misfitmonkey

“What did you do before we had the Internet?”

Wow. Well, I have mention that prior to the internet, I was young, so the difference between what I did pre-high school and what I do now has a lot to do with my age rather than the internet, I think.

The internet has really taken its toll on a couple of things though (along with life, a job, and being a grown up, I guess):

1. I read less. I was voracious reader as a child, to the point that I could devour several books in a day if I had the whole day to do as I pleased. I’ve recently found a better balance, which has been easier after finishing my Masters and not having that residual school-induced resentment of books that I typically get from classes that force me to read crap that I don’t want to read.

Did I stop reading as much solely because of the internet? I guess I would say that the content of my reading changed drastically as blogging hit the web full force… it’s honestly possible that I read as much as I ever did, just less items of the tradition book variety. Is that a bad thing? I’m not sure it is… although I’m not sure it isn’t either.

2. I write less. When I wasn’t reading, I was writing creatively, whether it was short stories, poetry, or my own journaling. I use to write creatively on a constant basis, notebook always in tow, constant scribblings, constant editing of poems… I thought at one point in my life that I would be a Writer as my main calling and while I know at this point that my purpose is a little broader than that, I still hope to accomplish a few things as a lowercase writer. ;) (Stay tuned on that, actually. I’m entertaining serious plans to finally self publish something I’ve worked on for a long time.)

I would say that only in the past few years has the internet really taken a big chunk out of my creative writing volume, because where my poetry and short story writing lessened with the onset of internet availability, my online blogging/journaling skyrocketing for a long time, and at the time, the internet was the perfect venue to express myself through introspective/personal writing of a journaling nature.

Initially, the internet actually increased the amount of writing I did, but as my need for cathartic LiveJournal-type writing decreased, my creative writing didn’t increase to keep the balance. Other things on the internet (shiny new videos and podcasts and lots of other people’s amazing and innovative new content) grabbed my attention and up until recently I’ve allowed other people’s innovative content to use up some of the energy that I should be using to create my own innovative and creative content.

As you can tell, I’m trying to remedy this lately. This journaling prompt actually prompted (pun intended) some introspection on how I can more often use the internet to foster my own creativity, rather than let it draw my attention away from my own goals with shiny, pretty internet things. :)

What did you do before the internet? Is there something you love that you should still be making time for, even if that baby laughing on YouTube is still funny the twentieth time you watch it?

I just want to clarify something here, which is that it sounds to this person (important distinction not made by said person) like I’m afraid (along with all those other wayward spiritual people) to commit to a belief system (which I assume means a religion, since everyone has a belief system).

The public service announcement nature of the twitter is offensive, basically implying that everyone who identifies as spiritual is broadcasting a message of fear to all the sensible religious people on the planet.

It’s divisive. It’s elitist. It’s judgmental.

FYI: It is actually possible that some of us have CHOSEN not to commit to a religion (I say religion because I have a belief system and everyone does), for reasons that are valid and important to us, and are based on our own very personal and individual life experience.

To diminish our choice by assuming it is fear is ignorant and judgmental. It is also none of anybody’s goddamn business and not anyone’s place to define another person’s spiritual identity (or identity in general) or the basis of that identity (especially based on one word), so I say in response to this person (and their immediate removal of me from all their social networks as a result of a four-twitter exchange):

ADIOS.

“If you had to evacuate your home because of a natural disaster, which of your possessions would you bring with?”

I’m trying something new, wherein I’m using random journal prompts when I’m not sure what to chat about on the ol’ blog. I want to keep my introspection muscle in shape and I also want to commit to regularly journaling, not just posting pictures and video and such.

This question seemed like an especially torturous one, so I thought I’d start here, with a list of the things I would be scrambling to take with me. I’m going to make a list of the sentimental items and the gadgets-I-would-cry-if-I-lost items.

Gadget list:

• iPhone - Not so much because it couldn’t be easily replaced, but because I am undoubtedly going to want to call the police and the fire department after fleeing my home.
• MacBook and external HD - I think losing the laptop and the external hard drive would hurt pretty bad, so I’m sure I’d be scrambling for both. I don’t run Time Machine often enough, so the external is never up-to-date, but has things the MacBook doesn’t.
• Rebel XSi - I did JUST get a fancy camera, so I’d pretty bummed to lose it in a fire, and it’s not on the renters insurance yet, so I’d be scrambling for that if it wasn’t in the truck of my car (I’m trying to get in the habit of always having the camera with me).

