A Quilt of Many Color(ful T-Shirt)s

Two years ago, Mommy was working on a Alfred and Nathy-Boo’s wedding [link] present, a t-shirt quilt made out of t-shirts they’d acquired growing up.  Not any old t-shirt, the ones from things like band, twirling, sports, 4H, etc. 

Mommy’d been wanting to teach me - or I’d been wanting to learn, something like that – how to quilt, and a t-shirt quilt seemed like a great simple way to start.  Then the office manager at work started to clean out the old supply shelves.  All sorts of old items for which the organization no longer had use.  Amongst the piles, some old t-shirts from the early days and past events.  I looked at those t-shirts, and I looked at the giant set of shelves filled with the current t-shirts, and I knew exactly what to quilt:

the history of Creative Commons in t-shirts.

 

 

We had a lot of fun making the quilt: cutting pieces, laying out patterns, sewing squares, finding a backing, tying it down and being silly. 

 

Mommy graciously offered for the backing one of the fun fabrics I’d brought her from Nigeria. That seemed perfectly appropriate as I had applied to CC while living in Nigeria and worked closely with the CC Africa teams. Plus, the fabric’s bright colors went well with the t-shirt colors and the pattern incorporated a close approximation of CC’s signature green.

Now, the quilt lives in the couch room at the CC office.  Often, when the office is too cold, I find the quilt and wrap myself up in the coziness.

And it all started from this:

A pile of t-shirts.

Smiling from Ear to Ear

Long time readers may remember a post from over a year ago featuring a silly picture of me … hold on, I know that doesn’t narrow it down, let me finish …  of me in a pirate hat and a princess dress. 

That day I announced my new Fellowship at Creative Commons.   And on that post I said, “It couldn't get more perfect.  Yet, somehow, I think it'll still only go up from here.”  I had no idea how right I would be.

For the past bunch of months, since my first day, I’ve been working pretty steadily with CC in various forms and incarnations.  First as a Google Policy Fellow, then as an intern supported by Vanderbilt’s Public Interest Stipend – then I disappeared to take the Bar – then back as a volunteer intern.  It’s been fabulous.  I absolutely love what I’ve been doing there:  spending my days working with people in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and even Zambia!  Never thought I’d get to sign a work email “Ndalumba,”!

Well, this week, all this fabulousness got even more fabulous.  I signed on as an independent contract, part time, until after Bar results come out.  Not only do I get to keep doing the work I enjoy so I much, I get paid!

Every day, there’s a new adventure and new excitement.  My dreams are coming true and things are coming full circle.  But maybe I’ll write about that another time….

For now, Yippie!!!!!!!!!  (and I hope this good luck sticks around until results come out.)

Happy Birthday Browser

Last night Mozilla threw a huge birthday party for it’s special baby. The Firefox browser turned 5!

A nice perk of working for one of the open-techie-non-profits in San Francisco is invites to events like this. Only two of us from work were able to go, but boy did we have fun! It was a great party; a dance party in fact.

There were special drinks made up just for the occasion. They were called foxtails and had vodka, rum, Midori and white cranberry juice, and they were served on the rocks with a special plastic ice cube that flashed red and orange in the glass. I usually am not a fan of some of the ingredients, but those drinks were yummy!

The place was decorated with red and orange flashing lights. There were shrimp and veggie kabobs outside the venue and little round orange carpet circles that led you from the entrance gate, passed the kabob stand, into the large hall. Inside treats included crème brûlée in various flavors, even Frosted Flakes!, and Firefox temporary tattoos.

The music was mostly electronic beats, but played with familiar song lyrics on top of them. Interesting, and good enough to get most people out on the dance floor. At one point, I got to see Mr. Firefox himself (or one of the incarnations of the night) break dancing. He lost his foot!

There were four cakes, each sculpted like different Firefox logos, including the spherical fox wrapped around the globe one. Each cake was a different flavor. I missed out on the raspberry cream layered cake and had to wait patiently by as they divided out all of the double chocolate that I had no interest in eating. Then they cut into that giant sphere cake. Yellow layer cake with a not-too-sweet frosting. Delicious!

But one of my favorite parts of the whole night was getting my picture taken with Mr. Firefox himself!

