Yep, I’m still doing my one thing per day and lots of days, it’s about writing Objective C for the app I’m building.

I wrestled with this problem for a stupid number of hours so hopefully my solution can help someone else. iOS SDK 6.1, by the way.

The structure of the problem:

• Navigation Controller has as its root controller a…
  • PageViewController, which displays an…
    • array of custom View Controllers, the first one being a different type of custom View Controller

I wanted to set the title of the Navigation Controller in the viewDidLoad or viewDidAppear methods inside each type of View Controller.

Solution:

• I had neglected to call the addChildViewController and the didMoveToParentViewController methods for both the navigation controller and the view controllers when they are created, as detailed in Matt Neuburg’s Programming iOS 6′s explanation of Container View Controllers and also vaguely referenced in Apple’s documentation
• Then, I merely needed to call [[self parentViewController] navigationItem] to get a pointer to the navigation item within each View Controller’s viewDidAppear methods. (after trying every single permutation of [super navigationController], [self presentingViewController], etc)

Face;desk.

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Inspired by Karol’s recent One Thing Self Improvement structure essay, I’ve decided to adopt it to help me learn iOS development. Each morning I’ll wake up and pick my One Thing, the thing that I focus on getting done that day above all else. As Karol says, it could be a quick thing or something that would take several hours. It’s worth it to note that I’m starting from the basic programming I learned from the undergrad HCI classes at Carnegie Mellon and various hacky skills picked up since then, an HTML/CSS/finished-the-Codeacademy-javascript-tutorials sort of place.

I’m texting a close friend every morning with my One Thing. I’m not a huge fan of the forced accountability technique that encourages you to tell your friends what! you! are! totally! going! to do! but this way feels pretty lightweight and friendly. And I’m trying to get him to do the One Thing too. Sshhh.

Why now? Well, yesterday was a day I’ve been waiting for for a long time. After a lot of serious thought, I decided to leave my position with the social media company for what I feel are several excellent reasons (which may deserve their own post) but chiefly a culture and design process mismatch. Now I am a free woman, with savings in the bank, ready to strike out on my own. And learn things!

Today my one thing is to complete my first iOS app creation tutorial. Hello world!

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What? Where am I? How did I get on this blog?

Amazon ate my life. But it was fun! The people were great. But I chose to leave for other adventures and now I’m designing for a niche social network that has about a million users. It’ll be cool. And I work from home!

What happened between June and now?

I went to Critical Massive, Seattle’s regional Burning Man event and it was amazing. I met so many wonderful nice people. I played and drank and danced and cuddled and felt the most comfortably social I ever have in a crowd. The best part? I keep seeing the same people again at events! Huge boost to meeting friends in town, which is good because…

Sometime in there I ended my year+ Seattle relationship. And we stayed friends. We stayed friends AND roommates as it happens. And then he started dating a girl who is way better for him than I was and it’s a very good situation. I’m sad I don’t get as many hugs, but then I made up for lost time by jumping into dating again very happily. And enthusiastically.

I went to Burning Man even though I didn’t think I could get time off from work (I asked really nicely) and I didn’t have any time at all to make art or gifts (next year). It was beautiful. It was crazy. I only had 3 days to pack and prepare. Just my style.

All that time at Amazon I was biking 6 miles to work (and back again) as many times per week as I could. Which was a good thing because a boy I’d met at Critical asked me if I wanted to bike 200 miles to Pacific Fire Gathering with him. With 3 days to plan. Again! Just my style. And then I bought crotch-padded spandex shorts. And was very grateful for them.

We fell in goofy, mushy wuv and ended up biking a total of 400 miles down the Oregon coast past Tillamook, up over into the Mount Hood national forest to Breitenbush hot springs, and then down into the incomparable sexy bicyclist city of Portland. We lit things on fire and camped and at at roadside BBQ shacks and went to a rave. I learned to hit myself less in the head with my poi.

My thigh muscles got huge and crazy in the process.

Then I spent 2 weeks in Vancouver, BC starting my new job (they’re based up there). Sadly, I was kind of exhausted. And homesick. And it was Canadian thanksgiving.

