Snake Goddesses

Where's winter? It barely snowed at all in the city this year. But I guess it's not too late for some surprise blizzards. Maybe?? Right now it's the weird temperature where it's cold enough to bundle up before going outside, but not cold enough where you're not sweating by the time you power-walk to class.

This week I went to the ROM since I remembered that it's free for students on Tuesdays. I used to go a lot, I think I'm gonna start doing that again. My class on Aegean art and archaeology has made me think about museums a little differently. I read one long paper by a couple guys who basically spent the whole 60 pages saying, "people didn't used to think Cycladic figurines were beautiful. But then they did. Then the art people starting collecting them and they gained value on the art market. Then people started looting them and making fakes. The collectors become celebrities and the museums become show business! Archaeological context is destroyed! Question their motives!!" And in fact my professor said during a lecture that he and one of his colleagues who was an expert in Cycladic figurines or something went to the ROM, and at least 4 of the 7 that they had were almost definitely fakes. This doesn't make me like museums less though. I think it makes it more interesting to go to a museum and have to question some things and think about it for yourself.

So I went to find the Bronze Age Aegean section, which was tucked away and small and creepily vacant. It was actually really cool to see at least a few examples of the things we had been talking about in class. But I had no idea which figurines were fake and which ones were real. This is one of the info-things that was up, I don't know if you can read any of it from the crappy photo:

The thing about this is, all this stuff is from a prehistoric time. So there's no written records to go by and all the evidence they have is the stuff archaeologists dig up. When they say "The Minoans worshipped in sacred caves, in sanctuaries on mountain peaks, and in towns" what they're really saying is "we've found caves and places on mountain peaks with Minoan stuff in them that some archaeologists believe was sacred or used for rituals, and some of these things were also found in places with houses." It's easy to jump to the religion conclusion when you find an unfamiliar and unexplained artifact. By the way most of this is just spewing back what our professor rants about during every lecture. Obviously I've only been taking this course for like five weeks now so I'm no expert. But what surprised me most was the first paragraph, where they're talking about the female deities and their specific domains. Not even my textbook talks about it with that kind of certainty and detail. I don't know how they know this? Maybe they are just giving the best guess for the sake of simplicity and sign space? For example I've read a little about the "snake goddesses" which are mainly these cool figurines of bare-chested women with their hands up holding snakes, and there are all kinds of interpretations that people have for them, like they are maybe fertility goddesses or protect nature or have some kind of chthonic meaning, if they are goddesses at all. And it all just depends on interpretation of the context and the objects themselves, and putting all the pieces together the best you can. And no one can ever really know for sure, because all those people are gone now. Basically what I'm saying is, I've found in archaeology the same kind of enigmatic...ness that I loved about astronomy. And that I still love about astronomy. And by the way I fully intend to go back to astronomy in the future. But right now I'm really enjoying this class and never realized archaeology could be so super interesting.

I spent the rest of the day sitting in the natural history section with a sketchbook, drawing the taxidermied animals and trying to self consciously hide the page whenever someone walked behind me.

Let's talk about tea now! First let me tell you this thing I read in a tea book yesterday. If you really want to taste your tea super awesomely, do this:

1. Breathe out

2. Take a sip

3. Hold the tea in your mouth and breathe in through your nose

4. Swallow the tea

5. Breathe out

Seriously try it, it works so well.

Okay now on to ROOIBOS!

This is actually a type of tisane but the processing is similar to tea. Rooibos ("red bush") is a shrub-like bush only grown in the Cedarberg Mountain region of South Africa. The tea, sometimes called red tea, used to be a poor man's drink there and only very recently gained popularity in Europe and North America, mostly because of its multitude of health benefits.

The plant itself is pretty tough and can withstand a harsh climate and various altitudes. Every year the upper branches are harvested and cut into tiny pieces, then bruised to allow oxidation. This used to be done with axes and hammers, but now it's all machines. :/ During oxidation it changes from green to red. After that, it's spread out and left to dry under the sun. There's also green rooibos, which is dried immediately and not oxidized.

