Monthly Archives: April 2013

Making Knives Out of Rocks in North Georgia

Posted on by

0

Enjoying the North Georgia Primitive Arts Festival.

Image licensed under CC BY 2.0. Courtesy of erix!

As promised in last week’s post about not losing your time in a fog of Netflix and malaise*, I spent part of this weekend at the North Georgia Primitive Arts Festival/Knap In. As expected, it was fairly small and uniformly delightful. Y’all, it is a truth well established that festival folks in general are friendly, and rural southern festival folks even more so.

You want to feel loved? Haul out to the Georgia Apple Festival, ignore the warnings about chewing tobacco causing mouth cancer, and eat an apple fritter with someone who makes wreaths out of bullet casings.

So, I was just delighted to find myself with my two classmates and professor on a Saturday morning, heading out to Cartersville to hang with people who like to make their own arrowheads, and–in the case of the primitive bowhunter side of the festival–their own arrows and bows, and then shoot deer with them. We rolled up–one of the few cars that wasn’t a truck–around 11am, and headed on in.  Continue reading →

Gorillas and Time Management and Self Care

Posted on by

2

Gorilla Eating

Image courtesy of Jarapet. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I have come up with a fail-safe way to test whether you are ready to have children at This Moment in Your Life. Ready? Here it is:

  1. Go to the zoo during the first nice-weather Saturday in the last two weeks.
  2. Meander on over to the tamarin exhibit.
  3. Decide whether you think that the five-year-old screaming, “AHHHHHH” every time the tamarins move for two minutes straight provokes an “awwww” response out of you or an “AHHHHH” of your very own. If the latter, maybe hold off on spawning!

I spend so little of my time around children, particularly children in groups. Hell, I spend very little of my time around adults that are not in the 18-22 range, or at least did before I got a job. (My coworkers have children! And hobbies that are not drinking and being sad! Truly it is a brave new world.) After being in Senegal last year, I thought my view towards them had softened. I had been around kids! They didn’t hate me!

I had forgotten what happens when the children clump together. Because then? All bets are off.

Children aside, the zoo was great fun. I spend so much of my class time learning about non-human primates via YouTube videos that I forget that you can, you know, go look at them for real. Which I did! Much to my excitement, our gorilla troupe had a newborn, and she was out, and it was phenomenally cute. Because if that infant was making noise? I couldn’t hear it! Continue reading →

On Conference Excitement

Posted on by

6

Attendees at RespectCon 2013

This was an exciting week. Not in the way that last week was trip-to-Texas exciting. And emotionally different than the previous weekend’s trampolining exciting. But exciting nonetheless!

Most of that derived from the fact that RespectCon, the conference on sexual assault prevention/response that I helped organize, happened this past Friday. Like, actually happened. People came! Presentations were made! Cameron and I got to have a wonderful discussion about armadillos and leprosy! There was a hashtag!

So that was very nice. I think it went well. If it didn’t, then I know a lot of very polite, very convincing liars, which is emotionally equivalent.

Continue reading →

Deep in the heart of Texas

Posted on by

3

A picture of the South Congress Cafe in Austin, Tx.

Image courtesy of Shu Tu, licensed under CC 2.0 BY SA.

As happens every few years or so, I spent this past weekend in Austin, Texas. (Austin is, of course, the only part of Texas that anyone in my family will admit to going to. We spit at Houston.)

Rather than being down there to hone my South by South Best* skills, I was in town courtesy of my cousin, who–kindly–agreed to be bat mitzvahed*, so that I might eat many breakfast tacos and migas.

She, like her brother a few years ago, interpreted a portion of Leviticus in a way that made my heart swell. Leviticus, for those who are unaware, is mostly full of rules that most folks in the family flavor of Judaism don’t really follow, as mixed fibers are great and smiting is not so much. It takes some skill to really consider what that means for a modern reform Jew, and of course my cousin was great and at the end we got to pelt her with marshmallows. (Ritual pelting = my favorite quality in a faith.)

So that was great.

Continue reading →

Trampoline Parkour

Posted on by

4

Trampoline 2

I defy you to come up with something that is more out-of-character for me to do than a 9am Saturday trampoline workout class in the suburbs. And yet, Saturday morning, I found myself in Sky Zone Roswell*, which is essentially a gym floor made entirely of trampolines, with extra trampolines on the wall for parkour/safety.

This was, incidentally, not my idea. I came at the invitation of a friend of mine from nerd camp (lo these many years ago), about whom I feel roughly the same as Leslie Knope feels about Anne Perkins. She is beautiful and terrifyingly smart and has the legs and cardiovascular system of someone who enjoys running as much as I enjoy breakfast tacos.

But my friend had assured me that every time that she had gone before, the workout had consisted of basic cardio, done on your own little individual section of the trampoline mat. We (I) could suck quietly, in a corner, she reasoned, and that seemed fine to me. (It was in Roswell. This is the first time I’ve been there in the 10 years I’ve lived in Atlanta, so if I reasoned that if I was truly shamed by my failure, I didn’t have to go back ever.)

Unbeknownst to my friend, however, this week’s trampoline fitness extravaganza was led by a new trainer. This man had biceps like hams and the relentless cheer that comes from being a personal trainer for a class full of people making fools of themselves on trampolines. And he did not want for us to do cardio on our little trampolines. He wanted us to sprints across the entire trampoline floor.

Reader, it was bad.

Continue reading →