But my college friend Max was spontaneously in town! We drank gin out of tea pot.

And then the weather broke and rain descended on the northwest, forever.

And I went back to Seattle.

But then I helped organize a silly bike ride. It was sunny and then it hailed on us and then it was sunny again! We got soaked.

Now I’m having an amazing but tiring time trying to balance work and dating and trying to get a few nights a week to myself.

And apparently now I have to sew Halloween costumes? The hell!

Life is really good.

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Between that and my startup work, this means that suddenly I’m very busy… like, all hours of the day busy. Not a bad thing. AND I get to dig myself out of the credit card debt hole I’ve been in for more than a year, which is especially amazingly wonderful and I get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever I remember that I’m being paid for the work I do. Choirs of butterflies singing, sparkles and unicorns. So much so that, with all we still hear about the unemployed, it makes me think about a job being just as much about being accepted as it is about being paid. I know for me recently, it’s been about both in equal measures.

I’ve been wanting to post more about design and the tech world and, if I can get a few minutes to spare, I bet I’ll be plenty inspired to talk about how I’m encountering an extended period of full-time work in the industry again.

In the meantime, I found this great essay by Christina Wodtke giving advice to new designers in which she says: consulting will make you a fox, and in-house will make you a hedgehog. And you should do them in that order. I completely agree. I feel so lucky that I, by complete accident, have followed this career path (more or less, kicking and screaming) and found it to be serving me really, really well.

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To paraphrase Clay Shirky, age plus paying attention equals knowing stuff. So I thought this post was going to be about stuff I know. I had some really profound thoughts while riding my scooter to a meeting and boy, they were awesome. I was like, that’s good, I’m totally gonna write that on the blog. But I’m not going to. Because I forgot them. Oops.

I also like how I wrote in my canary post about how I was going to make this a personal blog and then was like, HA, TOTAL BLOG SILENCE. Silence is very personal to me.

Today I was remembering a thing from a book about happiness, probably Stumbling on Happiness, that the pillars of English happiness (according to a British lady) are dogs and gardens. Does that mean Seattle is very British, with our tons of dogs and gardens? Or is Seattle just very European in general? Nah, that can’t be right. All our businesses are open on Sundays and we have rampant workaholics running around, or, rather, sitting at their desks forever. Well, besides that, Seattle is really quite European. Liberal and safe and very rule-abiding. Livable, as they say.

Seattle doesn’t toot its own horn much. Do you know what Seattle is like? What comes to mind? ……. Rain! You thought rain, right? Rainy rain raining Seattle. That’s actually a myth. That’s Seattle’s stealth identity. Lots of jokes here about how we pretend the weather’s really shitty so the tourists don’t visit. City identities are pervasive. And probably wrong. For instance, the sun is shining in Seattle right now until November. That’s right, we’re so far north we don’t have night. #fuckyeahseattle

The thing is, we watch TV and movies and read so much that it’s easy to forget we haven’t actually experienced something. We just have an idea of what it is. A really strong idea that will color all our thoughts and even actual experience of the thing.

Listening to a friend rant about New Orleans last year, when I was living there and hating it but trying not to, he said something really interesting. Bitter that original art was so hard to fund or sell, that the food was expensive and greasy and bad, that the government was corrupt and the people were racist, he said that New Orleans was not a city. New Orleans was a brand. And it totally is. New Orleans toots its horn so loud that you’ll find “New Orleans” music and food in cities all over the world. The sad part is that that food and music is probably a lot better than you’ll find in New Orleans itself. I’ll provide a translation. Whenever you hear someone say that New Orleans is “magical”, just insert “drunk”. Omigosh, I was there for a week and it was so magical. We saw a Jazz funeral, and all these beautiful ruined houses, and it made me feel so magical. Then I threw up on my dress.

I didn’t know it at the time but I moved to San Francisco in 2007 because of its brand. I didn’t want an artsy, rebellious, weird place. I wanted the artsy rebellious weird place. Joke was on me, because San Francisco is none of those things. San Francisco is currently the rich, frenetic, confident place with pressure to be even richer, expensive and less weird, with an artsy underground fueled almost entirely by its idea of itself as an artsy city (see: How Weird Street Fair, Folsom Fair, Bay to Breakers) and scrappy, tattooed, weird Oakland. …Oakland, my true love. I would live there again. After New Orleans it doesn’t seem nearly as dangerous! Ha ha ha.

