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The use of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) by teens increased from 2005 to 2013 but still remained relatively low, researchers reported.
The percentage of female teens, ages 15 to 19, selecting LARC, which includes subdermal implants and intrauterine devices (IUDs), at Title X National Family Planning Program sites was 7.1% in 2013, up from 0.4% in 2005 (P<0.001 for trend), according to Lisa Romero, DrPH, MPH, of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues.
The increase resulted from efforts to reduce barriers to obtaining LARC, they wrote in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Common barriers included "unfounded concerns about safety, high upfront costs, and lack of awareness about LARC," they added.
They promoted three strategies to reduce those barriers: educating clinicians that LARC is safe for teens, training providers on contraceptive counseling and LARC insertion, and providing contraception at reduced or no cost to teens.
It is important for healthcare providers to increase access, awareness, and availability of LARC, said co-author Lee Warner, PhD, CDC associate director for science, in a telebriefing.
National estimates suggest that LARC use among teens is increasing but still less than 5%, the authors wrote.
Use of LARC is recommended as a first-line choice for adolescents by both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians.
Despite a high upfront cost, over time LARC is often more cost-effective than other forms of contraception, Warner said.
Insertion of an IUD or implant can cost several hundred dollars and last for years.
Three IUDs are currently approved for use in the U.S.: the levonorgestrel-releasing Skyla (3 years) and Mirena (5 years), and the copper Paragard (10 years).
Progestin implants, which include the etonogestrel-containing Implanon and Nexplanon, remain in place for 3 years.
Authors used data from the 2005-2013 Family Planning Annual Report, which contained information from 4,200 sites nationwide receiving Title X grants.
The 45-year-old Title X Family Planning program provides federal grants for family planning and preventive health services.
Approximately 7.5 million women, ages 15 to 19, sought contraception from 2005 to 2013. A total of 616,148 women were included in 2013 data.
Reversible contraceptive methods were placed in three tiers based on the percentage of users who get pregnant during 1 year of typical use: most effective (<1%), moderately effective (6%-12%), and least effective (≥18%).
Most effective methods included IUDs and implants, while moderately effective methods included oral contraceptives, injectables, the contraceptive patch, the vaginal ring, and diaphragms. Least effective methods included condoms, contraceptive sponges, spermicides, fertility awareness-based methods, and withdrawal.
The percentage of teens using moderately and least effective methods decreased (76.9% to 73.4% and 22.7% to 19.5%, respectively).
The use of IUDs increased from 3,685 (0.4%) to 17,349 (2.8%). Implants increased from 427 (0.04%) to 26,347 (4.3%).
The authors noted that according to national data, both private and public service sites are more likely to offer IUDs than implants.
"To meet the increasing demand for implants by teens, providers should consider increasing on-site availability and affordability of implants," they wrote.
Teens ages 18 to 19 used LARC more commonly than teens ages 15 to 17 (7.6% versus 6.5%).
Use of LARC varied by geography. The West had the highest number of users (9.5%), followed by the Northeast and Midwest (both 6.4%). Use was lowest in the South (5.3%).
Colorado had the highest percentage of teen users (25.8%), followed by Alaska (19.6%), while Mississippi and Indiana had the lowest use (0.7% and 1.5%, respectively).
The variation could reflect state-based policies and programs, the authors pointed out.
They noted the limitations of Title X data, which does not include race, ethnicity, and other demographic information. It also heavily represented underserved, low-income communities, which could limit generalizability.
Planned Parenthood also saw an increase in IUD and implant use in women of all ages, the organization said in a statement released in response to the CDC report.
Since 2009, overall IUD and implant use grew by 91%. Use of IUDs increased 57% and implant use increased 361%.
Romero and co-authors disclosed no relevant relationships with industry.
- Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse Planner
last updated
Primary Source
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly ReportSource Reference: Romero L et al "Vital signs: trends in use of long-acting reversible contraception among teens aged 15–19 years seeking contraceptive services -- United States, 2005–2013" MMWR 2015; 64: 1-7.


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National Publisher Services (NPS) announces partnership with Henry and David Fry
Monday, January 10, 2011
Press release from the issuing company
Edison, NJ - National Publisher Services, a strategic outsource solution for publishers, announced today that Henry and David Fry have acquired a 50-percent interest in NPS. Additionally, NPS announced that it has acquired Circulation Specialists Inc. and that industry veteran John LeBrun has joined NPS as a partner and as chief executive officer of CSI. The announcements were made by Mark Harris, NPS chief executive officer, and are effective immediately.
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subset: commoncrawl


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The Chaga mushroom/conk doesn't resemble a typical mushroom at all, it looks like a piece of burnt black charcoal on the outside and the inside is orange yellowish. I first thought it looked like a lightning strike. Chaga grows on rotted or wounded trees, and has a symbiotic relationship with them.
Chaga was known by the ancient Chinese as the "King of all mushrooms" which is high praise coming from the masters of medicinal mushrooms in the East. The Siberian tribesmen who are also masters of medicinal mushrooms called it the "Gift from God," and what an amazing gift it is!
Chaga mushroom is an adaptogen which means it helps the body adapt to any kind of stress, bringing balance to all systems and acts as a tonic to the adrenals and immune system.
It is an amazing medicinal mushroom that addresses malnutrition, fortifies the immune system, and has anti tumour properties.
It is a top source of SOD (superoxide dismutase) which is an enzyme that protects all cells in the body. Also it is very nutritious being rich in vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, phytonutrients, tannins.
This Chaga mushroom weighs almost a pound and was wild-crafted from the Northern Ontario forest.
You can use the dried Chaga in a tea or in a tincture. A double extraction tincture is the best way to get the water-soluble and alcohol-soluble parts of mushrooms.
Use a cheese grater to break up Chaga into smaller pieces. Make a tincture by steeping ground chaga in 80 proof (40%) or stronger alcohol, for a month. Strain the chaga pieces and simmer them in water for at least half an hour, or use a crock pot.
I steep it on the lowest warm setting in a ceramic crock pot. I steep chaga tea this way without alcohol.
Cool and strain. Mix water and alcohol. Use 1:1 or 60-40% ratio above 20%
Here is how to make a tincture > http://earthelixir.ca/2012/01/10/make-your-own-herbal-tinctures/
Wild-craft ethically or buy it from a reputable source.
More about Mushrooms:
|Common Name
|Chaga mushroom/conk aka Clinker polypore/mushroom
|Latin Name
|Inonotus obliquus
|Parts Used
|Target Organs
|Immune, Nervous, Endocrine, Pancreas, Spleen, Digestive, Liver, Urinary, Heart
|Common Uses
|Strengthens and cleanses all systems.Tonic to Immune, Nervous, Endocrine systems, Heart, Stomach, Digestive, Liver, Urinary system.Lowers cholesterol, normalizes blood pressure,Supportive treatment for cancer, diabetes, infections, allergies, hypertension, worms, liver digestive problems
|Primary properties underlined:Adaptogen, adrenal tonic, analgesic, antiallergenic, antiatherogenic, antibacterial, anticarcinogenic, anticardiotoxic, anticatarrhal, antidepressant, antihepatotoxic, anti-inflammatory, antimutagencic, antineoplastic, antinephrotoxic, antineurotoxic, antioxidant, antiradiotoxic, antithrombotic, antiulcerogenic, antiviral, anxiolytic, aperient, appetite stimulant, astringent, blood pressure normalizer, cardiac, depurative, diaphoretic, diuretic, decongestant, emmenagogue tonic, expectorant secretolytic, hypocholesterolemic, hypolipidemic, immune stimulant, immune tonic, nervine, pancreatic, vasodilator,vulnerary
|Polysaccharides, tannins, phytonutrients, triterpenes, amino acids, saponins, inotodiol,
betulin and betulinic acid found in birchMinerals, magnesium, chromium, iron,germanium
|Correct identification is important to avoid poisoning, illness and possible death.Caution with hypoglycemia.


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Over the past month or so there has been a lot of talk about postdocs, whether it's why people do them, the purpose of them or why some think they suck. In my field there is pretty much no getting around doing a postdoc if you want to do the whole TT thing, and frankly, I think that's a good thing. No matter how much you think you know about research and being a PI by the end of your PhD, the time as a postdoc is valuable in learning how much you really don't know. On top of that, being a postdoc should be one of the most exciting research times of your career.
The biggest complaints I hear about postdocing are 1) Money, 2) moving around and 3) lack of independence.
Money. This may be unpopular, but if you are in this business to get rich you might as well leave now. Yeah, PDFs typically make $35K - $50K, depending on the field and that isn't a ton of money given the training they have had to that point, but get over it. You're being paid to do research, and in most cases, have no other distractions. Assuming you have picked a research topic you enjoy, this is a pretty good deal. Personally, I would seriously consider the pay cut to be doing just research at this stage.
Moving around. Yup, the academic lifestyle can be somewhat nomadic and that can put a strain of relationships and make for difficult logistics. Because of that, a lot of people try and limit their geographic search, sometimes unreasonably. Personally, I would (and did) take the opposite approach and look for a postdoc in a completely unfamiliar place where you might never chose to settle. Why? Because a postdoc can be a lot more than just a job experience. I have numerous friends who are doing postdocs all over the world and the happiest of them are the ones that chose a place totally different from what they were used to. Maybe this wouldn't work in all fields, but there are plenty of excellent labs in other countries and you would be amazed how helpful international experience can be for collaborations. Not to mention that being in an unfamiliar place encourages one to go out and explore. Getting out of the lab for fun can be a good thing.
Lack of independence. Now I know that lots of people get into situations where they feel taken advantage of or where they are stuck doing projects they don't care about. That is why it is critical to do your homework ahead of time and know enough about the supervisor whose lab you are joining to determine if you can work with them and get the mentoring you need. Don't just take a position in any lab doing something remotely close to what you like. Talk to other trainees in the lab! Talk to former trainees. Is the lab a good place to develop as a scientist? That information can be FAR more important than the project. Put yourself in a place to succeed.
