One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Thank Gawd someone came up with a really cool idea 

for what do with all the gross plastic bottles clogging up the world. 

Check this out!

 This modern dwelling is made out of plastic bottles. 

Eco-Tec's Ecoparque El Zamorano, Honduras.
Constructed with 8,000 bottles with composting toilets and a solar water heating system. It's the first house in the world made from PET bottles without using cement in the walls.

  I don't like it, I LOVE it!

 Eco Tec's Sky Field House: The first vaulted ceiling using PET bottles.

 Most of the PET bottles used are recovered in clean-up campaigns and recycling drives. The community then fills them with sand. They train the unemployed and disabled in their construction methods. They build water tanks, schools, community centers, urban benches as well as homes.

 An Eco-Tec home in Bolivia.

 This home in Bolivia incorporates lots of wine bottles as well as PET bottles. I am totally down with drinking more wine and building a house out of the evidence.

 Taiwan's swanky plastic bottle building -- EcoARK Exhibition Hall. They are rocking it out.

Ecological Bottle House. Iguazu Falls, Misiones, Argentina.

The Morimoto Restaurant's bottle wall in NYC is composed of 17,400 half liter plastic bottles filled with mineral water and then backlit with LED lights. Nice.  


For more info on plastic bottle homes, go here.

Thanks for the info Austin Realtor, Luke Graves.
You are keepin' it real with a user-friendly website and a very cool blog! We can feel your passion for providing people with a home of their dreams.

Step aside, Kickstarter. Meet Mia Nolting.

This Portland artist, Mia Nolting, has it going on. 

I love her work. 

She also does a lot of bad-ass Editorial Illustration. 

And it seems she's quite a list maker. I can totally appreciate the fine art of list-making. 

But what I totally love is her fund-raising campaign.  It's awesome. In a day where everyone needs money, get off your butt and do something about it. I love her approach. And I can afford to help her.

Mia Nolting, you have a fan in Austin, Texas.

PS: Okay, her surveys are super rad too.

Jabuticaba: Strange Fruit

Faraway lands with strange fruit.

Enjoy Jabuticaba. This fruit is from South America.

Jabuticaba (also called the Brazilian Grape Tree) grows off the trunk of the tree, can be plucked and eaten straight off of it.

Jabuticaba has evolved so that animals that cannot climb very high can reach it, eat it and then expel the seeds away from the parent tree to further propagate the species.

 Common in Brazilian markets, jaboticabas are largely eaten fresh; their popularity has been likened to that of grapes in the US. Fresh fruit may begin to ferment 3 to 4 days after harvest, so they are often used to make jams, tarts, strong wines, and liqueurs

Several potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory anti-cancer compounds

have been isolated from the fruit.

Thanks for the fruity cool info, Kuriositas!

wedding inspiration

I am the official Wedding Planner for a girlfriend's Fall wedding. I have super hard tasks, like getting to peruse all the cool wedding sites out there. Just doing my job, just doing my job.

I'll tell you what. Weddings have come a long way, baby.

Check out this one.

 magnolia leaves, white lilac, queen anne's lace, raw cotton, succulents, mint and green wheat with green tomatoes, succulents, tomatillos and raw cotton at the ends. 

Dang.

 tomatillos and raw cotton. nice.

I have fond memories of driving down to South Texas and seeing fields and fields of cotton. We would always stop and pick a few fresh cotton balls. So soft. So naturally white.

This wedding decor certainly does takes the cake.

If you would like to see more images from this foto shoot check out JL Designs, based out of Califas.

PS: If you need a wedding planner, give your girl a hollar.

Cool Facts About The Human Body.

1. Scientists have counted over 500 different liver functions. You may not think much about your liver except after a long night of drinking, but the liver is one of the body’s hardest working, largest and busiest organs. Some of the functions your liver performs are: production of bile, decomposition of red blood cells, plasma protein synthesis, and detoxification.

2. Women are born better smellers than men and remain better smellers over life. Studies have shown that women are more able to correctly pinpoint just what a smell is. Women were better able to identify citrus, vanilla, cinnamon and coffee smells. While women are overall better smellers, there is an unfortunate 2% of the population with no sense of smell at all.

3. Humans can make do longer without food than sleep. While you might feel better prepared to stay up all night partying than to give up eating, that feeling will be relatively short lived. Provided there is water, the average human could survive a month to two months without food depending on their body fat and other factors. Sleep deprived people, however, start experiencing radical personality and psychological changes after only a few sleepless days. The longest recorded time anyone has ever gone without sleep is 11 days, at the end of which the experimenter was awake, but stumbled over words, hallucinated and frequently forgot what he was doing.

4.  A simple, moderately severe sunburn damages the blood vessels extensively. How extensively? Studies have shown that it can take four to fifteen months for them to return to their normal condition. Consider that the next time you’re feeling too lazy to apply sunscreen before heading outside. 

5. Over 90% of diseases are caused or complicated by stress. That high stress job you have could be doing more than just wearing you down each day. It could also be increasing your chances of having a variety of serious medical conditions like depression, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Be kind to your body, it's the only one you got!

Thanks Global One TV!

mothers.

Blanca with four (Blanca Rosa, Lourdes, Angelica and Maria)
of her ten children.

Austin, Texas.

 Blanca (Oldest of the 10) with her daughter, 1972.
San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. 

A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
- Sophia Loren

 

Happy Mother's Day to all the powerful women of the world.

Mother's Day thought for you and yours.

Stickwork.

Sticks and saplings are a common material that everyone knows and has personal associations with. They are the material of childhood play, indigenous tribes and gardeners. Give a child a stick and you see that immediately it is a weapon, a tool or a magic wand. For me sticks are lines with which to draw. I use many of the drawing conventions that someone using a paper and pencil might employ. Also, I have learned to amass the smaller ends of sticks in one direction which gives the impression that the surface is moving. As long as I continue to make discoveries about how to employ saplings in interesting ways, I am hooked on them as a way to build sculptures that I dream about. 
~ Patrick Dougherty

Check out Patrick Dougherty’s site to learn more about his amazing work.