There’s one thing I miss about San Francisco and it’s that confidence. I’ve been hunting freelance projects in Seattle for more than a year now and I’ve talked to a fair amount of designers. And designers and design firms in Seattle, bless their hearts, reveal their insecurities by being a bit too stiff, a bit too formal, a bit too focused on quantitative research. They’re saying, we are totally relevant! We can prove it with numbers! Please believe us. I also see this with design firms in, like, Louisville. Or Arizona. Why are these designers insecure? Do they have to be that way to prove themselves to companies still figuring out why design matters (an attitude I have no patience with, come on people, it’s 2012 and Apple is eating your lunch, dinner and late night snack). Do I just know more late-career designers in San Francisco? Does San Francisco have such a pervasive culture of design that designeres don’t have to prove their work is crucial, essential, and desirable? Probably. Does San Francisco have a brand of iron-hard California-cool, creative-city-suave? Definitely.

What’s that? What do I think of the culture in Silicon Valley? Mmm …… ehhhhh. That’s what.

Ok, ok. I think you can trace the San Francisco “frenetic” and “expensive” culture to a pipeline leaking a steady stream of navel-gazing ADD social buzzwords 38.9 miles south to the developers and venture cowboys of Mountain View. That’s what.

Anyways, I do think a lot about the essential spirits of cities. I think everyone has their city soulmate. You just have to find it.

That was a website idea I had a long time ago: a place to find your city soulmate. For all those people posting on CouchSurfing and city-data.com: “What’s it like to live in ___?” and poring through “Top 10 Cities for ___” lists like I have so many, many times. I still love the City Soulmate idea but it’s currently in a bucket I was forced to make for myself called Good Ideas I Don’t Actually Want to Devote Years of my Life To. So little time. So much ADD!

But actually, if you’re into City Soulmates too, hit me up. We’ll totally own it. See that confidence? I’m a designer.

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Seattle is so cool, we have a farmer’s market on a boat. This post is in honor of the season and my discovery of the FarmBoat Floating Market held on an historic steamship in South Lake Union.

It’s an exciting time around Seattle right now; the seasonal farmer’s markets are starting to open up again. You can spot them by the crowds of strolling people and tall orange and purple banners at the end of closed-off streets in nearly every neighborhood of the city. Of course there are always the year-round markets on Saturdays and Sundays, but when you run out of fresh greens on Tuesday those are not so much help. In the summer with a bit of a flexible daytime schedule you can visit a farmer’s market every day of the week. Here’s how to find them.

FarmBoat Floating Market
An organization bringing fresh, local food and historic wooden ships together. The South Lake Union market is 11-3pm on Thursdays on a 125 foot steamship from the 1920′s. They also are proposing markets at downtown Seattle’s waterfront and in South Park on other historic vessels.

Neighborhood Farmer’s Market Alliance
Operates 7 markets around seattle, including the Capitol Hill market (which got up and running last month) and my own dearest and closest, the Phinney Market that opens next week on June 1. Their website just got a much-needed design update making it much easier to read the information (woo!).

Puget Sound Fresh
Many, many markets all around Puget sound, including my year-round Sunday favorite, the Ballard Market.

For an uber list of all the land-based markets, visit the Washington State Farmer’s Market Association for maps, opening/closing times, whether they accept credit cards or SNAP benefits (many do), and more contact info.

Now I’m just waiting impatiently for cherry season.

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Confession: I worry about a LOT of stuff besides the garden. Life, work, relationships, the world. Lately, I’ve been worrying myself to tears. But is it worth writing about?

One thing I know is that a good blog is for other people as much as it is for yourself. Other people should get something out of it. So when I was figuring all this stuff out, I read Man Vs Debt and The Art of Non-Conformity and DigginFood. They write guides and tips and how-tos and I, also, want so badly to be useful to people like they are. Their straightforward writing makes personal angst seem so… tacky.