Obviously, this isn't a fool proof way to a happy postdoc, but give yourself the best shot you can. Expand you research horizons with something different from your PhD and do it in a fun place, both socially and scientifically. A postdoc can be one of the best times of your career.


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Polish Dill Pickles - Canned
From: Lorac
My Polish grandmother didn't use a recipe because she could remember the ratio of salt to water and processing time. This recipe uses 1/2 bushel cucumbers. A bushel is a "volume" measurement, 1/2 equals 4 gallons or 16 quarts. I cut the top off a gallon milk jug to "measure" the volume of cucumbers I have to determine the amount of brine and pickling solution I will need. After experimenting with other recipes, Dill Pickles from "Treasured Polish Recipes" are as I remembered my Nana's - dill not sour or spicy. If you aren't into canning - try Nana's - Polish Dill Pickles made in a Crock.
16 quarts
Soak cucumbers overnight in a solution of 1 cup salt and 3 gallons of water, drain.
Fill each quart jar with 1 dill sprig, 1 garlic clove and cucumbers.
Combine water, vinegar and salt, and bring to a boil.
Fill jars leaving 1/4 inch headspace, seal and procecess in boiling water for 15 minutes.
Print Recipe (without
the ads)


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Priest Lake Trail Map
Color Codes for snowmobile map
green - family trails
pink - great views
yellow - high mountain ridges
Upper Priest Falls is situated less than a mile from the Canadian border. This enchanting falls is located deep in the forest a few miles east of the Salmo-Priest Wilderness Area. The shortest route to reach Upper Priest Falls is to drive to the Continental trailhead Trail 28 and hike the 2.3-mile trail that terminates at the falls.
Trail 28 is one of the more scenic trails in the Priest Lake area. It leads through an old growth cedar stand to the river bottom. Huckleberries, thimbleberries, devils club, and ferns grow thick along the trail. Once at the river, the trail turns to an open flat area that offers an excellent camping site. The trail then crosses Malcom Creek and leads to Upper Priest Falls. The elevation change of Trail 28 is 840 feet and is rated by the USFS as "more difficult".
To reach Trail 28 trailhead, travel north from Nordman 35 1/2 miles on USFS Road 302/1013 (an extension of State Highway 57) to the end of the road. The trailhead is located on the left side of Road 1013 just prior to the gate.
With over 70 miles of shoreline, much of which is public lands, Priest Lake offers a wide variety of swimming and beach recreation opportunities.
On the east side of the Lake, both Indian Creek and Lionhead Units of Priest Lake State Park have excellent day use areas on large sandy beaches with designated swimming areas. At both sites, day use visitors also have access to grills, picnic tables, rest rooms, etc. During the summer season, Indian Creek unit offers a wide variety of organized activities that are available to both campers and day use visitors. Public boat docking facilities are also available in the vicinity of the launch ramps at both park units.
There are also beaches along Huckleberry Bay and Canoe Point that have public easements. The best access to these beaches is via boat as private property often precludes access from the landward side. All are primitive, without facilities. A small public beach is also located just north of Bishop's Marina in Coolin.
On the west side of the Lake, the USFS Priest Lake Ranger District maintains day use/picnic facilities at Luby Bay Campground and at Reeder Bay Campground (Ledgewood Picnic Area). Both have beach access and the normal array of picnic tables, fire pits, etc. There is a $3 charge to use the Luby Bay Picnic Area, but no charge at Ledgewood. The District also maintains day use areas on Kalispell and Bartoo Islands and the designated camping areas on those islands are also available for day use provided there is no conflict with campers. Likewise, the four designated campgrounds on Upper Priest Lake are also available for day use if not fully occupied by campers.
There are also numerous public land beaches on the west shoreline, primarily towards the northern end of the Lake. The beaches are accessible only via boat or short excursions off main hiking trails. These beaches are seldom crowded and often provide a 'private beach' for day use visitors. Eightmile Island also has a day use beach area. All of these uncontrolled beaches are PACK-IT-IN PACK-IT-OUT areas.
None of the resorts on the lake have public, day use swimming/picnic areas.
The landscape at the southern end of Priest Lake is dominated by Sundance Mountain. In late summer of 1967, a forest fire erupted on Sundance and eventually consumed approximately 56,000 acres on the mountain and adjacent areas. A lookout tower sits atop this 6,300 foot peak and the summit is accessible by high clearance, 4X4 vehicles during the summer.
In the winter, a major snowmobile route passes below the summit on the west side of the mountain at the 4,500 foot level. Depending on snow conditions, it is also sometimes possible to snowmobile to the summit of the mountain. However, even at the lower trail elevation, the views of the lake and surrounding mountains are spectacular. Don't be surprised to see deer, or a moose in the forest leading up to Sundance Mountain.
If you want a really sporting adventure and have eaten your Wheaties, try your hand (and body) at mountain biking "The Sundance". Only the bold and fit (and maybe those about a quarter bubble off the level) need apply here! Many start, but few finish the trip. Those who do reach the summit receive the reward of a wild, exhilarating, unforgettable downhill ride. The ever twisting, turning, tire-skidding downhill road drops the knobby-wheeler over 1,800 feet in the first 2+ miles!! Not much technical skill required here - just hang on, scream to the wind, AND ENJOY - YOU'VE CONQUERED "THE SUNDANCE"!!
For the more sedate adventurers who gave up climbing 6,000 foot peaks with their mountain bikes "a couple of years ago", Sundance is a more quieting experience. Its splendid views, crisp mountain air, and Mother Nature's bounty of flora and fauna beckon to the simple pleasures of life - a refreshing mind and body experience awaits you atop Sundance Mountain.
To drive to the summit from the Inn at Priest Lake in Coolin, proceed on the Cavanaugh Bay-East Lakeshore Road for about one mile until it intersects with State Forest Road #19. Turn right onto Road #19 and continue for .9 mile at which point you will be at the junction of Road #19 and #191. Bear right to continue on Road #19 and travel 2.8 miles. At this point, you will be at the junction of State Road #19 and #2. Turn left onto Road #2 and travel 1.4 miles until you arrive at the intersection with State Forest Road #207. Turn right onto Road #207 and ascend 2.3 miles to the lookout tower -and watch out for the "knobby wheelers".
NOTE: This road system is minimally maintained and travel may include negotiating downfalls, brush, and other obstacles. Land navigation equipment and skills may be required to remain on the correct roads as some are not well marked. High clearance or 4X4 vehicles are recommended for this route. Information and maps are available at the Idaho Department of Lands office at the foot of Cavanaugh Bay.
Priest Lake Chamber of Commerce Copyright© 2018 | PO Box 174 Coolin, Idaho 83821
Phone: (208) 443-3191 | Toll Free: (888) 774-3785


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Magarpatta City, situated in Hadapsar, on the east side of Pune in Maharashtra, is a manmade paradise on earth, which is unique in all respects. It is a beautifully planned city with all the basic amenities required for the residents to live a happy, healthy and comfortable lifestyle. Balancing the role of nature in our day-to-day lives, is also given equal importance. This inspires the modern youth to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the beauty of nature in the midst of IT towers, residential buildings, club houses, schools, gymnasiums, shopping centres etc which are also part of this paradise. Beautiful flowering trees are planted on both sides of the wide roads which are vibrant with their colorful blooms in different seasons. Many species of birds announce their existence by loudly chattering and chirping various notes creating a beautiful and friendly bond between nature and mankind.
The city bears testimony to the positive vision and foresight of the management team at Magarpatta Township Development And Construction Company Co.Ltd., and the selfless untiring efforts of its Managing Director Mr Satish Magar and equally efficient and charming wife, Mrs Rekha Magar. Along with the strong and constructive support of his younger brother, Mr Umesh Magar, the Technical Director, they take an active interest in the day to day maintenance of this city. Satish is a man of few words. His actions speak louder than words. His priority has been for addressing basic human needs coupled with tapping the natural resources to make life comfortable for the residents while also addressing the issues related to the environment, which is the need of the hour.
Solar water heating systems are provided to every family to cater to the daily hot water needs of family members. This is a great luxury that everybody enjoys here.
Also, there exists a fully operational solid waste management project within the city including garbage segregation initiatives, a bio-gas plant, vermicomposting pits, rainwater harvesting etc. This has given a clean look and ambience to the city. This is one of the most progressive achievements for the management as it involves the co-operation from the residents and shop keepers alike.
Eco-friendly fly-ash bricks and concrete are used in construction which has advantages over using clay bricks in terms of cost, weight and strength.
