The Return to All Natural and Organic - Essential Cane

Hi Followers.

I have neglected the feel good All Natural/Organic healthier way of life for a while. See I got this job where it is really hard to not stress - eat and not much offered in the store is good for me. That statement could be all encompassing, and I'm not the black sheep of my co-workers in this thought train either. I mean the poor ventilation in the building is reason enough alone to feel sick, and to have a daily headache from the inability to take fresh water breaks dries up your heart. Not to mention the fluorescent lights, the occasional mean comment from customers... oh boy I digress. I also have this mild allergy to nuts and basically if I want something semi good for me there, it contains nuts. (no pun intended, but highly amusing!) Happy health wise it's misery. The upside is I get to make pretty crafts all day, so until the "Biz" picks up for me again... here's where I am, most days, with an non intentional glue high.

I have decided to honor less of the paper tissues in the box crying it out, and to heathify my inner body tissues by flushing the toxic stuff I have let invade my body for the past year. I'm back on the organic/all natural hay ride of nutrition :) I never stopped buying Organic Sugar however, so there is the one constant. And without further verbose delay here is my new favorite thing:

It's an all natural cane sugar called "Essential Cane." Aye Ca rumba the Raspberry flavor parties on my tongue buds. It all started because I wanted to put a pure Madagascar vanilla bean in my organic sugar cane granules to make my coffee taste like "French Vanilla" in a real way. (OMG $25 for 8 oz!) And then I found this on the shelf at Market Basket (photo). For copyright issues I would like you to take a moment to check out their photo on their website since when I buy this sugar, it is gone before I think to take a picture.

They have plenty of flavors! Now, here is the drawback of this most delicious raspberry sugar. There is only one. The raspberry seeds floating at the top of your coffee. It TASTES amazing, and is well worth the skimming of the seeds off the surface. I found it works best if you skim before you splash in your half and half/creamer/milk/soy/Vario/Lactaid/eggnog/Organic Cow (now owned by Horizon). I'm not a seed snob, but it equates to crunching on coffee grounds in the bottom of your cup, only it happens at the top. FLOATERS!

Once you get past the seeds...

Oh sorry I zoned out in raspberry flavored coffee heaven.

Check out their whole deal here. Suggest to your local grocery to carry it, if you can still do that sort of thing these days. :) Until next time, love from me and Jasmoos Kitty. (who scarfs up Newman's Own wet catfood daily. NOM.)

P.S. I splash Horizon Vanilla small lunchbox size milks into my coffee when I make Starbucks Instant Coffee at work, just an FYI. So the good.

cupcake

three peas and their pod.

MY Feelings: The coping post

I have revisited some old hobbies. Today I'm just going to share the cuteness of some crochet from an Anigurumi book I picked up. Enjoy:

I have done many more. Pictures will come.

Carefree emo blogging

Amazing. I have been enduring the mostly-unemployed-for-over-a-year-now struggle. I think I had the good fortune to have employment for three months in 2009. I'm more of a Cover Letter/Resume kind of girl, but lately I have been embarking on a journey which I was hoping was going to be an easier more time-effective/find a retail job in a few days journey.

Back in the day I was able to go into a place with a "now hiring" sign with a pen and a list of contacts to copy onto an application. That is long over apparently. I have been casually walking in, store after store and keep getting the same thing. "Go to the website, and on the bottom of the home page, click on Careers. You can apply online"

Sounds OK right? Now instead of paying for gas you just go to the yellow pages online, look up "Vinnin Sq" for instance and then click on the websites for stores found in the plaza five minutes from your house, and get out a bunch of apps in an hour, cut and paste right? Really, really wrong.

After an interview this morning that was so-so I walked around the square to see who else was hiring, and was told by a few stores to go online, so I figured it was a trend and went home. Got online and looked up Pet Co... filled out the app... as best as you can in my industry, every company you enter has to match the national database of jobs, which of course you type in "Furry Vengeance Productions" and it doesn't exist. So you have to call Cast and crew to get the ID number, they don't call you back with it of course. Ah well, so I write in Cast and crew, and then say I've been a freelance Production Assistant for a number of years... then I have to type in a few more things and done. ok cool thanks Pet Co... Hope my Resume fits the keywords someone is looking for. then I go onto another job I saw in the Career Center to apply to at Joanne's Arts and Crafts. I go through the two hour long process of a psych exam etc, to then be finally allowed to see what positions are available in stores for cashiers. No where but Ohio. Fantastic. I chalk it up to the time I would have wasted watching a bad movie.

