alien and beautiful-safe and deep

A friend for the little jelly?
Un ami pour la petite meduse?

Also, national geographic.

orange sea glass is so terribly rare

I'm not going to translate this.
A girl in my french class was telling us about how her uncle works at a research lab in antartica. He told her that he could get her a job (which are impossible to get) working in the kitchen and making the same in a year as a year or more of college tuition. Not to mention the fact that SHE WOULD BE LIVING IN MOTHERFUCKING ANTARTICA! She nixed the idea and is gonna go to school in california instead. Crazy.
Well, it was this little jelly that got me thinking about college and antartica and all that jazz. He was found in the icy antartic waters. I love jellyfish.
I actualy just got back from college visits in NYC. The tour guide at The New School was a really rad kid, a senior at Eugene Lang. He had spent a semester of sophmore year in the "Semester at Sea" program-where you literaly spend a semester on a boat and go all around the world, 13 countries in all. Hot damn. 68 or 108 days. At sea. Fuck yes. Sign me up.
The whole college thing is scary as hell. Maybe I'll just make cupcakes for the rest of my life. Or, better yet, I'll just turn into an antartic jellyfish and drift away.

national geographic

I love the sea.

Yes, please.

Oui, si vous plait.

^_^

national geographic

the black hills, the bad lands, the calloused east

I want to go to the badlands.
Je veux aller aux mauvaises terres a traverser.

from nationalgeographic.com

cancerous tasmanian devil proof fence

"Australian scientists say they want to build a fence on Tasmania to prevent the spread of a cancer that threatens the Tasmanian Devil with extinction. "


What is it about Australians and fences?
Qu'est que c'est des Austrailians et les clotures?

Story from BBC.

about (what is it about)
fence=la cloture

from MISI-ZIIBI, ojibwe for great river

This is a map of the flooding of the mississippi over a number of decades. I think it's the most beautiful thing that I've ever seen.
Ca c'est un carte de la inondation de la mississippi avec les temps. Je pense qu'il est le plus belle truc que j'ai jamais vue.

from my new favourite blog, strangemaps.

the hyena and other men.

So. Pieter Hugo's photography is maybe the most disturbing and beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. It makes me sick to my stomach and want to curl up into a ball and die. It's incredible. His series on the Gadawan Kura, the "hyena handlers," of Lagos, Nigeria is just frightening. The monochromatic desert and fur and dust covered flesh is really powerful paired with the little flashes of green or red. Too crazy.

Donc. La photographie de Pieter Hugo est peut-etre le plus perturbante et le plus belle truc j'ai vu depuis longtemps. Il me fait mal au ventre et veux me recroqueviller et mourir. Il est incredible. Sa serie sur les Gadawan Kura, les "dresseurs hyene," de Lagos, Nigeria est juste effrayante. Le desert et le poils et la poussiere, tous monochromatique, ils sont vraiment forte appaire avec les eclats petites de vert ou rouge. Trop genial.

Oh, I found the work via a really great blog, We Made This. 

i wonder what the translation is for 'oh gosh'..

Oh gosh Satu is incredible. I'm in love with this photo; the moss on the roof? Incredible! There's something about abandoned buildings and overgrown forests. 

Mon dieu Satu est incredible. J'adore cette photograph; le mousse sur le toit? Incredible! Il y a quelque chose a propos des batiments abandonne et des forets envahle par la vegetation. 

Oh yeah.. I've decided to write entries in english and french, maybe it will help me on the road to fluency, or at lease basic comprehension. If anyone understands french and sees that I have something wrong, don't hesitate to say something.

^_^

yellow leaves and microphones and white trees and sky

"Speaking in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai demands an end to civilian casualties, saying US warplanes bombed a wedding party, killing 37 people, including 23 children."
-BBC

purple mushrooms, brown wingtips, and green wellies

more from the woods by mieke.

I wouldn't mind being a jellyfish...

So. On that twenty minute walk through Boston in the pouring rain every inch of me got soaked, including my backpack. And what was in the front pocket of that backpack, you may ask? Well, apart from some basic items, a pencil set, some gum, a rubber dinosaur wallet, there was my brand new camera. The first thing I've ever bought myself that was that big. I had had it a week, a week and a half, and now it's kaput. I suppose it'll be okay; I can return it this weekend but still. 

Anyways. The aquarium started of a bit depressing but by the end was incredible. Their outside exhibit, the one next to the ticket counter, is a very small and dirty tank with a few seals that swim from one side to the other over and over. They looked very sad, although it might have been largely the miserable weather. 

Once we got inside everything perked up. The first thing we saw was the jellyfish exhibit which was SO INSANE! We spend a solid forty five minutes sketching. Then we split up into groups of two or three and wandered over to the penguins. Katie and I fell in love with the baby penguin. Actually no, they weren't babies. They were little blue penguins. Still very cute. Although there was one who was either molting or sick because he had lost nearly all of his feathers. It was pretty sad. Like a little fetus stuck in the penguin cage. 

Well anyways. Overall the aquarium was awesome. The jellies were stunning and the birds adorable. We saw a shark and I understood completely what a french family was saying. There was a turtle and afterward I had some pretty fabulous frozen yogurt. Not a bad day, if I do say so myself.

My camera broke before we got the the aquarium so I stole some of Adina's jellyfish photos^^

land of

i
c
e

Anthropologie went to iceland. 

orange mushrooms and candied ginger

(satu.)

a dark gray quilt with two squares of orange, dear and beloved wet soil and rain

orange and gold and teal and gray

(My Funny Eye)

blind contour drawings and ginkgo leaves and sleeping eyelashes and sun on my face and lucy's house and mushrooms and fish scales and hallways

Brookford Farms

(brookfordfarm.com)

We had the afternoon off and so a few of us went to visit a local farm. It's run by a German couple with their two boys under five. We wandered through the woods up to a pasture on a hill. The boys found a turkey feather and could name the red tailed hawk that flew above us. The cows are let loose after their morning milking and left to graze over the three hundred acres of farm, pasture, and wood. I wore my father's industrial work boots. He was six foot four and needless to say I, his fifteen year old daughter, do not wear the same size shoe. Still, it was a good decision considering that twenty cows produce a whole lot of poo. 

Anyways, the boy in the pictures is their eldest, Oliver. He and our English teacher, Kasperzak, really hit it off. Half way through the visit we noticed that both had disappeared. We found them again in the chicken coup trying to catch one. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about what on earth I'm going to do with my life. So far my list includes librarian, something involving archival photographs, some kind of teacher, and now, farmer. 

We may poor, but we get by.

where's the little bottle labeled "drink me" when you need it

Sometimes I think it would be nice to be the size of an ant.