Magarpatta Township Development and Construction Company has brought about a new eco-friendly awareness in society and has set a role model for others to follow. With all these facilities, anybody should be happy and proud to live in a place like this. We wish for more such heavenly abodes on earth.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
1 comment:
AUNTIE WE CANT EXEPECT THIS township to be like this for centuries on its own we have to take a step i suggest we can make posters and start a awrness campaing in our localtiy and then let it spread
- July 23, 2012 at 5:20 AM
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"Will you be my Valentine?" This is one of the most important questions that people ask every year, but it is only relevant on a special date. Since this question is usually the first step towards a relationship, people are afraid to ask it because they are not always sure if the answer will be affirmative. You need to do something special and different if you want to get a positive answer, so you need some "cute Valentines Day ideas" to help you achieve your goal! In order to help you prepare yourself and your special person for that question, our team created "Valentine's Day Live Wallpaper" - an amazing free app for Android™ with the collection of wonderful "Valentine's Day wallpaper images"! Of course, there is a catch – when you download Valentine's Day Live Wallpaper, you will immediately get 5 "beautiful wallpapers" as well as 5 "Valentines Day wallpapers for mobile" phones and other devices that will unlock after five days! Therefore, the idea is that you should suggest to your special person to download this collection of "love wallpapers" so you can both have this application and make comments about the existing and the new "live wallpapers for Android™" that will unlock each day. On the fifth day, when the last "Valentine Day romantic wallpaper" unlocks, the question that you would like to ask will be written on it! Just be near your special person at that moment, and you will surely get a positive answer! Your special person will think that this is one of the best "Valentines ideas" ever and it will be very hard to resist you and to give a negative answer! You will see how powerful this "Valentines Day wallpaper" collection can be and you will be more than satisfied with this phenomenal free app that you can use all year long!How to set the live wallpaper:- Long press on the home screen until the menu labeled "Set wallpaper" comes out, choose the category "live wallpapers" and scroll to Valentine's Day Live Wallpaper.- Choose your favorite Valentine's Day background for pictures.- When you download these Valentine's Day wallpapers and backgrounds, you will get five love pictures; the rest of them will be unlocked during the next five days.- If the wallpaper resets after the reboot, please move it to your device storage, instead of the SD card!- Choose the speed and density of animated Valentine's Day hearts floating on your screen!- Valentine's Day themes are ideal for HD phones and tablets!
Download Valentine's Day Live Wallpaper and you will get 10 "best wallpapers" in only one free app that you can use not only on Valentine's Day but also throughout the year! This is one of the best applications in the category of "Valentines Day wallpapers free download" and "Valentine's Day wallpapers free", so you will love all of these "high resolution wallpapers" that are in this collection! Spread love with these "Valentines Day pictures" and "free backgrounds" because these "latest wallpapers" will be at your service whenever you need them!
Do you want to find some "Valentines Day wallpapers live free for Android™ tablets" and mobile phones? Are you looking for a beautiful "Valentines Day wallpaper to download" or do you want to "download Valentine's Day special wallpapers" to impress your special person? You are in the right place, because when you download Valentine's Day Live Wallpaper, you will get as much as 10 "romantic wallpapers" with only one click!


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Classic business process re-engineering belongs to the past. An efficiency revolution is imminent, thanks to digitisation. Technologies to capture and analyse data in real time are fully developed and affordable: tiny sensors, wide network coverage and high-performance computers. Cloud solutions and standard algorithms allow for the instant analysis of data from networked objects, machines and systems. Whether it be with new control options or more accurate demand forecasts, real-time analysis can make processes far more efficient while massively reducing costs. Swisscom offers end-to-end solutions for sector-specific core processes as well as all support processes.
Berhard Lenzin interviewed about the Smart Factory
Augmented Reality within industry
Within five years
85% of companies will have implemented Industry 4.0 solutions in every important business area.
Pricewaterhouse Coopers, 2014
of the world's most successful companies will be managing their business processes with predictive analytics by 2016.
Gartner, 2013
At approximately USD 1000 million
Switzerland is set to achieve the highest per capita M2M revenue in Europe by 2024.
Machina Research, 2014
Our expert paper explains in five easy steps how predictive maintenance can help you do far more than prevent outages. The well thought-out structure of the technology platform enables you to gain decisive competitive advantages, even in the implementation phase.
The six most important tips collated for you from the experience gained in our pioneering projects. Focus: better products, customer-friendly services and digital business models.
The best ideas arise when people from different fields exchange ideas. In our co-creation workshop, you'll develop solutions for the networked world together with your customers and lateral thinkers from unrelated sectors.


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Hi.My name is Niraj. This blog here is an assorted collection of some of my Ideas. If u like/dislike any idea or just your opinion on the work or even otherwise, any comment is most welcome.*
hey niraj u have done very good work .... keep it up ma..
thanks aj..for the encouraging words
Hey Dude, How are?This is RAVI It's really nice to see u make progress in each and every Field.
Post a Comment


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Introduce Yourself
thank you guys
i changed it now, should work :P
Its been a while since i dont come around ....
Progress going on ....
and also i would like to share with you my new song, the first one that i have recorded living in the UK , hope you like it
thank you guys!
Yes, the girl in the video DESPUES is my little angel daugther.... )) she is learning to play the guitar as well!
Hi friends!
Well, SE told me today that he was listening to my music and i should post a video of mine here....
Just knowing that someone so far away (im in uk) was listening to my music, made my smile (thank you SE!!)
So, i ll follow his advice, and here is one video of a very known spanish song (not mine this time, but my cover of it)
Thank you for listening!
Interestig post!
I have a question for taye:
I think i might have the same problem you had, some of my dreads in the back top of my head might be too thick....
have i read that you separated them? how? you didnt have to undoe them?
i dont imagine how it would be... you should try it and show us photos!
absolutely AMAZING
lovely aha moments! i didnt have any yet....


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First Light Movies
A teenage girl's love life is ruined by her younger brother.
A charming short film, Dangerous Relations is a tale of sibling rivalry in which the narrator's younger brother posts extracts from her diary around their school, revealing deeply personal thoughts about her love life. Mortified, the sister retaliates by painting her brother's room pink before the two are reconciled after a savage fight.
Funded by First Light, Dangerous Relations is an excellent example of how digital filmmaking techniques can provide young people with new and creative opportunities to re-imagine familiar stories.
The film uses only sparse dialogue and narration, but employs a visually inventive mix of live-action and animation to convey the lead characters' emotion and emphasise particular characteristics. In one scene, the narrator is taunted by peers and her sense of embarrassment and vulnerability is expressed through an animation in which she physically regresses from a teenager into a toddler. Similarly, in the penultimate scene, brother and sister engage in an epic battle, in which they each use an increasingly improbable and ludicrous range of animated weapons.
The film was produced and filmed by a group of Welsh teenagers, with support from professional filmmakers.
Poppy Simpson
Click titles to see or read more


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And not just because we had one!
Take a look at this lovely French wedding I saw over on Elements of Style:
Coco + James Wedding // Short Film from Coco Rocha on Vimeo.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
I Heart Destination Weddings!
I Heart Destination Weddings!
Love and Marriage|Comments Labels: Love and Marriage
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Recap: Our 2nd Anniversary
at 5:47:00 PM
|Heading out for our anniversary!
We went on a dinner cruise!
I had been tossing around a few ideas of where we'd be going and was completely surprised! It was the perfect night for it too: a comfortable 75 degrees, breezy and a gorgeous sunset.
|Our ship (it came out a bit dark!)
|My handsome man!
The staff was gracious and so sweet to everyone. The waitstaff was actually the entertainment and while they were heavy on the cheese factor (let's just say tambourines were involved), I forgave them because of how attentive and nice they were. The music was also a good mix of old soul (our fave!), pop etc. The DJ was from Australia and did a good job the entire evening even announcing all the special celebrations (including our anniversary).
|Our Australian DJ/emcee
|The Electric Slide was in full effect!
After dessert we took a few snapshots of the gorgeous views:
We chatted about our memories over the past 12 years (!) and our conversation did steer towards our Baby Love Bird!
|My fave (yet blurry!) pic from the evening (looking as young as we did at 19!)
Recap: Our 2nd Anniversary
Love and Marriage|Mr. Love Bird|Comments Labels: Love and Marriage, Mr. Love Bird
Awesome Breastfeeding Commercial
As I near the end of my breastfeeding relationship with Nia I came across this commercial that I can't stop replaying. I've posted it on Facebook too, but couldn't help putting it here as well:
Awesome Breastfeeding Commercial
Breastfeeding|Comments Labels: Breastfeeding
Sunday, June 26, 2011
It's Our 2nd Anniversary!
What a wonderful year it's been! Of course, the biggest blessing was our beautiful baby girl Virginia "Nia" Adanna Agbai. I just told Mr. Love Bird, if someone had shown me a picture of Nia and said, "This will be your baby," I would've been in denial! She is one of the best things that has happened to me and Uka.
We both feel good leaving our 20s behind and know that we have a lot of ground to cover together in our 30s. Since our 1 year anniversary, Mr. Love Bird officially retired from basketball and has started a new career that he loves. We have stepped up our involvement in personal pursuits and self improvement such as Toastmasters and volunteering with our church.
I feel like this next year is going to be very exciting and I'm so glad that I have Uka by my side more than ever. Do I think marriage is hard? Sometimes, but it's something I'm willing to work at 200%. What's really helped me this past year has been The Power of a Praying Wife and while I know I owe a formal progress report, as promised, I will provide a teaser and say the #1 thing I've learned is, "Shut up and pray!"
I will be back soon with an update about our anniversary surprise, but I'll spill a few beans already: I made Uka buttermilk (whole wheat) waffles for breakfast with bacon. This was my first time using whole wheat flour so I'll report back as well with how they went over, but I wanted to stop using white flour so Nia can enjoy them too!
It's Our 2nd Anniversary!
Love and Marriage|Mr. Love Bird|Comments Labels: Love and Marriage, Mr. Love Bird
Saturday, June 25, 2011
I Rock My Ring, Do You?
|My engagement ring
With my 2nd wedding anniversary tomorrow I came across this article on Clutch about ringless spouses and was inspired to share my thoughts.
First, I have to say that I am not a jewelry person. I wear the same few keepsakes over and over again and despite being given jewelry I just can't bring myself to swap them out, even if it color coordinates with my outfit.
My engagement ring was a surprise - meaning that I did not go pick it out. Mr. Love Bird did ask me several months before proposing what cut and setting I liked and I let him know: Asscher with a criss-cross band.
|Just my e-ring
|Wedding set
Mr. Love Bird is good about wearing his ring, although it has gone missing before, but we promptly find it! I know as it goes with me, I'm sure there are many women who see he has a wedding band on but still flirt with him - just because the ring has significance to me doesn't necessarily mean it does to anyone else. I just think it makes interactions between the sexes more straightforward.
