Spring means Gardening!

      Now that Spring is officially here, I am excited for one of my favorite hobbies which is gardening. To begin with I have found some tips for composting and what you can compost around the house. Composting is the process where you gather unwanted garbage that you would otherwise send to the dump and let it decompose so that you can use it as fertilizer in your garden. The link to the page is 100-things-you-can-compost. I honestly did not know that tampons, latex condoms, latex balloons, or the contents of your vacuum cleaner can all be composted. If you are an avid gardener or are just starting out, this article is a must read for anyone interested in composting - if nothing else, this how much money you will save on fertilizer simply from throwing your garbage into a separate bin.

      Something else to consider if you live in a limited area is container gardening. Something like this:

This is perfect if you don't have a big yard/garden.

      The verticle or hanging garden can be built out of pvc gutters and this site hanging-gutter-garden shows you how along with everything you will need to build it. Wooden pallets can be used to build raised garden beds as well as cinder blocks. A perk of raised garden beds is that weeds are less likely to overtake your garden which has been my downfall the past couple of years. This site 20-creative-ways-pallets-in-your-garden/ shows your some really awesome ways to use pallets in your garden and for cinder block gardening, have a look at this:

      If you would rather, you can always stick with potted plants for your garden but you can also go DIY with that and use old containers as pots. Coffee cans, milk jugs, juice containers, yogurt cups, and pretty much everything else that holds a liquid substance can be used to grow plants (just remember to poke a couple holes for water). 

• Another tip is to use hay underneath pumpkins, squash, and melons to keep them from rotting when they touch the soil. 
• Pine needles can be used as mulch in a garden as nothing can grow through it. 
• Pine cones and/or packing peanuts can be used to fill the bottom of large pots to cut the weight and improve drainage.
• Baking soda can be placed around the outside of your garden because nothing will grow in it which allows you to keep weeds and grass from invading your garden.
• A simple cheap laundry basket can be used to grow potatoes.
• A plastic tote can be used as a compost bin.
• Milk jugs, water bottles, and soda bottles can be used to irrigate plants in your garden if you cut off the bottom and place it upside down in the ground/pot next to your plants so that it drains like a funnel.
• You can plant the top of a pineapple in a pot and another pineapple will grow from it.
• Tomato plants can be grown in garbage bags.
• Vinegar can be used to kill your weeds on walkways and around the edge of gardens but don't use it near your plants (and it is better for the environment than Roundup). For in the garden, smother weeds with newspaper.

      The best part about gardening is that you have the fruits of your labor, no pun intended, that you can eat later as part of a healthy diet. Strawberries, melons, tomatoes, and so many others are fairly easy to grow in your own backyard so get out there and play in the dirt for a while. At the very least you can say you spent some time outside.

Song of the day: Doctor Who Theme metal version

Movie of the day: The King's Speech

Another Job Down

      When I first started this blog, I described myself as an unsuccessful college student because although I have a bachelor degree I have yet to use it. When I moved to North Carolina, I was excited because there was supposed to be a lot more jobs. My first job down here was as a waitress and I left that because I didn't like working all night long, only getting paid $2.15/hr and earning tips that only amounted to $15-$20 a night. I went to work as a pizza delivery driver and that was when I broke my pink car.
      Some of you might know that when I first went to college, my parents bought me a Dodge Neon and painted it pink for me. This was my dream car as a teenager and I always wanted my first car to be hot pink so that was what my dad painted it for me. I've had that car for the past 8 years but while I was out on a delivery one night, I took off from an intersection and heard a very loud grinding noise by my rear tire. As it turns out, the frame of the pink car had broke. This was the first time I had ever heard of this happening and I was completely lost because I don't know a lot about cars but I know that the frame is like a skeleton but when it brakes it cannot be put back together. I was able to use my parent's vehicle for work until I was able to save up enough to buy another neon. This neon was fun because it was a manual so I was having a blast driving around all the time for work and I finally had enough power to spin the tires.
      Last weekend I was working and it was raining really hard. I was on my way back from a delivery when I hit a pool of water in the parking lot. The car instantly started rattling in the engine. I couldn't see the water at first because it was raining so hard but it must have been at least knee deep because when the car hit the water, the main splash was up over the hood and the spray was over top of the car.
      Now I am working with my brother to remove the engine from the pink car to put in the blue car and I have spent my entire savings on car parts. I haven't worked since the night I broke the car but now I have been job searching again to no avail. I've applied to a security firm and taken the security guard training class so now I am waiting for that but I've also started working towards setting up my own photography business. With photography, I am pretty good at light painting, landscapes, and adult portraits but I suck at kids and baby portrait.

