Ooh, my favorite!

Welcome to your holiday weekend! Hope you’ve got fireworks in your future. I’ll be having an interesting holiday this year since things are kind of crazy at the moment. Tonight I’ll be treating myself to the Opera (a Western!) and hopefully lots of good food over the course of the long weekend, but I will most definitely be enjoying my independence.

I have lots to share with you next week, but in the meantime have a safe and happy holiday.

[image via we heart it]

This melted my heart! See little Jonathan’s reaction to hearing his mother’s voice for the first time after receiving a cochlear implant. It’s a few years old now, I wonder how he’s doing.

I had a blast volunteering at the food bank warehouse last week. The volunteer coordinators, our group leader, and everyone there were all so fun. I’m already signed up for my next day later this week!

I was assigned with a group of Gap Inc. employees, so there were about 10 of us volunteering, and an additional 10 who were employees. Our task for our shift was to sort and pack oranges. To save money, some of the goods are received in bulk pallets and have to be re-packaged for delivery throughout the city.

The warehouse is just like a Costco inside, and it was hustling and bustling with people and carts scurrying about. It was spotless and really well organized. (I’ve been on a mission to reorganize my pantry, so the organization was one of the first things I noticed.)

These oranges were donated because they didn’t fit the bill for supermarket selling–mostly for cosmetic reasons. Anything that wasn’t able to be consumed was tossed into a bin where it’d be taken and used as food on a pig farm.

In three hours we were able to pack and move 15,000 pounds of oranges that will go on to help feed about 78,000 people a day. Sadly, our group leader, Will, told me that a majority of the fruit will go to school lunch programs for underprivileged kids, and in many cases it may be the only piece of fruit they have all week. I definitely look at oranges (and all of my fresh fruits and veggies) with a different appreciation.

Thanks so much to Sandhya at Livin Wide for organizing her Blog It On event. What a great idea!

So cool, the evolution of Crayola crayon colors from 1903 to present.

[via Weather Sealed]

One of the perks of having more free time is that now I get the chance to volunteer! As terrible as it sounds, I was so protective of my weekends since my weekdays at work were often so bad. As I mentioned before, Sandhya over at Livin Wide has organized a Blog It On volunteer campaign through her blog, and there are lots of wonderful people participating. I’m really excited about this, and I’ve been researching for weeks to figure out where I’d like to spend my time.

Since food is such an important part of my life, I decided to work at the San Francisco Food Bank. I’ll be based at their warehouse sorting and repacking food for distribution throughout the city:

The San Francisco Food Bank works to end hunger in San Francisco. We provide donated and purchased food to over 400 non-profit agencies, enabling them to give nutritious meals or supplemental groceries to thousands of low-income families and individuals in our community. These agencies range in size and mission, from the city’s largest soup kitchens to smaller agencies such as after-school programs, AIDS service providers, battered women’s shelters, child care centers, food pantries, health clinics, homeless shelters, residential programs for people in recovery or transition to independent living, senior lunch programs, and street outreach programs. We are the largest distributor of food to non-profit agencies in San Francisco; for many agencies, we are their only source of food. This year, we will distribute nearly 36.5 million pounds of food, or enough to provide 78,000 meals a day.

This seems like a wonderful organization and I’m so excited to help feed so many people. My first day is tomorrow, so I’ll try to get some good pics to share.

The Daily Telegraph compiled these images of the Iceland volcano eruption. Holy crap, I never knew lightning bolts could be seen at the mouth of a gushing volcano. Is there anything else incredibly scary and intense that can be added to this scenario, oh yeah, pitch black sky in daylight (see last pic).

Magnified view from space.

Aurora Borealis in the background, taken March 25.

Daylight

[all images via The Daily Telegraph]

Words cannot express how much I disliked the first movie, but the new trailer for SATC 2 looks like it might make up for all that was wrong with the first one! And Aiden’s back too!

So cool! This poster campaign for LG’s Viewty Smart phone has 16 hidden faces in each poster to convey that LG phones can detect that many faces in a shot. Click on the posters below to view them in full size and see how many you can spot. You’re supposed to be able to use the phone in the corner for hints if you get stuck, but it’s a bit small, so I’ve included a link to original posts from Mighty Optical Illusions (killer site!) so you can see the answers in the comments. So clever! Good luck.

The Party

The Picnic

Here’s one of my old favorites. Expand your vocabulary and help end world hunger. For every vocabulary term you get right, Free Rice will donate 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme. While 10 grains seems small it adds up quickly, and there are thousands of other people playing at the same time, so with everyone’s help there’s a lot of rice to share.

If vocab’s not your thing, you can change the subject to Art, Chemistry, Geography, Language learning, or Math. You can also adjust the level of difficulty from 1 to 5. When I first started playing years ago it was just vocab, the new categories are great. Have fun!

Update: Here’s the whole series that was featured last week!

Ooh, check out the Google homepage today. In celebration of Hans Christian Andersen’s 205th birthday they have created a flipbook of five different images telling the story of Thumbelina.