I agree with the author when she states:
I know what most will argue, a ring won't stop the infidelities. I get it. I really do. But infidelities aside, to exchange vows and place upon my finger the very symbol of what those vows supposedly mean only to decide not to wear the ring, feels like a slap in the face. It is a blatant disregard of feelings and the ultimate disrespect.
Do you?
I Rock My Ring, Do You?
Love and Marriage|Mr. Love Bird|Comments Labels: Love and Marriage, Mr. Love Bird
Friday, June 24, 2011
Movie: The Help
My mom, sister and I all read The Help and to me, the trailer is a bit of a disconnect from the book. While there were some humorous parts in the books, the trailer comes off as upbeat and sassy. I take it that this was because they were trying to market it to a mass audience without being weighed down by the subject matter: the segregated south of the past.
I came across a couple posts from a black and white woman who both had help in their homes. In the post by the black woman she commented on how growing up comfortably middle class with both parents, they had hired help, but that they treated them with dignity and respect. The white woman's post described essentially the same but that she currently employs help and was dismayed to find that her help eats lunch in a closet in her home.
Regarding my own thoughts on help, while my parents didn't have hired help growing up, I've employed cleaning services here in NYC and have had white and Hispanic help. Of course, I've treated all with respect. Additionally, while going to school at Wellesley I would babysit in between classes to make money. The community of Wellesley is extremely affluent and at times I felt conflicted about being a black woman taking care of white children, but many of my student peers of all races did the same. However, when I moved to NYC I was so shocked to see the prevalence of white children being cared for my middle aged black women mostly from the Caribbean. Compared to my student experience, it definitely brought back images of mammy from the U.S. slavery period. Of course these women chose to hold these jobs, just as I did, but at times it can be so glaring to see masses of white babies in strollers pushed by older black women while I'm out and about with Nia. I even get asked by some of these women if Nia is mine!
I'm not here to pass a judgement, but just state what I see in NYC and how The Help brought this observation to mind.
Movie: The Help
Commentary|Entertainment|Comments Labels: Commentary, Entertainment
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Commentary|Comments Labels: Commentary
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Nia's Playlist
We have story time at our local library on Tuesdays and I picked these up from our library and Nia loves them:
I love exposing Nia to world music! She bobs up and down, claps her hands and wags her head. It's too cute! This past Friday night my sister and I attended a free percussion concert at Riverside Church. Nia was so excited to hear the drums and danced and clapped enthusiastically! She even won her own elephant shaped shaker for being the youngest person there. Too cute!
I used to say I never wanted to raise a child in NYC, but it's fun events like this that make me excited to be able to expose Nia to such culture (and FREE ain't bad either!).
|Order here
|Order here
|Order here
|Riverside Church percussion concert
Monday, June 20, 2011
Mr. Love Bird's First Father's Day
at 10:25:00 PM
Mr. Love Bird had a wonderful Father's Day! I gave him a Shutterfly photo book of his newborn photo shoot with Nia:
It was a gorgeous day too and it was nice to attend church as a family. The topic was, "What Should I Do With My Life." It was excellent!
Later we had homemade pizza for dinner (an early dinner - we were exhausted from a lot of walking on Saturday).
Here are a few Father's Day highlights:
Overall it was a great first Father's Day for Uka!
It was a gorgeous day too and it was nice to attend church as a family. The topic was, "What Should I Do With My Life." It was excellent!
Later we had homemade pizza for dinner (an early dinner - we were exhausted from a lot of walking on Saturday).
Here are a few Father's Day highlights:
|Nia's morning Father's Day face
|Snuggling in her Moby Wrap with daddy after church
|Father's Day homemade pizza
|More quiet time with Daddy
|Nia's baby-thug face!
Mr. Love Bird's First Father's Day
Holidays|Mr. Love Bird|Nia|Comments Labels: Holidays, Mr. Love Bird, Nia
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Mr. Love Bird is Up to Something
|Uka's "Plotting Something" pose from when I was in labor
Our 2nd anniversary is next weekend (June 26 to be exact) and the following weekend we are going somewhere OVERNIGHT - shocking, I know! I'm pretty sure I know where we're going, but I won't say where until after it unfolds. I do know this means I need to pump some milk the next couple weekends so Nia's prepared for my extended absence. It's crazy how I've pretty much been able to feed her on demand for nearly a year. I never would've imagined that and I consider myself blessed, but boy, am I ready to wean!
Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a BFing post, so I'll get back on track . . .
Mr. Love Bird has declared that he doesn't like surprises, but I do! I'm very much like a kid when it comes to being surprised. Now certain surprises I don't like (for example not knowing the gender of my unborn baby - this would drive me bonkers as I'm such a planner!).
I tried to think back to when Mr. Love Bird's last surprised me and it was for my 30th bday last year. He had my friends come for dinner. It was a small group but very nice. Prior to that the big surprise was when we got engaged in 2007.
Have any of my readers been awesomely surprised by their significant others recently? How did it go?
P.S. I really wanted to insert a picture of one of my favorite Christmases. I have an image of surprise in my head when my parents gave me a piano. I can still remember that feeling to this day! It was one of the best surprises of my childhood!
Mr. Love Bird is Up to Something
Love and Marriage|Comments Labels: Love and Marriage
Friday, June 17, 2011
Wow! Cable Free for an Entire Year?!
at 11:37:00 AM
I was over on YHL today and saw John's post about HGTV's latest shows. I realized I was seriously out of the loop! I LOVE HGTV but since being cable free the only time I watch it is when I visit my parents' house.
This inspired me to look back and see just how long we've been cable free and lo and behold it's been exactly one year!
What's crazy is besides HGTV, I really don't miss cable. Besides saving $100 each month, we find most of our shows online and love watching them without commercials. However, even though they're online doesn't mean we watch them. Instead we are busy working on so many other projects, besides keeping up with Nia!
I wrote a few weeks ago about how our summer's shaping up, but since then it's become even more hectic. Here's what I'm working on now:
- Planning Nia's first birthday party
- Co-leading a summer growth group with Uka (every Saturday through the end of the summer!)
- Harlem School for the Arts fundraiser (please donate here by June 30!)
- Toastmasters
- A secret project for a friend ;-)
- Heading up the mom's ministry for new babies at my church
- A freelance project
- Hosting a fondue dinner party next month
- Volunteering with my church's children's ministry
- Planning trips {I was hoping to make it to BlogHer and Toastmasters Int'l conference but unfortunately looks like it's not gonna happen.}
- Columbus
- Baltimore
- Philadelphia
- Rhode Island
- Nigeria (Nia needs her passport ASAP!)
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Our Baby Love Bird Can Stand!
at 11:40:00 PM
{I know I've been posting a lot about Nia lately, but she is changing so rapidly that I want to keep up! I will resume non-baby posts soon!}
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Nia's New and Improved Fudgey Face!
at 10:45:00 PM
I am excited to share that Nia has a new fudgey face . . . with teeth!:
{she has a gap like her mommy!}
Monday, June 13, 2011
Life with Nia: 10 Months
at 10:35:00 PM
|Silly Nia on her 10 month bday!
|How Nia spent most of her time on the bus!
|Nia and my dad at his company picnic
We sang happy birthday to Nia yesterday and she smiled (I've been singing this to her regularly to get her used to it for her 1st birthday).
I also took her to the pool and had been showing her the video of her first time in the pool for the last couple weeks since we visited my parents so when we got to the pool it was as though she remembered it was ready to play! She was too cute in her sun-safe hat:
Now on to the full update:
- Baby's Weight: She's 20 lbs according to our new scale we purchased (she was 17lbs 15 oz last month)
- Baby's Height: Won't know for sure until her 1-year appointment, but probably up to 28" by now (she was 27 1/2" last month)
- What size of clothing does baby wear? She's fully in 12 mths!
- Any milestones baby reached during the month:
- Occasionally standing on her own
- Picking up her pelvis when crawling instead of dragging herself (she did this 2 days after her 9mth appointment after I had voiced my concern to the dr.!)
- Playing peek-a-boo:
- Special outings baby had during the month: Just going to DC-metro area a couple times on the Bolt Bus.
- What are your thoughts about the past month? It is as though a switch has been flipped and Nia's personality has come out in full force. I love that she "talks" a lot more now and can't wait to hear what she really has to say. She seems to have a lot on her mind!
- What was baby's routine? It's pretty much the same as before: waking around 5:45/6a.m., morning nap and sometimes an afternoon nap. We're bathing her more frequently now that solids have been introduced (which makes cloth diapering very eventful!).
- Reflect about the highlights of the month: Nia tried cherries for the first time and LOVED them! Here's a video:
- Did any big changes occur, such as baby started daycare, stopped nursing, slept through the night, etc... No changes!
- What are baby's favorites - toy, food, person, etc... My sister Lauren gave Nia the book Color Bears and she is quite obsessed with it. She "talks" extensively after each color and likes to turn the pages herself. Here she is the first day she received the book:
Life with Nia: 10 Months
Life With Nia|Nia|Comments Labels: Life With Nia, Nia
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text:
Maria Ponomarenko '14
Maria graduated summa cum laude from NYU Law, where she was a Furman Academic Scholar and an Articles Editor on the NYU Law Review. After graduating from NYU, she clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Posner on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Maria holds a B.A. in History and Economics and an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University. Her dissertation, "The Department of Justice and the Limits of the New Deal State," explored issues of federalism and institutional capacity in the New Deal and World War II years, with a focus on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's relationship with state and local police. Her research focuses on constitutional law, criminal procedure, administrative law, and police governance. She currently is working on an article on the constitutional underpinnings of administrative law. She is the author, with Barry Friedman, of Democratic Policing which appeared in the December 2015 NYU Law Review.
