Belen Echandia

I am in love with Belen Echandia's bags. They're a boutique out of the UK, Jackie, the owner/designer has an interesting story. She was a lawyer with a knack for networking and entrepreneurship, and ventured out on her own creating luxury bags. It's inspired me to come up with a few designs of my own.

How to Convert Any Toilet to a Low Flush Toilet

A lot of discussion has been going on in my neighborhood about ways to conserve water. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways I found was to convert your toilet to a low flush toilet using a milk carton.

One of my neighbors passed along this information about creating rain capture cisterns:

Current watering restrictions are likely to get much worse, as the gravity of the situation reveals itself, possibly by next summer or earlier, beginning with pressure fluctuations or restricted hours of use. Of course if it rains heavily next Spring in the very small area needed to recharge the lake, things might return more or less to normal, at least for a while.

But since Lanier is the smallest lake in the United States with the smallest recharge area serving a major metropolitan area, and climatological predictions are indicating a continuing drought, it would nonetheless be prudent to start thinking not only about water conservation, but limited independence from the system.

Serious preparation efforts would probably include the installation of a plastic ribbed cistern made of potable( drinking water standard) grade plastic that can be installed in a rear corner of your house near a downspout and catch and store rainfall, which could be used to water at least the Oaks and Dogwoods that are at such risk during a drought.

Practical sized systems might be a 1700 gallon tank, measuring 5 feet wide, 5 feet tall and 12-14 feet long. Those same cisterns could also be filled by hauled water trucks and used for irrigation using a small pump to which you attach a garden hose.

In a serious water emergency where pressure or service is limited or interrupted, those buried or above ground tanks could be used to pump filtered, purified water up the back wall of your house,following the gutters downspout upward, entering into the attic, and dropping down to upper floor bathroom(s), and could be used for showering and flushing the toilet.

Snapped

Some pics for my photography class. Melissa on Halloween.

Ami Chan and the Yetti overtaking the office.

On the luck of seven

I came across the blog The Luck of Seven. Noel a hidalgo is traveling the world, sustaining himself completely through his social networks. He uses a site called couchsurfers, a network that connects travelers with people in the community they visit.

Taking your life into your own hands for the fun of it

I used to ride a mountain bike. Let me explain something about mountain bikes, they're fun, they're easy on the ass but they are for biznitches. Now I am not talking about those crazy fuks that take their bikes actually ON mountains, clipped in, falling on their face eating mud the whole way down a 40 degree incline of pure pain, I'm talking about the lame-O's like my former self that would ride them around town on bike paths and sidewalks. I'm not knocking you if you have one, just put your little dog in a basket on the front of your bike and honk your self a good old time. You are what H2B lovingly refers to as "flatbars".

Now I have a road bike. It's a whole new world people, both good and ugly. Let me tell you something about riding a road bike in Atlanta. First of all, Atlantans are terrible drivers to begin with. If any of you have experience driving here you know what I'm talking about. People do not pay attention. They're too busy texting their friends, eating, smoking, talking, putting on makeup, yammering on the phone, yelling at their kids, doing bumps or as my father told me yesterday that he was doing on his way home, playing poker on his dashboard mounted laptop. All this instead of actually, well, driving. This is terrifying for someone that is sharing the road with these multi ton vehicles on a 10 lb piece of carbon strapped to 2 rapidly moving wheels and only a stupid piece of padded plastic to protect their noodle.

The scariest place that I ride is Dekalb avenue, it's the best way to get back from Decatur to Inman park. But, unfortunately its a three lane road with one lane that changes to incoming and outgoing traffic depending what side of the road you're on and what time of day it is. Of course, on Saturday mornings, there is only one lane going in my direction. Last Saturday I was nearly clipped by a Scion, Toyota and Minivan.

But you go fast. Really fast.

I must give it up to the fixed gear no brake folks, although I do think they're a little insane. One of the coolest ones I saw was a dude that had two tattoos on his legs, it said fixed on the back left of his calf and gear on the right back of his other.

I do admit feeling like a dork in my padded pants, but dammit those seat Feking HURT!!!!! I decided to create H2B a custom jersey to give a little bit of cred to his gear. The logo above I created to stencil on a jersey I got. I found a really cool way of silkscreening without having to use emulsion. It's called EZScreenPrint. You can check out their products here.

think of a happy place

Because those last two posts were way too fucking serious, I give you an example of great use of company time.

Pharmaceuticals in Our Water Supply Are Causing Bizarre Mutations to Wildlife

A coworker of mine was sharing with me a story of her associate who just got back from China, where she was studying the effects of pollution on China's water supply. Her findings peaked my interest and I did some research myself and came across this article.

It seems that the levels of pharmaceuticals in the water supply are causing mutations in fish, frogs and birds in our rivers and streams. I had no idea that when you take birth control, most of the hormones are flushed through the body and redistributed into the water supply, and that those hormones can cause male fish to become inter sexual.

"Meanwhile, federal officials continue to study the human health effects of the pharmaceutical compounds found in water known as endocrine disruptors, including possible links to neurological problems in children and increased incidence of some cancers. Federal officials are investigating a wide range of fish health problems in Cheasapeake Bay and its watershed. Several studies of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers have revealed inter-sex fish, a wide range of "abnormalities in which both male and female characteristics are present within the same fish.

The abnormalities include nine male smallmouth bass from the Potomac River near Sharpsburg, Maryland (about 60 miles upstream from Washington) that developed female eggs inside their sex organs. Inter-sex bass were also found in a study three years earlier, after fish kills about 170 miles upstream in the South Branch of the Potomac in Hardy County, West Virginia."

I know we all have to take certain medications to live, but this made me consider finding other holistic or organic remedies whenever possible.

Chip implants linked to cancer in Dogs

A friend of mine's pooches were both diagnosed with cancer recently. The tumors were in the areas where they had chip implants. Both had their legs amputated and one passed last weekend. This alarmed me as one of my dogs has a microchip from Banfield The Pet Hospital. I did some poking around and came across this article in the AP today about chip implants causing cancer in lab mice.

"Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous "sarcomas" — malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

_ A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent — a result the researchers described as "surprising."

_ A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors' cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, "These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence" of cancer.

_ In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors "are clearly due to the implanted microchips," the authors wrote.

Caveats accompanied the findings. "Blind leaps from the detection of tumors to the prediction of human health risk should be avoided," one study cautioned. Also, because none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted."

As a concerned pet owner I called Banfield requesting to have the chip removed. The receptionist informed me that they would not remove the chip, as there have been no studies that prove the implants cause cancer in dogs. I was outraged that this research is out there and Banfield is refusing to remove these devices.