Archive for January, 2011
Experiences in northern living
29 January, 2011 – 1:45 pm | Filed under daily life | No Comments »
I figured that having survived Snowpocalypse/SnowMG/Snowmagedden 2010, I can deal with pretty much whatever weather Pittsburgh throws at me.
However, this year I have my car here.
So far I’ve gotten around needing an ice scraper–leaving my car on to warm up for 10-15 minutes, combined with using my plastic dustpan to scrape off ice and snow, usually is enough. (I just feel fortunate enough that I have a private parking spot off the street, so I can just leave my car on outside.)
But here’s a new curveball: currently it is physically not possible for me to remove my car from my parking space, because there is a sheet of ice 1-2 inches thick behind the rear passenger-side wheel. Any time I try to reverse the car, the ice actually forces my car forward again. I tried hacking away at the ice with my shovel, but it’s made of metal and I’m very nervous that I’ll hit my tire by accident–the ice is right up there.
(I can see any northerners reading this nodding knowingly and rolling their eyes, going, “Oh, poor southerner…”)
I was going to go buy groceries for tonight’s Pittsburgh JET Alumni Association shinnenkai, not to mention my housemates have been begging me to take us out on a Trader Joe’s and Target run (direly needed: we are officially out of toilet paper). So yeah, I kind of need to get my car out.
I’m off to my neighborhood Giant Eagle to pick up some salt and cat litter. Hopefully one of those will do the trick.
I still smell of coriander and garam masala
18 January, 2011 – 11:05 pm | Filed under assignments, design, posterous, school | No Comments »
I’m still sorting out the semester’s classes, but am definitely taking a Color and Communication class. I’ve wanted to take a class that was all about making and doing, and it has been so much fun so far.
For today, they asked each of us to bring in roughly 30 objects of various colors within a single category. I raided my roommates’ and my own spices, and collected about 25. Our aim was to arrange them while taking hue, value, and saturation into consideration, then to re-create the colors using an artistic medium (I used colored pencils), to understand the subtle shift in colors between similar objects.
The instructors then encouraged us to look into juxtaposing different pieces to look at the color relationships. (I hadn’t quite gotten to that point so they helped me out a bit…they look amazing but would probably taste terrible together.)
