Poetry Portfolio!

I found my poetry portfolio from my first year of university! I thought I had lost it forever when my hard drive died in 2010. Turns out I had it saved on my student drive at school! Yay! anyway, here is my favourite poem that I wrote that year. I might use it this semester for a book I have to do.

Enjoy!

 

Stop that, Coyote!

Hee Hee Hee, Says Coyote

Better apologize, Coyote

Better pay attention, Coyote

 

Forget about where Coyotes’ live

Forget about Sky Coyotes’ too

 

Old Coyote and his pretty good tricks

First Woman is working hard

Building the world

 

Coyote is up to his pretty good tricks

Thinks he’s funny he does

 

Maybe I can help

Coyote says

Lets have food!

 

Straighten up, Coyote

Stop messing about, Coyote

 

Can we dance?

Can I sing?

Says Coyote

 

Remember what happened last time, Coyote

Better not start that again

 

Uh-oh, here we go again

Stop that dancing, Coyote

Stop that singing!

 

Got to straighten it out again

Got to fix up the world

 

Better apologize, Coyote

Better pay attention, Coyote

Got to fix this mess.

Research Class Sketch

Am I breathing underwater? — Metric

Night Photography Attempt

So I took this out the back of my best friends house near Sylvan Lake. First attempt at night photography really. There was some really good lightning strikes that night, but of course, I never caught any.

I was thinking lately, you know, maybe I don’t need to upgrade my camera body, maybe what I have is ok. And it probably is ok, for 80% of what I do. For night photography… Not so much.

This is a 5 minute exposure on bulb mode. After I close the shutter on a 5 minute exposure… It takes a good 10-15 minutes to process before it shows up as viewable, and before I can do anything else with my camera… I can understand there is a lot to deal with on a 5 minute exposure, but 10-15 minutes between shots is a lot of time for me to stand there missing awesome lighting strikes or aurora.

So… I will need to upgrade my camera body at some point. When that will happen, who knows. Right now the only guarantee is that I will do it when I grad from school and get my first tax return with awesome Education credit on it. But… that’s at least spring 2015. That is a long way off. So. Who knows, maybe if I can swing it, I will try to do it this Christmas when we get our bonuses at work. IF I can afford it then. Being on a student budget sucks when you have expensive hobbies. On the plus side, after this body upgrade, I shouldn’t need to upgrade bodies again for a good 10-15 years.

So anyway, just thought I’d throw this up for people to look at, since I haven’t posting much lately.

Cheers!

Brown Sugar Shortbread Cookies

Recipe Time. Enjoy!

Brown Sugar Shortbread:

Yield: 30 cookies depending on size.
Time: Prep: 30 minutes.
Total including baking time and dishes: 2 hours.

1 Cup unsalted butter
⅓ Cup packed brown sugar
1 ⅔ Cup all purpose flour
⅓ Cup Cornstarch
1 tsp Vanilla

Cream butter in/with mixer until smooth, add sugar and vanilla. Beat until well mixed.

Add flour and cornstarch. Beat until the dough begins to form into a ball on its own.

Roll dough into a log about 1 inch in diameter, wrap in tinfoil or wax paper or parchment, whatever you have, and refrigerate 30 minutes. You do not need to oil your counter top or anything for this. Shortbread has so much butter it doesn’t stick to anything but itself.

Preheat oven to 350.

Take the dough out of the refrigerator and slice log into slice about ½ an inch thick. Place slices on ungreased cookie sheet. You can put them quite close together because they don’t spread much. I fit 20 on one cookie sheet. Bake for 9-10 minutes. Possibly up to 11 minutes, but you don’t want to over bake shortbread.

Cool and eat them. They are delicious.

Fergus the Dog

I have been sick all week so far. And I’m getting really tired of being cooped up at home. And I get whiny and miss my dogs back home at mom and dads when I’m sick.
So today, Kate let me steal Fergus for a few hours. We went for a long very slow (hard to walk fast when your sick) walk down at Discovery Ridge which is my favorite place in Calgary to go for walks. So beautiful down there.
Anyway, it totally made my day. Kate and Fergus are awesome (Nate is pretty awesome too for putting up with me stealing his dog when he’s home).

Oh hey!

Look! I drew a thing! Also I suck at blogging. I’m sorry.

Yay for teachers!!!

Aaaah… I’m a little nervous about putting it out there on here that I frequent Reddit. And who knows, I may create a separate account after posting this just to protect my own privacy there… However, I had to post this.

It all started last year before Christmas. I’d heard about Reddit’s Secret Santa gift exchange. I knew people who had participated in past gift exchanges, so I decided to give it a shot. I signed up for Secret Santa 2011.

I got a match, I sent my gifts, and got a very enthusiastic response. Dude was pretty stoked about the stuff I sent. I also did a re-match, sent to another person, I can’t recall exactly, but I think they were pretty excited too. I also received a really awesome package from my Secret Santa in Poland that included a pack of my absolute favourite pencil crayons from Lyra which I cannot seem to find in Canada :(. So I was pretty stoked.

That was just the beginning…

I participated in Book Exchange this year, and that was awesome. I sent a book my giftee had been wanting to read and some tea and she seemed quite pleased with all of it as well.

More recently I participated in Arbitrary Day. Arbitrary Day is June 25th, and its Reddit’s Summertime Secret Santa where we just give because we feel like giving.

