had more yellow shirts to wear with my awesome new yellow and navy shoes.

Speaking of blue, I love these little blue flowers. This is a picture of the flax plants from last year, and I've used it before but it's so pretty! We have a small amount of new flax growing randomly around the yard this year, but not so many cute blue flowers. Blue is also the color of water and the sky, and who doesn't love a nice blue sky and the life-giving power of water?

Speaking of water, I love the water in this painting. Now, I'm not really a painter, but I enjoy trying to make pretty pictures like this for around the house. There's even a little purple in this painting, which I forgot to mention.

These are some little purple flowers growing in the yard. I'm not sure what they are, but they're so cute and a nice welcome change from the boring grass. I love it when nature leaves little surprises around.

Here is another nice surprise. A female cardinal was on the deck railing yesterday. She's so pretty. Some people might think she is drab, but I really love that tan/grey color. It is clean and calming. Her partner comes around often to gather food, and he is a very striking red. With that, I suppose we are back to where we started.

The topic for the blog off this week is color, and what is your favorite color. Clearly I cannot pick just one. I love all colors. It is a little-known fact that I have a large collection of shirts and a bit of a freaky habit of wearing the same color all week. This week is blue week. I'll be wearing blue every day until Monday, when purple week starts. Then it will be pink week, and peach week, and white, grey, black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, teal, and back to blue again. Actually, I skipped orange and yellow recently and added teal - so it does change over time. And I am trying to wear more black to seem more like an "architect." But I love colors. Bright colors, soft colors - they're all wonderful. I'll never be that person who wears all black every day, or any one color every day. I have to change it up, but in an organized and regimented way. hahaha

It will be really interesting to read about the other bloggers' favorite colors and their deeper thoughts about colors and/or color theory. Check them out with me!

Today's blogoff discusses the difference, if there is any, between truth and fact, and what these things are.

I took some philosophy in college, and it was not for me. There. One fact and one truth. That wasn't so hard! The study of philosophy was fascinating. I liked reading it. Although I didn't like reading it multiple times in one week to gain any kind of understanding. The philosophy lectures were great. I really liked my teachers. Discussion classes were decidedly not great. They were the pits because for some reason, while I thoroughly enjoyed reading and listening to philosophy, I did not like discussing it at all. I got poor grades for participation. The other students were all philosophy majors, and they had LOTS of practice defining their terms and discussing rhetoric, etc. This is all the truth for me.

My teachers might have experienced a different truth, however. They had one architecture major in their classes, and that was a nice challenge for them. They got to enlighten somebody new. With a clean slate, they could introduce readings that other students already knew and disliked. They got to practice lecturing to a novice. Then they could hand me off to their teaching assistants for the real work. The teaching assistants got quite an experience trying to impart their wisdom to somebody who had no practice for a change. And they got to learn a little bit about architecture, which they knew nothing about previously.

Using examples such as these is the best way I know to talk about fact versus truth. In both cases above the fact was basically the same: that I took philosophy in college, and I was the only architecture student in those classes at that time. Whether I stated the fact completely in both stories is another matter - one left to the philosophy students I dare say. The truth is much harder to pin down because I believe everybody has their own truth based on their own histories and perspectives. I stated a true story in the beginning as seen from my perspective, and surmised what could have been a true story from the perspective of my philosophy professors. Whether the second story is actually true or not is up for debate. One can argue the relative possibility of story 2 to be true, or parts of it to be true. Nobody can debate my truth, though.

I believe it is true that this discussion is healthy at times like these. There are lots of good discussions to follow with respect to knowledge sharing and business models. However, I also think that too much of a good thing can be harmful. The fact is we seem to be having more and more philosophical discussions lately. I believe it to be true that at some point we need to take a break and get back to work. Well, at least I personally need to get back to work on something.

One might say that this time could be another period of enlightenment for those of us pondering what it means to practice design and/or how best to go about it given recent world events, but that's only true in my opinion. Who is with me?