beaulac ferris

high times

xie — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:40:17 +0000

drinking Arnold Palmers (something so delicious, and surprisingly hard to say), reading comics on my computer. this is what i’ve been doing a lot of since school let out. that and contemplating my next hairdo (thinking of growing it out because i’m obsessed with the idea of braids, topknots, and side-ponytails). i’ve been making jewelry for Etsy, for myself, and for my friend alana. we don’t have a lot of money right now, so i’ve avoided shopping at thrift stores, in favour of selling off stuff that i already have cluttering the house. made a whopping $26 at Squaresville today selling a couple of things.. although it’s disheartening to think i could have had $42 in trade. cold hard cash seemed like the more sensible option. bought us lunch! i also finally finished this project last weekend…

why am i even writing right now? i was just reading The Sandman on my laptop, and thinking “weird.. i’m reading comics.” granted, i’m also reading “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” (part of my “required reading that i was never required to read” series). but i just never thought i’d be into comics. first i read The Watchmen (excellent- can’t believe we have to wait till 2009 to see the movie, and now Harry Potter’s been pushed back too!), read a slew of Batman comics now The Sandman (a rather disturbing comic, but interesting).

i’ve also been walking for a half hour every-other morning, doing stomach crunches and leg-lifts, but thus far i can’t really tell if i am losing weight. it’s been almost a month now. i figured that i better get a head start on getting fit so that pilates doesn’t kick my ass this fall, and so that i feel more proactive. only a week and a half left until classes start… it’ll be nice. air-conditioning, exercise, plant biology. oh yeah, and algebra… not looking forward to that one.

seth is still faithfully looking for a job or should i say job(s) since he is freelance after all. things are slow and frustrating, but looking more promising. i will let him post his own thoughts though.

Ebayer’s admonishment and life story

xie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:11:50 +0000

This was just too weird for me not to copy and post- found today on Ebay… don’t quite know whether to laugh or cry… this is just bizarre. I never understand people who will post their life stories on Ebay.

__________

ATTENTION BUYERS Please Read :The NEW E BAY RULES has opened the door for SOME DIS-HONEST E BAY buyers to steal from me my Merchandise & MY money and my time. I am selling off my best Years of COLLECTING to pay for a trip i had to take recently that cost me $50,000.00 on credit card bills to take care of my mother who died of lung cancer. (she never smoked!?) Plane trips to the east coast , her medical bills, then my step father and his children stole all her property and sent me her funeral bills. I sat and held her hand in the hospital for 3 months, even as her hand turned cold from being dead. Emotionally and financialy I got totally drained. I am selling my favorite STUFF to pay for helping an old woman die. I am not selling my stuff to defraud or rip people off so please do not do that to me either. PLEASE READ DESCRIPTION CAREFULLY AND IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ASK BEFORE YOU BUY. HONEST SELLING ON E BAY IS HARD WORK - PLEASE DO NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME. If you are into skamming people please pick some one else - I have had my share already and I can’t take any more. THANK YOU FOR READING THIS!

Word Press… you’re killin me

boli — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 06:25:32 +0000

So our previous install of wordpress was fully destroyed by spammers. I was truly torn between abandoning our 3 year old collaboration blog, but instead decided i should try to resurrect it by installing a new version of wordpress. Well it did the trick of eliminating the spam, however, it also deleted the names for all of our categories.

Xie and I came to the conclusion that its no real loss, in fact it made us realize we only have two real kinds of posts on this site anyways:

News

Rants

so going forward i guess thats all we’ll have unless we for some reason find need of something else, and in the mean time we’ll have to go back through 150 posts and re-tag them all. I think I will be restyling the site completely as well, we have way more features than we need. Which brings me to the queation… is this post a rant or news? Lets face it blogging about the state of the blog is pretty lame. REAL POSTS SOON. Now a picture of our cacti.