So I check out Michael's. Hour to write a custom Resume. Half hour to find the right words for a cover letter. Then I have to post it, then type out everything again in a data base that is in the resume. then I have to take a skills assessment test. Then I have to take a psych test again... 300 questions asking me 100 different ways if I think it's a good idea to make up for the pay I'm not going to be getting there by stealing it from the registers. Basically, now if they call me they are going to offer minimum wage and think I want to just steal from the registers all the time. wow. talk about employee confidence. they want to make sure I won't rip them off while letting me know that they are going to treat me like shit and not pay me, and expect I'm going to steal from them anyway.

Art supplies people. You sell art supplies. To artists. And scrapbookers.

Anyways, so hours of my day have been spent on applying to jobs. I guess I can say that before all this I could type 75wpm, and now it's prolly gone up to 100wpm. If nothing else maybe I can make some money by writing my opinion on "The Examiner" even though I have heard that the blogging revolution is dead.

Time to go to sleep, wake up at 7am. Travel an hour to help a "friend" (whom over the past two days of delaying my free labor for Career Center visits and interviews I can tell is thinking in the back of her mind she'd never hire me, nor recommend me after this) paint and learn from her (she who gets jobs with her Union card, I not)... for five days... for a free lunch. Payout $80 in gas, and hopefully no broken car parts. Time to say goodbye to my beautiful apartment, my freedom, my dignity, my hopes and dreams... and sell off more shit, to be able fit on a blow up mattress at my parents house in the living room... and undo all the good that has happened to me in my life in a few weeks time. I can't make it in this world.

But you know, with an upbeat twist! People, there aren't enough happy pills to fix this. God Bless America.

"funemployment" series: Mary Ferrara

Dear Capitalism. Your system is failing. We are sick of eating corn, and we are sick of... oh shit. You took away my job. NOW it's personal. Now as an individual starting to collect unemployment (two years ago my on-again off-again funemployment relationship started) first thing people say is "What a great opportunity for a new career! Now you can try things you weren't going to before, don't worry the right job will find you! Go on vacation! Start a new hobby! Clean out the Garage! RAH, RAH!"

yeah, right.

Today was a long day at the Career Center for me. Luckily I had been exchanging emails with Mary about her story for my Blog. I tell you subscribing to "The Secret" as I do, these emails came at the perfect time. All the bitterness I was feeling towards my own situation dissolved a little after I learned about Mary taking her capital to the American Career Institute to learn about Digital Media and Audio and Visual Editing. (they have all these deals right now where the state will pay for your training! So get on that if you are before your 15th week in to unemployment insurance! Yeah they didn't tell me either!) Mary was so excited to start the program right away and not wait for them to help pay. She's been paying for a lot of it herself (with a little help from Mum, whom Mary has a very reciprocal support relationship with) and I couldn't help but be excited for her!

I first met Mary on one of the 48 hour Film Challenges as an Actress in "The Pitch" our 2007 LTJFilms submission. Fortunately she was a fine artist too. As the Art director, when I asked Mary to be "doing something" at her desk since I ran out of time to fully decorate her character's cubicle she drew an AMAZING cat. To which she replied "well, I DO have a B.A. in Art History" SWEET! Cha-ching! Her real life Cha-ching gig was not a creative job, which she wanted. She is going to keep building up her portfolio and even get certified in a few programs; she really doesn't want to get an uncreative web production job again. Even if she has to temporarily work retail full-time while she does these things. I hear ya sista.


Mary also had something else nagging at her besides lack of a career with a creative flow. Ever get that gift that goes viral when you were a kid? Everyone SEES that you have a Barbie, so everyone BUYS you a Barbie... and you don't necessarily like Barbies? Well something like that happened to Mary. But let it be known MARY's dolls were several notches above a Barbie, Franklin Mint value and above even.

"My father would buy me these dolls that I never asked for, and I always wanted to take vacation time to put them away but I never did. Now I have about 40 some-odd in storage" Time off offered her the "new opportunity" to successfully get them in storage, so she can move on. She doesn't not like the dolls, she is planning on getting them insured and hopes to sell them off someday, she says when she's elderly. Forty of anything is lot in your closet. ( I know. I HAD 40 pairs of shoes, all gone now thanks to selling them off, giving them away... etc.)

