Just so I would have something of a scrapbook I guess, I don't know. We were listening to them one night (you can't really not listen to them when they're outside..) and A said to me, "This really needs to be recorded and put online somewhere." So I have.

http://myhillbillyneighbors.tumblr.com/

The pictures and audio pretty much speak for themselves. They are loud, obnoxious, blatantly racist, and let their dogs run all over the cul-de-sac. The woman who we just call "The Mom" since she's the mother of at least two of the younger (early 20's?) hillbillies refuses to leash them. She just stands on her porch screaming "DIAMOND! ASHLEY! YOU GIT BACK HERE NOW!" Which of course does nothing.

More will certainly follow. With how much they've been amping up the aggression lately (the confederate flag in the last picture is only the latest of many of the same flag they have flown from their porch, the utility poll, and wrapped around their dogs' necks like scarves), we are guessing they are either facing an eviction notice and decided to go out with a bang, or someone's been putting heavy drugs in their Milwaukie's Best. Either way, we're expecting a cop raid any day now.

For a while now, I haven't been entirely sure what to do with the whole blog situation. I like Livejournal because this is where my friends have their blogs, but I don't like Livejournal because of their ridiculous ads. I have my own website/blog @ www.melindabardon.com and in anticipation of job-hunting sometime around November and December once I graduate, I have decided to start posting some of my entries over there more regularly. However, I'll probably post some of the entry over here as well, with a direct link over to the blog. That way people that want to read and comment on my stuff can, and I can stay connected with the LJ crowd.

So without further ado, here's the post I made today.

Gardening: my summer obsession



Having lived in tiny apartments downtown for the past few years (some without even windows that fully opened), I've been deprived of a decent space to garden. It didn't bother me so much, since the Farmer's Market was literally right outside my door, but now that I'm situated in a full-size house complete with back yard, I decided it was time to do some gardening.

I took a few years of horticulture during high school and mucked about at various points with small container gardens or rosebushes, but I've never tried to go all out and plant things that I ever intended on eating. This year I started small, selecting a few plant varieties that I felt I could maintain time for over the 2010 growing season. I wanted plants that didn't seem too hard to grow, but that would give me at least some challenge. If all goes well, I'll take what I learned this year and expand my garden for 2011.

Since my garden is primarily for vegetables, I looked for varieties that offered the best flavor. These invariably turned out to be heirloom variety plants. The whole concept of "heirloom" vegetables is interesting. They are supposedly seed varieties that date back at least 100 years, and are often known for their interesting colors, shapes, and flavors, but also known for their susceptibility to disease. Presumably, that's what the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century was supposed to have fixed: huge crops of disease-resistant fruits and vegetables, but only in a few varieties. I decided to take the risk of diseases and went with the romantic allure of heirloom produce and got seed packets of the following: Cherokee purple tomatoes, White Stallion cucumbers, and Winter Luxury Pie pumpkin.


The full entry is here with the rest of the pics.

Trying in vain to keep my tomatoes safe from a rainy Oregon June night..

For my final project in my linguistics class, I need to find some willing people (that's where you come in!) to take a look at the slang terms below and respond as to whether or not you use the terms, and also define each term if you can.

Sauce

Whale tail

BFF

Balls out

Nearsighted date

Rick-rolled

Rice

W00t


Thank you! Everyone's help is really appreciated.

At wired.com today there is an article discussing a study done on environmental perceptions and women in computer science.

Researchers decorated a CS classroom with "nerdy" stuff like Star Trek posters, gaming manuals, etc. and then decorated a second CS classroom with neutral objects like potted plants and coffee mugs, then asked groups of women who were shown the rooms if they wanted to study computer science.

The women that were shown the geeky room were less interested in studying CS than the women shown the neutral room. They did a second round where they decorated two offices in the same manner, one geeky and one "neutral," and asked which one they would want to work at after graduation. Women predominantly said they wanted to work in the neutral office.

Full article here.

This is pretty interesting, as it helps to topple the idea that women are not interested in computer sciences professionally. In fact we are, we just don't necessarily want to work in a man-cave.

I'd be interested in seeing if these studies result in more gender-neutral environments and consequently an influx of women in computer science fields. However, it begs for a lot of other questions to be answered. The study seems to indicate that women are more affected by environment than men, and yet in traditional gender studies, men are almost always pegged as the more "visual" of the two groups, so one would think that men would be more impacted by environment than women.

I suspect, though (completely without any kind of research into it whatsoever) that it's more a case of familiarity and comfort. Either gender can be comfortable in a "neutral" room since it's something we're all familiar with. Coffee mugs and plants are pretty much background images in any working environment.

However, comic books, video games and Star Trek posters (things typically associated with "geeky male") might be more comfortable to men who grew up associating these kinds of things as positive, while a female who didn't would see this as unfamiliar terrain.

This study would be further helped if they did a third room, decorated in a more "feminine" style and then surveyed the participants yet again, to see if the environment had an impact on men or women.

Saw this article on the anthropologist community, and thought it was pretty interesting.

"Contrary to myth, Christianity's concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual.

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the "Office of Same-Sex Union" (10th and 11th century), and the "Order for Uniting Two Men" (11th and 12th century)."

The rest is here (http://colfaxrecord.com/detail/91429.html)

Pop-up ads that I can't close when I try to access my friends list? I think Livejournal just lost me as a user. I'll be on Twitter/WordPress/Tumblr/Facebook if any of you want to get in touch with me.

(Excerpt from http://www.penny-arcade.com/)

So Gabe was talking about how his last D&D game was the best ever. I didn't quite believe it until I read the following:

Next the party was summoned to compete in a tournament of Kord. This was a grand festival with jousting and arena fighting.

....

The first event was jousting. I did some research online and found a couple different home brew rules for jousting in 4e but none of them did exactly what I wanted. I ended up taking what liked from a few different places and then tweaking and adding my own ideas. For my game, jousting was intended to be a fun "mini game" style encounter to start the tournament. I created a six person tournament bracket with myself as the sixth player. Pitting the players against each other ended up being really fun. They were all competing for the title "Master of the Joust" and the permanent +2 to fort that the title granted.

...

So after the Joust I had them move to the arena. I wanted this fight to be really over the top. We've always thought of Kord as a real man's man. He's the kind of God who cracks open a brew-ski and watches the game. The theme was: THIS SUNDAY WE'RE TURNING KORD'S ARENA INTO A GIANT MUD PIT! So rather than just throw some random mobs at them I created WWE style intros and placed each mini on the field one at a time.

...

Next I let them know that they could play to the crowd in order to get bonuses to damage. They were using minor actions to taunt enemies, perform crazy stunts and all kinds of fun stuff. At one point the Dragonborn Paladin was actually flying around the stadium giving high fives.

That sounds like so much fun!