no more teachers, no more books

xie — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:43:19 +0000

for a month anyway…

so i finished my intensive 6 week courses for summer- now i have all of august between me and the fall semester. i took Poly Sci and Speech for my summer courses, and i admit it was a lot of work but it was nice to kind of rush through it. it was a bit rough too because i foolishly decided to quit taking anti-depressants at the beginning of July, so basically have been having wicked SSRI withdrawal since then. i am still having the electric shock sensations that i mentioned before…

next semester i’m enrolled in Plant Biology (yay! i’m dorkily excited about that one), Pre-Algebra (boo), and Pilates (yay! gonna burn off some depression chubbiness)! then i should only have one more math class and then my AA! very exciting.

not to spoil any posts that Seth may have planned, but Friday was his last day at the Dos. they never did hire him on full time and give us much-needed benefits/insurance (or a raise). we couldn’t really wait any longer because Seth stopped doing freelance because of them, which was really the only way that we were making ends meet while we were waiting for the raise Seth was supposed to get (like a month after starting there). so as a result we don’t have any real savings. we’re planning on selling my car so that we don’t have 2 cars just drainin’ money from us, and Seth is deferring his loans until freelance work starts to pour in (fingers crossed). it would be really nice to have insurance, but i think i will have to go back to work full time for that to happen.

my own update

xie — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:36:05 +0000

just thought i’d add this too… since i’ve finished some homework. yes, in case you didn’t know i am back in school. in june i started 2 intensive 8 week courses to try to finish my AA degree before the first of the year. i’m currently taking an interpersonal communications class (fills the speech requirement), and poly sci. (basically government 1). it’s a lot of work because it’s so condensed into 8 weeks instead of spread over a semester, but i kind of like it. it’s like i’m in school… in fast forward! (cue 80’s montage of me going to classes and laughing in fast forward). anyway, in the meantime i’m still maintaining my blog.

also am coming down off some gnarly medication which is making me feel like i’m being electrocuted every few minutes/seconds. it’s awesome. apparently you don’t just STOP taking anti-depressants, you are supposed to ease off. oh well, too late now. it’s been about a week-and-a-half so far. hopefully the withdrawal symptoms will go away soon. they’re rather disorienting.

we officially have a new cat, by the way (in case you don’t look at our Flickr). his name is Olaf, and he’s everything that Milo’s not… nice, grey… did i mention nice? he lets you rub his belly, pet his paws, and is very chatty. he came to us because he apparently wanted to be friends with milo (which still hasn’t happened), but he was so skinny that i started feeding him, and put a collar on him… and well, now he’s ours. he still needs to be neutered though. he’s very gentle… i’m not used to a cat that knows how to “play bite” or “play grab”. the funniest thing is that our neighbour has a little ugly hairless puppy and Olaf and him are buds- they wrestle around the yard. Olaf is actually bigger than this dog, but is very nice to it when they play. anyway… enough cooing about my new gato.

A Brief Update

boli — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:56:09 +0000

Well not much has changed in the last 5 months, and thats making me itchy. I’m still grinding away working and still getting progressively more fed up with los angeles on the whole. Xie dropped her camera resulting in its early retirement. Which also explains why there are way less photos on flickr (see little photo matrix at the right), I may take more picture than she does but shes way better about sorting and uploading (for me that feels too close to work haha).

We attended some beautiful weddings this season, and our friends have had some beautiful babies! Both causes for rejoicing. We love our community here and i think its literally the only thing keeping us from flying away to another town forever. The slow exodus of our closest friends to other cities seems assured as cost of living here is on the increase and quality of life is well… where it always was. Maybe that’s why I’m really excited about a little proposal I’m working on for our friends at church. I’ll keep my cats in the proverbial burlap sack for now but let’s assume it has to do with moving, community, and shared property. Wow i think i let three cats out… good thing they reproduce in litters.

I will leave you with a complete non-sequitor from my former-PMC friend Kent Sensenig who recently left LA to work with his wife on a farm in the mid west. He says this about some rather famous christian children’s literature.