Current Fellows
Maria Ponomarenko '14


text:
Each one of here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding. - Reverand MacLean from A River Runs Through It
Jon saw the stack of articles about the war in the Sudan on my coffee table and looked at me worried. "You thinking of going back?"
"Oh, I don't know," I said glancing around my living room, "not really." But my older brother knew me too well to believe that. "I guess so."
As journalists who always seemed to cover dangerous places, Jon and I had both had some close calls over the years, but a high percentage of mine had come during a single three-week period in the Sudan in 2004 and I'd returned from there quite rattled. Now, in February 2007, the Sudan was at unrest again, it was at least as vicious as before, and for reasons that weren't clear to me, I wanted to return.
"You think it's a bad idea?" I asked.
Jon pondered this. "Remember Madrid?" He saw the puzzled look on my face. "The tennis ball?"
I laughed. In the summer of 2003, I'd done an astonishingly stupid thing in Madrid. I spent a lot of time building up my hand-eye coordination bouncing a tennis ball and while waiting for the subway I accidentally bounced it wrong and it rolled down the corridor to where a bomb was setoff in the subway by terrorists. I was blown back several feet and developed an uneasy limp. On trembling legs, I'd spent the next two hours gingerly making my way back out of the subway. I'd told Jon about it as a kind of humorous, embarrassing anecdote.
"But that was just idiotic," I said. "I got careless."
"Yea, but you almost got yourself killed in peacetime. Don't you think that's kind of an omen?"
By the time of that conversation in my living room, Jon and I had spent most of our adult lives writing about the worst people and places in the world. That month, I had recently returned from northern Albania, where I'd reported a story on blood vendettas, while Jon was about to head off for war-ruined Angola. When we got together – which, given our schedules, was only about every six months – we talked of where we had just been, where we were thinking of going next.
What we did not talk about – at least not directly – was how any of this affected us. Instead, we had developed a kind of verbal shorthand with each other, the sharing of anecdotes, like mine about the tennis ball in Madrid, that had no real punch lines: "and then I walked back to the hotel," or, "For a while it looked like they were going to shoot us, but then they waved us on and we drove to the capital." We didn't need punch lines; we'd both had enough of these moments to know what the other had felt.
Yet the sharing of these oblique stories served a purpose. My brother and I had both become increasingly superstitious over the years, convinced that all the narrow escapes in our past made it less likely that we would escape in the future, and we relied on each other to tote up the odds. "Is this bet too risky?" "Do I walk away from this story now?" And the reason we sought this guidance from one another was because, in a peculiar way, our stakes were joined, rooted in a secret fear that had held us all our adult lives: that something would happen to the other when he was off in the world and alone, that one of us would die on the other's watch.
The seed of this, I believe, had been planted 11 years earlier, in the first great journey my brother and I shared. Whether coincidence or not, that journey also marked the first time we began to regard each other with anything more than contempt.
Summer afternoons are always brutally hot in New Orleans, Louisiana, but this one, in the middle of June 1996, had been downright perverse. I'd come home from soccer practice wanting nothing more than to lie in front of the air conditioner, only to find my parents huddled close together at the dining room table. I was surprised to see my father there – my parents had recently divorced, and he came around less and less often – but then I noticed that they were poring over a postcard.
"It's from your brother," my mother said, handing me the card. "He's had a bad accident."
The photo showed some mangy-looking beach in Honduras. On the back, Jon had crammed about eight hundred tiny words – economical, perhaps, but mostly incomprehensible. Something about building a rock wall, collecting coconuts, meeting a witch doctor. The details were in the postscript: "PS. Writing this from hospital. Accidentally kicked a machete and sliced open right foot. Swollen up to three times normal. Doctors say infected, maybe gangrenous, might have to amputate. Ah well, c'est la vie. Much love, Jon."
"Gee, that's a damned shame," I said, and faked a somber look for several seconds. "Well, gotta go take a shower."
While it was something our parents had refused to acknowledge, Jon and I were not close. If I really tried, I could dimly recall some pleasant moments in our early childhood, but not many. Much stronger was the memory of the day Jon decided to teach me how to catch by heaving a large rock at my head, leaving a jagged scar across my right eyebrow. I was six then, Jon eight, and it was a harbinger of the violence to come; from then on he beat me up almost daily. By the summer of 1995, though, I'd barely seen Jon for two years and was quite happy to keep it that way – and if he lost a foot, well, it might just even the playing field in our next fistfight.
But I also saw precisely where this little gathering in the dining room was headed, for on the table next to my father was a small pile of papers: plane tickets, a thin vinyl folder of traveler's checks, and, on top, a half sheet of thin paper that I recognized as a telex record. Somebody was being press-ganged into rescuing Jon in Honduras, and from the way my parents stared at me, I had a pretty good idea who.
This might require a bit of explaining about my family. My brother, my three sisters, and I had spent most of our childhoods being bounced from one Third World country to the next, the result of our father being a foreign-aid officer for the American government. That upbringing, combined with our parents' hands-off approach to child rearing, had instilled in most of us a fiercely self-sufficient and adventurous streak. Jon, for example, had hitchhiked across East Africa by himself at thirteen. Our oldest sister, Michelle, had solo-trekked the Kalahari Desert on horseback at seventeen. At fourteen, I had spent two months on my own in Bangkok.
The catch to all this freedom, though came into play whenever something went awry with one of us kids. Rather than directly involving themselves in the problem, our parents felt far more comfortable casting another of their children into the fray, and it was with Jon that problems consistently arose. The previous year, he had dropped out of high school and, after announcing that he was off to the Spanish Sahara to join the Polisario guerrillas in their independence war against Morocco, promptly vanished somewhere between England and North Africa. Our parents had dispatched Michelle, then twenty, to search for him, and she'd eventually found him in the Canary Islands, living on the beach as he tried to repair an old boat he would sail into the war zone. She'd hauled him back to the States, but it hadn't been long before Jon had set out once more, this time to Honduras to help build a friend's house on the Caribbean coast. That's where he had been for the past six months, and now he was in trouble again.
"You're sending Michelle, right?" I asked hopefully, reaching for the telex slip. My parents shook their heads.
My father loved sending telexes. They were charged by the word, with a maximum of ten characters per word, and he could spend hours devising messages that gave him his money's worth. This one was addressed to the main post office in La Ceiba, the town in Honduras where Jon got his mail, and he'd obviously put a lot of effort into it: MATTHEWCOMES TOHONDURAS TOMORROWPM. NOREPEATNO AMPUTATION BEFORETHEN LOVEMOMPOP.
This was aggravating. My sophomore year of high school had ended a week earlier, and I had big plans for my summer vacation. It was more than that, though. I had always been the good son, the dutiful one, while Jon had always been the hellion, the one who'd started having run-ins with the law at age eleven. It was he who had introduced me to the fine art of shoplifting at eight, and, as he constantly reminded me, we never would have been caught if I hadn't started stealing expensive cigars to give to our father to assuage my guilt.
"Look," I said to my parents in the dining room, "Jon has been nothing but trouble to you people for years; did you stop to think that losing a foot might be just the thing to straighten him out?"
I think that for the briefest of moments my parents actually considered the idea. Then my father shook his head. "Let's not make a big deal out of this. All you have to do is go down there, get him out of the hospital, and put him on a plane home. You'll be back before you know it."
The Paris bar was one of the only places in La Ceiba with air-conditioning, and it felt pleasantly arctic compared to outside. Jon and I sat at a window table, sipping from beers and staring out at the plaza. I was not in a good mood. An hour earlier, I'd been sitting on the front steps of the tiny airport terminal in La Ceiba, contemplating how to find the hospital, when a small blue pickup truck raced up the driveway and came to a skidding, sideways stop. From out of the passenger seat leapt my brother. He was wearing a straw hat and had a sheathed machete dangling from one hip, and as he nimbly loped up the steps toward me, I couldn't help but notice that he still had both his feet. As it turned out, Jon had sent his fateful postcard nearly a month earlier, and, with the aid of penicillin injections, his foot was now fine.
"So why the hell didn't you call to say you were okay?" I asked.
"Well, I thought about it, but…" Jon shrugged lamely. After about a three-second pose of remorse, he grinned and gave a dismissive little backward flip of his hand – a new gesture. "Ah well," he said, "c'est la vie. Now that you're here, we'll just make the best of it. Come on, let's go into town."
I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter; the plane that had brought me had just taken off for the return to Miami, and there wouldn't be another one for two days. Angrily grabbing my backpack, I followed Jon down to the pickup and climbed in for the ride to La Ceiba and the Paris bar.
Our conversation so far had been desulatory, with lots of long silences and me staring fixedly out the window. Despite my bad mood, I was struck by how much my brother's appearance had changed in the six months since I'd last seen him: He was deeply tanned and muscular beneath his white t-shirt, and his blond hair had turned even blonder in the tropics. With his machete and his battered straw hat tilted to a rakish angle, he seemed like some Hollywood prototype of a jungle explorer. I fell to studying the machete, hanging from his belt to brush the floor.
"So, what's with the knife?" I asked.
He drew the machete, handed it to me by the black plastic handle. "Whacking things. Down here, you've always got to whack something."
It felt good, heavy, in the hand. The blade was nearly three feet long and razor sharp. I tried a couple of short wrist-flick swings in the air before giving it back.
"You know," Jon said, sliding the machete into its sheath, "now that you're here, you should stay awhile. My job just ended, and we can knock around, have some fun."
Beyond the dirty plate-glass window was La Ceiba's main square, a bedraggled little plaza with some rusting statue in the middle. I hadn't seen anything in Honduras so far that resembled fun. "Maybe you've forgotten," I said, "but we don't really like each other."
He seemed surprised by this. "I always thought we got along pretty well. Oh, sure, we had our little spats every once in a while, but all brothers go through that. It's not like I gave you any permanent scars or anything."
