If you walked around the La Casa garden, you’d probably wonder why we planted so many sunflowers. Well, we didn’t actually plant a single one. At least no one did this year. They are all volunteers.
Year: 2009
-
volunteer sunflowers
-
Um, oh, coasters.
Sadly neglected coaster. Once upon a time Maria brought home bright green coasters.
-
long time no post
Sorry for the long delay in posts.
Here’s some quick photos from our garden shot with my cell phone: hibiscus bloom, bell peppers, eggplants, tomatoes.
-
Presenting Olive the Cat
I am cat sitting Olive until August 1st. She is a feisty, skiddish gal who likes to be petted lightly.
She mostly hangs out in my room, and enjoys sleeping with me or darting around the second floor. -
Least Disgusting La Casa Pet Award 2009
Goes to Olive!
It was a close tie with this year’s runner up, Sophie, who in the last moments of the competition threw up a foamy, buttery grassy mess on the dining room couch. Those around her made various “eww” and “you’re gross” noises, thereby knocking her down in the rankings. Sophie ate 1.5 sticks of butter earlier in the day and ate grass to help ease her digestion.
Great Job to both contestants! -
Top Most Used Phrases at La Casa
1. Sophie
2. Hey!
3. Sophie Sophie Sophie Sophie Sophie
4. Pxxssff!
5. Sooo…
6. Anyways
7. Oh My God!
8. Fail
9. SuuuUURE SUuure
10. There is [insert food item] in [place] if anybody needs some
11. Just like
12. Deenor
13. Varied tones of clucking from numerous emotional stages
14. Whining, so much whining
15. BARROOOO
16. Mmmh Mmmmh Mmmh -
Black Raspberry and Currant Jams
Carly whipped up some delicious jams with the abundant berries from our garden. I helped a little. -
The Moustache Dreams (of a moustache competition)
Vodpod videos no longer available.
more about “Mustache Dreams on Vimeo“, posted with vodpodGo Puppets! Theater, last Monday June 22, presented The Moustache Dreams or The Dash of the Stache at the annual Mike n’ Molly’s Moustache Competition in Champaign. While the judges deliberated (selecting one moustache-bearer to hold the honor of supreme moustache & to host next year’s uproarious annual pageant), we four took the stage and performed for myriad adoring fans. They had no idea what to expect from us, & neither did we from them. Judging from the exuberant [drunken] cheers, it seemed to go over well!
Written & performed by Lorene Anderson & Michael Iscariot. Additional performers: La Casans Andrew (on the left) & Jacob (center).
-
Dome Encounter
I went on a class trip to East St Louis this weekend, and lo and behold, we visited a dome.
The Dome housed the gym of the Mary Brown Community Center, which was a big stop on our two day tour of the different community centers, libraries, and churches where community engagement is taking place. I was very much in awe of this dome (which didn’t seem geodesic since there weren’t just triangles, but I could be wrong). I made the spliced panorama above (hastily) while two games of pickup basketball were being played.
As a blogged about before, Domes are notorious for being difficult to maintain. I was curious about this beautiful structure so I decided to cast a net (aka Google Search) and see what info about the Mary Brown CC was out on the web.
click the image to see the search results page I tried a few different search strings and eventually came across the Search Timeline for “mary brown community center”. The Timeline feature is cool, but its utility is limited. As you can see, the search results only go back as far as 1988, when Jackie Joyner Kersey began getting press about her desire to rehab the Community Center where she first began running track. The timeline displays results from the Google News database, which seems to have a limited scope. I’m sure if I went and did a similar search through old microfilm and other non-digital archives, I would come up with a much broader picture of the history of the Community Center and the Dome. Of course, I would probably never actually do that, and I was able to learn much about the Center by rifling through the results. I couldn’t find the year the Dome was built but I did learn that the Dome was rehabbed in 2004 after years of delays (and a scandal?). One thing I don’t like about this Timeline feature is that many of the News stories need to be purchased in order to view the fulltext, boo. I guess newspapers need to make money somehow.
-
Tour of the Secret Prairie in downtown Champaign
If you ever wander the streets of downtown Champaign, with just the right kind of aimlessness, you may suddenly find yourself in a tiny forest, which opens up onto a tiny prairie, complete with wetland, glacial till, and authentic hobo markings. This is the Pocket Prairie, which Dave Monk (a.k.a. The Prairie Monk) takes care of and uses as a demonstration of the ecosystem.
Dave came here from Australia decades ago to study the prairie ecosystem, only to find that it was rapidly being swallowed up by farming and development. Today, less than 0.1 percent of original prairie remains. Dave stresses that the sheer genetic variety found only on the prairie may very well contain future cures for cancers, as well as plants with the potential to be good biofuels. The research will take years, as it does, and of course it is up to all of us to ensure the prairie is still around when we need it.
From neverending battles with landscaping racketeers and those who hire them, came the slogan “Grow it, don’t mow it!” This spirit is reflected across Urbana, which has more un-traditional and wild-growing lawns than I have seen anywhere else.
At any rate, I helped Dave produce a virtual tour slideshow of the “Pocket Prairie” in the springtime, and here it is (original post):
-
Sound explorers hit BBBBQ
(cross-post from ODDMUSIC-UC)
This is the second day of the second year of the Blues, Brews, and BBQ festival in Urbana. Big names coming tonight, and it’s free this year. Too bad it’s the same evening as the West African dance/drum circle/potluck/bonfire at La Casa. I must catch some of both.
This recording was made today under the auspices of “Sound Explorers”…
“Sound Explorers” is an idea I had for a student club back at Rice; the group would take trips to local places of particular sonic interest. One way of learning more about your locality could be by making a map identifying these places of aural uniqueness.
At any rate yesterday I found myself wanting to try out the IMC production room’s Zoom H2 recorder, & I found a blues festival at my front door. The wandering took me to a Freebird kazoo-along, a porta-potty, and a small tree.
Mildly interesting…
-
Late Spring Bee Checkup
Ed, a local beekeeper, came to check out our hives for a three week checkup last weekend. Robby is out of town, so he arranged to have some members of CEIBA help keep an eye on the hives. We had gotten a late start with our bees but each queen came with 5 frames of brood and honey. In just a few weeks, the bees have really established themselves and Ed determined it was time to add the second box on the hive. This will give each hive 10 fresh frames to build comb and expand the colony size.
This frame is full of capped brood. Brood is the general name for combs that have eggs and larvae. The worker bees feed the developing larvae before sealing them in with a cap . In a few weeks these bees will hatch and the process will start over again with the queen coming around and laying eggs in each comb. In this way, the colony will double and triple in size very rapidly.
In the center of this photo, a bee is hatching from the comb. We watched as the bee ate away the cap. Like eating corn on the cob, she went back and forth chewing her way out. After she leaves, the workers will clean out the comb and get it ready for another egg.
This is what the comb looks like when the bees decide to store honey instead of brood. This looks like it was a fresh frame to begin with since you can still see in the lower left that the comb hasn’t been fully drawn out by the bees. There must be a lot of nectar flowing now because even though the comb isn’t finished, the bees are already storing and capping honey. In the upper right is capped honey. To process the honey, the bees sit over the comb and fan their wings to evaporate off the water. Once the honey is sufficiently concentrated they seal the comb off. You can tell the difference between capped honey and capped brood by the color.
I took lots of photos so we could inspect the bees in depth without keeping the hive open for too long. Click the thumbnails to go to a flickr set of the event.