PS–Speaking of Aslan (and given my own childhood love of Narnia), I’ve been disturbed to realize how much the Narnian movies coming out are engendering a war spirit in the next generation, as being part and parcel of the Gospel message/Western morality (and very consciously in a post-9/11 imperialist “West vs. the rest” context, I believe, just as the makers of the Lord of the Rings were doing). It is tragic how Satan, the “father of lies and murderer from the beginning” (that is, the relentlessly irrational if systemic spirit of violence, division, and enmity), can use such otherwise wonderful creations to its devouringly lethal (and very current) ends. C.S. Lewis worshiped the god of war (Mars) alongside his Christian god, as many do. (Both Lewis and Tolkien used their fantasy novels to work out the trauma of their experience in the trenches of WW I, though in problematic, unJesus kind of ways, I’m afraid. Tolkien, I believe, at least maintained a more traditionally sober just war position, whereas Lewis was tempted to glory in its horrific activity. Both were the products of the world’s greatest Empire, prior to our own.)

Lays it on the line don’t it. I have conflicting views on this but that’s topic for another post.

A plea to jewelry makers

xie — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:48:44 +0000

Dear Jewelry Makers and Craftspersons,

Steampunk is lame. Please stop disassembling perfectly good old pocket watches and other such antiquities in order to make your incredibly lame jewelry. It pains me to see it. Also, it brings up the question “How ‘punk’ is anything that refers back to early railroads, pocket watches, and other appropriated antique gadgetry?” For your consideration…
Thank you,

CBF

PS. If you don’t know what I’m referring to here, please go to Etsy and keyword search “steampunk” under handmade tags and titles, and you will understand.

Best in LA / R.I.P C&H Supply

boli — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:49:30 +0000

I giant has fallen. The monolithic rummage grounds formerly known as C&H Supply has finally closed it’s doors.

C&H was one of those stores that only a few people can really enjoy, people who scavenge for things that have literally no value, and attempt to bring some semblance of utility to them. People who glean intense joy from finding scraps and pieces of metal shining in brown boxes covered in dust. Human raccoons. People like me.

C&H was an electronics salvage stores that had been owned and operated by the same group of people for something like 40 years in east Pasadena. They had endless quantities of ice age technology waiting to be purchased, torn apart re-purposed. I spend numerous hours there looking at pieces of plastic and metal trying to figure out what the hell they had once done. I would go there often with no idea or particular project in mind but meandering around the dusty concrete halls and running my fingers through patch cables and components alongside equally crusty old men was cathartic in an off world way.

I think C&H reminded me of my garage growing up, unlike alot of families we didn’t have tons of car or bicycle parts in the garage, we had half dead computers and endless boxes full of all too precious serial cables. When I went to work with my dad as a kid I visited enormous labs filled with equipment that looked like it was straight out of Forbidden Planet or V. Literally I was greeted by this very machine when I was something like 8.

In fact if my memory serves me I even ran a few tests with my dad in that machine, I may have been too squirmy to get a decent reading but the idea that I was part of some scientific experiment fed my lust for technology all the more. So I guess it natural that, inspired by our dad, Stef (my sister) and I used to take apart every piece of electronic junk we had lying around, always with delusions of creating a robot or maybe some super computer. For us electronics was as much about magic as it was about science, we loved the movie Short Circuit and watched it till there were slow slurry parts in the tape. Somehow that pseudo-science mixed with my mother’s wild imagination made me into some half-assed technocrat come artist.

So once I began circuit bending and working with electronics in college C&H was like going back to 1986 when I would visit BTI (my dad’s work) in San Diego. Except instead of being a mere observer I lovingly delved into the hunt… for parts, for objects of beauty and above all for ideas. Often being in C&H gave me more ideas for musical interfaces than I had before I went in… and so for me part of my musical process has vanished.

Another fear of mine is that this signals the end of an era. People used to take pride in the ability to repair their goods, maintenance was a much a part of ownership as brand loyalty. People had intense opinions about the construction of his or her electronics and they knew what was inside, how it worked and if need be how to fix it. There was also the tinkerers ham radio enthusiasts, audiophiles and of course my personal favorite… synthesizer designers. It was from this tock that we got everything from the legendary blue box to the moog and buchla system synths.