movie of the day: Frozen

song of the day: Pollyanna Rose by Billy Burke

Doctor Who

      My new interest has sort of hit me like when you accidentally run into a wall. I watched the first season of Doctor Who on Netflix somewhere around a year ago but it interested me enough to watch all of the Torchwood episodes. At the time, I really liked Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and I couldn't really picture David Tennant as the same character so I didn't watch much of the second season or beyond. I don't remember how exactly but somehow I heard about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who was coming up and BBC America was going to be running an entire week of Doctor Who to prepare for it. I loved the first season so I said what the heck. I started getting up super early in the morning the first day the marathon was on and I watched a couple episodes of David as the Doctor and I kinda liked him so the next day I returned and Matt Smith was the Doctor. I watched a couple of his episodes before I went to work that day and then sometime during the day I decided I would go back to Netflix (using a different email so I could do a free trial) and watch all of the episodes from season two on. Of course after I decided to do this I ended up having to work a second job all the way up to the day of the 50th anniversary. I got home from work at about 10 that night and I stayed up until 1 am just to see the anniversary episode. Of course after watching that I was hooked.
      I have now spent every night watching at least one episode no matter how tired I am because I am determined to finish season 6 before the Christmas episode which is only three days away (season 7 isn't on Netflix). I want to get used to Matt Smith being the Doctor so that I can have the proper reaction when he regenerates. I know I will learn to like him because after continuing past season 1, I have fallen in love with David Tennant. The episode where he regenerates was a spoiler for me because I watched it on BBC America before I went through the entire couple of seasons with him as the Doctor so now I don't want that to happen with Matt Smith.

      As usual though, my nerdyness has taken over me and gotten out of control. In the past couple of weeks since the 50th anniversary episode aired, I have bought two Doctor Who books, two single comics, a full comic book, and a 7 pack set of Doctor Who themed socks. I am also trying to save up $300 so that I can buy the dvd set online. I can't wait until XCON 2014 (Myrtle Beach's comic book convention) because this past year they had a Dalek, a Tardis, and sooo many Doctors; now I can fully appreciate the experience.
      Now you know my latest addiction, I will leave you with this: Watch Doctor Who. You can start from the first season in 2005 so that the special effects are better than the original series and watch until you get to "Are you my Mommy?" because I think that is the episode that accelerates your love for the show. After you have caught up, go back and watch the original series (this is my plan) because I think the plot lines, characters, and overall story will make more sense.

Instead of a movie of the day I have a clip of the day. This is a clip in between season 1 and 2 of Doctor Who where the Doctor has regenerated with Rose in the Tardis:

Song of the day: Say Something by A Great Big World feat. Christina Aguilera

Photography and Where's George as a Hobby

Hobby: Something to take our minds off real life.

      Over my twenty five years of life I have picked up many hobbies. When I was in grade school, I collected rocks and minerals. I then moved to collecting comic books, dvds, and coins. When I was a kid I loved to ride my bicycle and this has continued into adulthood but now I've made a hobby out of adding upgrades and attachments to my bike. My most recent hobby has become photography and more specifically light painting photography.
      I know photography is a common hobby among the young and old but I never realized how many elderly people were really into it until I moved to a coastal community where many people came to retire. I am enrolled in a photography class at the local community college and the majority of the class is above the age of 50. I am the only person under the age of 30 in the class and this surprised me until I saw a picture in the local newspaper about a photography club that meets in town. There were about a dozen people in the picture showing off their award winning photographs and all of the people had white hair (ie they were definitely retirement age). I noticed that all of the older people did either landscape photography or wildlife photography. In my class now, the older people want to do landscape photography and the "middle-aged" people want to do portrait photography. As a youngster in this group, I am completely beside myself. I want to do something different that other people haven't thought of or really seen that much of.
      I came across light painting when I first got my camera and I was looking up all that it could do. I was watching Youtube videos (which is how I learn to do most things anymore) when I came across a man named Wes Whaley who was in a video doing a pregnancy portrait using light painting to do something different than the usual 'pregnant woman posing' picture. I fell in love. This is what I wanted to do. I found some more graffiti looking pictures taken using the light painting technique and I've used those to help get me started. I bought a couple different flashlights at Walmart and Home Depot and most nights I go outside after dark simply to mess around to see what kind of effect I can get out of each flashlight and each mixture of different flashlights together. This is what I've come up with so far:

 

 

      Now I work as a waitress at a Waffle House and we work off of tips. My next new hobby came from a one dollar bill I received as a tip. I had a stamp on it that said "Track me to see where I've been www.wheresgeorge.com" I was curious about the stamp so I checked out the website (hoping my virus software would protect my computer from any unwanted viruses or hackers). I was fascinated by the ability to track a piece of money all over the world. I tracked my bill to Ohio and California. I was hooked. I looked up some videos on Youtube (of course) about Where's George and found that thousands of people track these bills and there are actually a lot of people who stamp every bill they receive and register it on the website so that the bill can be tracked later. My curiosity grew until I marked a few bills of my own, registered them, and sent them out into the world. My intention is to forget about it for a while until I receive an email that a bill has been tracked or I receive another bill with a stamp on it because I think it is in the excitement of not knowing when you will find one or when someone will track a bill you sent out that really catches peoples attention as well as seeing how far away a bill has traveled that now sits in your wallet. My challenge to you is to go to the website next time you find a bill stamped www.wheresgeorge.com and I promise the site is not a plethora of viruses.