The creative flair of her forced vacation besides school was that in her time studing she was chosen (from an open call) as an extra in a major film. "I was chosen to be an extra in that Tom Cruise film [Knight and Day], now I didn't end up being in front of the camera but my car did, it was parked between Tom and Cameron's cars after they finished their big car chase scene on the top of a parking garage. I got to watch them film up close too! And of course I got paid. Not too shabby, anyways I nicknamed my car Ginger (she was the movie star in Gilligan's Island also she's sort of a gingery color)." You can make a good $250 a day if they are using your car as a picture car! (Note to Jess: I wish I had made that much, was less than $100. Note to Mary: WHA? Those cheap... anyways)

As she starts a new year and a promising new journey to a more fitting career, her story gives me hope that ONE of those 50 people in the Career Center with me today, also get to have that cliche come true. I'll be looking for her car's name in the credits of "Knight and Day." I'm sure Ginger can't wait to get her IMDB credit page started. Looks like Mary should take some Agent classes too.

"funemployment" series: Nicole Anderson

We who work in the “Biz” sometimes have maddeningly long forced vacations on “funemployment.” As I get to know my coworkers better I find we all have some intense creative projects to fill our time. My friend Nicole found herself googling flower jellies in her down time and was overtaken by inspiration to fulfill her desire to make violet jelly.

I first met Nicole three years ago on second unit of "Underdog." She was carrying around a platter of a billion exquisite cheeses and crackers decorated with grapes and strawberries. The platter was such a beautiful sight I never forgot her OR her brilliance in introducing me to my now favorite cheese Dill Havarti. Nicole "Crafty", (Local 481 craft service) and I have worked together on a few shows since, last being "Edge of Darkness” on which we bonded over some conversations about our tastes in Men and of course our tastes in food.

On her social networking site this past spring she posted photos of this violet jelly she made and I thought it a great story to get out there on the good ole blogtastic. This particular blog entry has been only brewing in the thoughts of Jessica Therrien since spring, but flower jelly has been 2o years in the thoughts belonging to Nicole Anderson. She divulged "I have a friend from Iran who made rose petal jelly. It was such a beautiful light rose flavor, with a pretty pink color that it never left my mind. I always thought about making a flower jelly since I make a lot of "pick your own" berry jellies, and I grew up IN a flower shop and there is that deep connection to flowers. I had time since I wasn't working and undertook the making of it"

Violets grow in the wild yards of New England in the spring, so she put out an ad on “craigslist” for people's violet harvestings. A New England independent film producer who also collects “face up” pennies as a Set PA, offered to gather the plethora of violets growing in her pristine backyard for Nicole. Claire’s yard does not get touched with pesticides, Miracle Grow or any of those other crazy “supplements” our over fluffed suburban yards do. Nicole now had her all natural violet supplier.

As a side note, it’s peculiar to me that these two would take part in this granola project, but on the same token I can’t imagine these goofnuts not teaming up. The yield (or “shit ton” according to Claire) of white and purple violets would arrive under night’s veil. The Supplier would deliver the goods at the predetermined drop off point (under “crafty’s” porch, in the “cooler”) at random intervals throughout the harvest season. Nicole was very amused by these drop-offs from “someone who doesn’t even live CLOSE to where I live. At all, she lives about an hour away. One time it was her whole family piling out of the car to make the delivery” Now that’s a film “community” stretching over the miles for ya!

It ended up being 5 batches of violets that yielded 60 small jars of jelly. Nicole removed the flowers from the stems and used the flowers fresh and made violet tea from the petals. Adding lemon juice is necessry for ph balance and makes the color bright pink. She then adds pectin, brings it to a boil, then adds cane sugar, and boils for a minute more... and voila violet jelly. (note: photos by Nicole)

Nicole says “flower jelly is more about the novelty of using a flower, than the flavor. The Jelly only has a slight hint of violet flavor.” She is a seasoned do-it-yourself berry jelly maker. She likes to use “the pick your own” variety of wild berries for the experience of getting in there and picking from the yields of the earth, and also to support the local growers efforts. She completes the whole food full circle aspect by sometimes mindfully using organic sugar and, feels better when she can give away her finished foodstuffs in full confidence that she oversaw the whole process, giving the people a great all natural product. She notes "it is very rare for people to make their own pectin. There are purists who do this, extracting it from citrus peels themselves." Nicole uses store bought pectin.

Organic heads would agree with her methods. I myself like this thinking of building from scratch as best as you can the “old fashioned”, but now very much back in fashion way. While we are talking she feeds her cat organic catnip and comments on the wildcat padding around her kitchen during our phone call. I will also note for fun that our interview was scheduled to pleasantly pass time while she waited for the Oil Man to arrive.

Her Jelly is a delicacy definitely to be sold on the Etsy that I am sure would be fruitful. I personally put in an order for clover flower jelly this spring.