Both types of rooibos have a smooth and slightly sweet taste. I don't really like green rooibos, but people say it has a light, fresh taste and it's often compared to green tea. I don't know, it always tastes kind of mildewy to me. There are a few green rooibos blends that I don't mind, but it's usually part green and part red with other stuff thrown in there too. If green rooibos is the main ingredient chances are I won't like it. I love regular rooibos though. It has a very woody and slightly syrupy sweet taste. Rooibos makes a perfect base for dessert teas. One of my favorite David's blends is called Oh Canada and it has rooibos and maple and caramel and it's amazing. Octavia has a rooibos blend called Chocolate Mint with rooibos, chocolate, peppermint, and vanilla. Basically there are tons of things that it blends well with, and it's also great on its own or with milk and sugar.

Of course it has a million great healthy things about it like antioxidants and all that, plus it's caffeine-free. It's easy to prepare since it's not sensitive to leaf amount or water temperature and it won't go bitter if you steep it too long. And it's cheap! Why are you not drinking it right now??

That's all, goodbye! Go try some green rooibos and tell me if you like it!

Today is Ian's birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY IAN.
In other news, I am blogging again. It has been a long time so let's start with an exciting and important hair update. In Oregon I got it dyed red. Now I will continue the series of photobooth pictures where I am looking down because otherwise I always make some awkward face:

I really hated the colour cause it looked washed out and weird so when I got back to Toronto I dyed over top of it:

Yay! Now it's a nice dark pinky red that's a bit lighter than in the photo.

I didn't make any new years resolutions. But I remember last year I said I would learn how to cook. I don't think this has been a complete fail since I know how to make very basic things without a recipe now. For example, last night I made pasta and vegetable sauce and when Matt came in he said "that smells amazing!" So I am going to count this as a win.

Let's talk about tea! Okay! How about herbal tea. Also known as... TISANES!
Basically an herbal tea is any infusion that doesn't contain anything from the Camellia sinensis plant. So it's not really "tea" and some people are all "actually herbal infusions are not TEA, they are infusions so when you call them 'herbal teas' you are actually very wrong, they are herbal infusions." That's annoying though. Don't be that guy.
Herbals teas have a long medicinal history and were first used by healers thousands of years ago. They're still heavily used in traditional medicine. Basically no matter what's wrong with you, there is an infusion out there that is used to treat it. Here are some of the most popular ingredients in herbal teas and their benefits (okay, well these are just some things that I've noticed a lot in teas. I'm not sure if they're really the most popular or whatever.)

• Chamomile - Calming
• Ginger - Good for circulation and upset stomach
• Peppermint - Good for digestion
• Lemongrass - Also calming
• Rosehips - Good for colds (since rosehips have a ton of vitamin c)

Personally I hate chamomile and it reminds me of babies (not that I hate babies) and lemongrass tastes soapy and detergenty to me. But whenever my stomach hurts, a mug of lemon ginger tea with honey usually makes me feel a lot better pretty quickly.
You can throw anything natural in hot water and call it herbal tea. Not all herbals are flowery or fruity. One of my favourites from Davids Tea is a mulberry leaf tea that tastes like cake batter. They also have one called Wintergreen Woods made of big leaves and pine needles and you have to just throw a bunch of it in your mug or teapot because it won't fit in an infuser. It tastes like a forest! I think I will make some after I finish writing this.
It's possible to make tea with marijuana. Some people try to make cannabis tea by just throwing it in a mug and pouring boiling water on top but obviously that doesn't work. Maybe it would make a nice (??) tasting infusion but there would definitely be no high involved since there needs to be some fat present to bring out the THC. So if you want to make cannabis tea the right way you need to use butter in it, or I think alcohol also works. Then you'll have a teapot full of pot tea... sorry.
Another interesting herbal is pennyroyal tea. I guess pennyroyal is supposed to induce abortions. A lot of people have tried to use it this way but basically they all just die. So don't do it. Also the Nirvana song.