Sentimental list:

• Japan 2001 photo album - I don’t have digital copies of the pictures from the time I spent in Japan during the summer of 2001, so I’d be scrambling to take that album with me. There is also a green box of photos near that album that I would try to take with me as well (old photos that I don’t have on Flickr).
• Keepsake box - I have a box that has some very dear things to me… a sweater of my grandmother’s, some letters and things from Jim. I actually have several boxes of this type of stuff, but there is one particular box that would be especially hard to lose.
• My cat - I think the first thing I would look for would be Penelope if the apartment burst into flames… I’m firmly entrenched in the belief that my cat will live forever, and if she doesn’t I will be demanding an explanation from the higher ups. She simply must out-live me.

What would you be scrambling to save if your home suddenly went up in flames/flood/etc.? Would you just head for safety, or are there things that you (whether wisely or foolishly) would just have to try and save?

Gift Of The Dreamtime: Awakening To The Divinity Of Trauma by S. Kelley Harrell
Rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book over 4-5 separate evenings, reading a section and then spending time thinking about what I’d read over the days that followed, and I came away from the book with what I felt was the author’s message, but also with a personal message of my own, which surprised me given that this book is so intensely personal in its depiction of Kelley’s own journey toward true and constant Grace.

Accepting and understanding “the divinity of trauma” (a phrase I now better understand after finishing the book) is extremely difficult, going against a lot of societal expectations of a trauma victim and suggesting some very unpopular or uncomfortable ideas about what trauma is spiritually for some. Kelley expresses the learning of this lesson in a way that makes the concept less foreign, and she sheds light (quite painfully at times) on the true nature of trauma.

View all my reviews.

I hate that I’m about to write this post, but it’s time. I’ve personally and publicly backed a tea blender who has at this point really and truly disappointed on a business level, regardless of whether the tea sold by the company is fantastic.

Felicitea has, after over a year, been reviewed on my tea podcast STeaP multiple times, I’ve purchased the tea, I blogged about the company when I was writing for Slashfood, I’ve raved about it to many people, I helped in decision making for a tea that has my name, and in November I received an email that Felicitea was in danger of going under financially and needed some help.

I immediately jumped into action, recommending the site for Christmas tea gifts to several people, and I purchased (on November 22, 2008 at 6:04 pm EST) $68.99 worth of Felicitea Earl Grey Brandice to give away as Christmas gifts.

The events that followed:

November 22nd - I order $68.99 worth of tea from Felicitea.com, and sent the following email to several people:

Hi all,

I don’t typically forward newsletters, but Felicitea is a great company and Summer (the owner) is having a very rough time with the economy being what it is. People aren’t splurging on custom tea blends and massages during a recession, so if you know a tea lover who would enjoy some really good tea, I highly recommend Felicitea for Christmas/holiday tea gifts.

I particularly recommend the Earl Grey Brandice, which I helped in creating (and do not receive any compensation for - I just genuinely love the tea and am proud of the blend), or the Sloth Tea. Summer also does haiku tea cups on Etsy that are very cool. I’ve grabbed a few for myself over the past few months.

Anyway, if you’re looking for tea for gifts, this is my recommendation. I love a lot of the bigger tea companies, but I’ll be supporting this smaller one in hopes of keeping Summer in business during holidays, and I hope you’ll consider throwing some business her way as well if you’re in the market for some tea.

xo,
Brandice

December 2008 - My tea never arrives. I keep waiting for it, but eventually Christmas comes and goes and I’ve given away IngenuiTEA tea infusers with no tea to put in them. I’m a little hurt, but unsure how to broach it with Summer from Felicitea.

January 10th - I finally become uncomfortable enough with the fact that I never got my holiday tea that I send the following email:

Not to be a bug, but that EGB I ordered weeks before Christmas never arrived. :( I didn’t know if the delay was due to needing time to get supplies to make it or what, but since it’s been quite a while, I wanted to check in with you about it.

Brandice

And the response was (the end comments are about my invitation to have Summer start doing video footage and some blogging for the STeaP site, which has never happened):

My official position on the US Postal Office is “hatred”. These people can’t handle anything.

I’ll ship you another order.

Also, SteaP stuff is coming. Committing to it and then having the holiday season? I couldn’t do both. I’m sorry. I’m working tea vids already - should have something uploaded on Monday. :)

Summer Plum

I feel a bit better. Clearly, the package was lost and I was just stupid not to say something much sooner or I might have had my tea prior to Christmas.