But my sister urges me to read Hipstercrite, and I do. And her writing makes personal angst seem meaningful, relatable. I like her fearlessness talking about sex and dating and angst and flailing around while you’re in you’re twenties. Flailing twenties? I could ALSO write that blog. I’m 27 and have about 10 years practice being a champion flailer. But I’ve kept that angst private. That’s the big deal – if I write it, you can read it, so I’m outed as a emotional being who is possibly bad at life. The horror.

But every artist I’ve admired said that the more intimate their work, the more people respond to it. That deeply intimate work touches people deeply. And I also want to do that.

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

— It Chooses You by Miranda July

But you know what? I thought I was past all this. I thought I had flailed, and earned my PhD of flailing, and now I need not flail or moan or cry anymore. I don’t know why. Things just have been SO much better than they were when I was  internet dating my way through Pittsburgh or unemployed in San Francisco or awkwardly faux-touring my way around Germany. I looked in the mirror one day and saw wrinkles around my eyes and I thought; finally. I’d had my quarter life crisis and now it could be over. Jeez!

But maybe I’ll never be past this “crisis” stage. Maybe as long as I think that my work and relationships should make me happy — something I share with so many people in my generation — I’ll keeping asking myself, periodically, if they do. And when the answer is no, I’ll always be galvanized to do something about it. And when I’ll feel like I can’t, it will always make my heart ache and my eyes burn.

The world is so terribly screwed up these days, it’s hard to feel like I can take any action to make things better. So my inability to “succeed” in my own life becomes a downward spiral of an inability to make anything better, despair with people in power, total distrust of institutions’ abilities to keep us healthy and free. When people freak out about pink slime or carcinogenic sunscreen or Monsanto suing small family farms when the wind cross-pollinates with their GM corn, all I can think is: when did you people trust anything? The default is shit. The only way you get things that aren’t shit is to research, fight, struggle, deal with inconvenience, and half the time make it yourself. And here I am, my only real skills being writing, drawing and designing things on a screen. I can’t even get my own boyfriend to stop ordering shit factory-farmed chicken wings at the hockey rink.

“I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, “Physicist, Purge Thyself“, Chicago Tribune Magazine, 1969

I don’t know about you but I feel like a pretty sick canary myself.

Sometimes I want to make really angry art. Though when I try to put it down to paper, I can’t really get past the theme of “everything is shit”, which is hardly inspiring. I’ve seen what negative art can do. It makes a point but it also pushes people away. So I vowed, long ago, to focus on positive art. To help people imagine better things, because imagining a better future is hard and our brains are bad at it and I want to help. The master of this is Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She writes things about the state of food and farms that could break your heart, but somehow is always so bright about other possibilities. But, hmm, as I write this I realize there’s also the Banksy model. To critique with cleverness that’s biting, but not wholesale condemning. Am I that clever? I think I could be.

So to answer my own question, yes. I think this should be a personal blog. I think I should embrace my role as a canary in a coal mine. And that probably means talking about terrible things from time to time. But I will always try to refocus on the good in the end. And maybe even be clever with it.

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A week ago I wrote about some mysterious squash volunteers I found sprouting in my hoop house. Well, now they’re bigger and growing like weeds. Also…they’re popping up all over the garden. Everywhere I spread compost. Now I think they’re probably seeds from an old zucchini or butternut I threw in the compost heap over the winter. Freaky.

I pulled out at least a dozen of them yesterday, but I’m letting a few survive to see what they are.

Also: Edamame sprouting!

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I feel like a lazy butt, but apparently I did some things in the garden recently.

The tomato seedlings I started in February were getting to be real pain, demanding to go out in the sun and taken in at night going on three months now, getting sunburned and finicky every time I turned my back. Clearly it was time to make them a home. I cut down four black bamboo stalks (our fancy backyard variety, stronger than green ones) and bent them over to make a frame. I hauled some buckets of compost and used the power of chickens to spread it over the bed (and out of the sides, and into my shoes). They efficiently ate all the bugs and seeds they could find, as well as the tops of all my chard and onions. Chickens!

