Lost in America-Austin:cookies! (ep1) from Karen on Vimeo.

The other episodes are on my vimeo channel and a behind the scenes post about Austin here. Photos and more photos in case you’re not sick of us yet.

____________________________
From: Karen Nguyen
To: Paypal

Dear Paypal,

I do not understand why you think my account is a nonprofit. Several months ago I sent an email to the support group requesting that my account be downgraded from a business account to a personal account. I do not have a business, and I no longer deal with finances for a nonprofit organization. I received an email confirming that my account was downgraded. Now, my account is limited and I cannot send or receive payments. I tried looking through the profile settings and did not find a way to change my account category. I also did a search and it did not have anything helpful to my situation. Could you please help explain how to fix my account?

Thanks,
Karen
——-
PayPal requires accounts within the charity / non profit category to provide us with some additional information regarding their organization. Upon a recent review, your account was identified as falling within this classification. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. Please take a moment to provide us with this information so that we can restore your access as soon as possible.
_______________________

And now, I wait some more.

I’ve posted episode 2 below.

Lost in America - Hot Dog/Cold dog (ep2) from Karen on Vimeo.

Gotta say, I love video quality preservation on Vimeo. You can watch all the episodes here. Photos of the Anchorage trip here and here.

I always have a ton of fun working with Justine and this project was especially interesting. The Studio 8 guys wrote, shot and edited. I absolutely love those guys. They make a lot of videos and the videos are uncomfortably hilarious. Professional, organized, and adorable.<3

Although, Brock might be the unibomber...

Today is a new day. A wonderful, though bittersweet, day. Change is here.

The battle for gay rights continues. It’s not over yet, and I will not lose hope.

I cut this pumpkin up. It fought me but I won. In case you can’t tell (I’m working on the carving skillz) this is a macbook pro. You can tell it’s one of the new ones because the trackpad has no mouse button. It also pukes hearts. I can type and click really fast on it.

Pumpkin hunting is an old tradition in our family. This is my sister keeping an eye out for attack pumpkins, while my brother gets really close and comfy with the pumpkins to pick the best one out.

As you can see, we are all very serious about this sport.

I made a bacon apple pie for baconfest. I used about a pound of bacon for the 8 inch pie. There is no top crust because I was feeling lazy, although the apples dried out a little in the oven. Next time I will put a top crust. I bacon-bitted (chopped & cooked) the majority of the bacon and threw them in with the sliced apples, some lime and cornstarch to marinate. When the pie was close to done I laid a few strips of cooked bacon on top. When making your own crust, I discovered it is much better to use pastry flour instead of all purpose. The crust comes out less bread-like and flakier.

Other foods at the party included sushi, mac & cheese, stuffed mushrooms, cookies and pancakes, all with bacon in them. The list is huge, but I’ll stop here. I mentioned offhand that it would be great to have a site with all the bacon recipes for the year with photos, comments, and whatnot. Steve23 told me I should make it happen and that “this is a do-ocracy”. The statement really struck a chord with me. Good ideas are cheap and it’s all about the follow through. I’m at a point where I feel like so many parts of my life are out of my control, and it’s really nice to be reminded that this is just a perception issue.

Aside from the art, costumes and fireshows, what I love about burningman is that everyone is encouraged to contribute. It could be as simple as bringing treats to give to people and scales up to making some giant flashing flaming thingy. This type of creative energy and empowerment is exactly what I need right now. I don’t go out much these days, and I am so very very glad I chose to go to this event. Not only did I get to spend time with some of my closest friends, I ate more bacon in an eve than anyone should in a month.

I only have one photo, since I find the flash of the camera is sometimes disruptive and distracting. Bacon Man was made by Diva & Steve with 30 pounds of bacon. More Bacon Man photos here

The song is different on it now, ‘cuz my upload rejected for copywrite violation. Here is the version with the original song.

This video is made of hundreds of 640×480 photos. I lowered the resolution on my camera, just to keep the filesize of the resulting video low. It was made in iMovie. Once the photos are imported into the timeline, you can easily select all the photos in your timeline and change the duration for all of them. I recently purchased iStopMotion for Mac and am eager to try it out.

I enjoying making stopmotion videos. They take a lot of work but I love the results. When I was 13 I recreated a Mengele ‘experiment’ with Barbie dolls. My editing technique back then was to start and stop recording on a video camera really quickly to get a tiny sliver of video. I then moved the dolls, and repeated the process. Back then I didn’t have editing software to string together a bunch of photos. The advantage was that I instantly had the finished video. Then I dubbed over the video with shrieks of pain. I wish I could find that video now.

I recently tried to do another stopmotion with Barbies, but the head of one of my dolls kept falling off and I gave up. Perhaps I should try a Barbie stopmotion horror video…

I am fascinated with architecture, so this was especially a treat. I learned a lot from the tour. The guide said Art Deco, Post Modern, and Chicago school quite a bit.

The curve of this building mimicks the curve of the river. It is divided in two and the other side is angular, to mimick the city blocks. That style is called contextualism. Yes I learned this on the tour.

This building is so big, it has it’s own zip code! It’s called the Merchandise Mart and is over 4 million square feet.

More photos of the tour and our trip here. One of the buildings has a freeway going right through it, and the building was built before the road. Crazy.

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time playing with bacon. Prather Ranch bacon is so far my favorite. The Niman Ranch variety is comparable. However, I found it strange that Niman Ranch isn’t a place as I always assumed, but a concept. Being heavily interested where my food comes from, this bothers me a little (though not enough to not buy their stuff).

Whenever I’m handling thick delicious bacon like the above, I am tempted to eat it before it’s cooked. It just looks and smells so good and it doesn’t look raw. Thus far, my hypochondriac germaphobe nature has prevented be from doing so. This post is nothing more than short homage to bacon. I love it.