January 15th - Summer emails:

Tea will reship tomorrow.
:)
Summer Plum

So, even though I’m a bit confused about why she’s mailing it out a week after I alert her to the fact that it never arrived, I eagerly await my tea, but…

January 25th - My tea has not arrived, and while I’m doing a test call for STeaP Live and testing out TalkShoe, Summer pops in the test call and we chat for quite a while. At one point, she mentions that my tea is “right by the door” and is going out the next day. I say something along the lines of “Oh, good. My dad is coming in to town next week, so I should be able to give him some while he’s here.” Summer also mentions that she will be on STeaP Live for the episode coming up that will involve a review of one of her teas and I excitedly say that I will be interviewing her.

January 31st through February 3rd - I spend time with Dad while he’s in from Texas, and at no point does any tea arrive on my doorstep.

February 10th - STeaP Live reviews Felicitea Day Dream tea, and I (the host) awkwardly try to cover for the fact that Summer never shows up as previously stated. Instead of spending most of the episode interviewing her, I record one of the worst episodes I’ve done, video or audio, because I was completely unprepared to compensate for her absence. Also, the one person in the chat who had ordered a sample of Day Dream to try with me on the show stated that he never received it and seemed a bit peeved about that.

February 19th - I post the following on Twitter:

Trying not to get outright angry at a tea vendor I’ve backed publicly that seems to have screwed me out of some tea at this point.

Shortly after twittering this, I receive a call on my cell phone from Summer, who leaves a voicemail apologizing, saying that perhaps my box of tea was mixed up among her moving boxes and she will find it and she will overnight me the tea and I will have it by tomorrow.

February 20th - I did not receive any tea.

And… here we are on the 21st, which is now officially three MONTHS after I ordered the tea. There is no excuse, NOT ONE, which would allow for a shipment of tea to take three months, and no amount of fondness for the company owner or the tea itself will excuse bad business or this many broken promises.

At this point, I have no faith that the original package was even lost in transit, I feel foolish for the support (and money) I’ve given, and I feel let down to an extent that I just can’t let it go anymore, especially if it means that others could be treated this way during a business transaction. I tried filing a dispute of the transaction on PayPal, but you only have 45 days to do that, so I sent the following email:

Hi Summer,

I really would just like a refund at this point. The tea (which did not in fact arrive Friday) would be nearly two months old in the package you were going to send, and it’s three months overdue as of tomorrow. There is no excuse at this point that would make up for tea that I should’ve had in November (December at the latest), and I would rather just have the amount of $68.99 refunded.

Thank you,
Brandice

So, there you have it. STeaP will unfortunately no longer be reviewing Felicitea’s line of teas, especially in light of the fact that there is a likelihood that any samples ordered by my audience will not be received in time for recording.

I have unfortunately learned a very disappointing (and financially costly) lesson, but my hope in publicly describing this interaction in detail is that I will prevent this from happening to anyone else. A company may offer the best tea blends on the market, but business practices as poor as the ones I’ve experienced in recent months are simply a deal breaker.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

So… I was in the midst of sending iMiiitch a TokBox videomail, when something strange occurred, causing a necessity for the following twitter and embed of my accidental video:

My husband is very, very strange. I love it.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

I got sick on Friday… blech. Here’s suddenly sick me and kitty:

And I’m still sick, but here’s a quick update (voice is quiet partially because I have some voice loss due to talking a lot while already sick today):

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Preacher Vol. 5: Dixie Fried by Garth Ennis

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not my favorite of the volumes, but still pretty good.


View all my reviews.

______________________________________

Preacher Vol. 6: War in the Sun by Garth Ennis

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Better than volume 5… I can’t even imagine where the story is going at this point. Nothing surprises me anymore with this series.


View all my reviews.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Quick update on today:

More videos from lunch:
Cake and candles
Blowing out candles
Cutting cake, etc.

Oh, and we went to see Uncle Dale, who is a helicopter mechanic for the Army/National Guard and I took some videos for my little brothers:

Another video from the National Guard:
Helicopter just landed

Oh, and I snuggled/played with my kitty this morning. :) Hope you all had a great day!

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Just a quick little update about the past weekend and my general state of happiness, etc. Having a great weekend with family and glad I took a couple of days off this week. :)

I did my quick little vid in Tokbox because I had it open at the time, but I notice that it doesn’t look very pretty at 425px width, so I’ll probably stick to something else for blog/video updates. I LOVE Tokbox for video messages though… great site, and I’m not aware of another site doing video messaging in quite the same way. I really like the service for private video mail. Friend me up and I’ll send you some just-for-you videos. :)

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Update while driving to meet my MIL for dinner tonight. :) This has been a good weekend and I’ve seen a lot of family. Got some good phone time in with my mom as well, even though she couldn’t make it to dinner with MIL and I.

And this is just some more of the drive to Red Robin with the Girl Talk on blast… ;)

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Bah. Today was wretched-ish and I ended up at work for 13 hours instead of eight. My day also got monumentally poopier AFTER I was done with this lunch and headed back to the chaos.