[Unfortunately, this was during one of Mr. Firefox’s shorter incarnations of the evening, so I had to bend down a bit, but it’s still a cute picture!]

Both my coworker and I had a great time at Firefox’s birthday party. We talked, we ate yummy food, drank yummy drinks, danced and enjoyed the scene. Thanks Mozilla, for throwing such a nice party.

P.S. Yes that's the dress I got stuck in. I actually received quite a number of compliments on the dress at the party, which I thought was a little weird since it was a dance party.

Remixing the CC Staff

Yesterday, we gave our End of the Summer presentations at work.  I love playing with Power Point, so I had a lot of fun doing my presentation.  I prepared this picture for one of the slides and loved it so much I just have to share.  It cracks me up so bad that I kept laughing trying to create the presentation at my desk. …and any other time I see it.

See, just a few weeks ago, I started getting involved with one of the groups at work called ccLearn.  They just launched a new website for Open Ed. It’s pretty cool and has some neat resources for teachers, nudge nudge to half my readership ;)  Anyway, so here I am, jumping on the ccLearn bandwagon.

All the headshots in the wagon are from the Creative Commons About pages on the website.  The whole website is cc-by.  (The two ppl sitting down in front are fellow interns and are on the Intern page, everyone else is staff.)  Me, I come compliments of Munchkinhead's Giant Twin’s Facebook page.  Although, I have no idea who actually took that picture because he’s in it.  Ah, the joys of Paint.

Incidentally, the new Paint on Windows 7 is way different than the Paint from Windows XP, Windows 3.0, Windows whatever back to the beginning of Windows.  Some stuff is neater, some stuff is not.  I’m finding it vampire-a hard to learn.  It actually works like real paint now, blending edges and stuff.  I want a nice clear, straight edged line!  This would be why my flying body above looks outlined in white.  This is not for effect, this is because of how the new Paint works.  Now, the sunshine outline in white, that was intentional; I did that.

Enjoy my bandwagon; I hope you laugh as hard as I do. :D

Signage Please

We have two bathrooms at work.  They are both painted green.  Not grass green, not pastel green, more of a bright Easter green.  It’s a very gender neutral color.

There are no signs on the doors to the two bathrooms at work.  The two Easter green bathrooms at work.

Each bathroom is large.  Each large, Easter green bathroom has little tiny octagon tiles on the floor.  And a sink.  And a garbage can.  And the other usual bathroom equipment.  Just like in your house, most likely.

But the two big, Easter green bathrooms with little tiny octagon tiles and no signs on the door are not the same.  No-sir-ee-bob.  One has a urinal in it.  The other has a special little garbage container built into the wall, a drawer unit, a scale, a bottle of lotion and a candle.

I think I’ve seen people go in them willy-nilly, with no regard for who uses which room.  But I am not sure, because I am not sure if this is OK. 

Now, I can suppose that the urinal and special built in little garbage container are left over from previous days, when the bathrooms did have signs on them.  But, the other stuff seems to suggest unlabeled gender division of the two big Easter green bathrooms.  Please give me signage!  (and tell me why the scale is there; do all the guys in the office think we’re fat?)

Welcome to Casual Town

It’s funny how sometimes we talk in song lyrics without even meaning to do so.  Today, I was explaining why I prefer the East Bay to San Francisco – mainly the weather – and I said, “I don’t do summer in the city.”  From my quote, it sounded like I either don’t care for the Lovin’ Spoonful or that San Francisco is too hot in the summer.  Neither of which are true.  But, the ‘hot-down’ conjured up by my accidental quoting of the song implied the city is hot in the summer.  It made me laugh a little – and be glad I was talking to someone apparently too young to catch all this.

Later, at lunch, another song slipped in.  The city is known for its cold and cloudy days.  But as we were sitting on the quasi-indoor patio, the sun started to shine.  Someone commented, “here comes the sun.”  Guess who had the Beatles stuck in her head the rest of the day?  Yeah, me.

Song titles aside, the first day of work was pretty uneventful and laid back.  Lots of power point slides, lots of paperwork, lots of mac books (pooey!).  Seems like it’s going to be a very interesting next couple months.  The intern group is small but quite a mishmash of… of… of… stuff?