Movie Reviews: Star Trek Into Darkness

      Today I went to the theater to see Star Trek Into Darkness. I was lucky enough to be able to watch it a day earlier than the national release in the US. I've seen most of the other movies in the Star Trek series and I think the other movies allowed me to appreciate this movie even more so if you haven't watch Star Trek The Wrath of Khan, I would advise you to do that before going to see this movie because there are many similarities and even a reference to it. I think JJ Abrams did a really good job with this movie, he took the Wrath of Khan and updated it to flow with the newest movie. All of the acting was very well done and the plot/storyline was really well written. Most of the best jokes were given to Scotty and they are mostly one-liners. I loved the switch that occurred from the Wrath of Khan to Into Darkness with respect to a Spock/Kirk scene that really shows how much changed since Nero changed history. All in all, the movie was really good, I laughed, I cried, I waited to see who would live and who would die. There were a couple parts of the movie where I had to remind myself that JJ Abrams was directing instead of Joss Whedon. Not only were some of the camera directions similar but JJ started pulling a Joss stunt where he likes to kill main characters - not to spoil anything but you will have to watch the movie to see what I mean. Overall, I highly recommend this movie for your summer entertainment (although I did prefer Iron Man 3). This movie should not disappoint the Trek fans.

Cue trailer:

 

Happy Mothers Day! and Preview Agents of SHIELD

      I hope everyone is enjoying their Mothers Day with a mom, wife, daughter, sister, etc. I didn't have much money to buy my mom anything so my genius plan was to bake her a cake. First let me mention I have never baked a cake before. Now that being said, the baking part was no problem. My problems came when I first started to decorate the cake with frosting. The frosting was a little cup of Pillsbury frosting that I got at Walmart and it said to give it some flavor, you could mix it with Cool-Aid. I tried a little frosting mixture first to see how it tasted. It was horrible. It was okay for the first couple of seconds but the sour hit you like a sideswipe with a bus. I didn't want to waste the frosting though so I put it towards the center of the cake and used the un-sour frosting to cover the rest of the cake. This way my mom will enjoy the cake when she starts at the edges and then when she gets to the center it will be a BAM moment.
      This weekend was also the start of Bike Week in Myrtle Beach, SC. My parents went and when they tried to get me to go with them I gave the excuse that there wasn't anyone there that was even remotely close to my age. When they got back, the let me know that it was a lot of fun and I should've went down with them. After a short inquiry, I learned they had spent the day bar hopping and riding on the motorcycle with 11 other people. That all sounded fine until I learned that they were one of the youngest people in the group. I had the sound of brakes squealing inside my head. They really wanted me to spend my weekend hanging out with geriatrics? If they were the youngest, I would look like an infant. Absolutely not. I've spent the remainder of my weekend desperate to find people my age in my area to see what they do on the weekends.

      In other news, SHIELD has a new promotion video out on Youtube. You can view it here:

      I am really excited about this show. I loved Agent Coulson and to have him back is simply awesome but to have him back in a television show instead of a movie, I think, is spectacular because we will get more of him than just a two hour storyline. I really liked the Avengers movie and I am a huge fan of Joss Whedon (I grew up on Buffy) so I can honestly say I have never been so excited for a show that hasn't even aired yet.

 

Happy Mothers Day Everyone!!

Movie Reviews: Iron Man 3

      I went to a special 9pm screening of Iron Man 3 on Thursday May 2nd and I got to see it in 3D. I loved the movie. I was a little worried about what direction the movie would take in a post-Avengers world but I think the writers did a very good job making a story realistic after the revelation of god-like aliens and an alien invasion. I think they did a really good job giving Tony Stark PTSD after everything he went through in New York and it helped the storyline make sense with him not simply calling his Avenger friends for help. I loved watching Tony Stark deal with PTSD because he is such a narcissist, this was an interesting way to delve more into the character. I really liked the interaction between Tony and Harley, a kid who shows up with sarcasm of his own to help Tony when he needs it. Usually kid sidekicks are annoying and wine a lot but Harley was a fun annoying because he annoyed Tony and Tony would say things to the kid that most adults wouldn't. The interaction was fun for me as a viewer. I found the movie had equal parts of humor, action, and romance but the Shane Black, the director made it feel more like a Bruce Willis  is Tony Stark Die Hard Iron Man movie. I think Jon Favreau did a better job directing the first Iron Man. One part of the movie that will inevitably be a hot topic among hard core Iron Man comic fans is the portrayal of Mandarin. I really loved Ben Kingsley's Mandarin but I hadn't seen him in comic form. I do know that the movie version of the character needed to be more realistic and that is why he was changed but he has become one of my favorite movie villains.
      The scene at the end of the credits is also worth mentioning. I enjoyed it and found it comedic even though it wasn't a preview of the next movie in the series coming out. I don't want to give any spoilers but another Marvel character joins Tony Stark and the two have worked together in The Avengers movie.

      I hope you all watch Iron Man 3 in theaters and enjoy.