My giftee’s response wasn’t quite as enthusiastic for Arbitrary day, but I still think he was stoked, I thoroughly enjoyed myself during the searching and purchasing part.

Most recently I participated in Gifts for Teachers. This is a bit different than most Reddit Gift Exchanges because it was mostly one sided.
It came up on reddit that a huge majority of teachers, most of whom are notoriously underpaid, spend a significant amount of their personal money on school supplies for their classroom every year. This happens for a variety of reasons, from students not having the financial resources to purchase what they need, to teachers not having the funding resources to supply their classrooms. I think there are tons of teachers who feel like they just can’t make class into a truly positive learning environment with the limited resources they are given. Teachers are some dedicated, passionate people yo, they are like, really amazing people. So in the end, teachers end up spending what they can out of their own pockets to improve their classroom environment however they can.

So Reddit Teacher exchange matched up all us “other” people with teachers who needed stuff. So I signed up for this. My cousin over at Mrs. W’s Non-Fiction Diction is a new teacher, I have friends with kids in school, I have friends who work in classrooms as aides, and I remember how difficult school was for me (although this may have been due to attitude problems on my part). So I am kind of attached to the idea of giving students a good school experience.

In school, my least favourite, and most difficult subject was always Math… SURPRISE! Reddit gifts matched me up with a grade 7 Math/Science teacher. Thats Karma for ya. Anyway, this teacher has been teaching for a long time (34 yrs), and from the digging I did it seems like she is still crazy passionate about her job. Just this year, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer!!!! And she has been through all her treatments, pronounced healthy again, and is right back in the classroom teaching grade 7 again this fall! That is dedication!

I wanted to make sure that I got my gift sent out early for this exchange since I know school has started already, or is starting soon in a lot of places. So this time I went straight to her Amazon.com wishlist, ordered it all and had it shipped off as a gift. I felt a little bad that I didn’t make it more personal, because usually I hunt around a bit and try to find something really special to send. But I didn’t want to waste time on this one.

Yesterday, my teacher posted about receiving the gifts. This is the most enthusiastic response I’ve received yet in reddit gifts, and I was soooooooo happy to see the pictures. Even for little stuff that I thought was impersonal, her students were stoked to get and you can see the excitement in their faces. And, she also mentioned that they asked why I sent the stuff and she was able to explain to them that its just because I care. So she was able to show them another little life lesson about caring for other people which is awesome :).

So needless to say, Reddit Gifts has truly been an awesome experience for me, and I’m now a little bit addicted. I can’t wait for Secret Santa 2012.

So here is a link to the post my teacher put up with pictures of her class with the stuff I sent. Enjoy! And please consider participating in Reddit Gift exchanges yourself!\

Cheers,
Bri

Also PS, Reddit Gifts actually set a Guiness Record with Secret Santa 2011. Yah, we rock! 😀

Muffins!

OK… so this blog is supposed to be about HTML….

 

umm…

 

 

 

So…

 

 

uh…

 

 

I cooked some things tonight! I saw this recipe on Pinterest awhile ago, (I know, effing Pinterest eh?) and repinned it, and I was actually intrigued enough to actually try it out!

So tonight I went and bought me some eggs (2 dozen! about 21 too many since I still had 3 eggs at home… Don’t ask, I’m always overestimate food amounts), and some Cilantro (i LOOOOOOOOVEEEE CILANTRO), a red pepper, and some CHEEEEEEESSSEEEEE!

Ok, enough with the freaking out eh?

Anyway, so then I went and found this recipe again, from my pin, on Kalyn’s Kitchen. I haven’t checked out the rest of her site, but she looks pretty cool.

So I kinda followed her recipe. In that I read the recipe once.  Thats about how well I usually follow instructions… (Plus, I was feeling very defiant today and I didn’t get to be defiant to anyone, so I decided to be defiant to the recipe.)

So I stuck about one sprig of Cilantro into each muffin spot in my borrowed-from-my-roommate sillicone muffin pan.
And then I cut up a few chunks of red pepper into each muffin spot. (I don’t know what they’re called, do you?!)
And then a couple of little cheese chunks into each muffin spot.
And then I whisked the hell out of my eggs, I think I used 5 eggs? Maybe 6? Anyway… One too many probably, as per above, I overestimate foods!

And then I dumped the eggs into the MUFFIN SPOTS on top of all my other things. And I definitely filled them too full. I filled them until they were about an 1/8th of an inch below the top. DON’T DO IT THAT WAY. They overflow themselves a bit when they bake.

Anyway.

I very carefully slid my silicone muffin pan onto a cookie sheet. Because silicone is bloody flexi and wiggly and thats just stupid when you have it full of LIQUID EGG MESSES.

And then I stuck them in the oven. Which was preheated to about 300.
I stuck them in there for about 15 minutes, and then I checked Kalyn’s Kitchen again… And she said 25-35 minutes at 375… So I naturally turned my oven up to 400. I also realized I had not seasoned them at all, so desperately shook some seasoning salt over them while the oven was open.

Total oven time, 34 minutes, 15 seconds.
PERFECT!

except the part where they seeped out onto the top of the muffin pan so I had to cut them apart and they are kind of ugly. But they taste DELICIOUS. And even if I had forgotten seasoning/salt completely they would still be wicked good. I made six, but I’m only showing you two. Because I ate one, and the other 3 are in another container to cool in the fridge.

So here is a picture for you. To make up for not doing any HTML homework this week. This counts right?

This is a bit crazy, clearly something needs to get cleaned up!