Adrian’s Microblog

“Olympic Skier Julia Mancuso’s Workout”

Couple of notes:

–Neat shoes; never seen ones like that before. Apparently Nike Studio Wraps.

–Keep seeing references to interval training and fast-twitch muscle training in various places, including this article.

–Some food info here too, including my beloved brown rice. :)

(via WSJ)

As history demonstrates, democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism. — JP2, Centesimus Annus, 46

Gollum Juice

John Butler plays OCEAN, and releases as a free download to his fans.

This is twelve minutes of really talented guitar playing – I promise you’ll enjoy. :)

(via hilker, via sds)

Aquaponics – combining aquaculture (raising aquatic animals) with hydroponics (growing plants without soil). This idea has been attractive to me for a while – I think I might do this. :)

(via AquaFarm by Back to the Roots)

Moss Glen Falls, VT

by yours truly

Driving in a Winter Wonderland

-yours truly

Randolph, with C. :)

Heaven touches earth - Happy are we at his coming!

Forget setting goals and commit to a process

I really enjoy snow: it’s a reminder that the right conditions can produce something magical. It’s like a little bit of the invisible becomes visible when it snows, and blankets everything equally with its covering.

Maybe the season of Christmas is like that too: given the right conditions in our heart, something special will appear. It’s not always easy cultivating those right conditions, and there’s a lot of pressures, both internal and external, pulling us this way and that. A quiet preparation seems far out of grasp, and then the moment seems to pass.

That first Christmas was like that too: the hustle and bustle of travel and census. Late night arrival, problems finding a hotel room, baby on the way. Yet somehow, in the midst of it all, light broke through, because of openness to the moment. An openness that existed in the midst of everything else, that didn’t deny it, but transformed it. Like a snowfall, the invisible became visible.

Many blessings during this season, and all throughout the year. Let’s both plan to look up for that snow falling from the heavens, and let it blanket us in the moment and place we find ourselves. Merry Christmas!

I’m telling ya, I’m am continually impressed with the folks over at Evernote. I think I may be upgrading to the Premium level soon, and the presentations feature above is just a great example of how they innovate simply but effectively. I can really see how this can be helpful to moving things along without a whole bunch of hoopla. Thanks Evernote team for your vision! (via EvernoteVideos)

“Snorbet”, courtesy of B: snow + milk/cream + sugar + vanilla + chocolate chips. Tasty. :)

Beethoven, Große Fuge (complete, Great Fugue), op. 133, string quartet (animated score) (by smalin)

Always enjoy watching behind the scenes: how the sausage is made. :)

Herewith, some of the voice acting from Disney’s latest animated movie: Frozen. (Some looks like it’s taken from the auditions too.)

I found it really interesting that the voice actors will sometimes repeat a line several times, trying out different ways of saying it (presumably the audio editors excerpting the one they want). Makes me feel a little better about taking ten times to do a simple voicemail recording. ;) And if you’re interested to see more, just check out the full 16m “B-roll”. (via Movie B-Roll Collection)

itsbrittanywilmes-blog:
I always appreciate your pragmatic and straightforward opinion on working and creating. I’m a creative nonfiction writer by night and an uninspired nonprofit marketer by day. What’s your advice for someone like me who needs to pay the bills but just wants to be immersed in creating and building community around that? I’m in near-constant purgatory at work, and I hate it. Should I just shut my mouth and keep at it? Is this forever?
I get asked this question more than almost any other. And it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Here’s what I wrote about it in Steal Like An Artist:

I kept a day job until I made more money off art than I did at my day job. And even then, it was scary for me to leave it. Everybody always tosses out that tired “do what you love, and the rest will follow” shit, and I don’t buy it. (I usually say, “Do what you love and the debt will follow.”)

You have to pay the bills and feed the mouths, and you do it however you can. I got married when I was 23—I’ve had a family to support for a while now. I guess in my attitude, I’m a lot like Philip Larkin:

I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare time, like Trollope. Then, when you started earning enough money by writing, you phase the job out. But in fact I was over fifty before I could have “lived by my writing”—and then only because I had edited a big anthology—and by that time you think, Well, I might as well get my pension, since I’ve gone so far….All I can say is, having a job hasn’t been a hard price to pay for economic security.

And my experience has been that economic security has always helped my art along more than any kind of “spiritual” freedom or whatever. 

“The trick is,” film executive Tom Rothman says, “from the business side, to try to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.”

One thing I would recommend to you is to see the day job as a positive, not a negative:

A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art. As photographer Bill Cunningham says, “If you don’t take money, they cant tell you what to do.”

Because the real truth is, once you start making money doing what you love, it BECOMES A JOB. And with it comes all the hassle of a job. Here’s Larkin again: 

You can live by “being a writer,” or “being a poet,” if you’re prepared to join the cultural entertainment industry, and take handouts from the Arts Council (not that there are as many of them as there used to be) and be a “poet in residence” and all that. I suppose I could have said—it’s a bit late now—I could have had an agent, and said, Look, I will do anything for six months of the year as long as I can be free to write for the other six months. Some people do this, and I suppose it works for them.

In other words: you always have a day job. (My friend Hugh calls this “The Sex & Cash Theory.”) Right now my day job is going around giving talks and writing and selling books. It’s a good day job, but “doing what I love” would actually mean sitting around all day reading and drawing and making these goofy poems. Guess how much that pays? Not much. And guess how much time I actually get to do that stuff? Not much.

Anyways, this is supposed to encourage you. Every artist without a sugar mama or a trust fund or extreme luck has had to deal with this.

Just hang in there.

This is what I recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for two hours on the thing you really care about. Then, when you’re done, go to your job. When you get there, your boss can’t take the thing you really care about away from you, because you already did it. And you know you’ll get to do it tomorrow morning, as long as you make it through today.

The “meaning” in your job is: it pays the bills. Get as good at it as you can, because it’ll make the job more interesting to you, and it will provide you exits to another one. Then find the rest of your meaning elsewhere.

For more inspiration from people better and smarter than me, click this tag: “Keep your day job.”

Video trailer for Worn Wear, a film about the stories we wear, presented by Patagonia. A response to the Black Friday phenomenon, it’s an invitation to celebrate the stuff you already own. If you’re interested, you can also watch the full 30m film.

First attempt at cranberry sauce from scratch.

Came out quite good if I do say so myself, ;) and preparation not as hard as I imagined. Next year may try a variation on the basic recipe, but certainly a recommend for your own dining pleasure. :)

Video: Mandolin Master Chris Thile Plays Bluegrass and Bach | Watch PBS NewsHour Online | PBS Video

“3 Queens” - a three-minute video about three mothers.

Thank you moms.

(via sds)