Have a great weekend! I’m doing lots of family stuff and taking Monday and Tuesday off since my dad is in town. :)

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

…from the latest blizzard. A little clip from my drive home to the tune of Girl Talk. :)

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Today I got home and I did NOT want to exercise. I was tired, and I had fallen off the wagon for the past week after my back went a bit spazzy, so I was NOT feeling it.

I made a snap decision and say to myself, I’m going to post a public message that I’m going to live stream my Wii Fit workout. Then I’ll have to do it, and there will be videographic evidence that I really did a 30 minute workout.

So I posted a quick message, and people quickly popped into the Ustream chat before I’d even finished setting up the equipment. I let the viewers pick some of the workouts and I only live broadcasted the tv screen (not my sweating, heaving, out of shape body), so I didn’t feel pressure, just support.

People popped in and out as they felt like it (30 minutes of working out can be boring if you stay through the whole thing), and one person was actually working out with me on their own console, which was really cool. Here’s the video if you want to browse through different points of the workout and see how I did or what the Wii Fit is all about:

The verdict: I’ll be doing this more often, because it held me accountable for doing the workout, entertained viewers as I was intermittently wacked in the head with shoes during the soccer ball game, and I feel like it was more of a social activity, where I was supported in my hard work.

I won’t be posting (or even recording/saving) each workout session, but in the future I will be live streaming as many of them as possible, hopefully at least a few per week. Staying social and accountable to others during my effort this year to become healthier is REALLY working for me, so expect me to continue talking about where I’m at in the process and asking YOU to cheer me on when you can. :)

Ps. I’m up to 9 pounds lost since January 2nd! w00t!

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Tonight I had dinner with Joe and Amy at Don Pablo’s. It was nice to catch up with friends, and I managed to eat fairly healthy, just having two enchiladas and rice. I made a Qik video on the way, but then accidentally deleted it, so I quickly grabbed the one that auto-crossposted to YouTube:

What did YOU do on this lazy Saturday? :)

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

I was really excited about the snow the other day when it was snowing these HUGE, beautiful, fluffy snowflakes… my favorite kind. :) I tried to take a Qik video of fluff, but didn’t have a huge amount of luck:

To subscribe to or just check out my Qik videos, click HERE.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

Wow. There’s a Facebook app that I won’t be adding any time soon.

“A friend thinks you’re too dumb” is not exactly the way to draw me in to your magical app of wonder, geniuses. You app creators may have genius IQ scores but perhaps you’re missing some other vital brain noodle that doesn’t affect your IQ while still leaving you a giant wanker. Lol.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

If you haven’t checked out Kiva, you really should. It’s a great site, great program, and it helps out small business owners around the world in a way that allows them to help themselves. I re-invest my Kiva funds in a new entrepreneur each time they are paid off, so I’m helping multiple people and not really spending very much to do it.

Here is this month’s entrepreneur:

From her Kiva page:

Samaya Musayeva is a very hard-working woman and knows that each day she has to give her best effort and all her courage. She is married and has five children. She works raising and feeding animals with the goal of later selling them. This activity creates feelings of satisfaction in her because it allows her to provide for a considerable amount of the household income. The care that she takes to feed the animals and supply them with occasional medical visits from the veterinarian has increased their population and so now she guides them into the field each day for grazing.

She makes sure not to neglect her role as a mother, because she’s also very dedicated to lovingly raising her adorable grandchildren. She wants to improve her stable stalls and produce milk in a quantity sufficient for selling commercially. It is for this reason that she’s requesting a loan of 1200 USD for the term of 15 months to buy two baby calves and fodder for her animals. Please support this woman who is determined to change the course of her life with dedication and hard work.

Hopefully I’ve gotten her a little closer to reaching her goal. :) Check out Kiva today, if you haven’t already!

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been editing some older video to try and catch up with my video footage and clear some of the raw footage off of my MacBook for space. Stumbled across this footage that I took during my trip up to Hudson with Dianah to go to Gary Vaynerchuk’s book signing back in late July of 2008.

Dianah picked up a handy book involving a map and an unsolved mystery, and I picked up a t-shirt for that wretched Twilight series… it was a fun afternoon/evening for sure. :)

The video was taken back when I worked for Viddler, but the site isn’t working for me today (literally, it won’t load), so you’ll notice that the video is embedded with Vimeo. I have a separate post coming on that at some point, but I’m trying to find the best videoblogging setup for me and the decision is an ongoing one.

Originally published at Brandice.net. You can comment here or there.