A few days ago my mom's side of the family was all in Etobicoke so I went and spent the day there. I went to Ikea with my aunts and FINALLY bought my two bookshelves! I built them yesterday with Marshall's help and my room is looking less and less disastrous. I still need a few Ikea things, like inserts for one of the shelves, so I'm excited to go back there and eat princess cake.

Blogging and etc

Good news everyone!
I finally reached 200 followers on Flickr. Yay! I'm kind of surprised because I hardly EVER post there anymore, which I feel bad about so I should start doing that more. Anyway. Today's post comes to you in three parts.

Part one: What have I been doing.

This past weekend I worked at the Women's Show at the convention centre as part of my internship with RfR. There were a surprising number of men there. Basically I stood at our booth and handed out cards and told people who walked by what we do ("Heeyyy ladies! Got any events coming up? We rent out designer dresses at a fraction of the retail cost!") It was a little exhausting and I had to smile a lot but I really like RfR so it was okay. I also helped backstage for the little fashiony runway show we did each day, helping models not fall down stairs and stuff.

I cut my Smoke's shift hours down to one night a week so I could have more time for other things, like school and blogging, and it's been a lot better. Usually I work Friday or Saturday night, but this week I'm working overnight on Thursday. This probably has something to do with my boss firing everyone all the time, so we get a lot of new people in with different schedules and I have to train them and they drop giant things of gravy on the floor.

Part two: Tea education yaayyy

You may know that I have become fully obsessed with tea. So I'm gonna talk about tea for a while.

GATHER ROUND, CLASS.

Today's topic is...

WHITE TEA! Because that's what I'm drinking right now.

So, as you may already know, all types of "true" tea come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. What a fantastic plant! Basically, the tea is picked, withered, oxidized, and dried. Sometimes people refer to the oxidation process as "fermentation," but that's not really what it is. As far as I know, oxidation is just when something absorbs oxygen and then the oxygen changes shit up. Like when you leave an apple slice out and it gets all gross and brown, that's oxidation too. Okay. Bringing it back to WHITE TEA now.

White tea uses the youngest shoots of this awesome plant, before the buds even open. The buds are covered in this silvery hair, which gives the white tea its name. It's allowed to wither for a short amount of time and the oxidation process just begins. Then it's heated to stop oxidation and dried.

Since it's close to its natural state and is often shaded for awhile during growth to reduce chlorophyll, white tea contains mucho antioxidants and is super good for you! It generally has a delicate, sweet taste and it's super smooth. For ultimate white tea happiness, steep it in well-below-boiling-temperature water. People say different things about whether it should be steeped for a short time or a long time, but I think it depends on the tea and on what you like. Generally I think flavoured white teas (that contain other things besides just tea leaves) should be steeped for a shorter time than straight teas. I have a flavoured white tea called buttercream from my favorite tea place, David's Tea (yay Canadian tea company) and it said to steep it for like 5 minutes or something, so I did, and I haaaated it and thought it was super super gross. So I came back to it a little later and tried steeping for just over a minute, and it was completely different and tasted awesome. So yeah I'm a fan of short steeping times for white teas.

White teas are one of the most expensive kinds of tea, probably because they require more hand processing and can only be picked for a little bit of time out of the year. They're also made in smaller batches I think. Apparently white tea is one of the least popular teas in the west, maybe because of the price? But tea really isn't that expensive. Silver Needle is the highest quality white tea, it's made with only buds (no leaves) and is produced only in the Fujian province in China and even buying this tea comes out to well under a dollar per cup.

Okaay, I really tried to keep this short hahah, sorry I kind of failed, thanks for reading all of it, I think this shit is super interesting. So yeah white tea, really nice, sweet, kind of young and delicate tea. If tea was music I think white tea would be Kimya Dawson or maybe like, Regina Spektor or something.