I leaned over the table, pointed to the hairless strip across my right eyebrow where Jon had hit it with a rock ten years before. Throughout growing up, I'd been rather self-conscious about the scar, a self-conscious Jon had done his best to promote by constantly referring to it as "the strip." He squinted to see where I was pointing. "Oh Christ," he said, "are you still on about 'the strip' I apologized for that years ago." He sat back in disgust, motioned to the waitress for two more beers. I returned to staring out the window.
"So how are things in New Orleans?" Jon asked after a while.
A hard question to answer. Our family had disintegrated exactly two years earlier. My father had taken me out of school, and we'd spent a year traveling together across Europe and the Middle East, but then he'd left me in New Orleans with my mother and taken to the road again. I'd spent the next six months there plotting my escape: hitchhiking to wherever my father might be, heading to the Yukon to pan for gold with some Scottish guy I'd met on a ship crossing the Atlantic. It had only been very recently that I'd tried to adjust and settle into a normal high school existence. At the Paris bar, I told Jon only about that part – my friends, soccer, girls I was interested in – but I could tell he wasn't buying it.
"It's not going to work, you know. Fitting in, becoming an American – it's not going to work. We started too late to belong anywhere. The only thing we'll ever belong to is this family, each other."
He looked out the window, his eyes darting over the plaza. It was late afternoon, and the streets of La Ceiba were gradually coming back to life, couples strolling through the plaza, lottery-ticket sellers calling for customers in strange, bullfrog voices.
"And we're always going to end up like this."
I imagine that everyone's childhood, no matter how unconvential or exotic, seems absolutely normal while it's being lived. By the time I arrived in Honduras, I was only beginning to comprehend the downside of how we had grown up, the hidden cost that comes with not being from anywhere in particular. Jon, it had seemed, had figured it out a little bit sooner. In the years ahead, we would both be caught up in a seemingly endless cycle of trying to fit in, failing, moving on. In a funny way, I think we both drew certain comfort in the other's inability to settle down – proof that there was at least one more misfit in the family.
At least initially, it appeared that I made a better go of things. By force of will, I actually managed to stick it out through high school and, pushing off college to some indistinct future, took a job with the federal government in 2001. By my nineteenth birthday, I was a full-fledged civil servant inching my way up the bureaucratic ladder, living with my fiancée in a nice Washington D.C. apartment. Jon, by contrast, continued his errant ways. Having dropped out of school at seventeen, he talked his way into Tulane University for a couple of quarters, but then signed on as an instructor with some high-school-at-sea schooner and jumped ship in South America. When I next saw him, he was passing through Washington on his way to Nunivak Island off Alaska to make a fortune collecting musk-ox wool, and I could tell he viewed my well-ordered, conventional life with a mix of envy and reproach. When that enterprise failed – it seemed the musk ox were a lot quicker than he was – he headed back down to South America.
By 2002, though, our roles had come full circle. That winter, Jon moved to Washington with his Peruvian wife to take a cub-reporter job, wore a tie, and went to an office every day. By then, I had long since quit my engagement and my government job to spend two years drifting around the country while writing a bad novel. I was rootless, unmoored, so the day after Jon moved to Washington, so did I, becoming a bartender in Georgetown. Jon would occasionally come by to sit at my bar. It was a weird turn of events; now he was the one with the stable home life and a real job, while I was the Ignatius Reilly, the one the family worried about.
But I'd always been a bit suspicious of this new and improved Jon, and when he stopped by my bar one afternoon after work, his mask finally slipped. After staring darkly out at the shoppers on Wisconsin Avenue, he suddenly pointed to my tie, pointed to his own.
"Look at us," he said with disgust. "Look at what we've become." He violently wrenched off his tie and slapped it on the bar: "This is not the way we're supposed to live."
Most people probably wouldn't have understood the source of his discontent, but I did. One thing our upbringing had bestowed upon us was a powerful sense of entitlement, a belief that we did not have to live by the rules – college, careers – of most everyone else.
Jon's solution was to head off for the civil wars of Central America. Mine was a five month ramble across Europe and then to the free-fire zone of Lebanon. For both of us, these were our first experiences in war zones, and in them we saw a way to have the lives we wanted, that we were supposed to have. We would be writers, together and apart, exploring the dark corners of the earth.
The Mosquito Coast, man – think of it!" I had already been light-headed when we left the Paris, but now I could barely focus on the small, tattered map of Honduras that Jon spread on the table of the dockside bar. He kept jabbing his finger at the top right corner, a vast stretch of green broken only by the spindly blue lines of rivers, the names of a few towns, and, across its breadth, the single word Mosquitia.
"The last great jungle in Central America," my brother went on. "No roads, no telephones. People have gone in there and never been heard from again. We have to go!"
Our stroll to the La Ceiba docks had seemed regular at first, but I soon discerned a pattern to the people Jon was engaging in conversation: sailors coming off boats, the captains up in the pilothouses. There'd been at least a half dozen of these little chats before we came to El Platanero, a crude wooden coastal hauler of about thirty feet. Upon learning that it was leaving that very night for Brewers Lagoon, a town in the middle of the Mosquito Coast, Jon had grabbed hold of my arm, gazed at the string of ramshackle bars lining the waterfront, and marched me in their direction.
Now, with more beers before us, he was pulling out all the stops to convince me that sailing off on El Platanero was not just a good idea, but a kind of destiny. "So we get to Brewers," he said, "take a steamer upriver until we hit this highway, take a bus over to the capital, and then fly back to New Orleans. We're talking a week – ten days tops." He looked to me. "Whaddya say?"
This was a pattern that had been established over our lifetimes. Jon was the confident one who never saw obstacles until he came to them. I was the doubter, the questioner – and in his breezy imagining of our path through the Mosquitia, there was a lot to question. It was interesting, for example, how the forty-mile path out of the jungle had become a "highway" in Jon's telling, when the map indicated that a black dotted line meant "foot trail."
But for some reason – perhaps it was the cozy somnolence of the tropics, perhaps it was all that beer – I found I was reluctant to assume my traditional role. I was tired of being the cautious one.
And maybe something more. Sitting in the bar on the La Ceiba docks, I realized Jon was trying to establish a bond between us that had never existed before. I thought back to what he had said at the Paris, that all we would ever belong to was the family, each other. I wasn't convinced this was true, but on this evening it suddenly seemed a risky thing to chance.
"Okay," I said. "Let's do it."
With a great grin, Jon ordered more beers, then rose from the table and announced that he had to run a few errands. In his absence, I slid the map over and fell to staring at the great green void of the Mosquitia. I was in a happy mood, a happiness that deepened the longer I studied the map and fully grasped what a remarkably bad idea this was. When Jon returned, he was carrying a long, narrow object wrapped in newspaper – a present, he explained. I tore off the paper. It was a machete in a carved-leather sheath, some goofy tassels hanging off the bottom. I slid it out, tested its feel in my hand.
"I also let Mom and Dad know there's been a change of plans," he said, taking a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket. It was a copy of a telex message. Jon had clearly inherited our father's telex-writing style, if not his brevity:
Beyond the condescending tone, I was irked by how this had suddenly become my idea.
"Come on," my brother said, and shrugged. "You're the sensible one. If they thought I was behind it, they'd just worry."
Jon came slowly down the rotting wooden dock at Brewers Lagoon, rubbing the back of his neck and staring at the ground as if stupefied. This was a gesture I recognized, and it had a twofold meaning. First, something was amiss. Second, it was not Jon's fault in any way; whatever misfortune had befallen us was completely unavoidable, a simple twist of fate.
"Well," he said, "it appears there might be a problem."
Indeed. Rather than the constant flow of traffic up the Patuca that Jon had envisioned, there was precisely one boat, a motorized dugout canoe, that made the run, and it had just left that morning. It wouldn't be back in Brewers for a week, which, funnily enough, was right around the time that El Platanero – now a mere dot at the far end of the vast lagoon – would return.
I looked at the Brewers Lagoon waterfront. It consisted of about two dozen outhouses built on stilts over the mud flats, each reached by its own little gangway, and my main source of entertainment while waiting for Jon had been watching the Brewers residents trooping back and forth to perform their bodily functions.
Jon continued to rub his neck. "I found a room we can stay in for two dollars a night. It's got a couple of hammocks, and the woman will cook for us." He followed my gaze over the sprawl of outhouses. "Anyway, I'm sure there's a lot of interesting things to do around here."
This, too, was in error. Rather, Brewers Lagoon was a collection of rude shanties in mosquito-infested swampland, its torpor broken only by the daily three-o'clock rain. We passed the days examining ourselves for ticks and reading – then rereading – the paperback novels we had brought. When we heard that the dugout canoe was finally back in town, I practically cried tears of gratitude.
It was a surprisingly long boat, with an outboard motor in back and room for four or five passengers in its hollowed hull. We set off early in the morning, the two boatmen slowly poling their way through the dense jungle marshes at the far end of the lagoon, charting a course through the maze of water hyacinths and mangrove trees. After a couple of hours, the trees and vines suddenly separated, and before us was the wide, muddy expanse of the Patuca. The captain fired up the outboard and we began to race up the brown, barely moving river.
I watched the riverbanks as we passed. There were no towns, no other boats on the river, but every once in a while I glimpsed a crude wooden shack amid the jungle, a wisp of wood smoke above the trees.
"Miskito Indians," Jon said. "They're the only ones who live in here."
Our destination that first day was the trading town of Awas. According to Jon's interpretation of the map, it was a fairly large town and probably the best place to cash some traveler's checks and stock up on supplies before continuing our journey upriver to the jungle "highway." Of course, it wasn't as if we'd made any actual inquiries in this regard.
By late afternoon, the Patuca had narrowed to just fifty or sixty feet across, and it had been a very long time since we'd seen any signs of settlement. At last, we rounded a bend in the river, and there on the riverbank before us were several Moskito women washing clothes, a couple of crude rafts hauled up onto the mud. The captain killed the outboard as we coasted toward the shore.