Then I put some plastic over the frame and fastened it with some clothespins. Fastest hoop house, ever. Please note the skeletal remains of my chard in the lower right.

Then I put the tomatoes under the hoops and left the whole thing for a week to warm up the soil. When I lifted the plastic, I was floored by a dozen squash looking seedlings just coming up out of the ground. And you know what? That was the exact place I had my sad, under-performing Benning’s Green Tint pattypan squash last year. We only got about 3 squash. I don’t remember letting any lie around. Actually I remember being sad that I didn’t save any for seeds. But here they are! At least I hope that’s what they are. Could be alien squash babies.

Alien squash baby.

Then I dug some holes for all my tomatoes, pepper and cucumbers. 25 plants in all. And take a look. See there, on the right side of the pic? The chard has completely bounced back from chicken attack. In fact, I’ve never seen it doing better. Must be all the poo-compost. And of course, I planted all my tomatoes sideways. To keep the roots near the warm surface.

Aaand… 12 hours later, the tomatoes have righted themselves. Here is my healthiest Early Cherry. You can also see the milk jug pieces I’ve cut up and used as plant markers.

What about all that other stuff in the garden? Here’s the Favas, doing their best to celebrate spring in the traditional way with enormous bean pods. The ground beneath them I’ve planted with a ton of my most exciting new experiment – edamame! Or plain old soy beans, if you want. They will be so delicious.

The peas are finally stepping it up. They’ve only been flowering for about 5 years.

Seed pods from my last Red Russian Kale, one I’m keeping around solely to save the seeds. Let’s hope it didn’t cross with all that Pac Choi that was flowering at the same time.

Gorgeous red butter lettuce in the sun.

And garlic! Fat stalks of garlic doing fantastically well. I’m doing my best to resist digging one up to see what’s happening. They’ll be ready when the stalks turn brown in July.

And then, since they were being cranky and laying eggs in their poo-bedding, I made the chickens a nesting box. Here’s Biscuit using it about 5 minutes after I put the box in the coop. It’s basically a 6″ tall table with high sides, keeping the nesting area separate from the sea of poo below (I hope). Chickens!

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A while ago I posted about radmegan’s gorgeous natural egg dyes. I know our egg dying holiday in the US was a few weeks ago, but nature seems to be in a spring celebration mood here in Seattle with an explosion of flowers! Sunshine! Baby animals! So last Sunday I tried my hand at some egg dying of my own.

For the sake of pure color I decided to use some white eggs I had gotten during a cupcake-making eggless emergency. For dye materials I gathered plants from our yard or used common in-season ingredients like cabbage and carrots. Getting good color turned out to be tricky; heat changes hues in strange ways.

First I gathered my ingredients.

Then I simmered each pot with 2 cups of water and 1 tablespoon of vinegar for about 10 minutes.

Things got a little messy and a little funky. Have you ever smelled boiling dandelion flowers before? Cabbage-fennel-tulip-stew? Me neither. It was an experience.

Then I let the pots cool and carefully transferred them to jars and let them sit for a day (or two… I got busy). It’s hard to see in the photo, but I labeled each jar with chalk pens I have around the house for just this sort of quick labeling. They write on plastic, glass or ceramic and wipe off with one or two rubs of a finger.

And then I carefully fished the eggs out, let them dry, and rubbed them with vegetable oil.

Pretty cool. I’m most surprised by the turquoise from the red kale.

Here’s the exact plants and herbs I used:

2 carrots, grated
3 tablespoons chili powder
hoping for: orange
actually got: spotty light brown

Big handful of fennel fronds (we have some sort of fennel or anise plant growing like a weed out front)
hoping for: green
actually was: ochre brown

2 cups dandelion flowers
hoping for: yellow (c’mon, I figured this for an easy win)
actually got: light pea green

4 cups Red Russian kale stems, leaves and flowers
hoping for: green, or even pink because to the stems
actually got: turquoise?!

4 leaves red cabbage
hoping for: blue!
actually got: blue! (I cheated, I knew this would happen.. but dye water turning out purple had me curious anyway)

petals from 4 pink tulips
skins from 2 red onions
hoping for: red or pink
actually got: olive green

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