Part three: Zombies

I'm super into the graphic novel series "The Walking Dead" right now.  I was always kind of freaked out by zombies and I don't really like zombie movies or anything, so I don't know why I started reading it. But it's awesome. I think they started making a tv series out of it, but I heard it wasn't very good. The books are about the characters a lot more than the zombies, obviously. It's more of a "what people would do in a dangerous, post apocalyptic world" story than a "totally laying waste to hoardes of zombies" story, although there are moments of that too. There are a lot of books and he's still writing more, I'm up to #6 now. In the intro to the first one he writes about how he's fascinated with zombies because of what they say about our place in society, and our society's place in the world, and how they're basically our own death personified which is generally what we fear the most. But they're also slow and stupid, and easily taken down by just about anybody whether they're an awesome fighter or a normal person and it's nice in a way to think about being superior to death. Anyway it made me think about zombies differently. The art is good too. So yeah check it out because it's awesome.

Okay, that is all, thanks for reading. Bye!

Important Hair Update

Hi! I'll probably do a normal post soon. But I re-dyed my hair yesterday or the day before or something and I really like how it turned out.
Recall, if you will....
Original blue hair:

 

Which faded in a month and a half or so to this:

 

Which I liked but was getting a bit too green. Also my roots were starting to come in more. The blue-green was confusing to me because some people thought it was blue and some people thought it was green. On the same day a homeless guy yelled at me, "I like your SMURF HAIR!!!" and an old woman on the elevator told me I was all ready for St Patrick's day.
I didn't want to bleach again yet, so I decided to just go over it with blue but mix in some purple dye so that the red would cancel out the green. COLOURS!
Apparently blue dye + purple dye = purple dye. But since it went over already-blue hair, it turned out this awesome dark blue/purple/indigo colour. And it's super shiny yaayyyy

Awkward photobooth picture:

It's less dark and more purple in person. I very much like it.

Creative Title

I dyed my hair blue! There's also some greenish parts, it looks kind of oceany. I am pleased.

Yay!

Suspicious package

Hi! Okay so, it's fall now as I'm sure you're aware. The temperature here in Toronto has been hovering around 20 at the hottest, and as I walked through Queen's Park today a gust of wind came through and suddenly the air was filled with yellow leaves. It looked like a scene from a music video, it was awesome. Here are some pictures I found from last fall, when Kara and I went to the Brickworks.








So today, this happened and it was totally my train in the station when they made everyone evacuate! We pulled in and after a few minutes an announcement came on saying something about a delay and then "please leave the train..... please leave the station." The place I was going was only a couple stops away so it wasn't a big deal or anything. As I walked north up Yonge street, firetrucks and police cars sped by sirening. There were tons of them! Of course it turned out to be nothing... but the subway was shut down for an hour so I ended up having to walk home. Some people talked to me as we were leaving the station and then walking outside. I met one lady who said she never took the subway and the one time she does, some hooligans try and blow it up. There was one guy who was telling everyone not to worry, if it was a fire we would all be dead by now. That was my mild excitement of the day.







According to my blogger stats, someone found my blog recently by googling giant b'loonies! This makes me incredibly happy.

Mehhhhh

I have a ton of photos to post, here are the last from that roll from the Golden Half. These are basically all the ones that were kind of mehh but I didn't want to just leave them to rot in my lightroom library. Except the one with the chandelier, I liked that one. But most people seem to not like it so much. I'm forcing you to look at it anyway.

I don't have to work at Smoke's today and I don't have to go to my internship thing and classes haven't started yet. And I don't feel like doing much of anything today except staying in and going through photos. I also have to finish this makeup tutorial thing that Kristy wanted me to do for the Rent Frock Repeat blog so I'll do that too.





I have nothing very interesting to post today, I really just want to get some more photos posted so I have more motivation to take my camera out. I don't know why I post all these pictures on here. I'm thinking about starting a tumblr or something like that.