"Awas," he announced.
"I guess the commercial center is inland," Jon said, trying to sound confident.
For some time, we stood on the Awas riverbank, unable to finally grasp our predicament, a source of amusement for the Moskito women washing clothes on the river rocks. The "commercial center" of Awas, we had quickly discovered, consisted of a single-trading post store, a tiny wooden hut built on stilts at the edge of town. What's more, the river above Awas was studded with rapids, so no boats went any farther. The two little rafts pulled up on the riverbank had been built by upland Miskitos to bring their goods to the Awas trading post and then abandoned, their builders walking home through the jungle.
At first, all this seemed a mere logistical glitch to Jon – his new idea was to emulate the Indians and trek overland – but there was now a practical problem standing in the way of lunacy: money. Between us, we had about six dollars in Honduran lempiras; all the rest of our money was in traveler's checks, and despite Jon's painstaking tutorial on the workings of international finance, the trading post owner simply stared at the brightly colored slips of paper in confusion. Finally accepting that we had no choice but to take the dugout back to Brewers, we returned to the riverbank, only to learn the boat had left fifteen minutes before.
"But don't worry," an old man said upon seeing us mad. "It should be back in a few days – two weeks at most."
I tried to imagine spending that much time waiting in Awas, cadging off the Miskitos for food and place to stay. Given the poverty of the place, and our own stupidity in getting stranded, that seemed indecent, the shame of those long, slow days intolerable. Then my gaze fell on the rafts. They were clearly built for short-term use, rough cut balsa logs lashed together with jungle vines. One sported a cute little shed, about three feet wide and four feet deep, with its own thatched roof, like a miniature house. The beginning of an idea came to me.
Considering that we had made the trip up to Awas in six or seven hours, I estimated that we were about ninety miles from Brewers; without a motor, drifting along on the Patuca's scant current, our return could take days. I tried to envision a voyage down the river, what dangers might lie along the way, how we would ever know where to turn into the mangrove swamp before we reached the open sea, whether the raft would even hold together that long.
I think most of all, I wanted to impress Jon. So far on this journey, we had played out our traditional roles: he the creator of plans, the pursuer of adventure, me the cautious one, the follower. I think I wanted to show him, for the first time, that I, too, could come up with truly bad ideas.
I pointed to the raft with the miniature hut. "Let's float down."
For both Jon and myself, getting out of tight spots has always been largely a matter of dumb luck. Of course, that's not quite the way we see it; before going to report on a war, for example, we can spend weeks trying to calculate the odds of something bad happening. It's an odd exercise – superstition, really – because the chief characteristic of such places is that their hazards can't be calculated, and all is random. But underlying our superstitions is something a bit more complex, something rooted in our experience in the Mosquitia and reinforced by our subsequent travels together: the belief that, so long as we are together, nothing bad can happen to us.
In the late 1990's, Jon and I teamed up to write a book about oral histories of modern war. For two years we investigated death squads in Central America and Nazi war criminals living in the United States and Europe, tracking their trails of murder around the globe. After that, we spent a year going from one battlefield to the next across five continents. The journey was exciting, it felt important, but it also came at a high personal cost: for Jon, his marriage; for me, a three year relationship. By the end of that year, we were like an old married couple, keenly attuned to each other's moods and silences, and there was the sense that, in our rootlessness, in our twin predicaments of having no one or nowhere to go back to, we were more joined than ever.
Afterward, we continued on our own: Jon headed out to do a book on guerilla groups worldwide, while I investigated a murderous religious cult in the American Southwest and the underworld of organized crime in Northern Ireland and New York. In phone calls from Belfast and Burma, we kept each other posted on our progress, our setbacks, and, in the cryptic, half-spoken way we had cultivated, our close calls. And there was no getting around the fact that for the both of us, these incidents were becoming more frequent. In Afghanistan, the Taliban fired a missile on Jon's jeep, missing it by a few yards. In Burma, he scrambled across a battlefield to interview a shell-shocked guerilla commander who refused to leave a position that was about to be overrun by government troops. In one four-day span in Omagh, I was confronted by roving gangs from both sides and barely managed to negotiate my way out. By the time of our get-together in Brooklyn this past February, we had probably been to twenty-five wars between us and, if I truly had nine lives, I calculated I'd now pissed away six of them. Now, when I thought back to that trip in the Mosquitia, our innocence and incompetence there, the simplicity of the hazards we faced, it was with a kind of longing.
While I spread banana leaves over the raft floor, Jon went back to the trading post with our last twenty lempiras to buy food – "provisions," he insisted on calling them("Only the bare essentials, Lloyd!) – for the journey. He returned with two plastic bags and proudly displayed the contents: three bottles of Colonial rum, one tiny can of Vienna sausages, a kilo of beans, and another of cornmeal. He noticed me wincing.
"What? Do you think you could've done better?"
"No, it's fine," I said. "I just figured you'd get things we could actually eat." I thought of explaining to him that beans and cornmeal had to be cooked, but decided against it; after all, we were going to be stuck together on this raft for the next two or three days, so harmony was going to be pretty essential.
Evidently, word had spread through the Awas of the folly being planned down on the riverbank, so that by the time we poled away, a good two hundred Moskitos had gathered on the bluff to see us off. It occurred to me that we were probably one of the strangest sights they had ever seen in their televisionless lives, these two white teenagers showing up one day, having journeyed all the way up from the coast just to take one of their rafts and float back down again. They waved good-bye to us as if we were sailing off into the abyss, and I suppose, from their perspective, we were.
It was a three-day voyage, endless hours of imperceptible progress along great looping bends, nothing but the sky and the brown water and the dark jungle around us. The Vienna sausages lasted only that first night, the rum not much longer, and after that we were kept alive with the help of the few Miskitos who lived along the river. In the strange way that news travels in the jungle, the sticks and the bamboo rudder with which to steer, threw us his hand-carved oar as we passed. Others paddled out in their dugouts to give us tortillas or motioned us ashore to share a meal of beans and grilled monkey. These encounters were infrequent, though; there were no other boats on the river, no real settlements along the way. Leery of what animals might lurk along the banks, we poled through the nights, dozing in shifts in the little hut.
Along with the tedium were moments of crisis. On the first day, a sudden burst of wind tore the thatched roof off the hut and squarely into me, knocking me into the water; for what seemed a very long time, I struggled to free myself from the vines pulling me down into the murk. A few hours later, a low-hanging branch got caught on our rudder housing and sheared it away. And throughout was the slow-motion crisis we could do nothing about, the knowledge that we were gradually sinking, the balsa logs becoming steadily more saturated, the brown water sloshing ever higher.
But there was a moment, late in the afternoon on the second day, that stood out. Rounding a bend in the Patuca, we saw a patch of whitewater ahead and amidst it, a newly fallen tree, its leaves still green, stretched across nearly to the far shore. We'd already been snared by at least a half dozen fallen trees and expended a lot of energy getting free, but this time, with an actual current pushing us, getting out might be impossible. Excited to finally have something to do, Jon and I got to our feet, took up our long poles, and began levering off the river bottom, steering toward a narrow passage the tree had left. We were doing well, nearly in position, when I felt a shudder pass through the raft, heard a small splash behind me. I turned, and for a moment I couldn't make sense of what I saw. On the far side of the raft, Jon was sitting, his left leg stretched out before him; he was using his arms to hoist himself up a few inches, then back down, as if performing some odd exercise.
"What the hell are you doing?"
He looked at me then, and I saw that his face was pale. "I'm stuck."
I hurried over. The spread of banana leaves had obscured a narrow gap between the two of the balsa logs. Jon's right leg had found the gap and gone through; it was now wedged in tight, clamped just above the knee. I glanced downriver. We were almost to the rapids. "You've got to get out," I said pointlessly.
Jon tried again, his arms trembling with exertion, pulling so hard that the skin around his knee came off in a broad swoop. The logs held him fast.
I looked downstream again and now saw that the fallen tree didn't end where had thought, but rather extended on across the river just beneath the surface; the raft would clear it, but Jon's pinioned leg wouldn't.
"You've fucking got to get out," I shouted.
"I can't!" he yelled back, still trying, his knee now covered with blood.
I had one of those moments in which the mind seems to skip over to a different plane, one that is less about conscious thought than simple instinctive clarity. I knew exactly what was going to happen if Jon didn't get free. Not the specifics – I didn't know whether the tree was going to break his leg, or slice it open, or take it off completely – but I did know that we were all alone on this river, and I understood the Mosquitia well enough by now to know that once things started to bad out here they just kept getting worse. In the remnants of the shed I spotted my machete. I scrambled over to it, pulled it from its sheath.
The raft consisted of eleven logs lashed together in front and back. Jon had fallen between the fourth and fifth logs on the right side, and I went to the bow and began furiously hacking through the vine roping. We were already in the rapids now, but it took only a few seconds, the last vine producing a snapping sound when it broke. The outer four logs immediately started to part, and Jon swung his leg out and got to his feet. When we scraped over a fallen tree a moment later, the half-separated logs caught on a branch and the force of the current ripped them away. I tried to imagine that force being directed against my brother's leg, and then I didn't want to think about it anymore.
Afterward, the Patuca returned to its usual brown calm, and I poled to keep us out of the shallows while Jon sat and examined his cuts. His leg was red from the knee to the ankle, but I couldn't tell if it was mostly blood or water.
"Just little scrapes, it looks like," he said after a while. He looked up at me. "Quick thinking; thanks."
I shrugged. "Sure."
On that day in February when Jon found the Sudan articles on my coffee table, we had dinner at a little place in my Brooklyn neighborhood. He was leaving in the morning for his home in Spain, and from there would go on to Angola; I probably wouldn't see him again for four or five months.