Two of the other interns make me think of, and miss, my little munchkinhead.  One of the guys is a year younger than her and seems like someone she might bring home.  He looks like he walked out of the 80s, or England.  I’m not trying to be mean; I think that’s actually in style now; I just wouldn’t know; I’m not into the whole hipster scene.  He’s got the skinny leg jeans that are somehow still slightly sagged, converse tennies, and a black T.  His hair reminds me of Flock of Seagulls, or maybe he’s a member of Wham!.  The other guy is from Ireland.  Both of the munchkinhead-guys are techie interns.

I knew the dress code here is casual, but I like dressing up.  So I did.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t go with the skirt and dress shirt like I wanted because it’s so dang cold in the city.  I had to put on the suit jacket just to stay warm.  There were two other interns also dressed up.  One in a suit, one in khakis with a button up shirt and a sweater.  They’re the other law student interns.

There’s one other intern, too.  Another techie guy, sort of.  I think his focus is international outreach.  He does not remind me of munchkinhead.  Like Wham! and Ireland, he was dressed more closely to the style of the place, jeans and pull-over thingy that looks like the one the guy who beats up Dirk Diggler in the parking lot in Boogie Nights was wearing.

Not a whole lot of the staff was here today, but the ones I met all seem really nice.  It’s weird to be interning at a place where most of the people seem pretty close to my age.  I’m used to working with people much older than me.  This is a first.  They were also mostly wearing jeans, but with nicer tops, for the most part.

I’ll probably still be dressed up tomorrow.  Why on earth would I wear jeans for something other than cleaning or bowling?!  I mean really, why wear pants when you can wear a skirt?  Oh, and there’s a shoe repair place across the street from work.  Perfect!  I don’t have to worry about ruining too many lifts.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the big day.  I begin my fellowship at Creative Commons.  I am vampira nervous. 

I know, I know; it sounds kinda crazy.  I mean, I go across the ocean to work with people I never met in a country I've never been to, where I don't know the culture and don't even know who I'm going to live with and I'm fine.  But then, I'm about to start a fellowship at a company I know a bit about, where I'm already living (getting settled anyway) and already know how to get around and all that sort of stuff and I'm super nervous.

Well, I guess that's what happens when you reach your goals.  I've had this idea in my head for so long of a my dream job and tomorrow, I go.  What if I don't like it?  What if they don't like me?  What if I can't do the work?  What if there's an earthquake and the Bay Bridge breaks in half again and my bus falls into the Bay?! (guess I don't have to worry about the other things then.)  What if I just can't handle being around that many Macs?

Ok, ok.  Technically, it's not my dream job.  Technically it's just a fellowship with my dream job company.  But, that's good enough to me - I'm nervous.  And I need to go iron my clothes and go to sleep.  I love suits!  Hooray for wearing a nice outfit tomorrow!

We'll see how it goes... 

This is How I Feel

Like a Disney Princess!  My dreams are coming true!  (I didn't have a princess crown, so I had to use the next best thing.)

I am so happy and so excited!  A week ago I mentioned I had an interview I was excited about, but I didn't want to say more because I didn't want to jinx it.  Well, yesterday I found out I got the Fellowship!!!!

I can hardly believe it.  I nearly started crying.  It's only a 10 week summer Fellowship, but it's with my dream-job organization, so I pretty much consider it my dream job.  A fellowship with Creative Commons.  A Google Policy Fellowship with Creative Commons.  Wow.

Mommy and Daddy are happy, probably mostly because I'll be getting paid (it's a stipend) for working for the first time in 6 years.  And they're happy because I'm happy.  I think Mr. Trizzle is as excited as I am.  He gets it.  He knows how awesome this is; how important Google and CC are in this field (the field I'm trying to make "my" field), and how much this is exactly where I want to be.  It couldn't get more perfect.  Yet, somehow, I think it'll still only go up from here.

 

On another happy side note: my presentation went well today and the class and professor liked my report.  In fact some of the students complained about my being in the group to go first because I set the bar too high.  And here I thought I was just having fun with my homework ;)  If anyone wants to see the whole report, let me know and I'll email it to you.  It's quite humorous, I think.

 

[...ok, now I have to go do my 24-hr take home final...]