The other weekend Michael brought up this sweet/gross bag of kombucha mother! On one of my bad days I brewed up the gallon of green tea and mixed in the sugar and put it all into a jar labeled “lacy pancakes” I found in the mud room, plus the mother juice and the oversized symbiotic bacterium membrane (blech!). I pulled a handkerchief over the top and fastened it with a sparkly hairband. The last two weeks have shown some pretty disgusting happenings, as the tea leaves left over in the jar have morphed into Fantastic Planet-like creatures with webbed follicles and gooey spilling innards. The leaves spread out and gummed up, hanging mid way up the jar. It is really challenging my tolerance for totally disgusting science projects (as brewing your own Kombucha REALLY is). Today is the two week marker, so I tried a taste. It was incredible! sparkly and spritely like champagne and cider. It needs another week or so, because Michael told me to put in too much sugar (though it was a good guess dude). The new mother is thickening up nicely, and it’ll be fun to pull the two mothers apart to start two new batches of Kombucha! The fun is just exponentializing.

Today brought another exciting bit of accomplishment. I have been looking at films from the UW School of Communications from the mid 1950’s. This has included hilarious class films, parodies of variety shows and travel programs. I noticed in the two class projects digitized, that there were title cards for “KCTS Educational Television, Channel 9.” First I thought it was a joke, to make the show look legitimate like a lot of spoof shows do. I grew suspicious though, because hey, aren’t most public access shows totally BS??? Could this be the very inklings of the shoddy, often traumatizing and inspiring cable access programming we all watched as pre-teens??? I soon discovered that KCTS, Seattle’s first public television channel, started right here at the UW School of Communications! Not only that, but Milo Ryan, the professor initiating all of these class projects, was the first program director! So I just unearthed a wealth of public television’s legacy! I found some other amazing notes, but you’ll just have to wait for my first published EAD works to come out! Needless to say I am super proud of my badass archivist self! My next truly exciting task is to go through the entire collection of about 37 film reels, and inspect them, check for titles, make recommendations for preservation and rehousing, as well as figuring out an entirely new organizational system and snazzy title to give Milo his cred! Nerd up!

Things slowly grow better as I applied for my first ever GRANT to back-up my recent crush and utter fascination with Edward Tufte and the legacy of Information Aesthetics. Thanks to Nicolette Bromberg for her inspiration, hand-holding and patience! Also thanks to Laurel Evans for encouraging my very bad behavior at the office, as well as answering every question I have. I just can’t contain myself, it’s too much fun! All of my work at the archive has piqued my interests in how we do personal research and empower ourselves with exploration. Accessibility is a huge problem in our over-saturated world, and we need new ways to pick, choose, smell, feel and think! On that note I think I bombed my German test today…but at least I didn’t bomb it as bad as the last one! Improvement friends! Prost!

P.S. Thanks Michael and Daniel for coming up this weekend! I miss my portland Heart People! Hit me up! I’ll be home for Halloween! Watch for a jazzy Wizardress! Alexa: See you Saturday! I can’t wait for your cool party!