"So, if you don't go to the Sudan," he asked, "what'll you do?"
"I don't know. Maybe start a micro-nation story."
Jon scowled. "That's such a dumb idea. I can't believe anyone wants that."
I shrugged, tried to mask my smile. For years now, we had maintained a competition of who had been to the most foreign countries, updating our lists whenever we got together. Jon had always managed to stay about six countries ahead, and even though my total was now in the thirties, his was in the forties, and Angola would give him one more. To keep his gloating to a minimum, I'd recently told him that a magazine wanted me to do a comprehensive report on micro-nations around the world, a project that not only would mean traveling throughout the South Pacific and the Caribbean, but would add another thirty or so countries to my list. Jon found this prospect so disturbing that he now tended to avoid the country competition topic altogether. On that night, I saw no reason telling him it was a joke.
Over the course of the evening, we eventually ended up talking about that summer in Honduras. "Can you believe it's almost been ten years?" Jon said. He shook his head. "Jesus, we were such idiots."
We had, of course, eventually made it back to Brewers Lagoon, and the raft trip proved to be only the first of our misadventures as we wandered through Central America that summer. A few weeks later, there was a near knife fight in a bar in El Salvador when Jon decided that a group of four campesinos were disrespecting us and drew out his machete; I quickly followed suit, but so did the campesinos, and when it occurred to us that we were about to be sliced to pieces, we backed out of the bar like characters in a spaghetti western movie. Then there was the volcano in Guatemala that had begun erupting so violently that the area had been evacuated – reason enough, in Jon's opinion, for us to climb to the rim for a closer look. When the vapor cloud suddenly shifted direction and came over us, the sulfur dioxide knocked me out, and Jon had to drag me to safety. Thirteen weeks later – or about twelve and a half weeks after I'd originally planned to get back to New Orleans – we turned up, filthy and penniless, at our grandmother's house in California. After that came our years of wandering, of trying to settle into some place or some job and giving up, of heading off to the wars of the world.
But whatever else was drawing us to this life – the adrenaline rush of danger, morbid curiosity, some poorly conceived notions of the power of journalism – I'd come to suspect that at least part of it was a desire to recapture the sensation we'd had floating down the Patuca, that peculiar mix of excitement and dread we'd felt, the sheer exuberant, innocent naivete of it all. The problem was, we were no longer innocent or naïve. We'd been scared – and scarred – by what we'd seen out there. We didn't trust in dumb luck anymore. My brother had remarried, he had a kid now, and even though he was away from his family a great deal, he had a compelling reason to get home, to play it safer. For me, it was maybe more cerebal and selfish. I had a number of snapshot images floating around in my head from places I'd been, unpleasant ones, and I wasn't sure how many more I could or should take.
In the Brooklyn restaurant, Jon brought the conversation back to my talk of returning to the Sudan. "Look," he said, "you've had a good run – we both have – but our luck can't hold forever. It's already turned, don't you think?"
I stared at him. I remembered my first time in the Sudan, the tennis ball in Madrid. I nodded.
"So don't go back," Jon said.
So I didn't.
A few days later, after Jon and I had left for Spain and Angola, I found myself pondering why I had so willingly accepted his advice. I suddenly realized that part of the reason was rooted in the Mosquitia, in my most distinct memory of that voyage down the Patuca. It was from our second night on the raft, maybe three or four in the morning, during my turn as captain.
For two hours, a lone bat had been my companion, endlessly flitting within inches of my head, and from the surrounding blackness came the sounds of birds, the light rustle of wind in the trees. It was both frightening and thrilling to be on that river in the darkness, and I looked down to see Jon sleeping in the remnants of our little wind-shattered hut. His bare legs were stretched over the logs, and in the faint moonlight I saw scrapes of dried blood around his right knee.
What would he have done without me? I thought. He would die out here without me.
For the first time I saw that my brother was just as lost and helpless and alone as I was on that black river, and that for as long as I stood at the helm and let him sleep, I was his only protector. And in a short time, whenever I imagined that my three hour shift was up – because, of course, we didn't have a watch either – I would wake him and we would switch places, and then it would be my turn to lie down and sleep on this slow-sinking raft somewhere in the jungle, his turn to stand over me, to carry me down the river.
NP: Andrew Bird "The Giant of Illinois" "A Breaks B" "Lull"


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Interview Motion Graphics Designer Andy Evans
Currently based in London working as a Junior Designer at Red Bee Media, Andy Evans is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University Graphic Design (Motion Graphics.) He won Best Stand Winner in 2013 for Sheffield Hallam University at D&AD New Blood.
Andy Evans – MMXIV Showreel from Andy Evans on Vimeo.
What were your first creative influences growing up? Who inspires you today?
I've always been into drawing since I was very young. This progressed into creating cartoon characters and making small cartoon strips. I think the silly amount of hours watching 90s kids shows on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network emphasised my passion in getting creative.
Fraser Davidson is someone who always comes to the top of my mind who is inspirational. I'm a huge fan of his work and his attention to detail in his animation pieces are superb.
How did you find your experience in exhibiting at D&AD New Blood? What lessons did you take away from it?
I found my experience very interesting as a whole, I didn't know what to expect to first but it was great to see the standard of design from students nationally all under one roof. With fellow graduates and industry walking through the doors and browsing the work, it felt like a very rewarding place to be, and this is how I landed my first job.
Lessons to take away from it is to talk to everyone and be approachable. Everyone is in the same boat and just be yourself and be confident in your work. You never know who you could be talking to!
Did you enjoy studying and working at Sheffield Hallam University? Is it a course and environment you would recommend?
I loved my 3 years in Sheffield. It is a beautiful city with a wonderful student atmosphere. The course was great as it gave you a chance to explore a number of different specialisms under the graphic design umbrella before choosing on one to focus on. I went through from Advertising, to general graphic design before finally specialising in motion graphics within my final 6 months of university. Working with the guys at the student union really helped me decide this was definitely the route to go down.
You're now working at Red Bee Media, how did that role come about?
One of the design directors of the company was at our stand and had a particular interest in the motion graphic work. They saw my work, liked it, and said they were looking for new graduates to join their team and I was offered an interview after I sent them some more work after the exhibition. The rest is history.
What has been the most nervous point since starting the job? First Day or Presenting work to big clients?
Such a good question! I was more excited than nervous on my first day, but yes I've had to showcase my work to around 50 odd people before which has been very nerve-racking!
Which projects have you enjoyed the most whilst working there?
One of my favourites is the animation piece I done for the Eden Shorts competition for UKTV's Eden Channel. This was the first project where I was able to successfully pitch a style I love to the clients and them getting very excited from showing them work in progress shots. It was a great feeling to have complete free reign on the look and style and for it to be well received by everyone at the company.
Eden Shorts Competition from Andy Evans on Vimeo.
Was it a daunting experience working for bigger clients like Eden?
Considering how much of a high profile the job was, it was actually not daunting as you may think! The Eden team is a very small number of people and we worked very closely together to ensure all of their criteria was met as well as going beyond that.
Where do you see yourself heading in the next 3-5 years?
Such a tricky question! I want to continue my strengths in motion and become a well respected one in the industry. Photography is something I do in spare time and I wish to push that further and see if I can form an interesting relationship between motion graphics and photography.
What advice would you offer to third year students who are heading into their final year, What do you think they should prepare for the most for next summer?
I think the most important thing is to have your own website having projects you are most proud of. I also think it's important to document your process as when it comes to the interview, you can show them that extra content they may not of seen when browsing you stuff online.
Also, during the summer if you can, work on a personal project and set yourself a deadline. This is a great stepping stone into the industry as deadlines are always a constant battle. It's good to show proof that you can work under pressure while generating work you can be proud of.
What is about photography that inspires you? What camera are you using at the moment?
The amount of creativity and flexibility that comes from photography is something that has always inspired me. I do enjoy technology and to think we can capture photos from mobile phones to sharing all over the world in a matter of seconds is a huge feat and something we all take for granted! I currently use my Canon 550D but also using my Galaxy S5 phone even more with the VCSO camera app.
Who are your favourite people to follow on twitter?
@Beeple is a great person to follow. His daily 3D renders of his work and his videos on his vimeo page are always so inspiring.
@Nickvegas from Greyscalegorilla. A great source of knowledge and inspiration in the 3D world.
@Seth_Eckert. Another fantastic animator I look up to who creates beautiful vector animations.
Away from working how do you like to relax and spend your time?
I like to spend my time exploring London. As it's now just been over a year since I moved here, I still feel like there's so much to explore and do. I tend to avoid the standard tourist hotspots as everyone does that. I like discovering unknown, sometimes unappreciated areas in London to get a reflection and feel of how incredibly diverse and unique this city really is.
Andy Evans – Animation Showreel 2013 from Andy Evans on Vimeo.


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Since Itzhak Perlman opened the theatre in November 2007, over 100 of the finest artists in the world have graced our stages and more than 419,000 people have visited the Sandler Center for these incredible performances, events and more. The Sandler Center is recognized as one of the premier venues in the United States, and we could not have done it without your support.
Bringing world-class acts to our venue is an expensive proposition. One way to offset these costs is to become a Sandler Center Member. Membership dollars allow the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts to keep the creative spirit of Hampton Roads alive through a wide range of performances and programs that promote education, encourage intercultural exchange and support the local economy.
Your support of the Sandler Center truly is a reinvestment into the community at large and is fully tax-deductible as allowed by law.
Your membership not only gives you some fantastic perks, but your membership dollars go directly back to the community. That's right, your philanthropic support is directly invested right back in your LOCAL community. The Sandler Center Foundation provides funding every year to thousands of students from Title I schools across Hampton Roads to see an educational matinee at the Sandler Center through our ACCESS the ARTS program. The Foundation also provides tickets to area teachers, first responders and our local military through the Local Heroes program.
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