blogging!?

should i continue blogging, i wonder. i just read over the mdk pimpom blog posts. i feel shame after reading some of them. oh well, no harm done. i have decided that i am just the sort of person that feels shame all the time. i am so ashamed. specifically, the charlie bit my finger post, the long incoherent rambling post about music, and the post about being slightly homesick. those are the most shameful. i guess i never really realized how ghey blogging is. how depressing! i like to create things that you can look back on without feeling great shame.

i am going to continue though. why not?

next week i am going to virginia to meet nycole, both sides of nycole's family, robbie, kasey, and possibly but probably not jono. i am kind of nervous, but very excited. i am going to take many pictures and make a gigantic blog post about it. yes, that is my decision. mostly, the things i am scared of are these: roller coasters at busch gardens. they are very scary to me. i know this makes me a coward. oh well, i will ride them. i will do my best not to make shrill squealing noises.

The Final Post, probably not though

Last night, part of my tooth fell off/out. Then I spat it out into the garbage, and had no proof that such a tragedy had occurred. But today, a bit more came off. I took a picture or two. It is really painful now. The tooth isn't, but the edge is sharp and cuts my tongue.

Also last night, I got somewhat drunk to make my mouth feel better. I talked to nycole for two hours on skype. That was a lot of fun. We left a message on Robbie's voicemail. Apparently you can no longer pay him for his services with anything buy cash or check.

Speaking of Robbie: I want to call a truce in the blog war. I think I have lost. I have lost the strategic advantage I once had and the war of attrition is costing me a lot more than him. My forces are few, and his are great. I can only hope for a white truce now, perhaps with a disarmament treaty. When he started deleting my comments on his blog, I realized I had lost.

NO!

I just have this video to post. I don't have anything to say, and this doesn't count as the final blog post.

genius

This is the end

This will be my 2nd to last blog post before I get back in September. That's just the way it is. I will take any requests for my final post. Seriously, just ask it will happen maybe. Pictures of what. Today there will be no pictures and hardly any text. That's right.

But I did get my cds yesterday. Very exciting. I feel like superstar now! LOL

Another post about tea.

I know I make too many posts about tea. But I don't care, it is a regular subject for me. I would like to explain how it is I make tea.

It may shock you to learn that there are different practices, theories even, about the proper way to make oolong. I use what they call the kung-fu method. It has nothing to do with the martial art. I think it probably has something to do with the Confucian tradition though.

Anyway, this method involves two unique things that you might not have realized: The teapot must be pre-heated so that the tea brews well. Also, the teapot is nearly filled with tea leaves. You use a lot of leaves, and you infuse for only a short time. These are pictures:

This is the bag the tea comes in. There is a lot of it, so I left it in the bag rather than put it in a tin.


These are the tea leaves in question, pouchong which is an oolong that the chinese call 'green tea', loosely translated of course. They call tea colours based on the color of the leaves rather than on the colour of the steeped tea. In chinese, black tea = red tea, oolong tea = black dragon tea, pouchong = green tea, green tea = yellow tea, etc.

Here are my teapots, of course. I am using the one on the right for pouchong and ti kuan yin. The smaller one is for tung ting/ten lu/ten wu oolongs exclusively.

It has a little squirrel on top, but his tail is broken off. How sad. I still have the tail, for some reason, I kept it.

Anyway, making tea begins at this point 1 time out of 5. Cleaning the teapot. It is gross until you are used to it. There is something upsetting about slimey gooey old tea leaves on your hands.

After nearly all of the leaves are scooped and wiped out, I take the teapot to the sink and rinse it out with hot water, removing old leaves and pre-warming the teapot. This is a picture from before I had done that.

Here are the leaves in the pot, ready for the water.


This is my electric tea kettle.

Here is the glowing red light on my kettle to show it is on. I use boiling water for tea. A lot of tea sites will tell you just hot water for green and oolong. They are wrong, ok. Just use boiling water. Not full boiling, but just when the bubbles start to move to the top.

These are the cups I use, just regular old cups.


After the water has been in there for 5 seconds, it is time to pour into the cups. This is the moment of truth. pour!




I really need a haircut


Oh, I should give a special tribute to my tea towel. He is responsible for soaking up all tea and water off of the desk and tea boats before any damage occurs. That is why he is so stained. He used to be white.

the last one

I have an idea after listening to a lot of je these last two days for my last pseudo-classical electronic instrumental monstrosity. There will be no effects whatsoever. I am going to make one the same way I always do. But when it comes to recording, there will be no reverb, delay, EQ, banding, distortion, etc. Instead, I will do a facsimile of all that with the synth. If I want distance or room, I'll mix in low amounts of noise and detuned sine waves. For delay, I'll record a separate part with different parameters on a straight delay, for more substance than a digital delay. No EQ, i'll just my band pass filter array. No distortion, except my diode ring. It will be 100% analog, just all mixed down on a jeskola buzz. Which I guess still isn't 100% analog, but no digital effects. This is what ronnie seems to do a lot of, although you do hear delays and some other things

But first I have to do some spambots songs. I am looking forward to those, actually. Maybe I should try the above practice with one of those

It is final

I am going back to Indiana and the strawberry farm. I messaged one of the owner's on myspace just today. So, for good or bad it is final. Here is a basic outline of my summer, then

• May 2-5, I drive 2,000 miles. I hope my car makes it. If not, I ditch in cowtown, prairie province and hitchhike from there carrying my only valuable possessions and leaving the rest.
  
• May 6 or 7th, I start at the farm.garden center. In may, it is just a garden center, no strawberries yet. It is hard work, but not so bad. I will work all day every day except sunday mornings, when I will go to church.
  
• End of may/beginning of June, that is strawberry season. My job now moves out of the garden center and into the fields. From 6am until 8pm I am on the farm, much shorter on sunday. My duties alternate between picking strawberries, manning the U-Pick field (where people come to pick their own strawberries), and moving irrigation pipes around.
  
• End of June/beginning of July: strawberry season ends. Now, I pick other produce in the mornings and work at the garden center (and produce stand) with fewer hours. This adds up to about 50 or 60 hours per week. I will probably get my first day off somewhere after the 4th of July.
  
• Middle of July: This is where corn season begins. From here on out, I work about 50 or 60 hours per week picking, bagging, and carrying corn in the market. corn, corn, corn. It is way easier than strawberry season, but mind-numbingly boring. I practice my whistling skills.
  
• End of August: I go back to calgary a little more insane and knowledgeable in the ways of corn and strawberries.
  

This amount of work, because there is no alternative, means some bad things for the internet and me. I have an addiction, and here I will be quiting cold turkey. There are also some other drastic changes. I won't log on to myspace, I won't check the bomb shelter, I won't make music, I won't upload music that hasn't been made, I won't drink tea very much (just black tea in the morning), I will only respond to emails once a week, I won't answer phone calls from people from california, I won't use skype, I won't.... well, etc.

Anyway, it is mainly worrisome to me because I won't be making music. I have gotten used to making music when I want to. I remember last summer and the summer before how frustrated it made me that I came up with melodies but couldn't preserve them in any way. I am always whistling while I work, but I can't make pseudo-classical electronic music while I work, which is sad. This summer will just be much worse in that department.

On the other hand, the food will be really good. One of the perks of working at this place is free produce. And my mother is a cookaholic. Also, I sleep outside in a hammock when the weather is good.