Make Magazine has attempted to rekindle this spirit with hefty how to articles. Still the need for them to be popular in a consumer (not a tinkerer) economy has lead them to develop useless if not extremely over priced projects which often serve little purpose other than to make the user feel “indie” or “crafty”. My ultimate fear is that perhaps Make will be successful in rekindling a “maker” (as the pompously self title) spirit, but that spirit will be entrenched in a consumerism that is irreversible. Rather than fostering a healthy frugality of reusing and imagining through materials. Meh maybe I just sound like a curmudgeon before my time but it is with loving feelings that I say goodbye to C&H Supply of Pasadena California. I will remember thee.

Restaurant Review: Cinnamon Vegetarian

xie — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:49:21 +0000

So I know it’s been aeons since we posted anything. And now, I’m posting something that’s really for locals only. Sorry Chase & Kate, Alana, etc. So we used to live walking distance from Cinnamon Vegetarian when it opened up about a year ago (technically we still do). It always looked so barren inside that I never wanted to go in. However, lately I’ve been keeping it in my mind for the next time I crave a burrito or any type of Mexican food. Cinnamon Veg. is mostly Mexican food, but then they’ll also have random things like Mediterranean sandwiches on the menu. They make smoothies and things too. So today after running some errands burritos were on my mind… I stopped at Cinnamon, and ordered their “carne asada” burrito with brown rice, no lettuce, no sour cream. Let me tell you… this was the most amazing burrito I’ve had for sooooo long. It came with guacamole, cheese, tomato, salsa and cilantro, a whole wheat torilla, and soy carne. There was also the tempting option of getting it with soyrizo instead, but I’ll save that for next time perhaps. Also, I ordered ginger-lemonade which isn’t on the menu, but she made it special for me and it was amazing!

I will be back for sure to try their tamales, and other goodies. I highly recommend it to any vegetarians or non-veggies who don’t find faux meats offensive. :)

This is definitely a new favourite. Don’t be put off by the interior, the food is good!

2 years

xie — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:41:53 +0000

This is the lady of leisure here, writing a much overdue post. We’ve been posting a lot of our activities to our Flickr account, so we sort of think people are up-to-date. So to give a more detailed account of what we’ve been up to, I thought I’d write a post. Yesterday was also our two year anniversary, which also prompted a post.

I am still not working. I have been selling stuff on ebay- getting rid of designer merchandise that’s been given to me over the years that I don’t wear, selling vintage things that I don’t wear or use often, or selling off thrift store finds that I buy specifically to resell. It doesn’t really count as work though, because I’m not making much money at it! I’ve also been reading a whole bunch, keeping things clean, gardening, and trying to get into the groove of working out more often. Two years of marriage and a desk-job really took a toll on my waistline! Now I have no excuses.

I’ve also had time to take care of things that I didn’t feel like making time for while working full time, like having my name legally changed to Beaulac-Ferris. I got my new social security card in the mail this past week! It’s very exciting. Now I just have to go to the DMV and take care of changing it with them too. Seth and I are slowly merging things we were keeping separate before, like cellphone plans and finally *gasp* bank accounts. I will most likely go to PCC for the summer intersession (a shorter semester) to try to finish classes that are required to complete my AA.

Seth went back to work fulltime, as you may know, as the freelance work had rather ceased coming in. We finally got reimbursed by Vans for the time we were in Hawaii, which was 3 months overdue! That set us back quite a bit. Seth is still working on design for USC in the evenings, and is getting rather tired of doing the full-time gig and freelance both… it’s a bit exhausting for him, needless to say.

Yesterday for our anniversary, we went to Akbar in Pasadena for some great Indian food which we ate way to much of. Indian food is one of those things that’s easy to eat to much of and not realize it. We had Sag Paneer, onion and cheese naan, Gosht Kachori, and Gobi Aloo with saffron rice. I also had a sweet Lassi. Yum. Then we went to the Apple store and Seth bought me an Ipod Nano as an anniversary present. This is my very first Ipod. I am looking forward to using it. After the Apple store we went and saw “Be Kind, Rewind” the newest Michel Gondry movie. We really liked it. My best description of it is that it’s like a modern day 80’s movie without the disappointment of an actual 80’s movie. I’d totally recommend it. The craftsmanship that goes into his movies never ceases to please me. You get the feeling that he really just makes movies to realize all kinds of crazy, beautiful, manifestations of his imagination, which is obviously the best reason to make something.